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

23:05And that seems to have died at least a little bit. There's always a sense that those sort 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 a Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw over the last 18 months, forget going back further. Like, is this really still continuing to ramp up? What's your perspective on this?

23:40I don't know if we have ramp up, so 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 analogues, right? There's been multiple studies of this where like the administrators are pretty much universally So the hard left are the professors and they're activists. And so these activists have conquered these institutions. It's not like it's active conqueror, right? And so, are they going to be virtue signaling as much about things like DEI in today's culture? Of course, they're going to be a little quieter about that, because they don't want to get pissed off the donors and get fired.

24:11Wave the flag. So they're going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values. Yes, and are they going to all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore, and give it up to someone else in no way? So, so there's a lot of night evening in our culture just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves were fixed, right? And these things are still completely conquered and I think people are they think of it the wrong way They're like, oh well, they'll probably just fix itself like no these people are in charge the 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 public or on the side of the administrators And so there's none of them are gonna get fixed.

24:50Which is why you got to build new ones. I mean, this is, and that's fine. You know what, these are somewhat broken. It's sad. Let's build new ones. You know, that's, that's, it's build new great ones. That's what we're trying to do. Yeah, just because you can say the word retarded on Twitter without getting banned now. That's the word here. Doesn't mean, I know it is. It's gay, it's, we're so back. So when I was to buy Miriam Webster with an LBO, just so we can officially make it the word of the year. Cause they're not gonna do it themselves. Ah, very good. I learned about Sullivan's law earlier today.

25:14Have you encountered Sullivan's law? Remind me, I think I know which one we're gonna have to outsource it here. What Sullivan's will? Well, there's conquest law and there's hardings law which is so Yeah, yeah, there's a that's love and there's different ones ways of bringing it basically This is really interesting and so another way of putting it for some people They say if you don't explicitly make an institution right wing it will get conquered by the left wing That's 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 U .A.

25:44Texas 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 They already want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with professors It's not a healthy intellectual environment if if only ones 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 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.

26:15So illiberalism is communism, that's specifically an illiberal force. Other authoritarian things are identity politics and that whole culture that does seek to impose. A lot of those things top down is very broken. It's a kind of a morphed new form of communism. And frankly, things like Islamism, like the applied authoritarian framework of that is also something that's not authoritarian for us. So those are the types of things you say, we're not gonna let those conquer our institution, We're going to be explicit about it, but it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views.

26:42So what are the other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you try to fix? Well, 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?

27:19But then you also want to have courses that are shaped not only STEM, but stuff that's shaped by, you know, I have like over a hundred friends who are founders of billion dollar companies who've signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare. Right, so I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education. Exactly, I think having both in it, and this is a dialectic, I'm obsessed with these dialectics, but there's like truth for why both of those extremes are important and you need to merge them and have them there.

27:51And by the way, when you merge them properly, it's really fun because you can get different debates about what's going on in the innovation world at a startup and you could argue about that from a philosophical perspective and you could apply some of the old debates from a long time ago and old wisdom from a long time ago. Like I imagine applying his NFUN, you know, who was this is a guy who was writing a 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 in the principles Well, it's fun.

28:29You can mix these things together. What else is the 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 and the product organization where on one hand you have like Steve Jobs or you have like the guy who ran Saudi in the 80s. Steve Jobs basically said, I don't care what the consumers tell me they want.

29:00I'm gonna figure out what's best, that I'm gonna show them a breakthrough, and then they're gonna love it, right? And there's some really deep wisdom in that. It's not what they're asking for, they didn't know what to ask for a car, right? It's like, you know, they were gonna ask for something with horses. So what's the breakthrough we're gonna give them? But then there's another thing that's actually really true. Even at Apple, which is that once you have a product, there's like 100 things the consumers want, the bug them, especially in enterprise, there's like waste and I use it for some reasons.

29:23They have like product needs. So you need someone like 14 hours a day, like mapping out all these needs and understanding them or prioritizing or responding to them and fixing it. So it's as good as possible. So how do you, you know, if you only have this Steve's job genius thing, it's gonna end up being something it'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 gonna tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing.

29:50And 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. There are two separate things. So you holding both of these and you're in mind at the same time? You have to know, yeah. You have to know they're both important and then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to make it make it meet some together. And usually with dialectics, the truth is on the extreme. It's not in the middle. It's not like some sloppy middle. It's like, 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.

30:27So, so in general, you know, I'll give it, like there's other one. There's the whole niche in, there's a whole niche in perspective versus the Dugia Christian perspective. And so, you know, I, a dad's Catholic, my mom's Jewish, I grew up Jewish, and yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole niche of framework because of 14 -year -old. I thought it was really cool. I know if you've read Fred or Nietzsche, and the will of 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 the top 1 % of talented people in Uber Mansion, 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's gonna look like because they're creating it.

31:07And there's lots of truth that the very, very most successful people and most talented people, and the 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, the 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 the great insight of Christianity is the radical, equal dignity of all human life. This is something that Rome did not have, right?

31:36Rome celebrated, like, making, watching people kill each other and whatever, and they're not us and they're slaves. And there's all sorts of kind of pretty nasty stuff. And once 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 to like every life matters and that you're not a good person under the geocrystian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone.

32:10And so does that mean that all of our money should go towards helping disabled kids and I think she goes towards the most best gift of kids. That's what they've done in a lot of lucidies now, which is they've failed. They've got just only one side of dialectic, right? They've only helped the bottom, but it also has a nation only helped the top either. You gotta help both. There'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 gonna keep both of these in mind as people running a society, as leaders in society?

