BigDeal - #30 Billionaire Entrepreneur: “America Will Collapse Without A Recession” | Joe Lonsdale

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

🚀 Main Street Over Wall Street is where the real deals get done. Join top investors, founders, and operators for three days of powerful connection, sharp strategy, and big opportunities — live in Austin, Nov 2–4. https://contrarianthinking.biz/msows-bigdeal In this episode, Codie Sanchez sits down with billionaire entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale. Co-founder of Palantir and numerous billion-dollar companies, Joe shares insights on building massive enterprises, investing in revolutionary ideas, and creating meaningful impact. They discuss everything from the roots of Palantir, leadership in tough times, the future of the U.S. economy, to the importance of bold action in politics and policy. Whether you agree with his politics or not, Joe’s perspective on entrepreneurship and building in the face of challenges is one you won’t want to miss. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. Chapters 00:00 START 02:45 Building Billion-Dollar Companies 06:36 The Importance of Entrepreneurship 10:18 Finding and Nurturing Talent 14:04 Navigating Political Divisions 18:17 Understand Economic Policies 22:30 The Decline of Meritocracy 28:41 Preparing for Economic Changes 32:31 Overcoming Challenges in Startups 36:14 The Role of Founders in Business 40:01 Philosophy and Business Leadership 46:14 The Role of Billionaires in Society 51:52 The Dangers of Unrealized 57:35 Creating a New University 01:01:42 The Importance of First Principles Thinking 01:05:00 The Future of AI and Society 01:09:33 The Battle of Good vs. Evil 💼 Register for Bizscout - https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XYT2zr 📈 Seller Financing Course - https://contrarianthinking.biz/SFN-bigdeal Follow Joe Lonsdale on X - @JTLonsdale Follow Joe Lonsdale on SubStack - https://blog.joelonsdale.com/ MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠Our community⁠ 📰 ⁠Free newsletter⁠ 🏦 ⁠Biz buying course⁠ 🏠 ⁠Resibrands⁠ 💰 ⁠CT Capital⁠ 🏙️ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think my take on this is probably not going to be popular with people of either political side. Recessions are actually good to have every once in a while. They clean out a lot of nonsense. You know, what happens is there's a lot of resources being used for things that are not productive in the economy. You obviously don't want a deep, deep recession that lasts for a long time. That's terrible. But at the same time, like in order to have growth be better, it's like in order to have the tree be healthy. You've got to prune the stuff that died on it, right?

And so in a lot cases, that means cutting back a lot. Cut all the way to the bone sometimes they call it, just to really focus what you need. Hey, it's Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who don't just want to be rich, but free and do what it actually takes to get there. Okay, today we have a guest I've been wanting to have on since episode one. He's a billionaire, but he hasn't built just one billion dollar company. He's built like 12. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, huge company, started an entirely new university at the University of Austin, created an America First Defense VC, 8 VC, that is now, I think, $7 or $8 billion under management.

They raise about a billion dollars every year. He's invested in some companies where we've got a little tiny check right alongside him. He also started Adipar, a fintech company worth $2.7 billion that does $2 trillion worth of transactions. I also invested in that bad boy. He started Cicero Institute, a nonprofit founded with the intention of bettering the country. It's incredible what this institute's doing. I was chatting with Joe afterwards. He thinks that his legacy might actually be Cicero, not everything else he's done, which is cool.

So obviously, Joe is not afraid to tackle the... tough stuff. Homelessness, criminal justice reform, American defense, AI, financial freedom for all. He's got opinions and he's backing them up with action and I think we can learn a ton from this man who in a world where nobody is willing to take a stand, in a world where maybe somebody that's 1.1.1% of the country builds one billion dollar business. He's built multiple and he's doing it all on a mission, not just to make more money, although I think he's got plenty of that, but also to change the world around us. And I'm glad there are humans like him that exist in this world, and I think you're going

to like this conversation with Joe Lonsdale. Whether you agree with his politics or not is kind of irrelevant. When somebody has a bigger bank account than you, I always like to learn something from them. Even if I disagree with them, I want to understand how their mind thinks to see if my mind can come up with better ideas in the competition of ideas. And if so, then I bet you can even change the mind of a billionaire. So today, in this episode, we talk about what does it take to build a billion dollar company. How do you spot top talent and CEOs? How do you get them networked in together?

What is wrong with the government today? What about economic policies that sound really great, but actually could make us lose all our money and become a bankrupt nation? And what is the fun in being an entrepreneur with lots of zeros behind your name and how can you affect the world around you? All right, let's get into it. Let's start with some hard questions. I hear that Palantir's name originates from Lord of the Rings. True or false? And are you a Lord of the Rings nerd? It's true. I have to give Peter to credit for the name,

although I also appreciate it. It's a lot of good symbolism in the name, you know. Yeah, but explain it, because it's from the scene stones. I happen to be a Lord of the Rings nerd, so I'm on your level here. So in the story,

like 2,000 years ago, there's all these bad guys coming into the land, and the elves help craft these really powerful magical objects to give to the humans to help stop the bad guys, help secure the land.

They can look through them and communicate and coordinate. And it's successful. It stops the invasion. It keeps the land. land peaceful, it gets rid of the evil orcs. And then the problem is, of course, it's 2,000 years later, a bad guy captures this, and then he's using it for evil purposes. And so when we were starting the company, we were realizing it's actually really dangerous to create anything really

powerful the world. And there's all these new possibilities of powerful ways you can help the government see the terrorists, find the bad guys, figure out how to stop what's going on, which obviously after 9-11, this seemed really important. It was scary. There was all these bad guys the world that wanted to attack us. We wanted to help stop them. We did. But the whole point is you have to build in all these civil liberties frameworks. You have to watch it carefully because when you create power, it can be captured and used for evil. It's interesting because if you were going to explain Palantir, you know, one of your companies, I think sometimes it could be confusing for the every person. Like what exactly is it? It's data. It's AI. It's all of these words that

maybe seem like a bad guy could use it. Oh yeah. I told, I mean, I think like maybe like a decade after we started the company, there was a James Bond movie where the bad guy was basically building Palatian. It's very easy. It's very easy to turn to the evil thing. But, you know, Palantir work because we worked really closely with a lot of the Special Forces communities and the teams and people like that who were competent. We helped go to Iraq. We helped reduce the number of IED deaths and really kind of, you know, fix things, make things work. And the government was spending billions of billions of dollars. And they'd gotten way behind Silicon Valley. So we thought, what can we do

put something together to help them and help stop the bad guys? And you obviously have a very storied history and now have how many companies you think you've actually started? Well, we build a lot of companies, so definitely at least a couple dozen. But so far there's only about eight or nine that are pretty big. Yeah, and by pretty big you mean billion-dollar companies. Yes. You guys like to be like a billion. Yeah, exactly. There's just going to be a really click-baited title with your name on it. Just put like dollar signs and like flash the bee. I got your back. That's kind of my style. Let me help you with Brandeat. Now, what I think is interesting, though, is I've heard you speak at little small events here and on a bunch of interviews, and despite you building, you know, Palantir, let's call it $67 billion in what market cap. And, you know, $8, $10 billion in assets under management, something like that, Atapar, which we are a tiny little investor in from the beginning, too. Atapar is the biggest number because there's $7 trillion in the platform.

Yeah, under management. Use a tea on that one. Yeah, I'll put you on a mountain of money. So despite all these things, I've also heard you speak about, sort of with this sense of longing, about original building and how there's something really powerful about a small group of people building together and how that's sort of the foundation of America. Do you think that is still accessible for young people today?

Could they build their version of Palantir today? Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point of America is that we build things from scratch. And when something's broken, when something's not working, you know, you build a new. And frankly, America needs a lot of new institutions right now. The only way to start an institution is to start from something really small and get going. And, you know, I would say, though, building is not always about building the big things. I think the most important thing about America is just building anything at all, building a small business, building a way to help your community. Most of what works in America is there's like hundreds of thousands or millions of people, each building something small.

And all together, that's still the majority of our economy is the majority of what's really positive. So I don't think it has to be big to be important, but the idea to go out there to be entrepreneurial and to try to create something, that's a really key part of our country. And you're still building. I mean, you could have stopped after the 47th company or whatever, but you kept going and you obviously find some pretty wild joy in this. You're also not sitting in maybe what's considered a center of power. You're in Texas, right? You could be in D.C. You could be maybe in New York or L.A. if you wanted to control attention or money or, you know, maybe. the government in some way, shape, or form? Why do you keep a building?

Well, I mean, it's the most important thing in our country is the builders, right? That's like everything else is basically just living off of the fact that there are a lot of people who are helping build and work and create things. And it's fun, too. And there's, you know, when we build things, you know, venture, we call it venture capital is the investment part, the entrepreneurship is the building part. And in either of those areas, there's really two things that matter a lot. One is what's newly possible now?

That's a really fun question. Like, what's a new thing you could do thanks to new technology, thanks to the way industry work. And then the other thing is just how do you get the best talent? And just like you would to like, you know, win a sports championship or have the best football team, like who do you get on the team and help you win? And those are, these are fun problems to work on. Yeah. You've now invested in what I would assume would be hundreds of CEOs. How do you find top talent? Can you tell almost immediately if somebody's going to win or not? You know Alex Karp, who is my co-founder of talent here. He is this great philosopher and has all these theories of the mind and he'll meet someone in two

minutes and he'll know all sorts of things about them. I don't have that magical power, unfortunately. But maybe a little bit of the fairy dust rubbed off on me or something. But it's not really, that's not really what I know how to do. We do know how to work with our networks. We know who's already the best in certain areas. We know how to find people who've done amazing things, you know, in the thousands of companies in our network and then try to convince them to build things with us. We do have a great talent network. So what do you think is your unfair advantage or superpower? You know, it's a combination of, first of all, optimism and seeing how things can work. So I think most people who had to consider smart people that I met at university or in science

and engineering, I think their first question is usually why it won't work. So I think being optimistic is really important. Being good at strategy where you kind of like really study and understand things. And, you know, having strong opinions, you know, looking at things and saying, okay, this is why this is broken. And I think this is why it's broken. I think you're all wrong. And I'm going to show you why it's broken. But then you have to take that strong opinion.

