
#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms
Shawn Ryan Show- 563 views
- 18 Dec 2024
Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor known for advancing defense technologies and national security innovations. As a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, he helped develop powerful data platforms to address global threats. Through his venture firm, 8VC, he has supported startups in AI, cybersecurity and battlefield intelligence, driving innovation at the intersection of technology and defense.
Lonsdale is a leading advocate for emerging military technologies, particularly directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and microwave systems, which he sees as vital for missile defense and counter-drone operations. Committed to fostering public-private partnerships, he works to ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of defense innovation while maintaining ethical oversight.
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Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Sean. Glad to be here.
Man, I am, super excited to talk to you. I've been following what been doing in a lot of your different companies for a while now, and, I know you're a busy guy. And, I just wanna say it's an honor to have you here. You know, you just you're involved in so much with technology, and also I love what you're doing with the University of Austin. I'd love to hit on that, but, but, I just I really appreciate you coming and and, I've been looking forward to diving into this for a long time.
So I'm excited to be here. It's an honor to be on the show.
Thank you. Thank you. But, everybody starts off with an introduction, and, we could go on for probably an hour here, but, I tried to summarize it up here. Joe Lonsdale, you're a real titan of industry and innovation, a man whose journey from Silicon Valley to the halls of policy making reads like a modern day epic. You're a Stanford educated visionary who cofounded Palantir Technologies, a company that's become synonymous with big data and analytics, helping governments and businesses worldwide to make smarter, more informed decisions.
After Palantir, he ventured into the world of finance and founded Adipar, revolutionizing how wealth management works, making it transparent and data driven. Of the 9 US defense unicorns, $1,000,000,000 companies, you founded 3 and were 1 of the earliest investors in another 3. You're deeply invested in education reform. You cofounded Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies. Your influence extends into policy with your involvement in 8 VC, a venture capital firm that doesn't just fund start ups, it pushes for policies that encourage innovation.
You've been an adviser to leading political figures, advocating for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges. You shape the ideas of the future with your op eds and articles that often delve into intersection of tech, policy, and culture. You're a father of 5 kids. You just had your first son, and, you've been married for 8 years?
Yep. That's right.
Congratulations on your son.
Thank you, Sean. He's he's 92nd percentile. He's a big little baby.
Yeah? Nice. Healthy boy, Yeah. Well, Joe, I wanna do a I wanna do a life story on you starting from childhood and get into all of your different companies and involvement, with different things that you're in. But, but it just so happens that, you know, I've been super interested in your company, Epirus.
And, I've had several conversations with your business partner, Grant, for standing, and, and, love him. Amazing guy. But, we got a situation going on literally right now in New Jersey, with all these with all these drones. And nobody seems to know what it is, so I just want to kind of start the interview right there. What what the hell do you think these drones are?
This is funny. I said, I was we're we're, you know, gonna be at the army navy game, and so I'm bummed that I don't I'm I'm gonna find out tomorrow probably from all these guys. Right? Because I'm sure I'm sure they know. I'm sure they know, but I haven't texted them and asked, you know, I mean, if it's not ours, then it's really incompetent.
Right? If this is not ours if this is ours, then it's also kind of weird. Like, why why are we doing this and freaking people out? But if it's not ours, what the heck, man?
Well, I mean, what it was, like, 2 years ago we're freaking out about a spy balloon traversing the United States from, what, Washington all the way down to South Carolina. I I got a good answer
on that, though. I'm sure I don't know if I'm sure it's public by now, but I think because of the fact that we let it stay up, we were able to hack into it, trace back where the data was going, and, like, find out a lot about the Chinese, and so it turned out, in that case, it made sense, and it turned out that Xi Jinping didn't even know his underlings had put this buy balloon up and were doing it, and it was actually bad for China because we used it to hack in. So I think in that case, there's, like, a competent answer, which makes you feel good that there's, like, not totally incompetent people. Like, they met with Biden, they said what they're going to do, he agreed to let them do it, and and that was fine. So so hopefully there's a confident answer for these drones, but it's it's a weird it's a weird thing, man.
I mean, do you think it's ours?
I I assume it's ours, because if it's not, that's insane.
Why would they be do why would they fly it why wouldn't they fly this over, like, Area 51 or or some testing grounds?
You know what I found out about government, man, is that there are some really great people, there are some amazing special forces guys. Every once in a while on the DOD, you'll have this, like, genius person in the strategy group, and then the vast majority of them are incompetent. And so so so so it's just hard for me to say, but I'm I'm I'm hoping they're ours, because if they're not ours, that's actually a little bit scary, and and it's really incompetent that we're not doing something.
Do you think this might be a distraction?
From from something going on in the Middle East or something going on
in the Middle East? I don't know. Maybe some maybe some some bad juju's going on somewhere else, and they're just throwing these things up to distract everybody.
If there was another story, then maybe, but I don't I don't I don't know. That's that's an interesting question. We're gonna find out really soon. I'm curious. I I don't want to make a bunch of stupid guesses and I come out to be an idiot because this is hard for me to know.
I I actually don't know the answer.
Well, I mean, drone warfare is becoming, obviously, very prevalent. Absolutely critical.
This is the future of warfare. It's, like, lots and lots of manufactured smart, weaponized, autonomous drones, whether they're flying, whether they're on the water, whether they're under the water, whether they're on the land. That that is the future of warfare as far as I'm concerned.
So, you know, people 1 of the reasons I'm bringing this up is obviously I'm I'm just extremely curious of what your thoughts are. But another reason is, I mean, you know, I've been reading reports on CNN. People are posting the the neighborhood watch groups and the Facebook groups and stuff, and people are, they're freaking out. And what I find probably isn't a coincidence, because I believe in a higher power, but you have you founded Epirus. Yeah.
And Epirus is a directed energy, basically, a directed EMP weapon, and it is I mean, it's it seems to me from the reading I've done on it, it's it's it's defense against drones. EPRIS is
a really important company, and I'm I'm proud to be a cofounder there with it. It's not just I can't take credit for it by myself. There's a few other people who are critical. Nathan Mintz, Beau Mar, you know, the other guys, Grant stepped in and played a key role. You know, in the background on that, by the way, is, you know, I'd gotten out of defense for a few years because after Palantir, it's just not it's hard.
You have to go talk to senators, you have to go to the DOD. It's like this is stressful stuff. I built companies elsewhere, like you mentioned, and but then, you know, we saw in the early 20 tens, we saw a lot of our smartest friends in China were being forced to have their engineers work on military projects, and we said, wait a second. This is not good. And then we saw our defense primes, you know, were not able to attract the best talent at all.
So we had in America, these defense primes had all consolidated in the nineties, and obviously Palantir had to compete against them in software side and crushed them, but but their hardware side was also going downhill. It was also getting worse, and this is a big problem that China's getting better. It's getting worse here, and then it turned out the Xi Jinping guy is clearly a commie who's gonna try to confront us. He's gonna be a serious adversary, and that got scary. And then a bunch of my friends, 3 of the best guys from Palantir with Palmer Lucky, started the andro, and so we backed out early.
And basically convinced me, you know, at the time looking at all these things and looking at ANDREL, we better get back involved in defense. So we said, okay, we're back involved in defense and what are we gonna do? We need to get more of our best and brightest from the tech world, which I'm lucky to come from and have access to to work on these problems. We mapped out about 20 different areas and we decided to start EPIRIS first and decided to build that because exactly the future of warfare seemed very clearly to be heading towards drone warfare, and it's just not sustainable to fire missiles, drones. Right?
You're spending a $1,000,000 or $100,000 to shoot down something that costs a lot less than that, so you need a 1 to many effect. You need to be able to shoot cones of energy, and the thing we, the thing we realized really, with the help of some really smart people like Beau and Nathan, is that it turns out that the that the chips in Silicon Valley had gone to be so powerful and so fast that you can they can help you control power on very small time scales and get the power to hit the emitter, and then fire way farther than anything anyone else was doing. And so the emitters was called gallium nitride. It's a super efficient way of shooting Gallium nitride. Gallium nitride is a gan, they call them g a n, is the is the element, you know, code code.
The gallium nitride, these are super efficient emitters, and these exist in other places too. It's a it's a big breakthrough that was really started to be used in the last kind of, like, 10, 15 years in a bunch of different contexts. But it turns out if you use the AI chips, get the power, hit the gallium nitride, you're taking a bunch of power, and you're kind of condensing it into, like, a 10 thousandth of a second or even less of a of a thing. And so you have this burst. It's a super fast burst, and the burst is intense enough because it's so condensed that when it hits the the drone, when it hits the electronics, it fries them, you know, it destroys them.
And then there's all sorts of things you do to kind of tune the burst and figure out how to actually do it most efficiently and effectively to fry these things as well. And, you know, we're now, I'm not supposed to say quite how far away, but you're shooting things down from miles away, you're shooting miles away, and and and it's not just it's not just the it's not just like the little tiny, like, you know, you know, d d g I drones or whatever they're called. It's like, you know, these are the big things that Iran's making for Russia as well. They could take down quite a far up distance away, and and what's really cool is you're not just doing it so you're doing it for bases, you're doing it for forward attacks, but you can, like, put these things, you put smaller versions in the cones, so for example, you know, you know, Andral's roadrunner, you've seen that, right, the thing that takes off and lands again. Yeah.
You can put it in 1 of those missiles and you can, and that one's not going to work out as far because it's a smaller form factor, but that missile can get up and get pretty close to the to the bad guy drones, fire a bunch of them, and then come back and land. And so there's things like this that you do now too.
So how how many how many drones could, like, 1 of these what what do you call the actual weapon? Is it Leonidas?
Leonidas is the is the first version of the product that's being forward deployed, with CENTCOM, and and it's just going out, actually, in the next month, which is great. You know, the tests have shown you could do about a 100 drones at a time
in certain A 100 drones at a time?
I mean, if they're con if they're together, and, you know, flying together, and and then then the thing moves, so you fire fire fire. What's great so you know why it's called Epirus? So the Epirus was the bow of Theseus. Theseus was the guy who started Athens in legend. Right?
And in legend, his bow had infinite arrows, and so that's the point here, is you're firing electronic powers, so you effectively have infinite arrows. So this thing could fire thousands of times, and each shot costs almost nothing.
Wow. Wow. What I'm just so that gives us hope. So basically, all these drones in New Jersey, if we wanted to, they could, you know, deploy a Leonidas and Take
it down that way. And if they want to, they could shoot down right now with any number of different types of missiles. I'm not sure. Yeah. But this this exactly I mean, I think there's probably rules from the FAA about there's always regulators about what you could do onshore and where you could do it and how you could do it, but, I mean, eventually, you'll probably have things like lean on us, protecting stadiums, protecting airports.
That that's another reason we started that, by the way, is, you know, when we were building Palantir, 1 of the big focuses was was stopping terror attacks. I mean, you know, we're working and partnering to stop terror attacks, you know, with with with the United States intelligence community, which I think were very helpful in doing. And so I I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a kind of a sick thing, but, like, what are what's a bad guy gonna do? Right? You kinda have to put yourself in the bad guy's shoes and figure it out.
And 1 of the things a bad guy could do, which would be horrible, maybe I shouldn't talk about it too much, is you can attack a stadium. Right? You can get you can get lots of little drones, you could put little explosives and cameras on them, it'd be really scary. And so, I think our stadiums are gonna need to be defended by things like this.
Well, yep. I mean, would yeah. I mean, we just I had, a former CIA Targeter in here just a couple days ago. We just released the interview now and, actually, yesterday. And, she's talking about, you know, there there are at least 1,000 very well trained terrorists within our borders right now.
Yeah. It pisses me off, man. It's crazy. There's some really amazing judges I know who are 1 of them actually was just involved in this well, it doesn't matter, a really great decision against the SCC last week. But they would go down to the border, and they assign them to, like, help because they're overloaded, right, with the cases.
And some of the, some of the Biden administration judges were letting in people on the watch list, and they're like, what are you doing? You can't let them in. He said, no, we're instructed to let in everyone. And, like, I I it's like I'm still saying it. I don't even believe it, but this is what I'm told by multiple people.
There's been I think Chip Roy, the congressman, wrote about it as well. Isn't that crazy? They're, like, they're letting in these people into our country. What are they doing? What do you think they're doing?
I think it's, like, this weird ideology where they just I mean, a, they probably, like, trying to spend a lot of money while bringing down inflation by bringing in more people, and, b, it's some weird it's just some weird open border ideology. I don't I don't understand it, but the fact that you'd let people in, even on a watch list, I guess they think it's not actually dangerous. I don't know. It's it's to and these people don't think in terms of of, like, like, you and I, in terms of there's bad guys there's good guys, and we gotta keep people safe, and we have this, like, adversarial relationship with some other countries. It's almost like they're just, like, extremely naive people who live in a different type of world than we do.
I I don't know. It's weird stuff, man.
Do do you think that they want something to happen for a particular reason?
Just start a war? It's possible. I mean, if they come in Yeah. They yeah. It's possible.
And and and do another terrorist attack, then we go right back to war. That spins up the military industrial complex.
There could be someone there could be someone who's that sick in the military industrial complex. I mean, I'm I I I fall in between these factions because, on 1 hand, I think we wasted 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq and probably shouldn't have been there in the way we were. I mean, obviously, we had to do something after the 9 11 attack, but we probably shouldn't have gone and stayed there and spent all the money and all the lives. Right? But the same so so but at the same time, we do need to stop the bad guys from from causing problems.
But, yeah, I think there are some pretty sick people who are who are much, much more aggressive about just, like, always being at war, which is terrible.