32:35It becomes a helpful framework to understand. And is the middle way you go to die? That could happen. Yeah, you just like go out where it's like, yeah, if you don't, if you don't, you don't want, it's just sloppy thinking, we're gonna, You know, you don't want sloppy thinking. You actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive. And it's right thing to do. It's an ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and they were investing a lot more in them. But you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years for 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.

33:03Because 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 inequity. it's that we, I want there to be like a hundred thousand extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future. They're going to cure diseases when I'm an old man. They're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone, right? So 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.

33:31It needs to be perfect. You need to obsess over perfection and quality. And also you need to ship it to right that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and start. That's a great dialectic. Like how do you do You're perfect shit and how do you do not procrastinating and taking too long? These are in his 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 since like a, I guess they call it a cone, I guess, in Japanese wisdom, right?

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35:06That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. My friend Alex and his wife talk about this is a problem to be managed not a paradox to be solved. And I think that that's kind of like an interesting frame we 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. Exactly. And then there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate.

35:45What else? What are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life? We've read my piece online before I can't. This is a tough one. I apologize. Nothing right away is coming to mind. and I wrote this long piece about this like 12 years ago. 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 a 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 the more.

36:18Correct. I was keeping it, I was keeping it, I'm sorry, keeping it quite bad. I mean, you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want. He's great. I really appreciate it as well that he wants to sort of be doing the thing behind the scenes without putting himself in front of the scenes No matter how much I try and bring him on the podcast. Yeah, I shouldn't I shouldn't talk about it No, you like 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, you know What have a territory of conversation to bubble that took over each one each person had a territory grab This is such a key thing to push education for this way And the only reason it's not happening a greater scale is because there's no So market mechanism right now of competition and education, just because you have the best thing doesn't mean people allow to go to it.

37:00So we're trying to put market mechanisms in. Can you explain what it is that he's trying to do? Yeah. And in general, it turns out that if you personalize the app and personalize the learning where you can map out like an ontology or a scheme of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area, and you can have something in drafting with them, you could see where they're good and where they're not good. And a lot of times what happens, for example, is a kid will get like way behind in one area, like two grades behind, and they never get caught up because no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills.

37:29But if you have an app that's really good at measuring and teaching, then it turns out with two hours a day, you're actually able to get kids way, way ahead. And I think you can get the majority of the kids in Alpha School, for example, I think are at 99 % tile. And some of them are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead with this personalized AI learning that teaches you to have the needs to learn and 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.

38:00Being designed by the guys that did Fortnite I think. I think 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 of the sport you want to play. So I think it's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and we could try out an education and it's awesome to see success swan spinner 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.

38:38I'm 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 day care that's terrible for kids and to actually exactly two hours a day of your level you need to know you're going to be more focused more interested than being able to run around, be in charge. I think the Alpha School model is built on top of what's called the Acton School model and Acton Academy is this really cool breakthrough where they just basically gave the kids a lot more control of the school and then got to build their own constitution, their own frameworks, give them a lot more responsibility, which I think it's a very cool kind of libertarian model for the inmate to running the asylum.

39:10That's what you're telling us. It's awesome. It creates this like responsibility. It works. It works. It works if it's done right You still have guides and adults there, but it works. And then I think on top of that, he's put like competitions, he's put like really good AI. And listen, it's just like a smart people game together and building and this is what education clearly to me should look like 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 they're just school administrations right now.

39:39And so that's gonna be a big battle on our country. Is this Department of Education stuff? A little bit. It's much more just like 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 just like, it turns these administrators and stuff and I don't even know what they're doing. It's just a 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.

40:09So hopefully we make that a lot bigger next time. I mean, 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 high red? Yeah, you know, in general, in general, I think a lot of like any kind of learning of math and science and any of that, like can be driven forward with AI. And you're going to start seeing a lot more of that too. You know, and there's probably lots of ways in which I think people are or you are learning in a higher ed, like what would Plato think of this based on this?

40:44Where can't it interject? What will it struggle at? You've thought a lot about the university experience. You guys are trying to give a more classical sort of approach, I suppose. Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the university experience is about being around other young adults who are exploring the world and learning and interesting professors and having an intellectual environment where you're socializing with and you're exploring ideas with other people. and I think it's really important to have this in -person experience. I think that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing.

41:16And so I think that's not going to be something you just have with AI. You have to have people around you. You have to be learning, you have to be debating things in a classroom. Can AI make some of that better? And augment it, certainly. I mentioned university for me was kind of like Navy SEAL bootcamp for socialization, but it lasted five years. And it is. It's the people's skills. Yeah, I was in the dorky fraternity and Stanford. I have friends who were in the cool fraternity So that sometimes there was still be my friend back then which was nice Mm -hmm. I ended up working for me later. So it's good But but like it but we got the dorky fraternity and I remember going to spring break and back then my friends Like Joe, you can't tell the girls that your computer scientist is not cool You have to pretend you're like American studies or something and I have some bad stories.

41:59We figured it out of actually Have you seen what John Peterson's doing with Peterson Academy? A little bit. That was only bad It's he's trying to give a university level education online and he's got some really really interesting lecturers at teachers I suppose and they're trying to get certification and they're trying to sort of assess whether or not people have gone through the course and all the rest of it and I think it's great but kind of like the realization that maybe many businesses have come to understand post -COVID that there are many intangibles that are born out from Watercooler Talk and from being a lot of people for me, at least if you're trying to do something that's like the high -end Western civilization university experience, like that's Oxford, that's Cambridge, it's Harvard, Stanford, and these places now are more broken than they were, but there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs and whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of group or whatever.