You have to talk to a lot of people and you have to iterate. So having a strong opinion, but having it loosely held enough that you can kind of make it more accurate and make it better when you continue to work. That's also, I think, a pretty hard thing to do, but it's a learnable skill. So what is the way that you do that in a company? You know, you've been with some big personalities, obviously Peter Thiel, Alice. Elon, and I imagine you guys all disagree intensely at varying points. Do you have a framework for how to do that in a way that doesn't just end up in emotional distress and, you know, entrenched sides?

Yeah, you definitely have to have to have debates. You definitely have to talk to a lot of people who disagree. You have to bring in others and learn about things. You know, a lot of people just generally don't have strong opinions, and so when you do have a strong opinion and you see other people who do, it's actually in some ways they can cause you to fight, but otherwise it caused you to respect the person. Okay, so let's get to the bottom of this. What do we have to prove to see who's right? And then you go and you prove it, you know. Interesting. And so if that was to happen between us and I was to say, well, I really strongly

believe this, your natural inclination is I'm going to push to find the truth. And it really doesn't cause you much distress to have that conflict, whereas a lot of people do. Or we can make a bet about it too. Yeah. I have a few of those going with friends right now. Is it really? What's the best story about a bet that you've made like that? I mean, right now, obviously, just last night, my friend and I are going back and forth on who's the most dangerous for the country, which presidential candidate, of course, right? And the bet we have is that if whether or not, whether or not if Kamala wins and she wins the Senate with a decide, does she add new Supreme Court justices or not? Oh, true. So then you can quantify, because it would be hard to determine who's more dangerous because we'll only have one that wins.

Yeah, so whoever wins, so if she wins, if she doesn't add any new justices in the four years. years, assuming she also won the Senate, then he'll win. How much money does he win? Wow, it's a lot of money. Is that? I'm very passionate about this right now. I like that. And so you have a lot of friends, as I've seen, on both sides of the aisle, both Democrats

and Republicans. 100%. This is really important. I think it's crazy that our country has gotten to the point where people like, I don't want my kids to marry people who think differently and I want them in my life. It's like, that's so unhealthy. And I mean, listen, if someone's like an extreme socialist and they're trying to trying to lead a socialist market revolution,

I'm probably not gonna get along with him very well. But we live in a pluralist society, and it's really important to work with people who have different views. I bet the majority of the scientists I work with are probably some form of on the left. That's the kind of the culture at the universities. Doesn't mean I wanna work with the best scientists in the world.

Most of the time doesn't mean they don't wanna work with me as well, but you still can get great things done, and you can save lives, and you could create new medicines you couldn't create otherwise. They need my network and financing and understanding of how to build things, I need their breakthroughs.

I mean, yeah, you've got to work together. Don't miss the Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters. Merrill Street, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is find my time until you fail. On May 1st, icons. I'm going to make something of this job. Rain.

Be the bridges I burn. Night my way. Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st. by David Frankel. Yeah. Well, we were even talking about this beforehand, that even on, let's call it the right, if that's where you sit, there's division inside of that. And so being-

There's a huge civil war here in Texas as well in the right. It's a big deal right now. And what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, there's a lot of people, I mean, the Pakistan issue is one issue. It's a huge one in Texas. And some people see it through the lens of Donald Trump's being wrongly persecuted, so he is too. And we shouldn't fight, you know, anyone on our own side and other people say, well, if you broke the law, I did all these things, then we need to make no room for breaking the law. I need to be honorable. And it's, you know, these things, people start going back and forth and fighting over things. They disagree on facts. They disagree on intentions. They disagree on principles. And there's a lot of people who are very angry at each

other. And, you know, it's complicated for me to be stuck because I'm like, yeah, I really want to get all these things done that are positive. Let's not fight. But at the same time, so I don't want to fight and I agree with the really strong policies. But then I also agree, the principles are really important. And so it is really complicated how you handle these things. Yeah. You know, speaking of which,

you had some really interesting tweets on, you know, kind of civil war in a different way. But I liked this one in particular, which was the truth is that anyone who fights for something real will inevitably be seen as controversial. And, you know, here you're kind of,

you're talking about meritocracy, equal justice, capitalism, things that perhaps weren't so controversial before but are now. I told you beforehand that we had one of the vendors from our podcast actually have pushback against different people coming on the podcast because they thought, you know, I don't agree with this idea. So because of that, I shall not work on it. And instead of having thoughtful disagreement, I'm just going to say, no, I'm out.

I think a lot of young kids are taught that these days that you're supposed to cancel people. You're not supposed to platform them. You're not supposed to let them chat, which is, it's really sad. I think obviously we should be debating these issues, not just telling people that they should disappear and go away, you know. Yeah. And so do you ever get scared by putting out really controversial opinions? Does that scare you anymore? I think scared is the wrong word. I do think there's certain things that are just not worth sometimes debating for like how controversial they are versus the positive impact you can have. I mean, there's hundreds of possible things we could talk and debate about. And, you know, if I'm going to go somewhere, like maybe it's not worth like debating about January 6 and what happened or what didn't happen for a particular crowd because then you're not going to get anything else done. because they're just not going to listen to you because I hate you, listen to your view. And so there are some things that are so polarizing that when you're trying to get things down in the world,

you say like, yeah, I do think this, but I'm not going to say it. But then there's other things that you say, you know what, this is so important that even if people aren't willing to work with me, I feel like this is so important for our country. There's my job to put this out. And a lot of people who are successful, they're really cowardly about what they're willing to put out because it just helps them to keep being more successful by not being polarizing at all. And therefore their whole life, they're just so careful. And it's a little bit sad because if you're a billionaire in our country, if you just put

out like standard kind of moderate left Democratic stuff that goes along with that party, then you're like you're totally fine. And everyone's going to like you and everyone's going to not attack you. And I have a lot of friends who in person are like, Joe, I totally agree with you. This is crazy. Like I can't believe they're doing this. This is so wrong. But of course I can't say that in public.

I would mess up all my fundraising with all these pension funds that are run by Democrats. or something like that. You know, so it's, it is a little bit sad, the kind of cowardice we see. You think you can make more money. You'd be like, Elon, and just say what you think. And that's not how 98% of these guys work. Interesting. What do you say back to them when they say that to you?

You know, I say back to them. I realize that sometimes it helps you get things done to virtue signal and to go along and then not have stress in your life. But this is a really important thing for our country. So let's consider allying on this and pushing this for. You don't have to like make lots of noise about everything else. but at least take a stand and be bold and save your civilization because if no great people, of no people with resources stand up for a civilization, we're going to lose it.

Yeah. I think that's really important. It's interesting, too, because I found, you know, even like I was getting ready this morning and I got my hair makeup done, as you can tell, from all the base pain I have on. And I was talking to the two young women who were doing it. And I was just asking them out of curiosity, how's your business doing? You know, and they both said, well, business has slowed down a lot. And I said, yeah, how much?

And they're like, you know, 30, 40 to percent. We ascertained that number after we talked through it a few times. And I said, is that normal for this time of year? Also, no. And so I said, well, you know, what do you think is happening? And so we started to kind of talk about the economy and not so many words, right? And explain that maybe we are coming into a recessionary period. And even small things where they were talking about, you know, there's a certain type of hair that has to be done consistently and one that's low maintenance.

And thus, like, 3X less expensive. And what was interesting is I was talking to them. I was like, well, do you want, you know, so when you're thinking about this from a political standpoint, does this change your mind on things? And they were saying, well, in one instance, our two biggest costs are overhead, so lease, their lease for their little unit, right? And then also their inventory. And they're like, our prices have gone up massively on inventory. And so I said, well, that's interesting. Why do you think that might be?

And so we were like kind of talking about this a little bit. And I was curious your take a little bit because one of them said, well, it would be nice if they capped prices. You know, if we could have some price caps on things, at which point I had your visceral reaction. And I had to really think of it through how would I explain what that meant? What is your take? And how do you explain to people who might not understand what an esoteric word actually means for their life and their livelihood? It's really interesting because when you get these kind of policies on the left that ignore how markets work, you want to have learned. is that there's people in the middle like that who are good people and they didn't study economics

and they don't realize they don't work. We'll talk about why. Then there's also people on the far left who are extreme. And the reason they're doing this is not because they think it's going to work. They're smart enough to know it doesn't work. But this gives them power. And so we should talk about that too. So there's really two things going on here.

It's really important most of these dumb policies that are dumb when you look into them. It's not because the people are all that dumb. It actually gives them power. So first of all, why does this not make sense? You know, we've tried this all over the world a lot the last hundred years. You know, this is a classic thing of communists and socialist is let's just make certain goods really cheap. When you make certain goods really cheap, you get scarcity because if you can't make a profit making the good, you stop making the good. And so the price in the market doesn't reflect, it doesn't reflect like someone like price gouging, right?

There's like if someone, if the price is really high, there's a giant market. Like, there's tons of businesses. someone else could start a competitor and they could do a lower price and that lower price would win. And as long as you have markets, as long as you have free people, you're almost always going to have people bringing the price down to what's a reasonable level. Like a lot, you know, the supermarket price gouging is the one that's been in the press a lot. And a lot of people said, well, the supermarkets are making so much money. They're making like 1.5% margins.

And yes, at scale, 1.5% margins is a giant number for Walmart, but it's 1.5% right at the end of the day. So, I mean, you can't lower prices as much more to be profitable. And if you do start setting them, you're going to make them go bankrupt or you're going to make them not provide certain things. And then, by the way, prices are going to go even up a lot more. And so basically, you know, I don't know if we have time to go over, like, what prices mean. If there are signals of how, you know, there's signals to the market of like how the work it takes to get everything else. It's like this complicated thing that exists that lets us deliver goods. It doesn't rip people off.