Yeah. You know, that's 1 of the things that's 1 of the things I love about what you're doing is is, you know, with with the traditional military to industrial complex companies, you know, we're we're shooting down we're shooting down $500 drones with $1,000,000 missiles.
It's crazy, man. It's not it's not sustainable. And with
a company like what you have, Epirus, I mean, it's it's not that way. It's an energy. It's an energy weapon.
This is this is the goal, is we're not cost plus people. I think there's this really sick disease of people that their whole incentive is cost plus. They just want to use more of their stuff and sell more of their stuff, and their incentives is is are pretty screwed up. I think I think I think I think the better way to do it is, exactly, you got to you got to you got to make things you got to make things much, much, much cheaper and better, and then change the incentives around, have it be more like a software thing, not like a, you know, know, not like a thing where you're just selling as many as possible at 6%.
I mean, you got a that brings up a whole another topic. I mean, what about your personal security? I'm I'm genuinely curious. I mean, you've got to be pissing off, you know, Lockheed.
Oh, for those guys. That's funny. I always thought you meant, like, killing all the terrorists, but, yeah, that's interesting. I'm I'm I mean, listen, I think the guy who runs Lockheed, Jim, he he ran American Tower. He's a great businessman.
He's, like, he's not from the military industrial complex himself. He's been brought in to figure it out and fix some things because there's some things that are broken there, and he seems like an honorable guy to me. I don't think those kind of guys are are and, you know, and and then the other thing, let's let's be honest. I'm, like, I'm I'm a step down from, like, Peter Thiel and and and Alice Carpenter fame. They're both 15 years older than me.
They're both important mentors to me. They're my co founders. I think I think they're the ones who who are who have more security than me. I we have my security guy outside. I'm not that worried, though.
Right on, man. It's just there's a lot of money at stake here for those companies, Raytheon, Lockheed, you know, Northrop Grumman,
companies like that. Interesting, though. I think I think I think, Sean, that's not actually in this case, I think it's not the right way to think about it because it's not like there's, like, some evil genius behind Raytheon or something. Right? Raytheon is like a conglomeration of all of this stuff that merged together in the nineties.
There were some great families, great people, maybe in the 19 forties, fifties, sixties, who created some of this stuff, and back then, by the way, it was legit. It was the best stuff in the world. And so you had this conglomeration, and then you saw all these bureaucrats and all these committees, and the problem with the military industrial people is they become more like the broken bureaucracy in government. So, and these bureaucrats, they're mostly cowards. Right?
They're mostly, like, people who just, like, automatically want to, like, do more fill out more forms. They want to they want to they want to, like, go along with whatever's safe. So I think part of the problem with these companies is the fact that they're actually not bold, and they're not they're not thoughtful, and they're not, they're not, they're not courageous, and so so I'm not really afraid of the bureaucrats, I'm kind of just, like, disgusted by them. Does that does that make sense?
It does make sense. It does make sense. All right, let's let's break from warfare for a second, and let's rewind. Let's go back to your life story. Let's where did you grow up?
Grew up in Fremont, California, the East Bay near Silicon Valley. Brothers, sisters. I'm the oldest of 3 boys. I have 2 amazing younger brothers. I was with 1 of them yesterday in Miami, and they they both live in Austin, although 1 of them spends a lot of time in Asia.
Right on. What did you like well, I mean, what did you grow up doing? What were your hobbies?
A lot of sports, a lot of video games.
Yeah. How many sports?
As a baseball player, as a swimmer, got the got the gold medal in breaststroke for the East Bay swim league. Nice. Nice. My family's very competitive. We're very competitive, whether it's sports, whether it's games.
We were each of my brothers and I were state chess champions. My dad was the top chess coach. We thought it was because we were smart. After we left my elementary school, he kept coaching. They kept winning the state every year for 20 years.
No kidding. My dad my dad is super competitive, so You still play chess? It's for fun. Yeah. You know, when you're playing at that age, when you're playing seriously competitively, it wasn't about being smart, it was about my dad training us, and we had to do it 30 hours a week if we wanted to stay on top.
So it was a it was a very serious commitment from the age of, like, 6 to 12 or so.
Who's the best chess player in the family?
I think I am. Don't ask my brother, Jeff. Are you teaching your kids chess? We're starting to. It's actually really funny, so my oldest kids are are our daughters, you know, I have 5 kids, so my daughters are the older ones are 4, 6, and 7a half, and and they they do little tactics with me and stuff, but I came in the other day when I was trying to trying to teach them, and, and they said, daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore, they're getting married.
I'm working on it.
Nice, nice. What kind of games were you been to?
Like, every Nintendo game. We played baseball a lot. I was a pitcher, so, just all we we we played a lot of we did a lot of video games, so the parents think it's bad for kids, so I I thought it was pretty fun. How old are you? I'm 42.
42. Okay.
So same same age. So, yeah, you grew up with Nintendo.
Nintendo, Super Nintendo. Right on. Yeah. All that kind of stuff.
Right on. Well, what got you what got you so interested in tech? You know,
I was lucky to grow up in Silicon Valley. I had a obviously, I was nerdy myself, but I had even nerdier friends who were teaching me stuff, and, you know, I had a I had a small group of friends who would be way ahead in math and stuff, and, you know, programming and math have a lot in common. So I I got these guys teaching me how to program at 9, 10, 11 years old, which is normal nowadays, but back then that was, that was pretty unusual. And, you know, 1 of the friends, his dad was at Intel, and they got these, they called them Pentium chips. Remember back in the nineties?
And they'd get them, and we'd did this rig where you'd, like, figure out how to over overclock them, and, you know, use, like, liquid nitrogen or whatever to cool it off. And it's just just silly stuff, and it makes the Quake 2 game work a little better. But it's just just just like, kind of in that whole scene, and a lot of my friends' older brothers, and people were building companies, so I was really lucky to be exposed to this stuff.
Very interesting. Yeah. Where did you go after high school?
So I went to to Stanford computer science, which is right in the area, it's the Bay area as well. And, it's actually funny, my mom made me apply last minute to Stanford. I was always going to go to Caltech or MIT, and actually I went back and read it. It was the most obnoxious when you read it, you're like you're like, screw this kid. Like, we shouldn't let him in anywhere because he's just, like, he thinks he's like the worst guy ever.
It was terrible. I was I was 17, and it was, like, pretty, you know, pretty overconfident. But but, I spent Stanford because I did it last minute and didn't it didn't sound quite as arrogant, I think they let me in.
So Stanford, you started interning at PayPal, learning from PayPal?
Yeah. No. So so all so all the really smart and, like, interesting programmers, I met a bunch of them who were a little older than me. I I was I was lucky to be a little bit ahead in programming already because I before I got there. So I got to know some of the older kids, and some of the really bright ones were going to work at PayPal and were interning at PayPal, etcetera.
And so I applied my freshman year, and this is really cool. I want to go work with these people. And I'd I'd known who Peter Thiel was. He founded the the Stanford Review, which I was which I was working with, and I became a big editor of, and and, and they they actually rejected me in my 1st year I applied there. So I applied again and got in the sophomore year.
No kidding. Yeah. What was it like? I mean, do I don't remember what it was like back then, but Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sachs, Reid Hoffman, I mean, were these big names in the space then?
They were they were definitely not big names. No 1 no 1 knew who any of these people were. Not not at all. So, yeah, so everybody was, like, oh, it's such a coincidence that, like, all these companies came out of PayPal, but now that we know who Elon is and who Peter Thiel is and who these guys are, it's, like, of course, they're all together there. You know, there's got to be a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of it.
And it was a power law. This was this was a group There were actually 2 groups, right? It was Elon had x.com, and Peter had Confinity, and and they had a bunch of their smartest friends each building stuff. And there were about 8 companies in the space, in the payment space, and these things, these guys were at war with each other. They're obsessed, you know, this really talented team is trying to win, and they finally realized they should merge rather than, you know, destroy each other, and the companies merge.
And, I hear Elon kept trying to rename it x. He finally got his way later. So but, but, no, it was an amazing group of people. I was just a kid. I get no credit at all for anything that happened there, but I but I learned a hell of a lot from all these people.
That's, a whole of a group of mentors.
It's really fun.
Touch with all these guys?
A bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. A bunch of them. You know, David David Sachs has that show they let me on last week.
They all in things that are entertaining, and, you know, Peter is someone I see a lot, and he still backs a lot of things I do. And Elon, you know, lives in Austin, Texas now, and is is a good friend. I text him and bug him sometimes. I'm trying to be helpful with the stuff going on in government, so Yeah.
Oh, you you are involved with that. Right?
I do my best to help. I have a bunch of friends who are involved full time, and I've passed a bunch of people in, and I'm obsessed with the policy world. So, yeah, I'm trying to be helpful there.
Good. It's good to have you in there. Yeah. So after PayPal, you went on to build in social media. What what were you doing in there?
Oh, I was I didn't I didn't build anything in social media, but I I worked for Peter Thiel after PayPal, and he had a global macro hedge fund, but he also, was the 1st investor in Facebook at the time. So so I don't get any credit for that either, but I got to know really well the Facebook founders, and the office, and the culture. And then right after that, he backed me to start Palantir with my roommate from Stanford.
What, I mean, what caught your interest in national security? Because you it sounds like you made a switch there.
You know, you know, so so I'd I'd always been pretty interested in it. It was, if you look at so computer science is, like, maybe a, a young man who likes things that young men like, there's, like, there's, like, games and there's cool defense stuff. And when you grew up in computer science in Silicon Valley in in the in the eighties nineties, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff the NSA was doing and the and the US government was doing that was way ahead of everything else back in the sixties seventies. So it was almost this mythical thing where where there's just, like, some of the coolest, most talented guys were there. Like, there's literally stuff that was done by the NSA in the seventies that, like, the very top academics at Stanford and MIT and etcetera only figured out 15 years later, like, what the heck they were doing and why they were doing it that way.
So it was just it was just this, like, like, this is what the cool guys are doing, and they're they're the smartest people are doing. They're working on these problems. And then, you know, I mean, as a kid, you you watch James Bond and you look at this stuff, you want to get the bad guys, you want to stop the bad guys. And so I was always fascinated by that world. And at Paypal, the thing that came up, by the way, with this, this was central to this, was the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money.
You know about this? This is like yeah, so PayPal was losing, like, several $1,000,000 a month. Back when that was a lot of money, and it was very unprofitable because you'd go you'd go use your card down the street at 711, and the cashier there is not getting paid very well, and so they're, like, secretly, like, taking the numbers, and they sell a hundred numbers online to the Russians for, like, $500, and then the Russians would take those numbers, run them through accounts, pretend you did transactions, and you and you get this thing later that says, PayPal, $200. And you're, like, I didn't do PayPal $200. So you say no to your credit card company, it's called a charge back, PayPal has to eat it.
And so this was happening at massive scale, and PayPal and its competitors were were going under things to this. And so we had to figure out at PayPal, how do you how do you exactly, how do you how do you go after it? We actually ended up taking a bunch of our customer service people, building these tools for them, building investigative tools, and then helping them figure out how to, like, stop and catch some of the bad guys, and then turn them into secret service and FBI. So so I ended up getting to know a bunch of these secret service FBI guys around 2000, 2001, 2002.
Man, I don't I don't, I don't remember that at all. Wow. How how long did it take you guys to solve that problem?
It it was, it was kind of a cat and mouse game because every time you'd figure out what the bad guys are doing, they'd change their method. So we tried to use AI. Right? You tried to teach the AI. It wasn't really as good 20 years ago, and the AI could detect something.
It was really machine learning. It could detect some things, but you really needed the human intelligence layers. You'd have a have a machine learning layer and you'd have these tools to let people see what was going on, and you'd keep just iterating and staying ahead of them, and the tools were good enough, we cut down the fraud by about 90%, and that made it profitable, and then eBay was sold, sorry, then PayPal was sold to eBay. And so so so so the anti fraud thing was a big piece of what made PayPal work, and we got to know these secret service guys, and these are good guys. There's got a lot of them are good old boys.
They're not tech guys. They're they're they're just, like, you know, trying to figure out what the heck this Internet thing is and how to deal with it and how to catch the bad guys, and so they'd come to us for advice, and I got to know quite a few of them. They'd come to me for advice on other stuff, and we started chatting with them, and, you know, because the cybercrime was a new thing, and you're helping them out. And then 911 happened, and then we kind of saw the government spend 1,000,000,000 of dollars trying to build new tools to help them do better, you know, to stop future stuff, and the stuff they were building horrified us. It was stuff that was based on principles from maybe like 20 years ago.
And we're like, wait a second, guys. Like, Silicon Valley exists. We've done all these new things with all the top talent. And it just had and it was just so disconnecting, and we realized this is actually really scary because our country's spending actually tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars on the stuff that doesn't work, that's 20 years out of date. It's just completely not what a top software culture is.
And that's when we realized, well, we gotta gotta figure out how to get involved and
how to fix this. And how did you get involved?
We started panels here. With Stefan and I, I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs, 1 summer to come and sketch and draw it up with us, and they all thought we were totally crazy, so we couldn't convince them to join. Few of them joined a few years later. But what is Palantir? So, I mean, at a very high level, Palantir is an effort, to take, like, the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems, you know, in these institutions that didn't have didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world.
But what is it actually doing? So there's there was really initially 4 pillars of Palantir. It was it was data integration, you know, search discovery, you know, analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is, like, a really big hard product. So what happens if you have a government department?
You know, at the time, government was spending, say, $36,000,000,000 gathering data. So you're you're you. It's your job. There's, like, 5,000 databases. There's all sorts of sig ints and humans and other things coming in.
There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see depending on the context. Like, what the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a that's a weird, crazy problem and and and you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you. Our job is to to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions like, okay, take this guy we found next to Son of Bin Laden.