43:00I think having these these things in your life are tough. So I think Jordan's a really talented guy. I'm a fan of his. I think he's going to have something that's very interesting to learn online. I think, by the way, I think we may do things to be learn online too. I think it's a very positive part of that, but it's not the full experience. Hmm. Can you explain to me what the fuck's going on with these tariffs? Joe, please. Well, this is always a dangerous thing to talk about for many reasons because I'm helping the administration and like I'm advising people in the DOD and HHS, which is a healthcare part with, you know, always the runaria is and I'm helping friends and doge I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on.

43:34And tariffs are a very complicated topic. So the typical libertarian framework is just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage, right? And you have people who specialize. And there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all. For example, if you have 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, then you say, oh, we have a trade deficit with you. So like the guy's growing the vanilla aren't going to start buying all of our products. So it's okay to have some trade deficits.

44:04Now, 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, just like the fruits have to be grown here have to only be sold within a certain amount of time or a certain amount of distance from where they're grown 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 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 they did take away a lot of her manufacturing It's you know in certain areas and then and then like we have this naive view that like if you just give China This like WTO and trans and you trade with them and make them rich.

45:10They're not gonna be Communist anymore and that naive view is shown to be totally wrong about 10 years ago You have this crazy communist in charge. He's murdered a bunch of people He's like, he's like completely in charge. He's not, he's not a pro -market guy. He's not a freedom guy. He's clearly like, you know, in his youth, he would sing poems about hardening your heart to the destruction of America. He's clearly doing things to hurt America. And so, and so these people have taken advantage of us around the world. China's definitely not become free. It's definitely stolen away a lot from manufacturing base.

45:39And so, where are the tariffs that are gonna 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 did not pollute costs a lot of money. So that's obvious. First, tear it off that right away, right? Because you don't want to just let them pollute, right? I don't think anyone can 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 hour defense, you know, to part the deal.

46:03To deal with it like that. Or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever, like obviously tear off some of that supply chain. We need it here. We need to build a hair, right? Subtonize a hair. I think those are obvious. And then you get into more complicated things. I'm generally pro free trade, but if you look at what happened, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, she was very pro free trade and she opened it up to the EU. 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 and charge everything, which was terrible.

46:34It's a total mess. You have to be very careful when you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge. In fact, it'll be now your rules. You'll give up sovereignty. That's the reason it's bad. And then, and then, I mean, finally, and this is where it gets like everyone really argues, but like in general, I don't think small consumption taxes are bad. I think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes. So I think a small one probably makes sense. So I mean, so the center, and then, 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.

47:04Should all of that be in the US 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. I think 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 to 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.

47:32So we'll see. Yeah, I can't work out. It feels like I'm in an opposite day meets groundhog day back to back to back. I'm like, is this a 7D chess move? Is this an era? 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 a very good intuition in general. I think he also, in general, loves to be the center of attention and it has to have everyone come to him. So I think making the, maybe my personality would not have been to do is quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, ah, I don't think everyone's - I'm trying to get off on a piece of PVC.

48:07But, A, that's his personality and B, they're all gonna 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 you make some great deals over the next few months It could it could actually end up being a great thing So so that I I think you have to say that there's there's a logic in what JD Vance and president Trump think they're doing and And in us and the jury still out is this my view how important is this to US -led global order Continuing stuff like that. Well, I they've definitely they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which on which we're engaging Beijing America has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world.

48:41And 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 in partner, has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that have got hollowed out. And I think they want to change those dynamics a bit. I am concerned to have America still be a very important powerful force of the world for good. I don't like the fact that even today, thanks to the bi administration's actions, if you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the Horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough to enforce freedom of navigation on the Red Sea.

49:19You look at a graph, a flex -port graph. You can get, it's just a company that tracks all these containers, it's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world orders started to break down because of our handling. Things like that that aren't good, and I think we should be strong 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 what's going on with the destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us.

49:57Over here, I guess, just because with those 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. They were, we've now found it in comfortable evidence. They funded the October 7th, you know, attacks and rape some murders. They've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation. We just talked about, and this is the, that's the, that's why I can't get to the Red Sea, is the Houthi thing.

50:38And so for me, and it's actually really sad because I work with a lot of our radians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, just deposition people, others, and they're definitely the most talented people in our companies, there's some amazing people, and it's what's really interesting is like the Iranian people themselves love America and even love Jews in Israel, But the people it's like this country was conquered. It was communist and Islamist together and then the Islamist and then it's almost killed off the communist It just took charge and it's like it's like a modern day country conquered by like crazy Theocrats right who then like whip people and like execute 16 year old girls for being raped because it's your fault If you're rape under Islamism and the whole thing is just like crazy if you can't make it up It's like these are insane people with 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 desperately want to be free.

51:29So 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 surely are crazy and I think that's to me that's a really big danger and we can end it for a long time. So I'm hoping we do. That's that. In terms of overblown, I actually, listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts. Now, I forget, I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa, but I as long as that's a separate problem, but also when I maybe there's something to do about, I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time.

52:02Obviously, we're all very worried about China. The rest of Ukraine thing is a mess, but I think overall, it's not like Europe's in tons of conflicts right now. I think I think overall we're pretty good place if we can like 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. Twice a year, Function run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers, and then they've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan.

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53:14That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. What does the future of warfare look like on the ground? I'm hearing all manner of different stories about, you know, it's just going to be drone versus drone. It's going to be magic bullet versus magic bullets. What's your perspective on this? Well, you know, after founding Palantir for a while, I didn't do defense because it's so annoying to have to work with the government. I built companies in other areas and then I went back into defense about 10 or 11 years ago, because really what happened is we saw Xi Jinping again take over China. We saw him forcing a lot of our friends to have their best engineers in China working on things with the PLA.