So anyway, so there's all these economics we can read more. You can talk to people, you know, see it online. But then what's really happening here? Well, if you look at the price gouging law that come. Mala Harris and Senator Warren and all these people on the very extreme left we're putting forward, it's actually something that applies to about 23,000 big companies, and it would give them a lot of arbitrary power to harass these companies and tell them to do things. And guess what?

We're talking about these cowardly, wealthy people. Think of the cowardly wealthy person in one of those 20,000 companies who doesn't want to be harassed, who wants to be able to keep doing their business. What do you think they're going to do? They're going to be friends with them. They're going to give donations to them. They're going to go to D.C. and hang out with them. Are they ever going to speak out against them?

Of course not, because they speak out against them. Then they'd have a price gouging investigation. I was talking to a friend here who's building this big, I won't see what it is, but some big popular thing for a lot of people here in Austin. And he had the inspectors come, and there was something they found after looking at everything. They say, it's okay. Just donate $100,000 to each of these three groups. And there are three, like, very progressive left Democrat groups.

And then we won't, like, make you, like, do the millions of dollars and fees and fix it and everything. And this is how it works when you have kind of a more socialist state is you put lots and lots and lots and lots of rules in. And then you basically selectively enforce them and kind of use that to get power to your side. And so this is where the legislation is really coming from. It's not ever going to fix prices. And everyone's smart who studied this, understands that. But it would give them an amazing amount of power. And she wants that power to use in our society, which is scary.

Fascinating. It reminds me of when I was working in China for a bit. And they talked about how in China they don't have rule. of law, they have ruled by law. And so, you know, they can have all of these rules that allow people to say, well, if you do this, we can actually use the law as a stick as opposed to a protection. A hundred percent. And this is, this is where the regulatory state is terrifying, because once you have, as we do millions of rules, if someone wants to come after you and find you for something, they will. If they want to go to attack Elon to punish him for speaking out,

they will, and they do. And they do this to a lot of our friends. And this is, this is why you need, like, government that's checked. The government should be afraid of us. not us of them. They should be afraid if they're bothering people for a wrong reason, people can get together and fire them. Like that's how elections are supposed to work, not some unaccountable mass of people that are harassed you. So things have really gotten out of control in this country,

and we really need to take back power for the people is I think what a lot of people are realizing. Yeah, I think, well, I certainly agree with you on that. You know, speaking of maybe government ineptitude, but also applied to businesses, you had another tweet that I like that said, you know, we can't hire the right people, we can't fire almost anyone,

our bureaucracies have been getting steadily dumber, more bloated, more broken for decades, and it's breaking the country. And you were talking a little bit about, you know, the decline of merit-based hiring and the focus on accountability and what it should be. Can you talk about this some more? Do you think that DEI actually helps organizations in society? Yeah, this is a really important one. It sounds abstract to a lot of people. A lot of people have their everyday concerns, and they're like, why do you care about this, like, merit-based hiring? I think that sounds great, but I want to put.

food on the table and I want to get to work and I want to afford health care for my kids. So like what the heck is this thing? And it's really interesting because in our society today, the government is huge. It spends a ton of money, right? It spends trillions and trillions of dollars and it's in charge of like putting in more charging stations, putting in more roads and putting in more buses, putting in like everything, right? And you keep seeing recently, it keeps spending tens of billions of dollars and stuff that just, it's all wasted. Or it's all, you know, given to their friends, of course. But it's all, it's all, it's like, It's like, you know, seven charging stations after spending $10 billion,

or I think Kamala did like a handful of buses for billions of dollars on something that people don't talk about enough. What about that light speedway in California? Oh, yeah, exactly. We have this supposed train in California that's just like giving $20 billion to a bunch of basically sketchy lawyers and supposed like minority-owned businesses that are run by their friends that aren't actually doing anything. They've built almost nothing, right, for insane amounts of money.

It's embarrassing for our country. And our country's becoming a place where we can't build big things. So what's going on? Well, you know, our government didn't always used to be run by stupid people. This is a big deal. It's like, you know, it's fascinating at the Civil War. This is mid-19th century, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln. Back on my wall, I had a bunch of things signed by Abraham Lincoln,

is one of, along with George Washington, others. I love the early American founders and presidents. And, you know, he made the government a lot bigger. Don't necessarily agree with all of that. But they agreed. 1883 afterwards, they say, you know what? We're making like tens of thousands of hires in our government, but we're just hiring all of our friends,

because, of course, if you win, you want to hire your friends, reward them for helping you. And it started to be a little bit of a mess. They said, this is not good. So they passed an act in 1883 called the Pendleton Act. The Pendleton Act put in merit-based tests. So in order to run things in government, in order to be in charge of huge budgets, you had to be pretty smart and understand the area.

You had to pass the test. We had those tests for about 100 years. But what happened? And by the way, during those 100 years, we went to the moon. We fought World War I and two. had all sorts of like really hard, complicated, amazing things that the government was involved in. And what happened is in the 1970s, we started to have these very progressive left movement in all of our courts. And they said, wait a second, these tests, are these the right things?

And they looked and they said, well, our research does show that doing well the tests makes you good at running the government. But our research also shows that minorities get much lower scores on these tests. So these tests must be racist. And so they decided that we're not going to have any tests anymore in our country. So this was basically a form of DEI. It's like proto-D-EI in the late 70s, and it was under Jimmy Carter's administration, and then eventually the courts pushed it and finalized it in the early 80s. So for 45 years, we haven't had merit-based testing government.

At the same time, Jimmy Carter said, we're also not going to be able to fire people. Well, it wasn't even him, it was a Democrat Congress. But anyway, they said, basically, if you want to fire someone, here's all these new procedures. And so they made it almost impossible to fire people who are doing a bad job in government. So you have, you can't test them anymore and make sure there's some. smart, you can't fire the bad ones, what do you think happens? And so all of a sudden, we're spending trillions of dollars by these groups that are not nearly as competent. That's fascinating. I didn't know that. So you could basically point in a lot of ways,

obviously we can't totally tell causation, but to the increase in maybe even amount of government employees. Because now, you know, you see right now there's some pretty decent job numbers before the most recent one. But it's all government employees. It's so embarrassing. Oh, we have amazing job numbers. You just took a bunch more, you know, just spending more and more money on, frankly, fake jobs. And I feel badly saying that because there are some people who are work for the government who are great, and there's some people who are trying really hard. But if you just arbitrarily hire more and more and more and more people, it's like that part of the country is not what's actually creating wealth and funding things. Like, it's all has to be funded

by the other part where we're actually building things in the real economy. Yeah. Well, you talk a lot in your businesses and in the government about incentives. And I think one of the most difficult parts about the government is the incentives are perverse, whereas, you know, if you don't spend the entirety of your budget, well, you get it taken away. And so there's actually no focus on profit. There's only focus on continual expense and having continual employees. It's even worse than that too because your reputation is like how many people who work for you. So they're all trying to justify.

Like in my companies, like if it's run well, you're trying to justify how to do something with less expense and fewer resources. Because there's an incentive for that. And in the government, you're trying to justify hiring more people. So I talk a lot about business buying and I get a lot of questions about it. One of the most common ones is where do you find a business to buy? My answer is sad because the worst deals are oversaturated marketplace sites, but the best deals are off-market or curated deals. Either way, finding a business to buy usually kind of sucks.

I think it should suck less, actually. So that's why we invested millions in this company. It's called Biz Scout, a business buying marketplace full of the best deals for both on and on-off market businesses. It's brand new. It's built different. And we've got verified buyers. So what does that mean? That means the best sellers that are actually interested in listing will get responses.

We've got scout sites, aka at a glance, what's the quick analysis of this deal? We've got off-market data so you can get all the info you need to do direct outreach efficiently. We've got embedded lending so you can get your own financing for the business right where you buy it. Biscount is brand new. So go check it out because we're going to be adding so many features over the coming years. And I hope that in the future with you guys and your feedback, we change the face of Main Street buying and selling and turn a few thousand more people into owners while we do it. Because you're a big deal listener, you actually get some goodies. So go to the link in the show notes if you want to see Biz Scout and if you want to think about buying or selling a small business.

So let's talk a little bit about the economy and some changes. So it feels like it's starting to slow down. There's lots of people talking in the ether about, you know, founder mode versus manager mode, about wartime CEO versus peacetime CEO. A lot of this generation has never seen a true recession. They saw maybe a V-shaped downturn during 2020 with COVID, but immediate government spending to fix it. And so they really, they've never lived or worked in a down period. So as somebody who heads multiple companies, what are you telling your companies right now?

And how do you think differently in this market versus the last? last 13 years. Yeah, I think my take on this is probably not going to be popular with people of either political side. Recessions are actually good to have every once in a while. They clean out a lot of nonsense. What happens is there's a lot of resources being used for things that are not productive in the economy, and you need a sensor mechanism.