Show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay. Now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them?
And just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and and, you know, bringing things in more easily. So it's it's a it's a it's a hard problem to solve.
I mean, this it was from a layman's term, it seems like very it it it helps predict.
There's some prediction, but you're real what you're really doing so so it's Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data because there's no way that any single human's gonna be able to keep, you know, 5,000, 20,000 databases of stuff of different formats in their mind at a time. So you're gonna have to organize it in a way you can interact with it, ask questions, preserve your investigations, share with others, collaborate. So so that's the problem. Now now it turns out that organizing all this information in all these ways is very powerful to then apply AI on top of it.
And so as AI has gotten to be more advanced, there are now a lot more predictive, a lot more kind of, like, magical AI like things that it could do, thanks to that. So Palantir was was lucky in a way to have a top technology culture and to be solving these these kind of data organization ontology workflow problems, we call them, that when AI came along, it was really powerful to add AI to it and go even faster.
I mean, you guys were doing this with also with with IED employees went to 100%. Like, like, to be able
to take all the data and figure that out, I we first started working with a bunch of the special forces groups and we really helped them and and and, you know, figure out some of those hard problems and partnered with them with some really smart guys that were taught us, like, here's the data you should be looking at, and we brought it together with that partnership and did it. And then the army brigade said, well, we need this too because because they needed it badly, and they couldn't pay for it, of course, because they have some giant bureaucratic process. We just gave it to them. We said, just show us the lives you're saving. That's all we wanna see.
So, like, that's really inspiring to our engineers. And they started showing us the lives they were saving, and then it came up for a bit. It's called the Defense Ground Control System, remember? His was his callback that I remember. And, of course, some general gave it to his friend for, like, $5,000,000,000 at some other company, and and everyone protested, like, we're using Palantir.
We don't wanna use wait years for this giant contract. So we ended up suing the government, and and I I never sued anyone, but Palantir had to sue because they purposely just gave it to their friends, and we won. And they and it took years, but they eventually used us. You know what was shocking to me is when they finally eventually used Palantir, I'd met a bunch of the guys, and they all said, it's the best thing ever, it's amazing, we thought you guys were fake, we thought you guys were liars, because because the people who were competing against us had just, like, talked shit about us for years. Of course.
But we finally got in and made it work.
Man, that had to be, that had to be pretty enraging to
It's pretty frustrating when you're saving lives and you're doing it for free, and you're, like, have always forward to play people just, like, working their asses off to, like, really to help, and then and then they treat you like like crap. Yeah. I said, but, you know, because Palantir went through that and because SpaceX went through something similar with their whole competition, we've paved the way now where a lot of the generals and admirals and congress is more on the side of new innovation. Now they're more open to it. They're more willing to let it let it than let it compete, which is important because that's a much better place we're in now than we were 15 years ago.
Man, that's, that's great to hear. I don't have much trust in anybody in government, but,
there's some good ones every once in a while who really care, and you just gotta partner with those.
You know, becoming 1 of the top serial entrepreneurs in the 2000s, I mean, what are some what are some lessons learned, you know, when it comes to building companies? You know,
first of all, I I come from this this background in Silicon Valley, these tech cultures, like, first of all, to build the really top companies, you need a really great technology culture. You need a place where the very best engineers, they're fighting to come in. So I think a typical company is like, you're like looking for engineers. Like, oh, I have this idea, I gotta find these people, I gotta find who's gonna help. And and what you what you want is you want, like, the very most talented technologists in the world.
It's there, and you want people lining up from the top places to try to come in. That's a very hard thing to build, but that that to me, that's number 1 if you wanna build a multibillion dollar company. Like like, there's absolutely a plus plus tech culture. Because what you could do with a really great tech culture is just is just you can try, like, 10 things or a 100 things in a time that that the other guy is, like, still building their thing. And and and you're and you you impress people, you make it work, you iterate.
Like, with Palantir, we'd be back and forth every couple weeks to DC. They'd have all these objections. We come back 2 weeks later, we have would have done the equivalent of 6 months of work for a typical contractor in the 2 weeks. We showed them, look, it's it's ready now, which we did what you said. And we and and do that do that over 2 years, you know, 50 times, You know, eventually you get somewhere really fast.
So I said tech culture is number 1. I'd say number 2 is you have to have a vision about, like, this is a gap in the world that you're really confident in because building companies is really hard. Things go against you. Things take a long time. No 1 actually no 1 else actually believes in you and believes you're gonna make it, so you gotta be really sure there's this gap that you're going after and really sure you're right, and just, you know, it takes it takes a certain takes a certain overconfidence on us to be willing to go after that and do it.
You'd be a little bit crazy maybe.
I didn't ask this about your childhood, but I'm curious. Did you did you grow up in a fairly wealthy household?
Or I'd say more middle class. Middle class? My dad you know, I I 1 of the most obnoxious stories I remember is when I was, like, 4 and a half, and we were flying on a plane economy, and I I asked my dad, I said, dad, why aren't we in the front? And he said, well, you know, this costs a lot more money, and we're comfortable here. I said, dad, but you're really smart.
You're smarter than all those people. Why don't why don't you have enough money to be in the front of the plane? Super obnoxious kid. My dad, it was really smart, and he just prioritized spending a hell of a lot more time with family. He's he was 1 of 8.
He brought I'm I'm the oldest of 19 cousins, so he brought them all out to the Bay area from Massachusetts, and he he did a great work, but he never really he he had a he grew up a little over middle class, so for him being middle class and having, you know, having enough money was was fine. He didn't care, which is a child buyer, by the way. As a kid as a kid, I was obnoxious, but, like, there's a lot less than that. It was really cool.
How did you, I mean, how did you get going? I mean, did did you're talking about, you know, lessons learned, and, basically, what you're saying is hire the best tech people there are. How did how were you able to find the capital to afford to to bring that?
That's a that's a good question. You know, at Palantir, and also at Adipar and my other companies, we actually usually try to pay lower salary or higher equity. So you give them more upside in the company, so they had to believe in the company. And it was interesting, whenever we gave someone an offer, we give them 3 choices for the offer. You could say you take more cash, but they get a little bit less.
You know, medium cash, medium, or take less cash, and take more, take more upside. And and, like, the very best people, the ones who are the really best, they always wanted even less cash and even more upside.
No kidding. Which is it's
just because because it's like it's like they're just confident. We're just gonna freaking win. And it was fun. I used to give them a table, here's what their shares would be worth if we had a certain level of success, and we'd like, we'd give them different types of options, and the biggest option was, if we make this company worth $5,000,000,000 here's what your shares are going to be worth, and everyone says, Joe, you can't say $5,000,000,000 that's too high, that's ridiculous. So that was, you know, it was kind of fun.
It's a 160 now, but that took took 20 years. Wow. What
kind of percentage of ownership were you, or shares were you, like,
I mean I mean I mean, so for for an early, really strong engineer, they might get a, you know, depending on where we are, like, you know, you might get a really strong 1 early on, might get 1%, and then it gets diluted over time, right, as you get those down, but then later on people get a half percent, a quarter percent, and and, you know, dilution is when you raise more money, so you're going a little bit less than that. But let's say you started with a quarter percent, you get diluted down to 0.1%, but, you know, 0.1 percent of of a few billion is still a still a really big number, and 0.1% of of, you know, 100,000,000,000 is a lot, so so a lot of these guys did really well.
Wow. Very how long did it take you to start how how I mean, was there a turning 0,
yeah. Oh, yeah. You actually, you know, 3 years into Palantir, we were building this off, reiterating, a few of the top guys for the engineering side are basically ready to quit. They're, like, Joe, this is just not working out, like, we haven't got enough contracts. This just seems like it's really unlikely it's going to be there.
And, you know, I I found this in life, is oftentimes right before the breakthroughs, you get this, like, really hard time where people are just, like, giving up. And I think I convinced a couple of them, let's just push for 6 more months because we have these other things coming, and, know, and Alex Karp did a really great job of figuring out how to get both the FBI and CIA to move on something, and all of a sudden we had these bigger contracts, and it was good that we were building. But it it came really close to dying early on. This stuff this stuff takes a long time to build right. And like I said, you gotta be a little bit crazy because it's just you just gotta push really hard.
You're building a bridge, and you don't know if the island's there or not that you're building it to, you know.
Man, that's, super inspiring. So from, from Palantir, where what was next for you?
I ended up so I was I was helping Peter with the with the hedge fund. It was my other passion, and I did a lot of finance since mapping that rolled out. And and it was after the financial crisis in 2008, we were thinking, like, well, there's a lot of things that are, like, not organized in this space and they're messy. And we realized 1 of the ways to really make things work better in finance would be to have, like, a platform with, like, root access to everyone's wealth and organize those problems organize better from there. And I also had just made some money myself, so I had like, what's called a little bit of a family office, like a small 1.
And instead I was I talked to people, how do you run your family office? I was talking to what are called REAs, the registered investment advisors, and it was a mess. They all hated their technology. So I was pretty arrogant at the time, having just had some success, you know, and and Palantir was starting to grow really well. I said, I'm going to build a company that fixes this space.
And, I thought it couldn't be that hard if we're running, you know, data globally for all these intelligence agencies and defense stuff to do this little finance thing. And so we started it off, and it turned out it was a really hard problem as well. It took about, again, about 3 years to get it to work. It was called Adipar. But today, Adipar is doing really it took us a long time, but Adipar is now by far number 1 in the country.
We just crossed $7,000,000,000,000 reported over Adipar. So it's it's a leader in that space now. You you just crossed what? $7,000,000,000,000 reported over Adipar. So if you think of, like, a big investment advisor, a big bank with wealth managers, or family offices, even some of them here in Nashville, you know, with friends you mentioned, like, those guys are probably running their family office and their wealth off of Adapar to do all their data and reporting and decisions, and how does their accountant see it, how does their lawyer see it, how does they bring together all the information, figure out what to do next.
And, you know, it's really good for finance to be more data driven because if things are not data driven, it becomes an old boys club. It becomes just like insiders just doing things like insiders do. Whereas, once you have all the data, it's it's it's able to bring in and and help new solutions work and help, you know, help people actually break into it. So I think it's been a good thing.
Very interesting. Very interesting. You know, we're talking about all things pretty much AI. Mhmm. Do you know I mean, what what is powering all this stuff?
Because AI takes a tremendous amount of energy from what I understand.
So so going Yeah. So because because a lot of those companies initially were just in in the cloud, and that was a pretty expensive thing, and Amazon and others, and Google and Oracle set up these big giant, you know, things that made a ton of money, like, the infrastructure power of the cloud things, you know, powering things like Adapar was become a big business, and now all of a sudden, you're there's a whole new infrastructure, of course, with NVIDIA chips and everything else to build for AI. This is like a it's like a $1,000,000,000,000 investment, and it's 1 of the biggest investments we've ever made in infrastructure in our civilization to power all this new AI stuff we're doing. And I I'm sure you guys on your team are using it for for different things. We're each using it for things.
You know, we're we're gonna need more power. I'm a lot of us are big fans of nuclear, but right now, we don't have a lot of nuclear in our civilization. I think it's still we do have some, by the way. It's 20% of what we do is about that, but a lot of us wanna wanna ramp up nuclear. I think this administration's gonna do that, but, you know, a lot of people wanna ramp up solar in different ways.
You know, there's just a lot of there's there's and there's a lot of good options for how we do this, but it is it is a big problem to to make sure we do that if we're gonna gonna keep growing this stuff.
Is solar is solar actually a realistic option Yeah. For AI?
You know, so the problem is it's actually funny, there's this term I like, so a lot of people the old term the old term is is clean energy, of course, because they call it clean energy, which I don't know if solar panels are that clean. It kind of takes a mess to make them, but, you know, it's it's clean in the sense that when you're using them, they're just very clean. There's another term called intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is stuff that's not always on, which is wind and solar. So if you're going to use intermittent energy, first of all, we've probably over subsidized that because if you have too much intermittent energy, it just screws you.
Right? Because it makes energy cheaper where the sun's shining, and then and then everyone's screwed and there's not you know, you have to pay people even more cuckoo or running all the time when the sun's not shining. Batteries are getting better, but and and there are there are certain, like, things, for example, with air conditioning, you probably could that works really well because you need more energy anyway when it's sunny outside. So listen, I I think solar is a big part of the solution, but but, you know, I think for the base load, I think natural gas and nuclear are the obvious things that scale out for now.
Do you know anybody that's, working with cold fusion?
There's a lot of stuff. You know, there's there's a few different companies. There's 1 called Commonwealth in Massachusetts that a bunch of my friends are invested in. And it's interesting because fusion is 1 of those things where, for a while, when I was younger, I was just really skeptical because it's always supposed to be coming and you're, like, this is never going to come. It's crazy.
But it turns out you can actually map out, the ratio of the energy you put in to get out, and then and you kind of graph that. Right? And so if you graph that, it's, like, it's called, like, the the thing is called the q ratio or something. If you graph that, it was, I think it's like 0.2, like 10 years ago, so you only got back a 5th as much energy out, and it kept going up and up and up, and now it's over 1. So fusion is now over 1 in terms of energy coming out.
I don't know exactly. It's like 1.2, 1.3. It starts to get really economic, around 1.5, 1.6, and really economic at 2. And it looks like, if you graph it, it's going to cross I think it crosses too in the early 20 thirties. I think some of these new designs make that very likely.