53:48And I was clear he was becoming like very militaristic. And then it was also clear that they were innovating and doing things that were ahead of some of what we do here. Well, they had better hypersonics in certain areas. They were trying to do swarms of drones that could attack in different ways. And it just, it was just none of our defense hardware companies, none of the big primes, you know, have, so what a prime is, is that in the 1990s the Cold War ended, and we had all the best companies in defense, but we weren't going to spend as much on defense anymore. So they all merged, and they formed these like nine giant companies.

54:16These companies started to become very bureaucratic, almost like there are arms of the government. And then in the late 90s, all the top soft engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating. And so these big companies just fell way behind and 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 gotta get our best people to work on this. And so my friend Palmer Lucky, who we'd backed it off, he was before he partnered with three panelists here, guys to form Andral, which is a very famous company in Auschwitz, a 30 billion plus valuation.

54:46And then shortly after that, as we backed that, we went all in and now we started the Epirus. Epirus is named after the both of these, which I didn't find arrows, but it's the best EMP company. So we could shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation. Right? So it's just really cool. It's 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.

55:14You 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 Wolf Hat technology has ever gone? You know, warfare has 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 a new form of warfare that's best, it changes the government's structure of government as well.

55:47Because the structure of government has to be to support that form of warfare. So if you example, if you need like, if like a knight who's fully armored with modern technology, it could take on like 50 peasants, everyone needs to make nights, which means you have this very feudal society of the forms, and the feudal society is cock or Europe. And then the other, another example of this is like if you have all these aristocracies that came out of the feudal societies and run certain ways, and then suddenly you're able to like mass produce rifles and give everyone a rifle, the aristocracies have to sort of become republics of some sort, because you can't give everyone a rifle and have them fight if they're the kind of your, you know, your slaves or your serfs or whatever.

56:18You have to kind of, so Napoleon goes after Europe, and it forces the aristocrats to basically give up a lot of their power and arm everyone to fight back. And it totally changes the form of government. And so you have had a warfare change a lot over the years. And you have this concept, which is interesting to me, is defensive or offensive warfare. So the question is, what's better? So it used to be defense was much easier. It's really hard to take a town. When the Ottoman Empire at its height, even by the 17th century, September 11th, 1683, the Hadad -Roman Empire, the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and say the town because it was taking them too long to take it before the Polish and French knights could get there.

56:55And then of course, the cannon becomes stronger and all of a sudden with the cannon is just much easier to build, like just massive empires all over Europe. And I think right now we're going through interesting change, right? I do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before. Thanks to EMP, thanks to the way swarms can cover shorter distances and kind of block things. And so I do Do you think this does favor asymmetrically 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 the space that can land on anything, effectively, with these really broads.

57:29So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard to break through defenses. And I hope that's where it goes. Because in some sense, it used to be at all these free city states, or all around Europe, that was a good thing. Then you had to kind of build the empires and take away their rights. And maybe we can have small states again. because when you have lots of small states, you can kind of, if someone gets to be too annoying, you're just good to another one. So I hope that's where things are going, is it defense is stronger. But that's a bit of an important question we'll see. What was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against?

58:01What happened over the last 40, four decades or so? What was it that were the innovations there that were now trying to push back against? Oh gosh, this is all sorts of these things in different ways. You know, I mean, I mean, there's all this like smart bombs. I think we're 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, so I'm saying it's army in a way that was just, it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air.

58:35And, and, you know, I think, I think the new thing today that we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is that you can all of a sudden have 20 ,000 or 100 ,000 things at once in a semi -coronated way actually move and attack and swarm. It's just really, really hard to beat. So you are seeing a thing just changed entirely. So the EMP solution is a way to stop using million dollar bombs to take down 500 dollar drones. We have this video for Everest where there's like these like thousand drones coming at you and then there's like old fashioned people are trying to fire the missiles at them and you can take out a few and like, what are you gonna do?

59:11And it's crazy, even people who only have like five drones attacking our ships, we're spending these super expensive missiles, you're exactly a million dollars like shoot down something as worth $100 or $1 ,000. And yeah, so if you can get, it turns out that you wanna have all the power hit the gallium night try at the emitter at about the same time. So you got these AI chips that control power on very small time skills and you get all the power, hit the gallium night try at once, which means it's a lot better. Gallium night tried is an admissive material. It's the most efficient and submissive material for like, for like, sitting out like a really like a 10 ,000th of a second burst of microwave radiation.

59:44And 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 on how you do it. So, and so basically, you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming out. It's like a Star Trek shield and you turn them off. Uh -huh. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I had, I've had a bunch of conversations Eric Prince was on and he was explaining to me about sort of what's happening in in Ukraine at the moment. It's so funny how we've got a sort of evolutionary mimesis happening in warfare where you have tanks, the tanks have some vulnerabilities and weaknesses, the drones are created so that they can be flown into the particular weaknesses on the tanks.

1:00:25The tanks weaknesses get patched up, the drones get a little bit bigger, a little bit more sophisticated, they can fly further, the tanks butt netting up, the drones have sharp things on them that can cut through nighting and you don't do that. 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 up our some of the tanks. We could defend some of them. You know, we have a company called Overland AI and they've won all these DARPA challenges with the best in the country. It is driving over complex terrain. And so everyone's using it for that.

1:00:52But it would be a vehicle of some kind. Any vehicle driving over terrain is what we're realizing. It's just similar to how Serrana Karen Austen's building thousands of smaller vessels for the Navy. And we're gonna 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 overlay and vehicles. And it's really interesting doing these things, because when you check 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.

1:01:15And you're like, wait a second, you could give it all 37 of those capabilities, or you could build 1000 of them for the same cost with like 10 capabilities. Right? So it becomes just like fast -saying problem where this is a really important point in warfare. Like warfare has this engineering aspect to it. Like if you want to build a bridge, and you want the bridge to never fall down, if you give me a billion dollars, I could build your 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.