You need certain things to go bankrupt. You obviously don't want a deep, deep recession that lasts for a long time. That's terrible. But at the same time, like in order to help growth be better, it's like in order to have the tree be healthy. prune the stuff that died on it, right? And so if you'd never prune, then it then doesn't do as well. So there's something like that here. So I'm not like scared of a recession. It's not a horrible thing. I think our policy makers are too negative about them. I think it's normal to have cycles where

you have recessions. The goal is for them to be short and then to have high growth afterwards. And you know, yeah, exactly. We need to be wartime CEOs. You need to take over and cut things that are necessary. You need to focus on making sure your default alive, which means you have enough cash coming in to pay for things. And so in a lot of cases, that means cutting back a lot and really focusing on, you know, we call it like, you know, cut all the way to the bone sometimes they call it and just really focus what you need. Yeah. Yeah, I was reading some interesting data about, you know, recessions and expansions. And if you can be one of the companies, it survives a few of those, you know, you are 3x more profitable and maybe in some cases have somewhere around 9x more

revenue. And so I think there's a really good argument for, if you can make it through this. If you can just survive during a downturn, your ability to thrive on the upturn, mathematically looks to be a lot more aggressive. The way our society does better is it has higher growth overall. If you want higher growth overall, you want more of the resources going into the really, really well-running companies and not into the ones that are sloppy. And so our recession kind of cuts the sloppy stuff, which is rough because it's rough, but it's actually necessary for a free market economy to work well. Yeah. Now, with your, with your companies, do you go and talk to them about how to run differently in this environment? Like,

are you going and talking to all the 8 VC companies? Do you talk to your, you know, capital allocators about how they should invest in companies differently? Does the thesis change depending on the economy? Yeah, it's been really hard to know when the recession is going to hit because you keep getting these waves of government stimulus, sending out money. And it's kind of, so it's like, yeah, so we've been worried for a couple years that at some point, that's a reaction to all this, like, over stimulus, kind of like being on some kind of drug high, like you have to have a crash. And so we've been basically trying to make sure companies take advantage of the money around, raise a lot of money on good terms, have a lot of runway that they can kind of get through it.

A lot of our more established companies, things I built like Atapar, for example, which is the wealth management technology company, trying to make sure it gets default cash flow positive. And so even though we're being very aggressive in building a lot of things there, we're also watching it carefully that it doesn't need to raise money. is what can happen if there's a recession. If things go bad, there might be a couple of years where it's tough to raise money on good terms. You don't want to be forced to try to do that.

Yeah. You also, I think, have some interesting takes about existential threats that your companies have faced before. And so was there a time where you were like, oh, my God, we're not going to make it. We're running out of cash. Everybody's going to hate me. I'm a terrible founder. And what do I do next?

And if so, what happened? Oh, all sorts of times like that. I mean, early on a Palantir, like a few of the key people were just about to quit in your three because it's taking so long to get the government to take us seriously enough and to use it. And we really, you know, it was interesting. I found it happens a lot when you're on the verge of success that people are exhausted and they're about to give up. And you just need to, like, get them to, like, double down for another year and then you can make it. But that's a common theme with a lot of companies I've seen where it's like you've got to push so hard and get exhausted.

and you've got to convince people to have a second wind. You've got to find a way whatever inspires them. I think in that case we try to bring in people like from MI6, which is the intelligence agency. As one does. Yeah. Yeah, this guy, Sir Mark is my friend from there, who's number two there for decades and, you know,

named M, which is kind of cool. Amazing. So you bring in people and you expose them with their problems and you inspire them with what they're working on matters and show how it's close. And it's tough because you do, startups are a lot of times like building a bridge, to somewhere, you know, exactly sure where it's going to. And that's a very scary thing. You have to be,

you have to be a little bit overconfident sometimes to do these things. And so, no, I think OpenGov's another one. So we sold OpenGov this year for $1.8 billion. And there were multiple times when we thought OpenGov was failing early on. Zach's an amazing CEO who, he'd tell me started, but then he came in his full-time CEO a few years in. And, you know, we just learned a lot. We built a tool to help governments and help cities and state agencies, like compare to others and see how they're doing. And And it turned out that when the budget turned down, that wasn't a tool they absolutely needed. So it was actually kind of useful at first, but then they saw him to stop paying us. We learned that we actually have to build tools that run their everyday processes.

And so we had to kind of rejigger and do things that they already had budget for. And then, you know, at one point our engineering team just wasn't strong enough. And I had been busy. I was a chairman, but I hadn't noticed. And we'd like been missing milestones. And like, crap, so I had to bring in a point, I'd have to call in favor is like bringing all these people. and like, you know, John Chambers who built Cisco, which is a very large company. His former CTO, CPO, Pongodge came in and we just, and it like helped us hire people.

And, you know, my CTO boss car. So we'd have all these people would just have to bring in and, like, fix it. And, you know, we could have just give it up a couple times. It was like we're basically out of money. The revenue wasn't going up. Didn't look like it was working. Realized the team had been demoralized and the best people had left. You know, what's happening is Facebook and Google were stealing them for like twice a salary.

because this is based in California in Silicon Valley paying people like $253,300K for good engineers and it got to a point where the top tech companies were paying like $6,7,800K and they're stealing people away. And even if they were sort of loyal, it's like, it's just like, Joe, what am I going to tell my wife?

What am I going to tell my spouse in their case? It's like, yeah, I agree. You kind of got to go for the higher thing job. We're not growing. So, yeah, we thought we were gone. But, you know, Zach really doubled down, really broadened some great people and were able to actually make it grow and be successful.

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please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGEMG operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Yeah, definitely. And I do think the other part, too, that you mentioned about, you know, in our companies, what I try to push upon them a lot is, you know, look how often these big, huge companies like Facebook and Google lay off massive amounts of their staff. I mean, we see it nonstop. We need to trim back sometimes, yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the nice parts, but you would know this better than I. I mean, our companies, I just sort of have a visceral reaction to hypergrowth, inflated salaries to grow. And then you cut 20 to 30% of the workforce because you didn't forward plan that well. And I've never built a billion dollar company, so I really have no idea.

But one of our, I think our differentiators is like, yeah, we're going to grow a little bit slower than other people perhaps, but you're going to probably make less money, but you're going to have less volatility. How have you thought about layoffs in your companies and growth? And how do you think about that? I usually tell people we're going to have a little bit less salary, but the upside is going to be worth so much when you get there. overall you're going to make a lot more money. I don't think it's ever a good pitch that someone's

going to make less money over long term. I think you want people to be part of something that they're going to do really well if they can. So for me anyway, that's the pitch I usually have. Palantir had very low salaries. You know, actually when I was working with Peter Thiel, it must have been 21 or so. We conducted a study he had me look into of CEO salaries. And so it turned out there were three different cohorts. At the time salaries were lower. This was turning 42 this week. This is 21 years ago. But it was like there was one ban was like 75k and under. There was like 75k to 120 and there was 120 and above. And the CEOs for startups that were 75k and under like just massively outperform the ones that were 120k and above. It was kind of mixed for the middle salaries. But it was like but the low salary CEO is just

massively outperformed. And there was something about like like just was very clear they were there to like to have get upside and not to not to get paid. Because especially especially you got even worse. when you have even the higher salary, like 200, 300k salary CEO for startups, which is like massive underperformance versus a low salary ones. That's interesting. Do you think that still holds? I think the bands would be different today because I think you can't even live that much money in these expensive areas very well, which is maybe obnoxious to say for people listening

in other areas. But these are really expensive areas to live. So you probably need to raise the bands. But yeah, I think it's definitely still a really important indicator. It's not like the main thing for how we invest, obviously. But it's definitely one of like the 10 things you want to check when you're investing. in the company early stage is if they're there to pay themselves a huge amount, that's a huge red flag. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and I guess the best CEOs we've ever invested in,

they wanted the upside. They were like, no, if you have two options and one of those options is much more if we win, I want that. So what I did at Pallantier is we actually ended up putting this in all of our offers, is we'd give them three offers of different salary and different equity. And then we'd show them, and we'd have a little caveat down below that's kind of fun. We'd show them like if the company has certain outcomes, like what might the equity be worth? So this is really fun. Imagine you're one of pounds here. You'd say like, well, you can make 60K or 80K or 100K for this position as an engineer.

But then like, and then you got obviously a lot more equity investing over the next five years for the 60K. And, you know, if the company's worth a billion dollars, your shares could be worth 10 million. And if the company's worth $5 billion, your shares could be worth $50 million. And they say, Joe, you shouldn't put $5 billion. That's totally unrealistic. I was like, jokes on them, no. Isn't that funny? So you like gave me shit for making the table with $5 billion is the high,

is the high outcome. Fascinating. Because it's just stealing a lot of money back there. Yeah, it's still a lot of money. But I think that you're, that's really interesting too, because theoretically, if you were this greedy billionaire capitalist, you'd say, I'll pay you $200,000, no problem, no equity. But like, investing is one of the very few areas in the world where, you know,

as opposed to charity, like you could invest in somebody, and that person could become richer than you based on the capital you invested in them. Oh, totally. I have people, I've back to have started giant companies who are worth a lot more than me. But frankly, if you're greedy or you want everyone around you to have upside because then they're working harder. And it's, and also it's just long-term greedy. It's long-term greedy. And you couldn't, you couldn't, if you want to sleep at night, like you need to make this theirs too. Yeah. Especially, by the way, if you're doing more than one thing, which is usually a bad idea to do more than one of the thing, but because I'm in a position where I'm helping start these things and get them going and

helping kind of coach them. I want them to feel like their company, not my company. I may be come up with the idea, but you want the people involved to feel like it's now their idea, and they've iterated it, and they've taken it, and it's theirs. And, you know, it's one of the reasons why I don't always talk about a lot of other companies that help start is I think it'd be demotivating sometimes for some of the CEOs. I'd rather they were in the media more because that's because it's theirs and they own it. And it really is more theirs now, you know? So I guess that's a better way to do it. I like that. How about, how often do you think for a fast-growing company, you have to completely redo your executive staff?

Like, how many people came with you all the way from the beginning from Palantir? Palantir was unique because we did have five or six extraordinary individuals who have grown over 21 years. And I wouldn't be, I wouldn't say came with me because I'm definitely, I'm an advisor, but I'm off the, I'm off the train. So, but it's, you know, Alex Carp did call me on Friday when they got into the SEP 500 earlier. Oh, I saw that. Congratulations. That just happened. It's a big milestone. It's a big milestones. And so I'm still very close to him.

And Stefan, who is my college roommate as a co-founder, and people like Sean Sankar and Aki, actually been there the whole time, as to have some others. So Palantir is unique. And though they have just such a strong team that they were able to scale. The vast majority of the time, you are very often upgrading and redoing a lot of the positions. And even Palindor has to upgrade things and change things. It's not just upgrading people.