I'm not this is not something that just happens magically. There's a ton of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of work. But, you know, 1 1 thing I will say about America that's awesome is even people I disagree with politically, I have a lot of friends, you know, in the tech world, for example, that might be on the might be on the other side, but but there's people on both sides who including Bill Gates, including all sorts of other guys, who are putting just a ton of money into this fusion research, these fusion companies. And I think we're gonna get there, and I I think it's really, really good for our civilization if we do. If we have cheap energy, man, that helps everyone, but it helps the working class more than anyone else.
Because it just it just makes everything cheaper, and I think it's a really good chance we get there.
Can you go into a little bit of that? Because I don't think under I don't think people understand, you know, why cheap energy would really help the economy in middle class, lower class homes.
Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the cost of everything, cost of food, the cost of driving your car, the cost of building stuff, the cost of, like, building a manufacturing plant for things you buy, the cost of running the manufacturing plant, everything comes back to energy. If you make energy cheaper, you make everything cheaper, then it means all of us can afford more stuff. And by the way, it's not just like like if you make energy cheaper, it's also then cheaper to clean the environment. It's cheaper to to, like, to make things more green.
Right? So there's all this stuff that just, like, in our society, like, there's just tied to that. And if you look at the standard of living the last couple 100 years for the poor middle class, it's tracked, like, almost 1
to 1 in a lot of
cases, you know, with the cost of energy. It's a really big deal to innovate on that. It's just it's just been this very predictive thing for how well people are doing.
What's the holdback with nuclear energy? What is what is the
Well, there's 2 different holdbacks. The holdback on the fission side, which is what we should be scaling up now, is that we have an insane regulatory apparatus. And so we have, this, like, it's, like, this atomic energy group in the US that was very innovative, and we used to do things very quickly in the, like, fifties, sixties, and we built a ton of plants. And then in, like, the mid seventies, they shifted it and it became what's called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as far as I could tell and all of my friends could tell, had a mandate of just stopping anything new.
So if you graph, like, new nuclear new nuclear stuff, it would go like this, and then it flatlines. And and and do the and these people, like, it's just crazy. So basically, like, so my my father, for his job actually, was at something called Raychem, and he was selling heat tracing. And he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants, and and sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he had to sell it to a nuclear plant, he had to bring, like like, 60 binders that they had to work on, and then all this stuff of just nonsense information.
It made it 10 times as expensive for him to sell to nuclear plants. So so what these bureaucrats did is they created so many rules and so many laws that made no sense whatsoever. And by the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just, like, way aggressive beyond that, and so it made it unprofitable to do new nuclear plants. And so what happened is starting from the mid seventies, you no longer could innovate on this technology, and you only had what you had. And and so so it really crushed the industry for really almost a couple generations now.
And finally finally, thanks to great work by a lot of people I know, 1 of my friends who started Airbnb, his his wife is a is a model who's a big nuclear energy promoter. It's really cool. They're, you know, they're they're just really into this, and I have a bunch of other friends who are pushing nuclear energy. It's finally coming back as a as a bipartisan thing, that it's cleaner for the environment. It's good for the for everyone, including the working class.
It's good for American business. We should be innovating again in nuclear energy and building it. So so so it looks like we're gonna start fixing the regulations and allowing us to do more things there. I think this new administration, Chris Wright's coming in as secretary of energy, he's a very big fan of it. So so I'm I'm seeing really good things.
So so that's going to come back there. That's what's been blocking that. On the fusion side, we just haven't had the technology, but this big investment might get us there the next decade.
And do you think that, do you think that big oil and gas lobbyists have something
to do with it? It's very possible, it's very possible that part of the reason, there's probably like, if you look at, if you look at Germany, the green party in Germany, which is the left party, was basically founded around an anti nuclear energy framework. So there is, like, a crazy part of the left that's against nuclear energy, but I bet you on the right, there's some interest from oil and gas that I can't go back in time and see those conversations in the smoke filled rooms, but I bet you some of those guys, you know I love Texas, but I bet you some of those guys in Texas, they they might have had a thing to say about that. Now now today, are they blocking it? No.
No. They're not really anymore. I think I think we're gonna break through and fix it. You know, most of the guys I know, Chris Wright comes from the he created some, you know, giant fracking company, Liberty Energy. I think a lot of these guys nowadays are, you know, they have a lot of money, they love the country, they just want the best solutions to win as well I've seen.
I'm sure there's some of them that don't want it, but I think overall the the vibe shift we are in and the it's just, like, let's do what's best for America, so I think we're gonna break through and fix the regulation,
I'm hoping. I mean, a lot of people, being included, are very concerned about our power grid, you know? Yeah. And and and so I got I would like to kinda hang out on this subject for a little bit. Sure.
A lot of people are seeing rolling blackouts. Yeah. You know, power grid structure is extremely outdated. It's old. It doesn't seem like it's getting updated anytime soon.
You know, how how much is the is our outdated power grid holding us back?
It's it's gonna become a bigger problem. I I I agree. It's it's I mean, especially as you go to more electric vehicles where it's distributed and everyone wants to charge, that's gonna weigh on these grids. They need they need to be modernized. The way we've built them right now, Sean, is the regulation again is a problem here.
The incentives are all screwed up. You're only allowed to charge certain amounts or spend certain amounts, and it's it's very much, like, 1 of the areas of our society that's, like, 1 of the commie areas of our society. By commie, I mean, it's, like, controlled by top down by government and told what to do. And it's like, you know, I have 2 concerns. 1 is it's not ready to work with what we're gonna need as, you know, in terms of future demand the next 5 or 10 years.
2, it's not protected very well at all. So if I was an adversary who wanted to go to war against America or I wanted to harass America, probably lots of ways to break in, hack in, just take down these utilities. And, you know, it's kind of crazy, like, we spend all this money on defense. We haven't defended any of that stuff at all. I think we just leave it to the local towns, but I'm sorry, these small towns aren't going to know how the heck to defend against the top hackers in China, or, you know, so so there's there's definitely a lot we could be doing to fix that.
Are you concerned that China manufactures a lot of our energy equipment? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's,
I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective, it's extremely dangerous. And if we want to be ready so in World War 2, it wasn't that we had, like, a bunch of big defense contractors, it's that we had a bunch of big industrial, you know, manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war. And if if we've we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base, And I think we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think I think Trump is very good on this.
He shifted it back. I think I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country, where a lot of people on both sides now agree. We need to fix this. And so but but we I mean, this is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are are not totally insane at all. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah. I mean, how do we where do we start, you know, with updating the grid? We talking I mean, we're talking everything from power lines to power plants to
transformers. I think I think I think I think, I think an effort to to do more advanced manufacturing here and to and to and to and to give give some kind of, you know, general subsidies and have a competition is not totally insane again to rebuild our manufacturing base. And and then, you know, I think I think you have to look again at at how it's being regulated and what the incentives are for people to update these things, and you need people to have the proper incentive to update them. Let's take a quick break here.
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Alright, Joe. We're back from the break. We had a little side conversation about, the the incoming administration, and we're both pretty fired up about it. I'm just who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular that Well,
I I'm most excited about Elon and Vivek and the Doge effort because this is something I've wanted to see for forever. I'm, like, probably, like, 1 of the only guys in tech that's done a lot in policy on the on the right, on the small government side for the last 10, 20 years, and it's like the world just, like, shifted this way. Like, the vibe shift is exactly in line with stuff I've been thinking and talking about for a decade, so I'm I'm I'm so excited about this.
What I mean, how fast do you think
they're gonna start cleaning this stuff up? They're already doing it, man. They can't really officially do it yet, but they're already making all the plans. There's people working hard there. There's guys thinking, hey, Joe, we need another engineer for this.
We're trying to mount this out. We need we need more lawyers for this. We're going they're going right now, as hard as they can, and and getting ready, so it's it's gonna be really bold.
Do you think they'll have it all mapped out before they even step in?
Well, I think the way Elon works in general is just, like, what can we do right now, and then what can we do next? Let's just focus on what we can do right now. So they have what's called their day 1 priorities, and they're just focused and sprinting on everything they could do day 1, and I think they're going to have a lot of stuff ready for day 1. How about,
I mean, where do you think they're going to start? Are they do you think they'll go from agency to agency to you know what I mean? Do will they do it in sections, or will it be all 1 big sweep at different stages?
I mean, they're they're bringing in, like, at least, like, well over a 100 people, the Doge effort, and there's gonna put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs who are the pulse, you know, there's these policy placements that are all working with Doge and being liaisons with Doge. And, you know, they're they're gonna they're gonna come out of the gate with a bunch of general things, a bunch of removing certain people, a bunch of removing certain regulations. There's all sorts. I I can't I can't go into the details exactly what they're gonna be doing, but it's gonna be really aggressive right from the start.
How much pushback do you think they're gonna get? I mean, and will it will it affect their their effort?
I mean, it's a really good thing that the supreme court of the United States right now is controlled by the pro liberty side that's skeptical of the special interest of government bureaucracy. The government bureaucracy is 1 of the most powerful special interests in our country. It's it's such it's such, like, a strong force. So, you know, what happened is that in the late 19 seventies, in a very, very kind of, like, government union bias, congress, or Jimmy Carter's congress, they just put in all these crazy rules to try to make it impossible to hold people accountable. I'm sure you've seen this a lot in government too.
And so they will fight it really hard, but a lot of us believe, and I think the supreme court believes, that the intent of the constitution is that the president is supposed to be in charge of the executive branch. It's supposed to have unitary authority to to remove people and to and to fix things. And, you know, there's another thing called the Impoundment Act from the 19 seventies as well. They tried to force Nixon to say, you know what, you have to spend every last dollar that we procure, you know, and tell who you spend. And I'm I'm not sure that's constitutional or that's that's an unconstitutional, like, you know, thing coming from congress on the presidency.
So I think controlling the presidency, controlling the courts, we only partially control congress because you really need 60 senators to really do something bold, but we partially control that too. We we should be able to get a lot done here. Man, I hope so. The the whole world's watching, man. I I was with someone, even like freaking Keir Starmer's government, which which I have some issues with over in the UK, obviously, they're they're like kind of more really hard left slide.
Like, even people out there is like, they know they have to cut their bureaucracies. Bauchracies are like these cancers, man, that have grown out of control, they're unelected, They think they're in charge. They're laughing and saying, no, Ora, we'll be here forever. We're gonna stop whatever you do. It's just, like, level of, like, broken arrogance.
Like, we have to. If Elon and Trump and Vivek and, like, a bunch of my other friends, oh, my smartest friends are going in to help right now. If these guys can't do it, it's not possible. So so we all have to root for them for the sake of our civilization because if we can even, you know, get part of what they're doing right, that's a much brighter future for everyone.
Who else are you excited about?
As there's there's a lot of great people coming in. I think we were talking about, I think cleaning out the DOJ with Kosh Patel is gonna be just so much corruption, so much mess there. The stuff you see coming out, it's like, they're spending all their time going after white supremacists as opposed to real criminal the whole thing is crazy. And, by the way, there are good people in the FBI. There are still people in the FBI trying to find communists, trying to find bad things happening in our country, so, I think we ought to be careful.
It's not that the whole agency, like, if you have friends in the FBI, they might be a great person, but there's just so much corruption, so much waste, so much nonsense in these places. Yeah. I I am, I'm ecstatic. The cash got in there. I think he is gonna do a phenomenal job.
What do you think about Chris Ray resigning? Why do you think he did that?
I think these guys are probably afraid at this point. I don't know. Or maybe maybe he just knows his, you know, there's there's a vibe shift. He knows he's not supposed to be in charge anymore. You know what you know, the vibe before, it was, like, it was bureaucratic, it was cowardly, it was guilt ridden, like, that was, like, that was, like, the vibe for, like, from, like, the whole, like, the whole, like, woke movement, and now instead the vibe is is is greatness, it's courage, it's joyous ambition.
I mean, the whole country has just shifted away. Like, these guys, they there's this, like, overvalue on credentialism. Right? It was just, like, fake credentials, and now we're shifting towards, like, human judgment and common sense. Like like, it's it's like nature's healing here, man.
Things are going back to the right way, and and I think a lot of people know that their time is over.
Do you think we're gonna see a lot of you think we're gonna see some mass pardons?
I'm scared of that. I'm scared of I don't know. I mean, I get him pardoning his son, although the way he did it was super sketchy because he basically did it for the whole Ukraine period, which so we're you know? I hope he could still do that investigation to find out what went on. I mean, the guy it's it's such a corrupt family.
It's just terrible. You saw the thing where he he paid 1 of my friends in in, like, like, a a booklet with his art that was made with his own own shit. I can't even say it. It's it's crazy to see this stuff. It's like he literally was 300,000 behind on rent, so he tried to pay it with his with the art made from his shit.
It's like, and he did, like, he got away with it. He's pardoned now, so he's I don't think he can go after him for anything.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm I'm worried you're gonna see a bunch of more mass pardons. I really hope not. The joke is he'd pardon SBF because SBF gives so much money to the Democrats and and and, you know, the the crazy guy. I really hope not.
It's just the whole thing's crazy, man. Do you have any concerns with the upcoming administration? Yeah. Listen, I I think you can't agree a 100% with anyone. I actually posted on X recently, like, you know, I I disagree with the with the longshoremen decision that came out recently.
What? So so Trump said that we're not gonna automate the ports, and we're not gonna and that it's a waste of money to automate the ports, and I know about equipment, and it's not worth buying this equipment, and we should just let the unions keep going. And, you know, and what I posted is I think Trump's clearly wrong on this, but, you know, it's okay to disagree with someone and still respect them and follow them in other areas. So I don't think we have to agree. I'm never gonna agree with someone a 100%.
I'm never gonna be afraid to say it. I think that's how America is supposed to work. And if people don't think America works that way, too bad, I'm just gonna keep speaking out. So, you know, and so I I a 100% love the Trump's president. I agree with a bunch of stuff he's doing.