1:01:39It's how do you build it for $50 million? Never fall down just as much, right? That's a similar thing in warfare. You always have scarcity. So 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, as long as I spend a certain amount of resources that we're going to fight, let's do something that just overwhelms. Even if the tank has better in all these ways, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just gonna swarm you and crush you and keep going, right? So there's things like this now where it's all, and this is why advancement manufacturing, I'm actually tear off, it's so important to be good at, because if we're not good at that here, and the other guys are good at it, that's scary.

1:02:15What is the likelihood that in five or 10 years, there's that many troops on the ground as well. A human personality is gonna be that important. I think people are still very important, 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 clearly obviously don't want like tons of troops like running forward and there's like tons of drones coming That's terrible. I don't want to be that guy I'm like this is like the really sad thing in World War one where like the British Aristocrats have been treated like crap for 30 years and they if the rest of your talk So your role was a warrior who defends the society that was like kind of how you were taught and so they were so excited Well, when came to they get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their side and be proud 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 Well, it was terrible, right?

1:02:58So even like a hundred years ago, you don't want people charging that way. Now it's insane, but what you do have, is you have a special forces model where there's like, you probably have everyone have like multiple robots around them and they're controlling them in different ways and commenting them. You probably have them calling in air strikes, calling in drone strikes, like figuring out what's going on, using the tools, but you are gonna want people on the battlefield and you're the battlefield, they're just gonna be like using a lot of stuff around them. But you're probably something I want them there for quite a long time as my view.

1:03:27What were you saying about rods from space? A lot of rods. Yeah, it's one of those things that's always like not clear how much one should talk about. I don't have clearance these days, which is good because I can knock it myself in trouble. But it's just pretty obvious that a fighter jet is a missile delivery system. If you could have the missiles being in space and be extraordinarily accurate with it going to hit for any kind of ground target or even other things, then it's like that's probably a better way of doing it. It's just much cheaper. It's much cheaper now. Thanks to Starship, right?

1:03:54It would be very, very cheap to get, right now, I think it costs as much as an aircraft carrier to get 100 ,000 of these in space. I don't know what the ratio is. It's going to go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier. At some point, it's just like, obviously, you want to be spending that money. It's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers. Like, it's just... There are many cases. Some degree of intermediary, whether it's the thing that the carriers, the missiles, takes off from, whether it's the thing that carries the missiles, whether it's the missiles.

1:04:22It's a huge part of it. I mean, when we do these Seronic ships with a Navy and their law. Seronic? Seronic is a company that just raised $600 million at a $4 billion valuation that we helped help some amazing talented guys start. Dino Marrucos is a Navy sail who started here in Austin. And so it's an Austin based company. So it's building hundreds of these weaponized vessels. And I think the current ones are mostly 24 footers and they could do certain things. And I think if you build a... Unmanned. All unmanned for now. And if you have 130 footer, mostly unmanned, but maybe you make people go on if they want, that lets you shoot things that take 80 footer ship to fire the other way, you couldn't fire from 24 feet.

1:04:54So it does become like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels. What's the world of autonomous submarines looking like? That to me seems like the most obvious place to... And again, it's about the scarcity question as well, right? Because it's like what is a cost versus having a swore with things on top of the water you want both, I think. Yeah, androle, which again, I'm a big investor in Palmer and my friends were running, they have, I think, a facility in Rhode Island is pumping out a couple hundred of these a year and there's these very advanced submarines. They've also just, I think, last week introduced these new underground, no underwater centuries that can detect certain things and do certain things underwater too.

1:05:35I think you can use them as mines and stuff as well. It all sorts of possibilities. So, yeah, you definitely want to 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 wheels, you can detect all sorts of other things moving around. So I always wonder how advanced is China in this area, how advanced are we in these areas?

1:06:01It's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear. Try out too easily right now. Oh yeah. I kind of have this sense in my mind of people not wanting to show their hand and people different nations understanding that if you have that you almost have this trade off, in fact, this actually happened, I think in World War II, once the Enigma code had been cracked, there was a value judgment that needed to be made. We know that they are going to try and attack these three ships, but if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked, they're going to know that something's up.

1:06:36So 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. 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 small committee, but it's done by people that go, fuck, go to town, or go to eight, or go to whatever.

1:07:26And there are certain things we work on, even at some of these counties I mentioned, that they aren't putting into Ukraine, for example, because they don't want Russia and China to learn about them and learn how to respond to them, which is not my judgment, by the way, I'm not in charge. So they reach out, you're doing more of the fin to create whatever. I'm like, we're balancing your angel doing a lot, but it's not up to me. We have leaders in the, these are the technologies that are available. You choose which ones you go in. And they're going to be rational by the stage. And you're right. I mean, when it comes to nuclear deterrence, this is a very scary topic.

1:07:51And you actually probably don't want perfect knowledge on other psychs. It makes, it makes things more likely to happen. And you actually don't want anything to happen. Like, say more on that. Well, the whole point is like you have the nuclear, nuclear triad, and the different ways you could respond in, you know, in nuclear, nuclear war. and you want them not to know 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 give you confident with some strategy that they've found a way to stop it and then they could strike and then they can know they could strike and it's actually good for both sides to be a little bit unsure about these things.

1:08:21That'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 terrain and end of itself. Exactly, which is probably healthy. None of us want a nuclear war. Like the reason I work in defense by 20 % of HVC, my firm is a defense we're doing things in biodeous, safe lives, healthcare in other areas. And I work in defense to deter the bad guys and to have the mixture that we have the best technology through 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, I don't think what we didn't have to ask, Stan, for that so long was right.