It's changing your structure. I think this is very important. If we're talking about a startup world now, is that if you're building something, it's scaling, the right way you're going to report to each other and set goals and kind of have a heartbeat of what everyone's doing and how you're coordinating is going to be totally different with 20 or 30 people than it is with 50 or 60 people than it is with 150 people. And so a really great startup will leader will kind of reevaluate these things really every like six months even. And sometimes it'll be a whole year, year and a half, but sometimes you'll have multiple structural

changes even in six months because you have to if you're growing so fast. And it feels it feels very much like you're doing something wrong. It feels like, oh, everything's broken. This coordination doesn't make any sense. I'm a horrible leader. This is a mess, but let's just try to redo it this way instead. And it's almost like it's supposed to feel that way if you're growing well. It's not, there's no like clean, perfect way for these things to work. Thanks. This is a therapy session for me, mostly. Forget about the podcast. I feel good about life now. This is sort of random. But we were talking before about some people that we both know and have met here. And I was telling how I had some funny interactions with them. And I've noticed maybe in Austin, in

but it's got to be even more in San Francisco, that a lot of people who are wildly successful are neurodivergent to some degree on the spectrum. It's a nice way of putting it. Asperger's as fuck. Like, whatever you want to say. Like, have you noticed that as all? I'm really weird, but I think I'm less weird than a lot of my friends. Yeah, you're actually are highly sociable, which I don't think is always the case.

I'm like right on the fuzzy line where I can kind of pretend to be sort of normal for the sake of your cameras. Yeah. How long does this last? You know, let's, you got to go hide a little bit. No, it's, it's, yeah, I think in general people who are entrepreneurs, people who are different, sometimes that's because they don't fit into the other boxes, right? And sometimes that's in a positive way.

Sometimes that's in a negative way. You get people who couldn't fit in to get a real job, try to be an entrepreneur, actually just dysfunctional. That's bad, too. But, yeah, I know, people who are different because sometimes do things that other people can't. And so you definitely get a lot of them in the valley. Yeah. And do you think that, like throughout your life, You have to have outgrown a ton of people.

Has there been many points in your life where you've had to leave others behind because of your level of success or they didn't understand you? They didn't agree with who you'd become. I don't really, well, I don't think I left, I lost friends from who I'd become or anything like that. You know, if anything, I've probably been, like, too loyal sometimes. It's really hard for me to fire CEO who I've, like, built something with and sat together with. And I usually want to, like, get to the part where they're also convinced that it's, it's like the right move for the company.

And so it is a really tough thing. Yeah, you definitely have things where things don't work out and things have changed in your life. It is a little bit annoying to me. Like because of my level of success, I'll have like these acquaintances I never would have heard from before like reaching out for things like constantly. Right. And so it's like it wasn't even that social in high school. We had our little small group of like I guess someone nerdy friends and I had other people around.

But now all of a sudden like everyone like everyone like. remembers you. And it's like, it's like, so if anything about leaving people behind, is the people I left behind are no longer ones to be left behind is kind of how this stuff works, which is whatever. It's fine. And it's like, this is just a normal way of things. It is, it is very fun to be a position where you can help a lot of people. And you can't do things. You know, you can, you know, you can, there's a rare disease. Somebody, somebody's kid has and there's ways to like do research on it. You couldn't otherwise have done before. There's all sorts of cool things you could do being in my position, which is positive.

But no, I, I wouldn't say I'd like lost two. many friendships things to these things. I do think I'm so busy that sometimes they don't always have time for as many of the old friendships, but some of them, the ones who are really close, those are precious because you can really trust people you've known for 20 years, especially when you're in a position like minus. It's really nice to be able to have a whole friends you can trust, you know? Yeah, and that don't really want anything from you. I mean, everyone wants things from each other, but it's like, I trust them, you know? Yeah. I think I mean, I try to convince them to come on my trips and stuff with me. So maybe I want them to come on a trip more than they

want to come. Who knows? Oh, yeah, that's true. You're always like helloski. and somewhere breaking stuff. I did have ACL surgery. The trip with hell skiing, it's not that dangerous if you don't put the skis on too tight. I don't know. I feel like a lot of your logic seems reasonable. That one I don't know about.

Well, also don't fall off a cliff. Those two things. Minor, really. We've just got two months before my first ever book is out in the world. If you want to pre-order it for yourself or anyone you love, you can do that at the link in the show notes. If you're thinking about buying businesses, if you want to scale small businesses,

If you want to own Main Street, it's called Main Street Millionaire, it's for you guys. You know, these days, lots of people have a lot of negative things to say about billionaires. Billioners shouldn't exist. Billionaires are bad. Billioners take from society. Are they really negative? Is this a jealousy thing, or what is it? I think, I mean, I can never ascertain somebody's emotions as to why they do something,

but you can just look at what they say on Twitter, let's say, if they're not a bot. And I guess my thought here would be, one, Does that ever annoy you and what's your comment back? Like, how do you explain to people that it's good for society that we allow uncapped upside for all? Very self-serving arguments here we have to make. Let me tell you why I should be allowed to have more money. You give away a lot of it, to be fair. Of course.

We're starting universities where I have teams in 20 states try to fix laws in ways that are nonpartisan that make things efficient and functional. Listen, I think it's a really interesting question. for a free society. Like, do you want all of the money to be wrong with my committee? So right now, first of all, our society, there are trillions and trillions of dollars, right? Like, over the next 10 years, our government's going to spend, like, probably about 65 to 70 trillion, you know, plus minus 10%.

Trillion, right? This is so much money. If you took away all the money for the billionaires, all combined, I think it's, what, like, four or five trillion. So this is a very small amount of money, like, relative to, like, what our institutions are managing right now. And you see our institutions, and you see them when they try to build these things. They lay money on fire, right? You literally have, I think, 300 billion a year, going to NGOs, which is the non-government organizations. These are mostly nonprofits that are like trying to,

like, do things with progressives, right, and trying to create more activists and, like, I think mostly amassed. They're not accountable. You have, you have all sorts of committees that run trillions of dollars in pension funds that run trillions of dollars for government to give out to things. And the amount of return you get from the relatively small amount of money controlled by the billionaires versus the amount of money controlled by our big institutions, to me it's just obviously much higher. Like if anything, I would love for Elon and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. And by the way, I don't know how the same politics as some of those guys I just mentioned,

especially not Bill Gates. It sucks on the middle right now. We're trying to pull him over. It kind of seems like he might be open to it. You're probably a little bit based, right? Yeah. But Bill Gates, for example, is like totally different politics than me. I would love for him to spend more money through the Gates Foundation rather than that.

and how we're spending it right now because it's just so much more competent. Even where I disagree with them, it tends to be more confident. So I guess the thing, and then the other thing is, I do believe in the moral principles of freedom and autonomy and being able to create things. I'm not, I'm not out there like stealing stuff. I'm literally just like building new companies that didn't exist before, taking my small piece of them, investing that in other companies, taking my piece, investing in other ones. So I think, and by the way, every time I do it, I pay pretty high taxes already. So, so I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I think it's interesting.

Like, overall, our society would probably work better with more people with wealth and more people investing. And I frankly that is by way why America is so awesome. America has hundreds of thousands of multillionaires who are investing in things in their communities, who are building things. And it's that money that tends to actually, you know, when you own something, when something's yours, when something is tied to your family, that just gives you the incentive to make it functional. So I think that that's what free society is.

It's a bunch of people who own things who care. about them who want to make the functional themselves. Whenever you see, whenever you drive in the city, whatever you drive in a city and you see a building that's like dilapidated and broke down and ugly and abandoned, there's a really good chance the government's involved. Really, because because when the government owns something, it's nobody, so they don't have to make sure it's used, not to make sure it's nice, they don't have to make sure it's worth it. So when you look at, when you look at Soviet Union in the old days in East Germany versus the free sysot part in West Germany, the part the government owned, the, the part the government owns,

is ugly and it's broken and it's in the plumbing doesn't work in these places and things have been stripped and no one ever replaced it and it's falling apart and it's and it's sad and what that is is that when no one owns stuff it just it just breaks and so so the fact that we already have the vast majority of our resources run by government right now like I think that's the problem right and the problem is not this other part which is smaller which is the work crew which we create and which we build things with so I think I think it's a very unfortunate kind of left populist thing to try to focus you on the billionaires over here, when there's actually this much bigger, obviously, broken part of our society that's really scary.

It should be scared to all of us. Of course. I mean, tragedy of the commons. I've seen it again and again. In Latin America, I used to run a business in Argentina. And I remember a young woman, you know, Christina Fernandez came up and wanted to be president of that country and came with beautiful commentary and very flowery words. And I think the path to hell is often paved with good intentions.

and they ran us out of the country and nationalized all businesses and those businesses that used to be producing for a highly resourced country that has all the, in a highly educated country, too, by the way, in Latin America. That's the amazing part. It's so rich, so educated, but with the wrong ideas, it became very poor. Destroyed it. It's really sad. Well, I'm a huge fan of Havre Amelay, who's in charge there right now. I know Elon and I both look to him as something we'd love to do more of here in the U.S. as well as Afwara.