But, like, giving in to these, like, crazy corrupt union mafia people, not what I would have done. I get it in the sense that, a, there's a vibe shift where you want the union vote for the right, and, b, like, he doesn't want a giant strike to deal with as he comes into office, so I respect that, and that's his decision. I wouldn't have done it in a way that kind of, like, attacked automation. I think that's silly.
Yeah. That's interesting. I've never thought of that. Interesting. Well, let's move back into I know we already talked a lot about Epirus, but I'm just fascinated with the subject.
So where how did that even pop up on your radar? What what was going through your head when it started?
With Epirus when it got started?
Yeah.
So the thing the thing was the thing we were talking about earlier is basically we realized that China was gonna be an adversary, that this, like, crazy guy is actually communist, who's coming in, that he's forcing his best and brightest to work on new ways to get us. And we said, okay, what does the war look like in the 21st century? Like, what what is the warfare gonna happen gonna have happen? And you're gonna have, like, these massive numbers of drones is by far the best way to fight, and you're gonna need ways to stop them. And so so so so what is 1 of the most important weapons?
Well, if you could have force fields, if you have the star trek shields, that's pretty freaking cool. And let's let's and it turns out, in venture capital, there's 2 things. Right? In venture capital, there's there's where's the best talent in the world and what's possible now that wasn't possible before. We have access to the best talent.
We're lucky to have that. So what's newly possible? Well, it turns out these chips are now fast enough to control power on small time. Skills to make our electronic warfare weapons work way better. So we said, okay, this is a really key area because we know there's new possibility here, let's prove it out.
And it was really fun because with about 30, $40,000,000 on our side, we're able to go to the desert and have a competition against guys who've raised and spent, and give give them 1,000,000,000 and billions by the government, tens of 1,000,000,000 by the government for their stuff, and and when the hardened drones flew, for the same size, same power, we shot down the hardened drones 9 and a half times farther away. Are you serious? 9a half times farther away than the guys who got 1,000,000,000 of dollars of contracts, and it's because there's these new possibilities that they didn't know how to do.
How was it how was it developed? Where'd you guys develop this?
El Segundo, Nathan Mintz, Beau Mar, a bunch of guys, Andy Lowery, a bunch of really key guys on their team who, know and the DNA was a combination, like, we had the DNA from the Silicon Valley world, and we had the DNA from the electronic warfare world. So there are some people who have worked at some of these other places because you there's just certain expertise that's been built up in America that no 1 else has that you need to build on what already exists and build on a kind of knowledge of how gallium nitride can be worked with as well as what's nearly possible.
Is Leonidas an offensive weapon as well as a defensive weapon? There's lots
of ways. It's yeah. It's it's it's it's at its core, it's really it's a defensive thing in a sense that, like, you can have something protecting a city or a base or a squadron, but, I mean, if you're going to be attacking the bad guys and you're going forward, you wanna have these things. Right? You wanna have ways of stopping the drone and other attacks from getting you during an offensive.
So or your base by the way, you wanna just turn off the area you're attacking. Imagine if there's an area you're going after, then all the electronics go dead. That's probably pretty useful right before an attack. Yeah.
So what would you what would you point the the weapon at? If you wanted to take out a could you take out a city?
What what do you mean by that? I turn off the power? And if you turn off the power in a cone that goes, again, we're not supposed to say how far, but but quite a far far distance, it's so you could definitely turn off an area of a town or a city, and you could move it to turn off more.
Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah.
It's pretty crazy. Right? It is. We used to think we used to think about this in terms of when I was a kid, you'd thought about, like like, the EMP from a nuke going off in the high atmosphere. So that'd be like it's a not but, you know, that that's actually much more aggressive and scary version of these things.
But but this thing, that can only be used once, this
thing could keep being used without hurting anyone at all. Could this could this take out a nuke mid flight?
It could so so it's frying electronics. So if you think about it for satellite defense, for example, which is not what we're doing right now, but it's just it's just me talking out of my butt, so excuse me if it's if I get something wrong. But but my bias would be that if something's targeting a satellite, it needs to be adjusting its flight in order to hit it, and so you probably what you'd want to do with satellite is you'd want to blast this, and you blast it a certain number of miles away, and then you could just adjust slightly and the thing's not gonna know how to hit you. Same thing. A cargo plane's a better example probably.
Right? So I think if you got a big slow cargo plane and the bad guy's trying to take it out, which is key for contested logistics, you can put 1 of these on it, you know, you always see the movie where the missile's trying to follow the guy. You blast the missile, now it's a dumb missile, and then you turn. Right. So there's things like that we're probably going to be doing for defending planes.
Wow.
So this, so these these might be deployed on planes. I think I
think I think some version of these will definitely be deployed on planes at some point if we're going to be having battles. Now, the question is what type of planes and drones we we have or use in 10 years, but but, yeah, you definitely want I mean, definitely want cargo planes, no matter what I think, so you can definitely use them.
What other what other type of, what other type of stuff are these things going to be deployed on? A naval ships, Odezs?
Odezs ships are I mean, our company, Ceramic, which is building the, you know, hopefully, thousands and thousands of these, smart, autonomous, kind of like so smart, autonomous weaponized vessels, you're going to want that could be 1 of the things you put on an autonomous vessel, obviously, during a battle is to be able to go around and turn things off with this. So I think I think you're going to have stuff like that too.
Are there different sizes now?
100%. So the ones that are the ones that are Leonidas is a certain size, which which is, you know, takes out a certain distance, it's much farther. If you wanted to, for example, if, for example, this was put in an Androl Road Runner, if we did that kind of partnership, like that would, like there's only a small cone inside the Road Runner, so there's only a certain amount of the stuff you could put in there that might only shoot things effectively, like, 20 or 30 meters, for example. But that might be okay because the road runner could fly up, fly next to the swarm, and shoot a bunch of times, then go back and land again. I love that video that Palmer made with with the guys on that.
It's such a cool such a cool weapon. So combining it with stuff like that would be great.
Man, can you can you go on to the road runner a little bit? Just another So I'm I'm lucky to be
an early investor in Anduril. Brian Shemf, Trey Stevens, Macraim, a bunch of our superstars from Palantir co founded this with my friend Palmer. Palmer before had started, Oculus, was the VR company, and actually back to me at the beginning of that. He was like so he's a crazy kid, like 20, 21 years old. We met him and he had prototype, and we're like, this is too crazy.
Let's give him a little bit of money, though. It's so impressive. And then we actually co led the next round because it was starting to work, and then Facebook bought it. And he very famously got kicked out of Facebook for being a Republican. That's a longer conversation.
What? You know about this?
I didn't know that. Yeah. I know. He, like, put up a billboard against Hillary and was, like, outspoken. I mean, listen, you're all of a sudden a billionaire in your mid twenties and you have opinions and it's right in the middle of woke Silicon Valley, so they and this Facebook's, like, famously, like, on the other side of it, so they just attacked him like crazy and and, you know, all these people were really nasty to him.
A lot of people have come out from Facebook and apologized to him now because he's now like this really important leader in our country doing great things, and they realized they were wrong to treat him that way. So it's like a it's like a whole saga in his life of being like beaten down and out and discarded. Not bad, he's a billion billionaire, you know. Just because we're talking about Palmer. I was at his wedding.
He's not gonna like this maybe. I was at his wedding, and I was sitting next to, like, you know, Peter Thiel and Senator Cruz and all these people. And it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy when he's getting married, and all of a sudden all the music goes off, and Topgum music comes on, and then like a helicopter flies over us. No.
And then it lands behind the behind, and he and Palmer's flying it. He comes out in in tails, and he never dresses up nicely for everybody. The helicopter goes away, then the normal music comes back on, and his wife comes in normally with her dad. But that's the kind of guy. He's just he's hilarious.
Damn. That's awesome. He's basically America's Iron Man. He's, like, he's a hilarious inventor guy, amazing guy. So he invented all this hardware for for the first real VR in America that worked, and then and then he partners to my Palantir guys, and they start Eendrill.
And they're and and so Eendrill has all these crazy cool products, and they're they're running circles around the primes. They're basically, like, the next new prime. Right? They just raised, like, 1,000,000,000 of dollars at, like, you know, 15, $20,000,000,000 valuation range. And so 1 of their new products, which is amazing, it it reminds me of Elon's rockets.
It could it's a missile that can open up, launch, and and if it's not used, it comes back and lands and waits and gets used again, which is not something that I think the generals knew to ask for, but if you think about warfare, it's all about, like, dollars per effectiveness. Like, if you have a bunch of things attacking you, fire 50 of these things, use 10 or 20 if you need, and have the other ones come back and use them again. It's way better. Right? And so and by the way, this thing is like a tiny fraction of the cost of similar competitive missiles.
Are you kidding me? It's like it's like it's like it's like he's literally competing against stuff that costs, like, you know, depending on what it is, 1 to 3,000,000. I think we're selling them for 250 can now and still have much better margins than our other guys, and, so it's just like which is why you want to let people not do cost plus because you want to have them reengineer from scratch, you know, what makes the most sense. Wow. Because you charge someone cost plus, your job is to make it as expensive as possible because you get to keep a piece of that cost.
Right? But if you don't charge cost plus, then you have this whole better framework.
You know, you get you had kind of mentioned that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, like, these companies are the big guys. You guys are, you know, underneath them. I mean, do you see that flipping? Yeah.
I mean, there's still some really, really amazing expertise in our military industrial base. It's like America's military industrial base that's important and that exists inside some of these primes. So I won't I I wouldn't wanna say there's, like, they're not going away.
We don't
want them to go away. That's actually as much as the military industrial complex, like you talked about, is an issue, you have some stuff we need to know how to do to keep America safe and to be the best in the world. And so these companies are going to be important, but in terms of anything really new and innovative, anything with really hard software, they they just don't have the cultures they used to have, and they don't have the top people they used to have for most things. So so so it's really important that we have you know, Silicon Valley just got so far ahead, and it's really important we take some of that culture and apply it. You know, when when I first wrote the check-in to Andral, it was 2016, I think, I had a bunch of people, who we work with in, like, the bio world say, we're not gonna work with you anymore if you're doing defense.
This is so wrong. Like, you're just such as evil. Why would you do this stuff? Like, we it's just wrong to do. And then a lot of fun just wouldn't even mean it.
It wouldn't say, you know, so it was like a thing you weren't supposed to do. And and it was really cool with the live shift that's totally changed. You have a lot of the best people going in. It's popular now, which maybe it's too popular now, but that's that's another problem, you know.
You know, you had mentioned, you had mentioned Facebook kicking them out because of a Yeah.
Because of
a billboard.
What do
you think about, Zuckerberg trying to get in with the conservative crowd? It's pretty interesting to watch the, you know I mean, well, 4 years ago, you kicked the president off your platform. Now you wanna buddy up? Yeah. It's I mean, what's what's going on here?
There's a lot of that going on. Look, listen, Zuckerberg Zuckerberg is an interesting case. He is fundamentally, himself, not super political, and he himself, and I get a lot of flack for this, but he himself, like, has always had an appreciation for some of the Liberty side and some of the conservatives, which is shocking given how his company does things. But, like, I've sat next to him not that long ago, you know, at a wedding or whatever, and he's like, you know, he's he's he's interested in his his kids learning about some some of these ideas, like there's a like the Tuttle Twins or whatever, you know, these like these conservative, you know, libertarian shows and stuff. I think he I think he's open to different sides.
I think the culture inside of Facebook that comes from the universities is so poisonous and so leftist that I think they get away with things sometimes that they don't even tell him about. So I'm not saying I'm not saying he's, like, a perfect good guy on this. I think he should be way bolder and hold his company accountable to stop censoring conservatives and stop doing the wrong things. So I think he's maybe a little bit soft, maybe I would say a little bit cowardly sometimes about these things despite being amazing in other areas, but he himself is not really a driver of that. And, you know, what happens to a lot of these guys, maybe I'd say he started off moderate, moderate left, but with an appreciation from both sides, and he'll start like a foundation.
It's called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI, and what'll happen with these moderate leftists is they don't they're not good at keeping out, like, the crazy far left, and so his philanthropy org becomes run by these activists.
Oh, yeah.
And and he's busy with his business, and and, like, they'll his wife and my guests don't want fights or whatever, so you get these crazy activists, and they just start doing terrible stuff, and they're very good at, like, sounding maybe to him, like, oh, it's a reasonable thing, it's not actually affecting things, But when you saw it, it actually changed the 2020 election Mhmm. The way they put that, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to work. My my guess is he didn't even understand or might not even still understand how much, how much it would screw things up. Which which is not an excuse for him, but it's, I think that's just the reality of how these orgs evolve, you know, with these with these crazy activists inside of them.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. So you're you're basically saying he wasn't necessarily the catalyst, but he
He wasn't the George Soros. He was, he was, he's not, he's not George Soros. He wasn't, like, doing the crazy bad stuff himself. I think in general, Silicon Valley, people who are moderate on the moderate left have been way too tolerant of letting these crazy activists take over their companies, take over their philanthropies, and break things. And and and if we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls.
We need these guys to have a little more boldness, a little more courage, and they need to come out publicly and, like, excise these parts of their orgs and say, you know what? I was way too tolerant of that. There's 47 people I just fired because they were all found to be doing this crazy stuff, censoring conservatives, turning things down, screwing with them, shadow banning them. We're not gonna let them do that anymore. Like like, that's what he needs to do.
And he can still be on the moderate left if he wants, but you can't freaking tolerate these crazy activists, man. You know, that's what I that's what I would tell him. I haven't caught up with him in a bit.