1:08:58I 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, it's just a very big, very smart deterrent. Traveling should be about the pleasure of the trip and not the stress of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of nomadic. This travel pack, the 14 -litre travel pack is what I wear every single day. It is the biggest game changer and it genuinely makes spending your day lugging your possessions around infinitely more enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything, your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses, so well organised that even your toothbrush will feel important.

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1:10:10Yeah. And by the way, there's good people, these places in some departments or some great things they do, there's something as worse. I think Crony and Corrupt and broken too. That's, I didn't know much about sort of the background and how they work, but that's such a fascinating situation to get yourself into where you're the preferred partner, the preferred supplier or whatever. But that if you have a vacuum of talent that gets sucked out of you to a place that's able to be more exciting, more sexy, pay you better. And then what happens is they try to lobby and block the other people and they mostly succeed at doing that because so they become these bureaucracies whose main job is to do innovation and theater, pretend they're innovating, and then they keep new things out.

1:10:49So both Palantir and SpaceX were the first two companies to break through and become new primes, and in both cases they had to sue the government because they were being treated totally unfairly in their own record, they were people ordering not to tell people that something was better, because they're going in and out working at these primes. Like you work for the government, you work for the prime, and they're all friends, and so there's like don't let any of these 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.

1:11:12And so even now we're the outsiders, but we've broken in enough that it we're in some parts. We're in the undeniable. And I mean, what is the percentage of payloads being put into space by SpaceX? It's 80 % and 90 % of SpaceX just dominates that now. Palsier dominates certain other areas. But if you look at the overall revenue, the government spends with companies and 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 of a few hundred billion in the same area as in, it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus and so they're incentive.

1:11:46What's that? That means you go and you say I spent $10 million on this, so pay me $11 million for delivering it to you. And so it becomes just 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, for the extra profits bigger from the government. And so it's a weird model where you're incentivized to be inefficient. Exactly. This is how we've built this for 50 years. And so you have things where Palantir or Andral as an example will come in and do something like a 10th the cost better. It's just like crazy.

1:12:15It's just, it sounds like I'm lying. They do something like they'll have a drone versus Lockheed and their thing will be literally a 10th the cost to make and it'll have like, you know, 60 % more battery life. It'll be like twice as fast. It'll carry 50 % more weight. And then it'll literally be like a tiny fraction of the cost. And still you'll lose it first because Lockheed or whoever it was, Raythean does this really well. It's like right through Quest for Proposal with like a 300 page document specifying all his requirements that no one actually needs, but that actually make it so it has to be their solution.

1:12:43And so this is the same as the foreign country that says the... Exactly. Actually, a headlight to need to be this high ground in Buffalo. So the same game being played by Germany and even Israel and other countries with their internal trade bearers against outsiders, everyone plays, is a game being played by the prime stopping anyone from breaking in. And so this is what happens. is what we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats in the complexity of their bureaucracy is a feature 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.

1:13:27Like there's literally no more important job than keeping people alive. And in warfare, Yeah, you go, this has to be bureaucracy because if it wasn't cutting the gaudian knot of all of the issues, if there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, okay, this has been a nice lap for a while. The pantomime's fucking over. All right. 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 in the British Navy and get rid of all the old, funny, dutty, super impopular, right?

1:14:05Is it impopular? Hell, straight. That's why they framed him eclippily in World War I and then threw him out and he was out of his career for a while because by virtue of having to fight the bureaucracy to fix it, everyone hated him and wanted to make him look really bad. And then he goes through this 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, pisses a lot of people off. But it's necessary to win the war.

1:14:31is 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. It's a dialectic. Again, if you're going to go back, you want to know the dialectic. Is there 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.

1:15:00It's not how it works. You know, it's not just like I exist outside of history. No, the way great man work of history is you understand the system deeply and the way Peter Teele I was talking 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 you like fundamentally bringing through the bureaucracy, bringing through this other area, inspiring people with a better solution.

1:15:27So 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 change things and make things possible. I think God, we have Elon Musk and SpaceX is just one example. America would be screwed from a defense perspective and from my perspective. 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 just, it's just, I make certain things you can't talk about with Space War for being imagined.

1:15:55It'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 try really hard. Have you seen those videos where they try to do the thing where they land? Do they have them figured it out? Yeah, 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 -ending without the chopstick, the chopstick's for the really heavy, big one. So they're still, they're still back, they haven't got Falcon figured out yet, but they're trying.

1:16:19Then 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. I mean, there's just really smart people there. So as it's the fact that we're this far ahead, that's just an amazing fact. It's when you think about intellectual property. And this 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.

1:16:45Every time, every time you do something, they're still faster copying. It's actually amazing how good they are. Have you got any idea what that system is? What it is that they got some team of crack? I think it's the culture. I think it's the culture of their education system to take something and to learn it and regurgitate it. It tends to be how they teach there. So I think there's something that's interesting. So I think there's some things that are as people being forced to do that. And then they take things and they it's really funny because they copy and they iterate on it. And they do steal.

1:17:09I mean, I'm not going to say which company. But one of our companies was like training open AI and then throp it on a certain very specific area where they'd measure them every week, give them feedback and get it ahead and they got like certain scores and they really was open AI, they were doing it the most with and they was score open AI and they got to the point where it's really good of what they needed and then deep seat came out. This is when China had their own AI, they trained and they said, it's interesting, let's measure it and they measured it in the six different areas and it was exactly the same scores as opening AI from four months ago and this is something they'd like train and iterate it on to get there.

1:17:40So it's clear they just exfiltrated it. You know, this is what China is good at. The difficulty the EMA's face at holding on to commercial patents and 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 flopman over all of this shit.