Yeah, agree. I really like that. liked that video where he was just throwing away all of the government agencies? All these departments are just, a lot of them are fake and they're just doing things to spread their control not to actually help people. I mean, it's really sad. But, you know, if we can go back to the billionaire one more time, because I know this, then I always turn to be silly. But, you know, I think there's a bout in America, depending who you ask, there's tens of thousands of people worth more than $100 million. And Kamala Harris is targeting them right now. It's a classic populist policy. She wants to do something called Unrealized Games times. And I could forgive.

people for thinking this might be a good idea because if you're just like trying to pay for your health care and you have a job and you want to be able to afford things and you see people making all this money and you hear some people aren't paying enough taxes. It's like let's find another way to tax them and make them pay their fair share. So I think that first cut is like, oh, this is interesting. It sounds like a good idea. Now let's actually look into this. Unrealized taxes, what does that mean? And so a lot of people who have a lot of money, you have a couple options. One option is you just like go to the beach all the time and you relax and you party and you and you don't build things because you don't really need to anymore. The other option is that a lot of people who have that kind of money in our country

is because they've actually been really good at investing and building. I'm sure someone got lucky, but a lot of them have done it a lot of times. I've gotten lucky dozens and dozens of times, so maybe it's all luck. But at some point there's probably some skill from these people, probably some knowledge of how industries work from these people. And so it's actually probably good to encourage them to build. Let's say, let's say you take one of these people and I'm going go build something. I want to bring back, you know, so I built a multi-billion-dollar company with my friends that brings back advanced biomeufacturing to the U.S. So this is helping do like gene therapies and cell therapies and curing all sorts of diseases. It's a really, it's that we actually,

you know, it's like MNCOs as well, actually, which is interesting. But there's all sorts of things. And we're doing it onshore because we don't trust China. We don't trust other countries to give what we need it. And also creates jobs in America. This is a great thing, right? We want to bring more of these things back. So if you want to start a company like that, what do we do, we literally went, we raise $750 million for half the company. We bought some old plants that weren't really being used, their capacity, and we hired a few thousand people, and we equipped them, and we went off, and then we raised more money at $5 billion valuation. And so imagine starting a company like this, and you're starting to produce, and you're going to raise another

billion to $5 billion valuation. So now on paper, let's just say my senior co-founder, who's a famous guy, Bob Nelson, he's a billionaire in the biotech space, suddenly, his share of that company and say, you know, it's 20%, suddenly his share is worth a billion dollars. Now, the company's just hiring people just getting going, no one's going to buy his share for a billion dollars. But suddenly, because he's already worth all this money otherwise, she wants him to have to pay $250 million to the government.

So instead of being able to take all this money and scale up our manufacturing, scale up our business, do everything, she wants him to have to sell out, basically, you know, sell it to God knows who, and then have to pay tons and tons of money. money. And does that make sense? And on top of that, let's say I'm doing this, let's say I'm doing another advanced manufacturing thing for defense. I want America to be able to defend itself. I am doing that, by the way. We're, you know, we're building a bunch of stuff

for that. And let's say I have a friend who ran the fleet previously and just one of the smartest people there. And we want to give him, he's now retired. We want to give him like a few percent for this company. And he's been a good investor. A few people like that have been a good investors on other things. They've just crossed a hundred million dollar threshold. And I say, listen, I want to give you 5% of this new company. You're going to help out a lot. It's at a $5 million valuation. It's going to be $25 million. And he and his wife look at this and say, oh, wait a second, now that Kamala Harris has passed this rule, if we're going to take it $25 million upside in this, illiquid, hopefully help make it much bigger over the next decade, suddenly we'd have to pay $6.25 million,

a quarter of that. So suddenly, if we were going to do this, we couldn't all of a sudden, buy this house we're going to buy with our kid. And so no, of course not. We don't want this illiquid, risky thing that we're going to have to pay all this money on. And so suddenly he's not willing to help that. He's not willing to bring the dogs back here. So what you see in a lot of words, what I'm saying is there's like systems that work certain ways. And if you put bad incentives into the systems, you try to make people pay money they don't have if they were to build, that actually gets, you get less building. And so, so yes, you need to tax people for money they have, but to tax people with this unrealized tax thing. And by the way, like, every way, like,

everyone in the Valley, Democratic Republicans alike who understand how things work, they know it's a terrible idea. This is one of those ones that I wonder if she kind of knows it's a terrible idea, too. It just sounds good to people. It's just, it, by the way, it would expropriate so many of us. It's like a communist thing, basically. It's crazy. Very. Well, on the other part, I think that people don't realize is that everything's a slippery slope with the government. So, sure, you start with the 100 millionaires, but then you trickle its way down. And that's how all taxes has happened in this country. So if you think that you should be taxed, When you go and give your friend $100 because he's starting a startup and you want to invest some tiny part in his startup.

But you are okay with not getting any cash back and having to pay $20 for the eventual potential that you could make money, but probably a higher likelihood that you'll lose it. Then you should vote for this policy. A hundred percent. You can invest in a startup early on. Your friend goes and raises a big round and much higher valuation. He says, the company's doing great. We just raised a bunch.

Your shares on paper are worth this. And you're like, oh, man, all these taxes. It's crazy. It's crazy. You should pay every, I mean, no country in the world does this. You should pay taxes on money when you have access to it, not when it's on paper. It's just one of these obvious things. I think she knows it.

I think this is like a, she's just so far left that she's just kind of going along with this kind of fake energy from people, frankly, who, you know, I've talked to a few people. They don't understand this stuff at all. Of course they don't. So it's just, she's just taking advantage of that. Yeah. We actually went around Samuel and I to the University of Texas campus, and we asked a bunch of people, if a bunch of students at the business school, if they should be taxed on unrealized capital gains. And it was fascinating to see their responses

because most of them said, yes, first. And then I said, can you explain me what unrealized capital gains are? And they cut it across the board. And then I explained it. And I said, now what do you think? And they're like, oh, yeah, that seems dumb. And so, you know, that's why probably it's important

that you built a university, which is like the next thing I wanted to hit on. You basically saw the university system and we're like, not only do I not want to fund any of the existing schools that are already out there, but I want to have the extreme excruciating pain of trying to create a new university and get accreditation, which you guys just got. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential were never meant to be

boxed in. Nothing can contain us. With the support of export development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities. discover new markets and keep our nation front and center on the global stage. The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. We just, we have the first class. You have your first class.

The way we have permission to be a university, it took thousands of pages of regulation. The only official rule is that you can't actually be fully finished with your first accreditation until you've graduated your first class. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, exactly. It's very funny because all the trolls online are like, The undercredit university. I'm like, the rule is that you can't be fully credited until your graduate your first class. And this is, it's basically a cartel system.

They don't want new competition. But, you know, my co-founders and I are very stubborn. So we're going to build a great university, despite all the dumb rules trying to stop us. And it's going great. We've had thousands of professors apply amazing, amazing professors. We have, you know, from top schools and other places who felt persecuted in many cases by the extremes. These people aren't all on the right, by the way. This is a diversity of perspectives, but it's confident.

people who, you know, it's really liberal versus illiberal. Liberal in a traditional sense means open to pursuing truth and free speech and not shutting people down, or as illiberal means they want to censor you. They want to shut you down if you have the wrong views. And a lot of universities, they're very illiberal these days. And that's unacceptable. We need to train our best and brightest young people to actually pursue truth, to actually speak out to not just virtue signal. Yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, we're pretty big on online education, but more tactically in the trades and for small business. That's amazing. But I do think that so much of the underpinning of society is, you know, history, philosophy, how the founding fathers happen.

You need some class of our leaders in society that study these foundational principles for how our country is supposed to work and you fight for them. And if we don't train anyone in those anymore, we're going to be in trouble because that's how civilizations prosper is they have to understand their founding. They have to understand why they work. They have to understand what their core is. And if you lose your core, then you lose a lot. Yeah. Well, it seems there's this like trend from the great. CEOs and leaders of our time, sort of they start out as either engineers or executors or doers,

and then they end up Naval Robicon, like philosophers and psychologists. Philosophy is the highest art in some ways, right? And you understand people, don't understand institutions. How do you have massive impact on the world if you don't deeply understand people in institutions? This is Alex Karp was, you know, the star student for one of the greatest living philosophers alive in Hoppermast in Germany, my co-founder of Palantir, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Well, Charles Koch calls himself the chief philosophy officer. He's a great philosopher. I've interviewed him before and obsessed with how he helps every one of his

employee self-actualized. He's always demonized by some people. But he's extraordinary in terms of applying philosophy. I'd say he's the greatest living, applied philosopher of business. He's 89 now. But yeah, these guys who have success at all these really high levels, the vast majority of them spend time trying to understand philosophy. What books have impacted your thinking from a philosophical perspective,

more than any others. You know, it's, there's no, there's no one in particular. David Hume was always a really important influence on me. A lot of the ideas of how he understood how the mind worked and how reason worked, really shaped a lot of how we designed Palantir and some of our technology early on. I think a lot of the philosophy of falsifiability is really important. There's, you know, Kant is really confusing. I don't suggest people try to read it without someone to help,

But one of the ideas Kant had that I always really loved is that in order to understand something, your brain has to have a model of it. So you actually have to try to build a model of how something might work. Like you're trying to play a game or whatever, like build a model. And then once you have a model, you can iterate on that model. So a lot of times in business, when I'm trying to look at something, I just don't know how it works. I'll like force myself to try to even just guess how it might work with some kind of model. And then we say, here's why it's wrong. But then you kind of get you iterating and you get to the right model.

So it's just fascinating to try to understand from some of these philosophers. like how do you in mind actually approaches things and then try to apply that. Interesting. So in business, might a model often be, is this their business model? Is this their organizational chart? Is this, like, what are the applied business aspects to a philosophical model? Well, you could say, like, how does this part of logistics work? What is the incentive of everyone involved? And, like, who's paying who? Like, why is this, you know, I'll give you another one. For healthcare, one of the things a lot of people don't understand is, like, how do people make money as a as an insurance company in healthcare.

And it turns out that we've capped the margins for health care. It sounds good you don't want the insurance companies making too much money. But because we've capped the margins and because they make 20%, their incentive is now to make health care as expensive as possible. Because the more expensive it is, the bigger that 20% is. And you can kind of go around at each of the players in the ecosystem and see what their incentives are. And you say, wait a second, everyone wants this thing to be way, way, way more expensive.

Like we've totally screwed up how we regulate this space and how I put it together. There's things like that that you kind of kind of map out and understand. Interesting. So are you like Queens Gamut? You're just like watching checkerboards in the air, chess boards in the air as you're visualizing models.