I mean, you're obviously a major player in tech as well, so, I mean, how have you how have you kept that rot out of your companies?
Yeah. You got it. You got you got to be really disciplined in how you hire. You got to be really fast to fire. And by the way, we have I've worked with a ton of people who are on the left, on the right, like, that's that's this is not about left versus right.
This is about the activists. This is about the crazy kind of woke, like, can't cancel culture or liberal people. I mean, as soon as you see that, like, you can't tolerate it.
Do you build culture under your companies?
You have to. You have to. You have to have CEOs who I mean, you set the tone by how hard the top's working. You set the tone by the values and principles we talk about. 1 of the values of APC is is patriotism.
You know? You you have to you have to explicitly have these values and and say this is what we stand for. This is who we are. We're, you know, we're we're we're, you know, we're principled optimists. We're patriots.
We're, you know, we're we're we're we're gonna fight for the truth. And, you know, you want to live in a world I think I think the vibe shift that we've been talking about is, like, is, like, a lot of people are comfortable living with lives safely, and I think it's important that a lot of people come over to live with the truth, even if it's dangerous.
That's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. Back to the future of warfare. I mean, what what are some things that other countries are getting involved in that concern you?
Well, I mean, I think the fact that we let China and Russia become such close allies is ridiculous. I think that was a huge strategic mistake, and I think they're not necessarily natural allies. I think that was something where we drove into each other. So that that concerns me. I think the biggest concern right now is Turkey, and on top of that Turkey.
Yeah. So so so Russia and China, obviously, the biggest concern, and Iran, obviously. But Turkey is, like, the biggest kind of wild card going out right now. So Turkey, you know, Ataturk created Turkey as the first really successful secular Muslim country in the modern world, and it was a really big deal. And there's there's a lot of problems historically with Islamists, today with Islamists.
So he built all these institutions into Turkey to stop the Islamists from taking over because he knew that would always be a threat. And 1 of the most important institutions was the army to to to make sure that Islamists did not run it, and that his job was to fight and stop Islamists if they were gonna take over society. And Erdogan knew this. Erdogan, we thought a lot of us thought I when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate when he came in 20 years ago. That's how he ran.
But he secretly, like, very strongly on the Islamist side. And so in order to make the Islamists win again in Turkey, you had to take out these organizations in society that had been built to stop Islamists. And so when he did the coup 8 years ago, a lot of us believe, and a lot of intelligence agencies believe, it was purposely tripped off as a coup in order to get all these people to come up and see who's gonna be anti Islamist, and then wipe them out. And so what happened in society is he ended up, like, killing and torturing tens of thousands of people 8 years ago when this happened. Anyone who was gonna be against Islamists, anyone who was kind of built in to stop that.
And so those people were all eliminated. The people in the army who were against Islams were all eliminated. So for the first time, all of Al Attarq's protections are gone. So now you have this, like, very Islamist leader who's very pro Islamist, and he just he just, like, with his forces, conquered Syria because of what's going on in the Middle East for Islamists. He also now is wiping out by, reportedly, huge numbers of Kurds.
Like, I you can go look online. There's I think a lot more Kurds have died in the last month than than people in Gaza have died this entire last year. And you're not hearing protests about it because, I guess, because there's no Jews involved, but it's, like, it's crazy. They're just killing off the Kurds. And by the way, a lot of the Kurds were close allies with a lot of my friends in the special forces who had to deal with stuff over there.
They were our friends. Yeah. And and and they don't have a country, which I think they should. A lot of their territories inside of Turkey, lots of Iraq, lots of Syria, and they're the Islamist enemy. The the Islamists don't want these guys to have their own country, and so so he's wiping a bunch of them out, and I'm very scared what Turkey does next.
Turkey has nuclear weapons that you know, because it's it's in NATO. It's it's, it's a wild card. Like, are they going to go after and help the Islamists take out the Jordanian king? I don't know, but there's lots of really scary things. So I think Iran's on the run.
We need to we need to, you know, finish off the whole story with Iran, but now there's this other Islamist threat there that's a wild card that we're going to be dealing with and figuring out. It's pretty scary to me.
Yeah. I didn't even that wasn't even on my radar. What about technology? Are you worried about is China developing anything that you're aware of that we should be concerned about? Or is Russia have any technology that they overplayed their hand, maybe?
You know, China has a bunch of advanced new technology in all sorts of areas, whether it's hypersonics, whether it's massive numbers of submarines, whether it's all sorts of, you know, all sorts of new projects they're working on that I'm sure I don't even know about. You know, all sorts of things. They're trying to copy SpaceX. Thank God we have SpaceX, and they don't. But they're they're trying to copy it.
I think, yeah, I don't know if you see the videos, it blows up when they try it, but they're but they might they're gonna get there eventually probably, you know, because, like, I mean, Elon's really smart, but it's I mean, we have a really great program, but eventually they catch up and they they then do things in space, which scares me. I mean, I mean, what what am I scared by? I'm scared by the space stuff, to tell you the truth. I really hope it's very funny. Everyone's, like, don't weaponize space.
Don't weaponize space. And I agree. I don't want there to be wars in space that would screw up a lot of stuff for the world. At the same time, if if someone else weaponizes space and we don't, we're kinda screwed.
What what's go I have no insight into what's going on in space.
So I don't have any clearances around this, and so I might piss people off talking about it, but I'm not clear, so I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you a few things. But, like, the number 1 thing I'd say, there's a natural network effect in space where it's very cheap. Like, for the cost of 1 aircraft carrier, you can put up probably a 150,000 things up there that you can accurately drop on people within 1 meter, and so this and they're much, much cheaper than missiles. And so so so you basically and if someone does that and no 1 else does it, then, like, the person who has that first, you can never launch a rocket again. So it's very easy to see if a lock rocket's being launched, and you could just take it out.
So there's a network effect that really scares me. If there was gonna be a war, whoever conquers and whoever has stuff up there first that's really good, could probably stop the other guy from getting stuff up there. And I don't want stuff exploding in space, but, like, it's just it's just such a powerful thing to own for any future battle that we need to be thinking about. I think some people are thinking about it. I'm not sure our budget reflects that we're thinking about it.
And by the way, this is why a lot of us were usually in favor of space force behind the scenes, and really glad that president Trump started that. It's obvious he needed space force. Cause it's just this like, we're talking about how warfare changes, like the space thing is is a scary angle.
Wow. Is there anything else that you're aware of going on? I mean, that's that's fascinating in itself.
That's a big 1. I mean, the the other thing in general is that, that I guess I'm most afraid of, is that China has about 200 times our ship building capacity, if you want to say. And I think you've probably talked about this before. In world war 2, you get these, like, I had this cool painting, a house in Montana, or ski house, of, of these, American ships hunting down a German warship and taking it out. But we we needed multiple ships to do it because the German battleships were actually better than ours, I think.
And now, America battleships ships are destroyed, they're not battleships anymore, but American destroyers, everything else, they're way more advanced than Chinese. But, you know, if someone has 200 times your capacity, that's really scary because they eventually have a bunch of them hunted down. Right? And so so the question is, what the heck do we do? We need to get our capacity up.
So my friends and I started this company, CERONIC. We're gonna hopefully build 500 ships in Austin next year. We're working with a bunch of the admirals, a bunch of the best people in the navy. We're teaching them how to use AI to to have, like, swarms of these these weaponized vessels and how they can work together with the fleet and how we could eventually have thousands of these in any kind of, you know, mission or battle scenario because because that's really what what you want because for the cost of 1 big ship. By the way, all of our shipyards are delayed.
They're all behind. It's pathetic. It's they're all run by administrators in turbular relations. So there's this navy that's just like way behind and broken, so we need to have an alternate path to help create, you know, thousands of these ships that deter the bad guys.
That space thing blows my mind.
I mean, if that if
that if that happens, or we're not up there already, you know, and and with that 1 m thing, I mean, when you when you had mentioned, you know, you could stop anything else from coming up there, I mean, that's that right there is that's global domination.
Yeah. But we really don't want there to be war in space because it's it may be the case that you start just blowing up certain things, they figure out how to get missiles or whatever and to blow up certain things, and then then you have lots of junk up there, and then it this is just a giant mess, and, you know, I think Starlink's really good for the world. I don't hope we don't destroy this shit.
Wow. That's, that's fascinating. Let's go into ceramic. Mhmm.
That's what we were just talking about. Exactly. It's like, go ahead. So the the reason this is so important, man, is that, like, there's no interfaces right now for controlling 1 to many that actually work. Right?
So do you ever play StarCraft or Warcraft? Oh, yeah. Right?
Oh, yeah.
And so and so there need there needs to be, like, modern AI enabled versions of this. 1 of my friends is a really impressive video game guy who built Riot Games with League of Legends and stuff. There's tons of really great American talent around there, and and so part of what we need to be doing is iterating on and practicing on, like, what interfaces work for these things. Because right now, if you have, like, a drone, there's, like, 5 guys work like, flying 1 drone in the Middle East, which is fine for that project. It's not gonna work for a battle with thousands of these ships.
If you have a hellscape, it needs to be some AI. I I still want people in charge, but then the AI needs to be augmenting them, right, and helping them, just the same way your troops were in in your Warcraft game. Yeah.
And you are you are involved in so many things. How about Anduril?
Did I pronounce that correctly? Yeah. So Anduril's the 1 that Palmer Lucky who got kicked out of Facebook and my 3 pounder, you know, my 3 pounder colleague started. And it's it's it's doing the road runner we talked about. It's doing a bunch of other great stuff.
It's a really important company.
What do you think about Neuralink?
I think it's cool. I think, you know, you know what actually is really neat? There's a bunch of the talent for Neuralink's moved to Austin, where we are. I've seen a lot of those tech talent, just people have shifted out of California, and so that, so a lot of the head people are there, and, you know, it's it's it's they're making amazing progress. It's there's probably all sorts of things you can do with Neuralink eventually with, like, you know, people who are paralyzed, fix that with back pain, with I mean, it's a little bit scary if you really get a high bandwidth into your brain, maybe see what's going on.
I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know everything about that, you know.
I mean, does that worry you at all?
Well, I I'd say I trust Elon and the people working on it, but in general, having companies have access directly into the brains of huge numbers of people, if it spreads to be a thing that lots of people are touching, that is a little bit of a scary kind of concept. If you can kind of, you know Overall, it's like really positive. Right? Overall, for the near term, a 100%. Like, I think there's guys I can't even imagine.
I'm claustrophobic. I don't know how you I don't like being stuck in a small space. Imagine if you're paralyzed and you just all you do is blink your eyes. Yeah.
And there's
guys who are literally getting this thing, and suddenly, they're able to effectively, like, you know, communicate, play games, like, do all these things that otherwise, otherwise they were trapped in their head. I mean, this is like, this is like God's gift for, for a huge number of people. So it's like so it's like, is it a good thing? A 100% it's a good thing. But sure, if we're gonna speculate 30 years from now where society can go if we're all plugged into our brains, there's there's we gotta make sure that crazy things don't happen, obviously.
Yeah. You know, I've I've read, something a couple weeks ago saying that, it's helping blind people potentially see.
A 100%. There's all sorts of these amazing things you could do with this. So I think for people who have issues, who are injured, and it may even be, like Elon said, at some point, for a really bad back pain or something, you could just adjust it and stuff. So there's lots of really, really I think I think we're going towards a golden age that's really positive. I think whenever there's these positive things, there's always some negative possibilities, and it doesn't mean we should stop doing the positive things, but we should just keep those in mind and do our best to make sure we avoid them.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's move into, let's move into fighting for western civilization, and your efforts to combat, basically, wokeness. Yeah. When did you start doing that?
You know, even at the Stanford reviews, there's a version of that that was going on there. It wasn't called wokeness back then. It was it was, like, it was political correctness run out run amok, run out of control, And, you know, and and it wasn't as extreme back then. There were there were bad things, there were dumb things, but it was always, like, it was always, like, there's just generally, you can kind of assume there's gonna be common sense in charge, and things weren't that broken. And and and I noticed things really started to get crazy, Maybe 2014, 2015.
It's it's like it's like just it's like something in society snapped, and all of a sudden you just had all these, like, irrational activists, and it wasn't about truth or what was right anymore, and it was just, like, everyone had a virtue signal and go along. And if you're if you're not virtue signaling and going along, you're a bad person for saying anything else. And I remember it started getting crazier and crazier. There were these, like, Black Lives Matter groups which were clearly, like, they'd be on TV saying, we are marxist trained. We're marxists.
And then my friends who are not marxists would be, like, giving them money, and they're like, guys, these are marxists. Like, they believe in, like, creating division. That's like part of what you study as a marxist, is how to divide a society and how to break things. They they they hate you as someone who's building things and creating things. They want to take it and give it to everyone else.
And they're, like, yeah, Joe, but this is, like, the thing to do right now, or you want to be helpful. And I'm just, like, I've always argued, it's drove me crazy. Like, why are you giving these people money? This is insane. And and it's it's, and I add, like, this is
That was literally their answer? This is this is the thing to do right now.
To do right now to promote racial justice, that we're just trying to, like, be, like, good citizens and show that we care about black people. And it it was it was I just and by the way, like What the fuck is that? I mean, if you want to steel man something, like, there have been things in our country from, like, 80 years ago, 60 years ago, that were particularly egregious, that that should piss everyone off. Right? Like, if you like, you look at, like, I mean, all these just all these like like like, you know, in the in war war just as just an example.