1:18:12That must be locked down as hard as you can get people to talk about Area 51 and being able to sort of keep secret secret and go, I don't really know if the Chinese would be that bothered about using aliens against us, but they're fucking sure as hell of one of those robotic rockets that can get stuff in the space tube. It's really funny at Palantir, I'm not funny but serious too, obviously, because we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and 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 with like a server room like with like inserting its selling data.

1:18:46And 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 that kind of made me and this is quite a long time. I was fully infiltrated. And well, in that case like they didn't get it out and then he left the country right away. And so you know, and he went back to his family. 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 teal then spoke out at the RNC for Trump in like 2016 Obama's just as a part a labor department right away sued parents if not hiring enough Asians We had 25 % Asians, but it wasn't no Which is funny though because we couldn't hire people were born in China and then of course they sued us for that But is is is and then a code D .O .D.

1:19:28is agreed with us the laboratory disagree with us. Is the government doesn't always agree with itself? Yeah, have a chat between yourselves. Go to the workout, go to the sewer, sew us a knot and then come back. Well, isn't there all of these rumors? Obviously, this I think will have stopped now that the southern board 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 board? 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 Chinese mafia operating in Shenzhen, which is like an area with had a lot of this historically and it's really very powerful groups.

1:20:02And 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 and just appeared and died in the tech world where I don't think we're bad guys. I think they just didn't just didn't agree with CCP. But some of it was crackdown 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 thinking fantastic.

1:20:29We've actually finally got a turn of military age. Oh, god, they're fucking, they're criminal. They're selling fentanyl. What use is that? We need you to steal the secrets of Palantiyah. 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 get a advantage of it and use them too. So it's very scary. I'm met. I think the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for SpaceX. I love it. 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 saleliqui about artificial education.

1:21:05And 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 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, did this was like as I'm watching this thing happening, I'm basically watching my own career and legacy.

1:21:46So it 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 unique kind of fearlessness, you know, to sort of back yourself to be, to be innovative, but I just thought it was such a cool story. I loved hearing it. It's, it's, it'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 our smart people, convincing them of it and then like building and iterating towards it.

1:22:18I love that. It's one of my favorite things. I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things. And it's just so fun when you have these big, bold ideas. They don't always work, but you know, with enough smart people around you to iterate on a lot of times they do. 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 so. You know, the ownership thing, it's fasting.

1:22:49This is a lot like, I think you can go back and study like the 16, 17, 18 centuries where there's just like infinite room and infinite space. And you know, for the new world and all these places you can get and you can fight over some big lamb bodies. Of course, the 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's actually helpful and you're using it for something useful, it kind of becomes yours. And there's so much out there that we're not gonna, we're not gonna like run into scarcity for a long time. So the way we think of it on Earth is probably like today is probably the wrong model because we have this like Biased, there's a certain amount of land and certain amount of resources and it's scarce and do I own or do you own if and there's just so much stuff up There in 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 Can have their own moon base and they like be like doing whatever we want to be doing on the moon and they're not gonna like run out of room on the moon for now Right, it's just and then same thing with like there's just and there's millions of asteroids So, so I'm not I'm not too concerned about that.

1:23:46I think the scarier thing is you probably don't want wars in space right at all because A 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 do you screw a lot things up? So I hope that's not something we get. Well, there's also I there's a buck called seven ebes by Neil Stevenson and in the first line the moon explodes. So I've spoiler alert for the moon explodes in the first line.

1:24:14And they've got say 500 days to get as many citizens off Earth and to the ISS. And they basically build out this new habitat of the ISS. And they say there's going to be a hard rain as the moon breaks out from the seven pieces, seven eaves, the seven pieces that it's in. And it's going to basically shout down on Earth. Everything's going to be fucked for about 5 ,000 years. And then after a while, if we can survive it. We'll come back down and we'll see how all of this stuff goes. And they're talking about when you're in, I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if you're 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.

1:24:55And it only takes, there's quite a bit of junk up there, but this kind of well positioned, it doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke, which broke this thing, and before you know it, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, and entire sort of swaths of real estate and of useful technology that's up there can all be damaged. So yeah, I think anything that involves fucking around in those areas is. We don't want that. There's a funny technology I saw the other day. There was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on. Of course, there's a Japanese, which I love.

1:25:26This is like, do you expect them to do? Of course, there's a cleanest country. It's a dog. It's a miniature dog. It's a shape like a miniature dog. No, that's a great one. But in theory, there's things like that, hopefully we could do, but I guess it's, yeah, it's, you don't wanna war up there. You know you're talking about our map of how land works, kind of not working when we think about space, three dimensions or whether you're looking at sort of the way that all bits occur. I promise this is gonna, I think this is gonna work. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, right? Hold on, every time I see a squirrel on a tree, I think about the way that their map of terrain must work, because what they see is being able to run forward to move themselves away from something that's on the other side of the tree, so they're moving around this cylinder.

1:26:13And 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 seven eaves 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.

1:26:52Like, oh yeah, I just walk forward and back. Like you know, you think, You know, you first drive a car and you go, oh my god, this is so complex. I'm never gonna 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 game, which you kind of get it, get built into it, but 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 six child, so that's a lot of kids. You are single -handed, maybe in collaboration with Elon reversing population to Cline, yeah.

1:27:22My wife, Taylor and I are very traditional, but we love having six kids. We're probably done. It's probably enough. So that's the most important thing in my life. We're running our firm. We're doing all sorts of new things in AI, back in great entrepreneurs. There's amazing companies, and construction, trying to do things in bio. I think there's a lot of ways we could save all our lives with the breakthroughs in bio, especially applying it to the cure -bearing diseases and help young kids there. I think there's a lot of new ways of doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases Right now kids are very young So I think there's tens of thousands of children we could say with stuff there So there's just a lot of promising things there and then you know on the nonprofit side 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.