Are you a visual? I was the California state chest, you know, for K to 6.20. So that is you. But I don't know if that's how the brain works. But I do like strategy games. You're listening to this podcast. So correct me if I'm wrong,

but I'm going to take a guess that you either own a business, want to own a business, or are generally interested in making money. If that's true, I wanted to share this thing with you. I don't know why I've never talked about it before, but of all small business transactions, somewhere around 60 to 80 percent use some amount of seller financing to buy a business. Meanwhile, most people don't even know what seller financing is, let alone how to use it. So what is it?

Cellar finance is when the seller of the business becomes your bank to buy the business. So you get to pay them back for the new business that you own over time using profits from the business. This makes it possible to pay as little as $0 down or a much smaller percent than with the traditional bank. It's one of the most powerful levers in business buying, yet there's next to no info about it out there. So I went ahead and put everything you need to know about seller financing in one package. If you want to check it out, go to the link in the show notes. What about what it comes to? So you have some philosophers that you've turned to.

If you were a young man today, you know, and you probably have thought about this because you created a university. But if you were a young man today, where would you say you should, read these things. You should follow these people. You should think through these in order to create some sort of foundation on which to build a principled, successful life. Well, I would, I mean, there's been a great conversation and debate for the last thousand years in the West. And I think that if you want to understand what's going on, you'd understand that. I would, I would look to, I would look to what the University of Austin is teaching in their courses, right? I would look to, I mean, if you want to say, like, you know, what are the great business leaders reading? I think

I think Charles Koch would say like Carl Popper or falsifiability. and Paua Nyi and all sorts of those things. And, you know, I think in general, just like look to the people you admire in business. A lot of them write a lot these days. A lot of them talk about a lot of these books these days. You have a newsletter and a podcast. I do. I do put things out myself as well.

You know, I'm actually thinking of doing something on a little bit more about the kind of the fundamental values of liberty and the frameworks beyond our civilization and why it works the way it does. I think a lot of people working in AI right now don't understand. like the frameworks of liberty and why our civilization works the way it does. And it's very scary because they have these very authoritarian biases if they're not careful. And so I think giving a counterpoint to that's going to be important. We probably should put out more they should be reading.

So I'll be doing more of that. Amazing. Actually, on AI, you've said this is going to be one of the best things ever for humanity. It can make things really inexpensive for poor people and for everyone else. But we've also heard people like Elon Musk say, your buddy, that it could be really bad for society, too. What do you think as a broad, generalistic stroke about AI today? So about nine years ago in California, I used to live in California, here in Texas, which we love. But I had a dinner with, he was actually Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and about five other friends about AI.

And this is like well before Open AI. You know, all of us assumed that AI was going to have a very, very big impact over the next 15 years, but it was just really unclear what the timelines were. And it was funny because even in that dinner, Mark Zuckerberg was definitely on the office. optimistic side. Elon was definitely on the pessimistic side of how it could destroy the world. And listen, Elon's obviously not only helped start open AI and X. He's also applied it at Tesla, apply to our places. He's using it to do great things. So he's not like he has a simple-minded approach or he's all negative on this. But he is obviously very, very worried about the long-term,

the long-term things that could happen with AI. I'm not saying, obviously, he's like naive or wrong, but it's just so extraordinary over the next 10 or 20 years what AI can be harnessed to build and to accomplish and to create for our civilization. It's like this amazing, very positive tool that I guess I'm more focused on the positives. And I tend to think that as we build it out and as it gets stronger,

we can use it to figure out how to stop the negatives. There definitely is some chance many, many years from today that there's something that's like gone exponential and intelligence. I don't think the universe usually works like that, though. I don't think things just usually go exponential intelligence. I think they get better at certain things over time that we use them for to make everyone wealthier to basically produce things much, much cheaper. And in most cases, I don't think it's going to be like Dune where we have to have

like a jihad against the intelligent machines, right? We'll see. Great movie. Don't want to live in it, though. Yeah, I agree with that. Probably not. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. I was with the lady who cleans my house the other day who's amazing.

and she is the first-gen-immigrant, and she was talking about how her daughter is teaching her how to use chat GPT, and some of the others, and how she's applying it to her business, and she used it to create a little LLC so that she could hire a few other people to do it. I love it. And, you know, you can see sort of the immediate effects of she's 40.

It's so fast. You do it right away. You could talk to it. I mean, smart enough to work, exactly, for people who are older and who are not tech savvy. Exactly. It's making the tech stuff more productive. It's going to make everything more productive.

We're doing it for health care billing. Health Care Billing waste hundreds of billions of dollars for our country right now. It's just this thing in the middle. And we're making healthcare billing about four times more productive. And there's going to be all these areas. You just cut tons of necessary expenses out of. Yeah. So I imagine that, I mean, if you look at the uptake rates of AI just for the everyday American,

it's lower than I anticipated. Like, for instance, my parents have never touched it, right? So if you were young today, would you be telling people you should be experimenting with AI above everything else? who should be learning philosophy. What would be your core tenets for the youth? I mean, you've got to do things you're passionate about, first of all. We can't, our minds, our minds don't really work that well. You're not using your full mind unless you have emotional feelings about something,

unless you're, like, really interested in it. Like, this is one of the things when they scan, like, the best chess players in the world, and they're playing games. They have all sorts of emotions about all these different positions. And it's like, it's basically a way for them to the, like, harness even more of their mind. Like when you're passionate about something, you're actually better at it. So for young people, find what you're passionate about, of course, learn about AI. I of course explore it.

It's fun of the little kids. You can, like, make pictures. I have my daughters and I will tell the computer different things. We'll make different dragons and princess caves or whatever, you know. And you tell stories. We'll, like, write a story. And they're like four and six and young, right? Four, six, seven.

Yeah, but a four-year-old can, like, can, four-year-old could describe something she wants to see and can, we tell a story. She could describe some silly thing, and we could weave it into the story. And you didn't have a make a story with you back and forth. And you could tell it, you know, you can have my daughters be characters in a story that we're working on and iterate on it and stuff. It's fun. I love it. Samuel, you're going to do that next?

All right. Samuel's a new father. So he's... Probably got to wait until there at least three for this to make sense. She can't feed herself yet, talk or communicate. But yeah. Okay. Kind of where I want to close out a couple of things. One is, I think people have beat up this idea quite a bit, but first principles thinking.

You know, obviously categorize or created by Peter Thiel. But then you talk about a lot to this day, this idea of getting back to base level. How do you explain that at a very simplistic level? first principles thinking. Yeah, and Bridgewater, by the way, was all about this as well, which is a very interesting hedge fund. I was the biggest hedge fund of the world. But it's really important, you've seen this in lots of areas where you go back and you say, what are our fundamental assumptions? What are we doing here? Like, why, like, what is our firm the best at? Why is there an opportunity here? What are we got to, like, what's our core capabilities? These are really

philosophical questions as well as how do you break down the frameworks for who you are? And then say, could give them these core capabilities. What are the juxtapose areas, where are the areas next to it that we can go into that are similar? And it's a really good exercise to keep coming back to, because it reminds you of things.

This is why building a deck is really good for an entrepreneur, even if a small business is you want to put together. Here's 10 pages on who I am, what I'm doing, what the goals are, why it's going to be successful. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs say, oh, I'm just so smart and fast,

and why would I do this stupid thing that's for stupid people? It's not for me. And it's actually, it's for everyone because everyone needs to get back to the core of like exactly like what and why and who and how. And sometimes those principles you'll notice have actually changed in a way. Maybe you're intuitively realized one of them's changed, but you don't really find it until you go back and actually write it down. So it's just such a helpful thing. You know, as a founder, I really admire the founders, not just of companies, but, you know, the founders of America as well.

And the founders of America were really clear about their principles. And we're very, very lucky about that. There's all sorts of debates. There's all sorts of writings from that time. I grew up reading something called the London Magazine, which is the founders of America and the people, you know, writing things in Parliament and everything would write in and argue back and forth, even as you have all these primary sources of what was going on.

And it was the light of me kind of just happened over the last hundred years. It was really a time where people were really focused on principles and society and what's correct. And so it was a great intellectual breeding around for founding something like America. But I find founders in general who were, are the best are similar to the American founders, like really debate these things, really come back to them. And it kind of refreshes and renews what you're doing. Yeah. And also seems like you have to repeat yourself very, very often as a founder. You do because you need to make sure people understand the vision of what's going on. I remember early on a Palantir, we'd walk around and talk to a bunch of the

engineers helping me recruit. And I'm like, what's the mission to you in your words? Why are you excited about it in your words? When you're talking to your smartest friends and we're going to go or we're to or MIT or wherever else we're going to go and recruit, like, tell me as if I'm one of them. Let's talk about this practice. And that, you know, it's helpful. You got to do that. And isn't that how you guys originally were able to recruit a bunch of engineers from top schools who maybe didn't want to work in defense or maybe didn't want to work with

this upstart? Well, so I think the reason we were able to recruit a lot of the best people is we started with a bunch of the best people. So it's very chicken and egg. You know, from the chess world, from the math world, from Stanford computer science, from my friends who, you know, we're at Caltech and MIT. had a really strong group to start. And once you have a really strong group, people are like, oh, yeah, my smartest friend from Caltech went here. I should go check it out. And then you have

to convince them with the mission. When they come and convince them that they're going to be solving these really interesting, hard problems. Interesting. All right, I want to close out with a few fun ones. Spending money. What are some of the silly ways that you spend? He's like, look at my wall of Lincoln paraphernalia over here to the left. My wife designed this. She's not a spend trip, but she did a great job. Yeah, I would be shocked if you did this. That would be a fun little aside for you. But I think a lot of times, you know,

I don't really like to glorify money for the sake of materialism ever. But I do think when you're young, there's something fun about, hey, I can take my work, I can turn it into this thing, I could buy something in the world. Is there something ridiculous

that you spent money on early on? I think the things that are most ridiculous that I spend a lot of money on, but that are also really cool, is like getting laws passed in the States to help people. It's really fun. So like, I know it's not material, but like, I mean, this is when I was 16, I bought a BMW, if that's what you're going for. When I first made money, you know, the bubble. I was going to go for which size plane, but fine.