In World War 2, like, they didn't this, like, secretary Knox didn't want any black people fighting in the navy and was kind of a dick about it, and there were even some of these heroes, like, I don't know if you know, like, Dory Miller in, like, 1941 in Pearl Harbor ships, gets attacked. He goes he goes and he saves a bunch of these people carrying them out, then he's, like, he's, like, not even he's never even trained. He runs up to the anti aircraft gun, and he shoots down 4 of the Japanese heroes, and just like this total badass, and and they still treated him like shit because he was an African American at a time when people were being treated like shit. So I think I think there's, like, this generation that's, like, traumatized correctly from, like, how horrible they were, and I think that's still in this psyche. So so so that's like this steel man.
Okay. There is something there we should be, like, remembering and and and pissed off about. But then but then, like, the answer is not to do things that divide us further and and to spread Marxism. And so it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a very weird it was very cowardly because everyone kind of knew, yeah, this is kind of wrong, doesn't really make fully sense, but I don't want to think about it. I just want to go along because I don't want to have trouble in my life.
And so it just swept through our country, and When I think of
Black Lives Matter, I think of burning towns down.
Yeah. It's just it's just like this anger. It's just this, like, just anger expressed aggressively and righteously, and and and and it was people fanning the flames of that anger and that divisiveness. And, you know, it's really sad because I feel like in the 19 nineties, we'd got to, like, a really good place in our society where where, like, you know, it was it'd become, like, much less racist. Everyone of all backgrounds was much more optimistic on how we're gonna work and live together, and I feel like there were frankly these race grifters who, like, just, like, reignited a lot of stuff and and and caused a lot of trouble.
That that's that's the perspective from my perspective is that is that and and and, you know, and the woke stuff's not just about race, by the way, though. The woke stuff's about is about just general illiberal energy, and the general kind of, like, it's not about truth. It's about conquering things for the far left and demonizing anyone who stands in their way. And it's just a very it's a very very scary time in our society the last decade. And, you know, a lot of our universities have basically been been conquered by these forces, by these neo marxists.
It's all, like, if you stand up and you speak out against anything that's part of their omnicause, they do their best to crush you. And and and if you're if you're if you're a professor in a history department, in a sociology department, in an anthropology department, like, you do not allow any professor to join who doesn't agree with your kind of woke view of the omnicause and your neo Marxist view. And so for for quite a long time now, we've not been graduating professors who even understand, you know, the history from the other perspective. And, you know, John Stuart Mill, 1 of the great kind of like like like liberal theorists, liberal in a kind of in a pro liberty sense, in a classical liberal sense, you know, he and 1 of my favorite things he he would say is that, you know, if you don't if you don't understand the argument other argument, you don't understand yours very well either. And this is the case now in most of our society in the in these institutions, is they don't actually deeply understand the other side, because they've demonized it, and they've kicked it out, and it's it's very dangerous.
How are you combating this stuff?
There's a lot of different ways. 1 way is is as as a leader, to role model speaking out, and role model the role model courage. The classical virtues are really powerful against this stuff. And the more the more 1 person shows courage, a few more people show courage, and it it snowballs. And and once once people are showing courage, they can't get us anymore.
You know? They they need us to be afraid. Another thing, we gotta create new media. Right? You know, investor in Bari Weiss's free press, I think it's really important what she's doing there.
I'm I'm, an investor of my friend's something called Arena Magazine. We're trying to build more of these media sources.
What is the magazine?
Arena, a r e n a. Arena Magazine. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just which we're creating we're creating new we're creating new, you know so basically what happened is, like, there used to be all these things in technology world, like Wired and Scientific American and TechCrunch, and they were all conquered by the crazy woe people who hate markets, hate America.
And so I don't want my entrepreneurs going to talk to this TechCrunch thing when it just constantly is attacking us and lying about us. Like, let's talk to something else. Right? So let's build new media. So there's things like arena, we're pushing, we're growing that quickly.
And then I think, you know, the University of Austin is based on this as well. So, you know, my friends, Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson, Neil's probably the greatest living historian, taught at Oxford and Harvard, really, really bright guy, and, Barry Weiss runs the free press. You know, we thought, listen, there needs to be at least 1 top university in the country that's not conquered by these goddamn Marxists.
Man, that's a I mean, when did University
of Boston start? Our first class, actually, just started. It took us 3 years to to launch it, which is was pretty fast because there's lots of barriers, thousands of pages of regulation. The new universities don't want competition. They're trying to block you out.
The creditors try to block you out. But, you know, in this case, we found 1 that's pretty good, and, we have we have we got 92 students in the first class. A lot of these kids turned down the very top schools to be there. No kidding. The idea is pursuit of truth.
The idea is, you know, it's a it's a it's a patriotic institution, but we have people who think on both sides. This is not this is not like a conservative institution, like, yeah, and I wouldn't want to be. That'd be a failure because you need to understand both sides. Right? But it's an institution that really is gonna engage with the last 1000 years of great ideas and the great debates that kind of built Western civilization.
If you look at Western civilization for me, there's 3 great traditions you have to understand. You have to understand the classical virtues and, you know, in the classical world, in Rome and Greece, and all the wisdom that comes from that. That's like a that's a core base of who we are. Amazing stuff. And you have to understand, I think, Judeo Christianity.
I think I think you have to understand, like, what what the wisdom came from that, like, that, like, gave us that gave us modern Europe, and really the the dignity of the individual. Right? So I think if you only have if you only have this aristocratic, like, Ubermensch, Nietzschian, kind of classical view, then I think your human life becomes very cheap, and that's very dangerous because I think Christianity has, like, has a lot of wisdom in the fact that there's, like, a radical dignity to every human life, and so you have that base. And then on top of those 2 traditions, you have the scientific enlightenment and the philosophical enlightenment, which, you know, really started 17th, 18th centuries. They kind of gave us this understanding of the modern world with with Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations and how trade works with the scientific revolution, with, you know, that kind of led to the industrial revolution and led to what we have today.
So we have these, like, really important 3 traditions. And if you want to be a top leader in society and you want to be an educated leader in society, I think I think our schools should be should be teaching those traditions to these people. We should be engaging them, debating about them, and applying them to today. And if we're not doing that with our leaders by the way, that that is what our leaders had who created our country. Our founders of this country, they understood deeply and were well read in all of those traditions, and they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our constitution.
We're really lucky to have that. There's this amazing thing based on all that wisdom. And if we don't apply that today to our modern problems, instead, we kinda go off in these kind of woke or nonsense instructions, like, we're gonna break our civilizations. Let's have leaders who are courageous and who who know these things. You know?
Man. Man. So 92 students is the 1st class. We're
going to try to do more than a 100 next class, you know. It's very funny, you're not allowed to be officially accredited fully until you've graduated the class. Interesting. So all the trolls, like, oh, the under accredited university. It's like, yeah, that's the rule, but I'm doing our best, man.
How how big do you think it will get?
You know, Stanford and Harvard have, like, 1600, 1900 kids. I'd love to scale it out over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to you don't want to go too fast because you want to have, like, really top experiences for the students you really wanna and there's gonna be things that aren't perfect. There's gonna be things parts that are amazing that that they love, and there's gonna be parts that we gotta keep building, keep improving.
I wanna launch a master's degree in a couple years, on, I wanna compete with Stanford Harvard Business School, and that would be, like, an innovation master's degree, where if you wanna be part of the innovation world and you wanna, like, work with, like, the people who have built the top companies, come here and we'll teach you how to be part of our innovation world, and and then you kinda bring you as a leader there. And we want people obviously, there's a tech and stem side, but again, we want to train leaders how to think about our civilization and how to be kind of fighters for America who are you know, we call them philosopher builders. We want we need more philosopher builders, you know, people like Elon who are gonna fight for our civilization as well as build.
Wow. How many applicants do you guys have?
We got, you know, we we got we got we got several 100 applicants. It's interesting. The common app is where most applications come through for most universities now. We're not allowed on the common app until we're accredited. So our number of applications, even though it was even though it was silver 100 of the first class, I think it would have been a lot higher, but kids couldn't check it off on that.
So but we're still getting a lot of great people trying to come.
How are you vetting the professors?
So Neil Ferguson himself is a really great professor. And then we have, like, we have a set of amazing people, our we have a bunch of really, really top teams who are who are their their job is help recruit the new professors and getting some pretty famous names applying right now and coming in. So hopefully, we'll announce some really great great new people. But we have we have a really great set of about 25 really top professors that I'm yeah. It's really fun for me, actually, to get to learn from these guys too.
So it's a it's a good set of people.
Are you spending a lot of time there?
Yeah. I'm the chairman of the board and trying to design this new master's degree, trying to make sure we create opportunities for the students, giving scholarships for really top students to come. Right now, all the students are on scholarship. We get extra even give extra scholarships for, like, really, really top students to turn down, you know, the very best places and come, and, just trying to make sure it's a great experience for them.
Wow. Wow. Any scholarship? What's that? Any scholarships?
Yeah. So so so so, basically, everyone everyone there gets gets to, like, get their tuition covered right now, which is which is great. So we're sending it, and we're giving scholarships beyond that too for great people.
I mean, it seems like you guys are getting a pro, a lot of, interest in there. I saw it was on 60 minutes. Is anybody or any what I mean, what is the media saying? It sounds like there's a lot
of trouble. 60 minutes 60 minutes was surprisingly positive. I really appreciate that they came, and they looked at it, and they and they, I think, they gave it a fair treatment, which was which was great. Listen, when we launched, everyone attacked and mocked us. These these other universities, they don't want competition.
They don't want something else there, but we're getting a lot of positive news from a lot of people. I think we have we have several 1,000 donors now. I think we have dozens of donors who've given over $1,000,000 each. So so a lot of good supporters have come out of the woodwork and a bunch more are really helping us. It's it's it's a movement whose time has come, like we need in America is what you do.
If things are broken, if things aren't doing what they can, you know, you get together, you build something new, and it teaches everyone else. And so right now you have dozens of other universities that are referring to us on their boards, that are saying, why don't we do this, why don't we do that, why don't we take these ideas? Which which is great. That's the whole point, is let's let's bring everything back in the same direction, you
know? Man, I love it. I love it. Let's move into the, the Cicero Institute. Yeah.
What is it? Cicero Institute
is our policy group, so, basically what we do is we we work in states, not in DC for the most part. It turns out there's 50 states in our country, and our founders our founders intended stuff to happen to the states. Like, this is it's called the United States. This is an alliance of states. So that's that's the that's supposed to be where most of government actually happens the most in our country.
Like, obviously, we have federal, state, and local, but states are supposed to be now federal had gotten too big, so it does too much right now. But states still have a lot of power, and they're really important. And we've seen, obviously, people moving between states a lot because some states are doing the right things, some states are doing the wrong things, and so there's a lot of different ideas for how to how to make things work better. You can test and prove out at the state level, and what we tend to do is we like to fix broken systems. We like to fix things that governments usually by mistake broken or special interest is broken.
So so for example, I'll give you 1 I like, is vocational education. Vocational education was a lot more prominent in the US in the sixties seventies, and a lot of people said, no. Let's let's send them to college instead. It's racist not to have everyone go to college. It's it's bad not to have all poor people go to college.
And it turns out a lot of people went to college. They get these studies degrees that, you know, they don't come out with any real skills or any real jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily. I think they should be doing what they should to get a great job. And and so and a lot of people agree with me.
So we find these vocational education schools are starting to come back up. The problem is, what if it's a badly run vocational education school? What do you do? How do you decide to fix it? So for example, in Texas, there's 27 high end technical vocational schools teaching you to be like a high end manufacturing job, like really good jobs coming out of these video right.
But they weren't working that. They weren't working nearly as well as they could. And so what we did in Texas, is just said Texas said, we're going to fund these schools based on the average salary coming out. So we're going to tell each of these schools, you better figure out how to get your students succeeding, and if you do, you're going to get more money. If not, you're going to get less money.
And you know what happened is the schools started saying, okay, what skills do we have to teach? What businesses do we partner with? How do we figure this out? Wow. Salaries doubled coming out of these schools.
No kidding.
And and so so that's an example of where you could take a law, so we draft the law, we kind of go to the legislature, find the sponsors, go to the governor's administration, convince them it's right, we help write op eds along with the people in the legislature, and and we have to hire lawyers to draft the appropriate law for that state. You get all the, like, stakeholders involved, you say, here's what here's who's not gonna like it, these special interests aren't gonna like it, but here's why they're wrong. You kind of prepare them ahead of time. We have this 20 step process, and and you and you and you partner with all these people in the state, and you get the law passed, and and then and then it fixes the problem.
How fast is this spreading? So it
takes usually, usually it's 2 or 3 years to get a law done, and we've been doing it for 8 years, and we get dozens of laws passed in 17 states last year. We have teams in 20 states now, and you what you'll do is you'll hire someone who used to, like, you know, be the lieutenant governor or speaker of the house or whatever, and they're a lobbyist, but it's the coolest type of lobbyist relationship because lobbyists are usually sick of having to help businesses try to ask for things for themselves, and these guys charge us way less than anyone else because they get to work on something they agree with. So you'll hire these guys, like, yeah, this is really cool. I get to work on this with you, and they'll work because every state's different, every state has different, you know, ways behind the scenes in getting things done, and so you just you just have to you have to do it and push it through. But rather than play the lobbying game for the bad guys, it's playing it for the good guys, which is a lot of fun.
Are you guys in Tennessee? We do. We do have teams in Tennessee. Governor Bill Lee has been a great guy to work with, and, He has been. He has been.
He has been. He's he's a strong he's a strong governor. A lot of pro freedom things here. There's, there's, a bunch of stuff we're working on for next time. I apologize.
I should have checked the notes for exactly what we're doing here. It's all good.
All good. I just love that you guys are operating in here.
You got a strong you got a you got a you got a strong set of leaders here. You got a you got a I think that all 3 houses that the 2 the congress both sides of congress and the and the governor are are red, and so there's there's a lot of bold things I think we can get done here.