1:28:08We 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, I'll give you just one example. Like let's say we all agree, we want middle class or working class people who maybe they're not gonna be like the top investor entrepreneur, but they wanna have a good job. They go on a good vocational job with skills. Like anyone with the right teaching could get like a high invocational job if they really into work, right?

1:28:38And some of these jobs pay 100K, 120K, great stuff. And so all these states all have vocational schools and the problem is a lot of these vocational schools are terrible. And so what do you do? Well, here's you know our politicians like let's give more money if there's an idiot guy running it It's looking at not doing well. So how do you help the hundred thousand people going coming out of these schools? Well, here's one. I'll tell you how you do it. You say okay. There's 27 High -ant technical vocational schools in Texas We're gonna only give them money in proportion to the salaries of the students coming out That's not something they can game take the average salary coming out for three.

1:29:07That's interesting average time for three years coming out And we're gonna rate the schools based on that and you know what happens when you start giving all their money tied to that the school starts saying, wait a second, what skills do you need to teach to get our consent? Consentives, incentives, look at the insights. What businesses we partner with, and I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas over the last decade, the salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools. It's a much more direct route to getting universities to do the thing that the customers, students of the universities want.

1:29:33I 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 functional useless, they want that function of the 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, is part of education. And our policy thing is only give loans to students for majors where the major is going to on average, we let them repay the loan.

1:30:10So stop putting people in the debt to get like terrible degrees, right? That's something we can do right away. So things like this we're working on. We're making huge impacts on picking prisons fixing fixing types of what do you fix in prisons? Well, think about it. And how should how should probation and parole and prisons work? You need to have some incentives, right? You have some framework right now. Right now, if you're running a prison, a lot of 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.

1:30:38and there's nothing there's no incentive to fix it right what if you say to the people running probation and parole on prisons that part of your job is rehabilitation the 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 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're on the right you're too much because whatever, those are both extremes that I don't think, you know, they're both extremes.

1:31:09Like whether you're left on the right or right, if they are coming out, let's make sure they succeed as best we can. Let's have incentives around that, right? There's things like this we could be doing for our society. And we fix a lot of probation and parole programs to like start having the right incentives and it usually impacts these communities because you're all of a sudden care about people. What? So you know, to all cash Patel, you know, he is, yeah, yeah, clever kid. Really lovely guy. He had this really interesting tweet with regards to AI that I'd love to get your take on. And he said, if you gave any human one million, one tenths 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.

1:31:58I don't know if this is true, but But the criticism that he was repurposing was we haven't seen much new innovation that's necessarily come from AI at the moment. Have you got any insight about whether this is a limitation of LLMs at large, whether it's a processing problem, whether it's a sophistication problem? 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. These are types of things that if it really had the right intelligence, it would be analyzing and pushing them forward and taking my ideas, maybe it's like the Chinese, and it can make them even better, you know?

1:32:34It's like, but like, no, it's not your eyes, not doing that. I guess you could say in certain mathematical situations it is doing that. I think when you see some of the contests where it's actually solving math problems, it even insult the rooms 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 what, the great example was the very famous Go game, right? Where it played that new type of move. It was like move 37 and it was like everyone studied and like wow I never thought that before I was like really really cool that it figured it out so there are some constrained areas were sitting that but I think reality is too unconstrained.

1:33:08It's not it's not good enough yet to To build the conceptual structures to do that can't it do that the next five or ten years very possibly But but you're right. It's not yet. What would you like for a muggle like me? Everybody else is listening. What should we expect do you think from AI over the next half decade? You know, it's really interesting. All I have to admit is that some of my friends were involved in building open AI, some guys worked a penalty or a key there and I was watching them a little bit. I wasn't that focused on it and I thought it was pretty interesting, but I just, I didn't realize the breakthrough they're gonna have.

1:33:39So I have to admit, I would have loved to say I'm so smart that I knew this was coming in the name. I didn't realize the emergent properties that would come out of GPT -3 at that point. What's 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 I don't know where, you know, I don't know where to ask them to. I don't know where it starts to stop getting better. My intuition is that it's going to ask them to, and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion.

1:34:08Why? I don't think, for the things we're just talking about, that it's like fully understood all the properties of intelligence necessary to do what we do. And I think it's the fun and really different type of intelligence. It's a difference of kind, not a difference of degree. And that's my intuition, but listen, I have people who are, I know who are geniuses who disagree with me. So, so this is, and because I didn't predict this in the first place. I was going to say you've been wrong and ignorant before around AI, so maybe. Exactly. So it's hard for me to really know. What I do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars in industries already today.

1:34:38We can make twice or three times as productive, and that's where kind of I'm working. So I'm like, I'm like, if you're a muggle, I'm like, maybe like, maybe like a mid -level wizard and there it is, the top level wizard, who are actually pushing forward AI. and I'm taking it and understand it quite well, understand how build quite well, and I'm deploying it to out of productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it. But I'm not the guy who's like pushing for the LM itself. Sadly, it's not who I am. Time right. Joe Lonsdale, ladies and gentlemen, Joe, you're awesome. I really appreciate you man.

1:35:07This is fascinating, so much cool stuff to go through. Where should people check out whatever it is that you got going on? Well, thanks for having me on. You know, we have an American Optimist podcast myself and you joined us. And yeah, just trying to learn to fall on your footsteps here at the moment. And you know, we got UATX, we got a lot of amazing students still applying and going there, the second class, and you know, we'd love to hear from people. I can, Joe, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.