So it's really cool. So for example, you talked about your passion about vocational stuff. I am too. I think it's really important for a lot of people. The problem is a lot of our vacational schools suck. What do you do if a state-based educational school sucks? What is being run by people who are incompetent? I say there's 20 of these schools in a state. Like, what do you do? And so the thing you do actually, we figure this out. We spend a lot of time on it is you say, okay, the state is funding all these. Starting next year, we're going to fund these things in proportion to the average salary of their students coming out. Brilliant. And so suddenly, they can't game that. They actually, so the schools freak out and they're like, what skills do we

got to teach our students? What businesses do we got to partner with to get their salaries up? Because you can imagine most board level conversations, they're probably talking about woke shit. They're probably talking about some nonsense of war they're trying to get. They're probably talking about how to raise the salaries of some people that. Who knows what they're talking about these goddamn boards, right? But if all of us, they're probably talking about these goddamn boards, right? But if all of a sudden it's like, okay, no, you are being funded based on your student's success. Yeah. You know, we've doubled the salaries of some students coming out of these places over a period of six or seven years.

So imagine like spending, it's what cost to me like a few hundred thousand dollars of like lobbyists and lawyers and my team traveling and all this stuff. And we write op-eds for the legislators and gets into the governors. So to pass one of these laws, it just like fixes this and like helps tens of thousands of students costs us a few hundred thousand dollars, which is that's like so much cooler than any nice car I could buy. I don't know. Cars are cool, but like it's actually cooler to do something where you know you've helped tens of thousands of people. And imagine to get to do that like dozens of times. To me, that's pretty cool. And you get to build the world that you think should exist, which I think is one of the benefits of money. And you get to make it functional. You get to make it. If we don't fix these people's lives, they're probably going to vote for Kamala Harris's nonsense and stuff. If you fix these lives and they're happy and they don't want to tear things down, they want to actually be part of a functional society, then all of a sudden they're not going to vote for the They're not going to vote for ending America. They're going to vote for more of America because they're doing well. So the more we can fix things, the more we keep everyone's functional.

Yeah. And I do think, like, when my team asked me this, they got mad because I didn't have a fun answer on one of the podcasts. And my answer was I like to hire people when I have more cash. There's like 20 people who work here. Yeah, you literally have a small army here. They help you get things done. Fine. Now, the other really fun thing that I bought recently is my favorite thing I bought this year by far is. is Starlink for my plane. Oh, that is cool. Not at all.

Because, you know, basically when you're taking off and landing, it's still perfect. And, like, I have Zoom calls that work perfectly well. It's like, it's great. Do you just call Elon if it's ever wrong? Anything ever goes sideways? Usually it'd be, like, his number two, because it'd be really mean to bother him. But, yes, tempting. Okay.

I want to end with something a little goofy, maybe. But there's so much going on in the world today that feels like a battle of good versus evil to me. Yeah. And I know you're very principled, and I don't really know how to phrase this question, but do you think that we are? Is there sort of a spiritual warfare going on? Is there a battle for good and evil going on?

What do you see? Because you're embedded in governments across the world. You see true evil in war zones with Palantir. And you've been on the front lines here in Austin helping homeless crises all the way to helping us win wars in the Middle East and China. I think most people in our society, first of all, are not evil. If you disagree with me, I think this is very important. So we definitely have ardent disagreement between good, well-meaning people, and I would start with that. However, I think there is definitely some evil in the world.

I think the Islamists, this is not people who are Muslim, but Islamists, the people who are the extreme, are terrifying and evil. And there are so many people full of hate, full of destruction, full of murder and horrible things. And so you get that in the world. I think one of the evils that I see all around me is the nihilism of the successful class, the successful people who are just out for themselves and their families and are too afraid to speak for what they know is right. Our civilization really only works if the people who are the leaders, the people who are successful, the people who are in charge of things, if they're willing to fight for what they know is true and what they know is right. And there's something really poisonous.

It's kind of like what black pill, people call it, where they say, you know what? Things are so broken anyway. I'm just going to get mine. I'm just going to ignore this. I don't want the trouble. I'm just going to just keep making more money or keep doing these other things, but I'm going to have nothing to do with these battles. And they know these battles actually impact millions of people's lives.

They know they're going to really, really matter for our world. They know what the right answers are, and they're afraid to engage them. And that drives me crazy. Yeah, it's beautiful. I agree. I think there's so many people listening to this who, are entrepreneurs who are building something, but say, I don't care about politics. I don't care about what's happening in the world around me.

Politics cares about you. Exactly. You know, I think there's hundreds of millions of lives on the line. I think there's all these things in our civilization right now where we have this really cool research going forward that's going to save lives, right? There's all these things that are so functional that I'm just like, like what I see, I have a relative with the certain disease. It's scary.

And I say, you know what? As long as our civilization is functional over the world. the next 20 years, we're going to cure this because I know the technologies there. I understand as long as we have the money to invest, as long as we can get people to work on these things. But if our civilization is dysfunctional, if we let people break it, if we let people do what they're doing right now with terrible ideas, whether it's price fixing or unrealized taxes or packing the court and God knows what else with our country. Or gaze for Gaza. That one really gets me.

I mean, that's just like those people are very cheaply confused. But if you break things, right, if you have like, whether it's the commies and the Islamists or something else, and you break things that we don't keep kind of going upwards with positive feedback effects, we're not going to solve those things. We're not going to cure that disease from that person. We're not going to have people living positive lives. And frankly, we're going to have people having less children as well. It's a huge problem right now.

I think if you make things more functional, like we can very easily bring down housing costs, get rid of traffic. If our government was at all competent, we literally could get rid of traffic for very cheap compared to all this other money we're spending. You have tunnels everywhere. There's no traffic. And there's things like this. It would let people have more kids. It will let people live, you know, whatever other other happier lives they want to live. And I think it really matters.

Like, these fights really matter. And I'm very frustrated to see so many people on the sidelines. Yeah, it's beautiful. American optimist. I so appreciate you being on the pot today, Joe. Thank you. Thank you. Now you guys get to say you were inside of a billionaire's house with me.

Isn't that fun? If you liked this episode, please subscribe and share. Tag me on Instagram, where I reshare everybody who watch the podcast. That is the only way we get the word out in a world in which mainstream media does not want you to get this word out. They'd prefer to feed you a bunch of proverbial lies as opposed to tell you some uncomfortable truths. I'm not that into that here. But the thing that's interesting about today, I was actually not going to say this publicly. And I was debating it with the team. And then I thought, fuck it, my show, right? And here's what happened. So Joe Lonsdale was going to come

on the show. And we had a vendor that was working on our podcast. They do some what's called pre-production stuff, like come up with thumbnails or their interesting tidbits on the internet. And this young gentleman reached out like two days before the podcast and basically said, hey, due to my moral beliefs, I do not agree with this guest that you're going to have on your podcast. And so I'm not going to work on this podcast. But feel free to send me other podcasts to work on. And I thought about that for a minute. And I thought, man, that is everything that's wrong with our society today. That instead of when you disagree with someone, you try to dig in deeper to understand their perspective and define mutual truth, you instead

want to silence them and you want to be no part of the conversation. So needless to say, we're not continuing with that individual. I believe hugely in the right of free speech and never in shutting down other people's words, especially when I disagree with them. Because that is when you are actually supposed to protect free speech. There are trolls of mine all over the internet that say ridiculous things. And I've never once reported that they should be kicked off platform or that they should not be paid attention to.

Except if it was something that was violence, I think you have the right to say it. And so I thought I'd bring this up not to shame this guy, although I disagree with his decision. I respect anybody's beliefs to have whatever beliefs you want. I just think it is the core of what rotten in our society today. That someone who doesn't even know this individual is going to read a few things that they have written online, probably a few tweets, maybe a few

one-off YouTube videos other people did, and say that this man who has done more for the city of Austin that I live in and across the country doesn't have a right to speak. I think today increasingly we've got to figure out how to have conversations with our neighbors and realize we have more in common than not and stop vilifying them. And I think Joe Lonsdale said it perfectly on this podcast, which you guys probably heard. He said, I'm friends with people on all sides. And I don't think most people are evil. He actually said the opposite of that.

He's like, I think that I don't agree with all of their ideas, but I still talk to them. And in fact, we have to do that. That's part of being in a republic. And so in this episode today, you know, afterwards, Joe and I got some breakfast at his house that we talked with his head of his podcast. And I'm reminded again about why I like talking with guys like him. because unlike some billionaires who, I mean, God, the Kossela guy, Vinode, or whatever his name is, I mean, this guy, for instance, he is going out there saying that we should have an open border when he has a private mansion on a beach trying to block public access to the beach for normal people

is in a lawsuit for like five or seven years while trying to say that we should have open borders. That guy's out of touch as a billionaire. But when you go to a guy like Joe Lawnsdale, he's still fighting the good fight every day. He's getting kicked in the gut, just like the rest of us trying to build a business. He's losing tons of money. He's having wins. He's having losses. It's probably more insulated once you start being able to have your own plane.

But I think when you're in the game of business, you get killed all the time, no matter how successful you are. When you're in the game of politics, even more so. And so maybe this episode is a little reminder that we shouldn't villainize each other and that actually the real villain are not the builders beside us, but the burn it downers or the grabbers that are located in government. Those are the people that we should be fighting back against. All right, if you guys agree with me, follow along on the Big Deal podcast, and I'll see you next time.

Also, if you like this podcast, leave a review. I'm trying to get to 1,000 reviews. We're right around 464, not that anybody's counting at all on the internet. And I read every single one of them. It means the world to me, if you wouldn't mind leaving a review if you like what you listen to.