Amazing. What other states are you guys in?
Do you know? We do a lot in Florida. We do a lot in Texas, of course, where I am now. You know, Missouri, you know, does a lot lot of stuff in Georgia. There's there's all sorts of places.
We're we're all over the country. Arizona was a big place for us. It's harder now with the current governor, but but even even sometimes with moderate democrats, we get a long I'll tell you what happens. Most of the time when our laws pass, we get people from both parties voting for them, and the moderate democrats love a lot of our stuff too because it's like we're helping fix things with incentives. Right?
And accountability, the far left hates us. Because the far left's tied to those government unions I was talking about. They don't want anything to be held accountable. They don't want spend to be tied to metrics because then they can't capture the spend for their for their corrupt groups. And so the far left tends to be, like, really against us, and and so therefore, when you have a a left administration, usually you can't get to the far left, but but but but we're still getting a lot done in purple and in red states.
What about homelessness? That's a big 1 for us. So we've passed a bunch of laws in a bunch of areas there. So I come from San Francisco, remember, originally in the air nearby area, and San Francisco is just totally screwed because of homelessness. And what happens is you get these special interests, the NGOs, and these guys lobby for money.
And then even 20 years ago, people were like, wait, we're giving you all this money. How about we, like, tie the money to results or to outcomes or to goals together? And they're like, no. No. No.
You can't do that. And they scream and yell and they and and they're so powerful because once they have lost money, they become the biggest donors, and so all the politicians don't wanna piss them off, so they don't hold them accountable. And when and when you look at it, these NGOs, they started giving free houses to a lot of their their friends, the people in their groups because there's, there's houses that are given out, of course. You started, like, actually having a center to bring more homeless there with, like, super generous stuff. You started giving, like, free drugs to all these people because that's what the homeless people want, it makes them come.
It's just, it's just a total mess. I'll, I'll, I'll tell you the worst, I think the worst part of it is the vulnerability index for homes. Have you heard of this before? No. So if you talk to the people on the very far left, they're not really big on incentives, and some of them are well meaning, of course, since they say, well, we want to give homes to people who need homes.
It sounds like a nice thing. But, of course, there's an infinite line in America for homes, so everyone wants a free home. It's okay. We have to prioritize people who are more vulnerable. So how do you prioritize them?
This is something that came from both HUD and a bunch of these blue cities. So he said, you get more points towards a free home if you're on drugs, you get more points if you're on drugs, you You have more points if you're not in a recovery program, because you really need it better. More if you're not in a recovery program. You have more points if you commit a crime, you have more points if it's a violent crime, more points if your kids are truant. So basically, there's all these points you get for bad things, and they say, well, these people deserve a home because they're going through all these bad things.
I'm like, no no no. If you give them points for bad things, you're creating an incentive. So you look at our cities and say, why are they so effed up? Is you literally have insane amounts of money being given out based on points for bad things. And so we, like, followed up homeless guy around and a bunch of homeless people around Austin trying to be helpful, and we map it out, and, like, 1 of them goes in.
The first time he goes in, he says, you know, I'm trying to look for job training. What do I do to get out of my situation? And this, like, young blue haired progressive woman says, no no, sir. You deserve a home. And I'm not sure we're going to have enough from right away because Republicans aren't funding us enough, but you deserve a home.
Sign this. Here's how you get your tent. He's, like, oh, I was going to stay with my cousin, and she said, don't tell me that. It's better if you have a tent. You're going to get home sooner.
So he gives him the tent to go set it up in the city. And he comes back 2 months later, he doesn't get all quite qualified for a home, and he says, but you know, I heard that if I was on drugs, I'd be more likely to have a home by now. And she said, yeah, that's technically true, but we don't like to think of it that way.
Do you believe that? This is enraging.
This piss pisses yeah, exactly. Why do you think I'd get so involved in policy? It pisses me off. It's crazy. It's breaking our country.
And so we passed a bunch of laws in Georgia and Florida, and a couple other places, you know, where where we're actually, like, just completely fixing the incentives, completely getting rid of this nonsense. The red states still need to hold these NGOs accountable. There's there's these really sketchy NGOs, and, you know, probably shouldn't be illegal to run 1 of them in the red state, but at the very least, if you get any money from government, you should have to be way more transparent on your outcomes, way more transparent on on everything you're doing. Because a lot of these things are just actually lobbying groups for the extremes.
Do you think any blue states will start to adopt this?
I think I think I think so. I think it's and and this is this is 1 of those things that you have to first do it somewhere and prove it works, and then it becomes, like, and then it becomes clear that the moderates are going to do it in the blue state to fix it as well. So I I think that is the fight. I have a lot of friends who are moderate Democrats in SF, and they're fighting hard against the far left. That's the battle.
It's the moderates against the far left, and I think the moderates are going to win, and they're going to start putting in these accountability, putting in these incentives, defunding the stuff that's corrupt. That that's what we have to do to fix our cities. So I'm I'm bullish it's gonna happen. It's it's a really tough battle because there's just there's so much money for these extremists in our country right now. Like in California, there's over 2,000,000 people working for the government.
They all have to give a piece of their paycheck to the government unions who then who then are part of funding this whole complex. So it's just there's a lot of there's a lot of corruption in our country and there's a lot of money going towards the wrong things. But you know what? I think, like I said, there's a vibe shift. It's a vibe shift away from the bureaucracy, away from the cowards, away from the away from the people who are acting based on guilt.
And, you know, it's going towards greatness, going towards courage, going towards kind of like a a positive ambition. So I think we're going the right way.
That's amazing. That's amazing to hear.
I
also see you're involved in, trying to fix the prison and parole systems. Yeah.
You know, that's and that's really similar in some ways to the vocational thing we talked about. Obviously, they're different systems, but think about it. If you if you're running a probation system, if you're running a prison system, whether or not you're on the right or the left, like, there's certain things we want to have happen. Like, we don't want people to have to go back to prison, but we want people to succeed and not commit a crime. Right?
And we don't want if someone's going to come out of prison, you want them to have a job. Right? You want to be employed. So so what do you do? You want to create incentives in the system for the people running it to hit certain goals, to have more people come out and be employed.
And it it turns out there's lots of programs that work to make people more likely to be employed, and there's lots of programs that don't. And in fact, right now, most of our prisons, they're terrible cultures. The guards hate the prisoners. The prisoners hate the guards. It's it's it's really bad.
There's exceptions to this, but there's most of them run really badly, and there's bad leadership. And, you you can't automatically create good leadership, but you can replace bad leadership. You can incentivize good leadership. None of our states do this pretty much right now. So it's just stuff like that that we're trying to work with the governors, and work with the legislators, and, like, let's just make these systems work better for society, you know?
Am I missing anything with this? What else are you working on?
That's a lot.
I don't know.
That's fun, man.
I mean, how do you you're involved in so many things. You got 5 kids, you're married. I mean, how do you manage all of the tech companies, of everything, of the University of Austin, everything that you're involved in? How do you
Well, you have to have really great people around you who are in charge of each of the organizations. Somehow, Elon stays the CEO. I don't know. He's I think he's an alien. He's great.
He's a genius. But, like, for me, I can't be in charge of all these things at once, nor would I be as good at it if I was trying to do all. No. It doesn't make any sense. So, like, so you get someone who's better than you at it, and and you and I work as usually a chairman with them or as a co founder with them, and and we partner together.
And and and the more you can surround yourself with attracting more and more great people who come and want to work with you, who are inspired by stuff you're doing and want to be part of it, the more advantage you have. So it it does kind of like snowball the advantage. Like, just keep trying to find and get really great people. And we don't always get things right. Lots of our things screw up.
There's lots of mistakes you gotta iterate. You know? It's not like we're we're not infallible. We're making mistakes all the time, but you just gotta do your best to push in the right direction.
Do you wanna talk about any of those mistakes, anything big that you've learned from them?
Oh, goodness. There's it everywhere. I mean, there's just a general thing for me. You asked, like, how do I do it all at once? I think when I was younger, I thought I could be in charge of a lot of things at once, and if you're in charge of too much at once, then a lot of it starts to break at once, and then you're really screwed.
Right? So, like, my new rule right now is I'm only responsible for the failure of 1 thing at a time.
I'm gonna take that advice.
It's, it's important because especially once you start to have your success, it's happened to all my friends who've been really successful, is that all of a sudden you try to do a lot at once because you're like, I could do that thing, I could do these 5 things, and it turns out, no, actually, now you're totally screwed. So you really want to have other people who are each responsible for the for what whatever's going on. You wanna have teams that are great that are that are responsible. By the way, they have to own a piece of it too. This is why nonprofits are really hard for me, because I do I do a lot more for profits because I'm for profit.
The people there, they own a big piece of it. They're going to sleep thinking about it. They're waiting up thinking about it. And that that equity works really, really well. Just like you give people real upside in things, and then they own them.
How do you recruit them? I'm just I'm curious because I'm trying to build my company out, and I have no business sense.
So We well, we have a pretty big talent network. We spend a lot of time on this. We have teams that about not teams, but we have, like, fellows and, you know, people we we nurture and take relationships with at about 20 different universities. We have people on our team who spend a lot of time figuring out where is the top talent right now, making sure we're helpful to them, make sure we get to know them, be in the right circles. And, you know, but it's I'm still figuring it out.
It's 1 of the reasons I wanna I'm happy to be on here. Maybe maybe some smart person will will will hear about it and wanna come work with us, you know?
Right on, man. Right on. What do you do you have anything particular, 1 of your ventures, that you're the most excited about? You know,
I think some of the I mean, obviously, defense stuff's really exciting. I think some of the bio stuff for me is really important because it's it's it's cool because it's saving lives. It's like it's like it's like defense does save lives too, but there's almost nothing that doesn't that feels more pure than when you build, like, a, like, a therapeutic company that's actually treating and saving lives, where you invest in 1 of these things. So there's just a bunch of that stuff that's really working well right now. Like, for example I'll just give you an example, YouTube.
1 example is this company, Orca Bio, has amazing founders. We backed relatively early on and they're able to sort cells 1 by 1, using semiconductor technology. It came out of Stanford Lab. And and it turns out this is really useful for cell therapies. And so cell therapies, there's been a there's been like a $1,000,000,000,000 invested in cell therapies.
They're amazing. So what they are is it used to be, that all the all the pharma guys were chemists and they would do things with molecules, and all the drugs were molecules. And then with Genentech and others in the 19 eighties, you had what's called biologics. And so instead of using a molecule to treat you, you'd use, like, a peptide or an antibody, something that came from your from a body, right, to treat you, and that was a really powerful way to cure a lot more things. And now instead of just using that, you're using, like, a whole cell to treat someone.
So, like, if this is a peptide, like, the whole building is a is a cell. Right? It's a much more complicated thing that we and just in the last 10 years, learned how to program them and use them. So all this is going on, but the simplest form of cell therapy has been around forever. For example, it's called a bone marrow transplant.
So if someone has late stage blood cancer, they're gonna die pretty much for sure in 6 months. What you do is you can give them a bone marrow transplant, reboot the immune system. Good chance it cures the cancer. Now unfortunately, it's like playing Russian roulette. You'll die 15, 20% of the time with a bone marrow transplant.
Right? Because it could be rejected. It could could just kill you. So you'll only do it if someone's about to die anyway of cancer, and then maybe it saves them. Now it turns out with this new cell therapy sorting thing, these guys are doing, they're able to make it so the rejection rate's almost nothing.
And so as opposed to 15 to 20%, there's very, very few rejections even those were not were not fatal. And so so here's what's really cool about this. Not only is that gonna save, you know, thousands more lives per year of people who have these blood cancers, it turns out that when you reboot someone's immune system, it seems to cure autoimmune diseases. So autoimmune diseases are like Crohn's or multiple sclerosis. You may have heard of, I lost my aunt, unfortunately, to multiple sclerosis.
We're starting a phase 1 now with the FDA where we think we may have a potentially have a cure for multiple sclerosis. So there's there's stuff like this happening right now with with bio that's really exciting.
Man, that's incredible.
It's fun stuff. Right? There's, like, the breakthrough is coming out of our top universities with the latest technology. It's just it's just really inspiring. I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can if we can keep things functional, you know?
Wow. Man, congratulations. You're doing just phenomenal things, not only for the country, but for the world.
And and Well, I'm honored to be part of this stuff that all these other amazing people are doing too that I get to invest in and get to back and try to help because our, you know, we we live in an awesome civilization. There's so many smart people doing so many great things here, and we should be more positive about that, you know?
I'm I am, I'm just honored to have you here, and and I'm so thankful that we met that you're an amazing human being. Who are 3 people you'd like to see on this show?
Well, at some point, you got to get Elon on, of course. He's the he's the he's the he's the king of the moment. You know, probably my my my my my 2 most important mentors, Clara Peter Taylor, and Alex Carr, I'd say. Those are the guys I learned the most from in my youth, and they're they're both extraordinary individuals. Alex is my cofounder of Palantir, as was Peter.
And, and Peter obviously was cofounder of PayPal and was kind of 1 of the intellectual leaders that I think I think even though Peter was not involved in this election, he a lot of the things he created kind of led to this stuff happening. I mean, he's he's someone I really admire.
Well, maybe you can put a word in for us. I'll let him know. But, Joe, it was seriously it was an honor to have you here, and, I hope to see you again. I really do. Thank you, Sean.
But thank you.
Named 1 of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamins show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun. Draymond Green has a podcast. He was asking Mark Cuban why at the beginning of 2024, Cuban sold a huge part of his company. He's like, did you see how much money I got? I'm sure there's a more graceful answer than that.
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