Shawn Ryan Show - #151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor known for advancing defense technologies and national security innovations. As a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, he helped develop powerful data platforms to address global threats. Through his venture firm, 8VC, he has supported startups in AI, cybersecurity and battlefield intelligence, driving innovation at the intersection of technology and defense. Lonsdale is a leading advocate for emerging military technologies, particularly directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and microwave systems, which he sees as vital for missile defense and counter-drone operations. Committed to fostering public-private partnerships, he works to ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of defense innovation while maintaining ethical oversight. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://patreon.com/vigilanceelite https://shawnryanshow.com/newsletter https://shawnryanshow.com/collections/shop Joe Lonsdale Links: X - https://x.com/jtlonsdale Website - blog.joelonsdale.com YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Joe_Lonsdale Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joe-lonsdale-american-optimist/id1573141757 Firm - 8vc.com Policy Group - ciceroinstitute.org University of Austin - uaustin.org Sesh - https://seshproducts.com/shawnryan Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply, details at fizz.ca. Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sean, glad to be here. Man, I am super excited to talk to you. I've been following what you've been doing in a lot of your different companies for a while now.

And I know you're a busy guy, and I just want to say it's an honor to have you here. You know, you're involved in so much with technology, and also I love what you're doing with University of Austin. I'd love to hit on that, but I just, I really appreciate you coming and I've been looking forward to diving into this for a long time, so.

I'm excited to be here. It's an honor to be on the show. Thank you, thank you. But everybody starts off with an introduction and we could go on for probably an hour here, but I tried to summarize it up here. Joe Lonsdale, you're a real titan of industry and innovation, a man whose journey from Silicon Valley to the halls of policymaking reads like a modern day epic.

You're a Stanford educated visionary who co-founded Palantir Technologies, a company that's become synonymous with big data and analytics, helping governments and businesses worldwide to make smarter, more informed decisions. After Palantir, you ventured into the world of finance and founded Adipar, revolutionizing how wealth management works, making it transparent and data-driven.

Of the nine US defense unicorns, billion dollar companies, you founded three and were one of the earliest investors in another three. You're deeply invested in education reform. You co-founded Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies.

Your influence extends into policy with your involvement in 8VC, a venture capital firm that doesn't just fund startups, it pushes for policies that encourage innovation. You've been an advisor deleting political figures, advocating for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges. You shape the ideas of the future with your op-eds and articles that often delve into intersection of tech, policy, and culture. You're a father of five kids.

You just had your first son and you've been married for eight years. Yep, that's right. Congratulations on your son. Thank you, Sean. He's 92nd percentile. He's a big little baby. Yeah, nice. He's 92nd percentile, he's a big little baby. Yeah, nice.

Healthy boy, huh? Yeah. Well, Joe, I want to do a life story on you, starting from childhood and get into all of your different companies and involvement with different things that you're in, but it just so happens that, I've been super interested in your company, Eporus, and I've had several conversations

with your business partner, Grant, for standing, and love him, amazing guy, but we got a situation going on, literally right now in New Jersey, with all these drones. And nobody seems to know what it is, so I just want to kind of start the interview right there. What the hell do you think these drones are? This is funny, we're going to be at the Army Navy game

and so I'm bummed that I don't, I'm going to find out tomorrow probably from all these guys, because I'm sure they know, tomorrow probably from all these guys. I'm sure they know, but I haven't texted them and asked, if it's not ours, then it's really incompetent, right? If this is not ours, then it's also kind of weird. If it's not ours, what the heck, man? It was like two years ago we're freaking out about a spy balloon traversing the United States from Washington all the way down to South Carolina. I got a good answer on that though

I'm sure I don't know if I'm sure it's public by now But I think because of the fact that we let it stay up We were able to hack into it trace back where the data was going and like find out a lot about the Chinese And so it turned out in that case It made sense and it turned out that Xi Jinping didn't even know his underlings had put this by balloon up and we're doing It and it was actually bad for China because we used it to hack in so I out in that case, it made sense. And it turned out that Xi Jinping didn't even know his underlings had put this Biden balloon up and were doing it. And it was actually bad for China because we used it to hack in.

So I think in that case, there's like a competent answer, which makes you feel good that there's like not totally incompetent people. Like they met with Biden, they said what they're going to do. He agreed to let them do it. And that was fine. So hopefully there's a competent answer for these drones,

but it's a weird thing, man. I mean, do you think it's ours? I assume it's ours because if it's not, that's insane. Why would they fly this over Area 51 or some testing grounds? You know what I found out about Government Man is that there are some really great people, there are some amazing special forces guys.

Every once in a while on the DoD, you'll have this genius person, the strategy group, and then the vast majority of them are incompetent. And so it's just hard for me to say, but I'm hoping they're ours, because if they're not ours, that's actually a little bit scary, and it's really incompetent that we're not doing something.

Do you think this might be a distraction? From something going on in the Middle East, or something going on in China? I don't know, maybe some bad jujus going on somewhere else and they're just throwing these things up to distract everybody. If there was another story, then maybe, but I don't know, that's an interesting question.

We're gonna find out really soon, I'm curious. I don't wanna make a bunch of stupid guesses and I come out to be an idiot because it's hard for me to know, I actually don't know the answer. Well, I mean, drone warfare is becoming obviously very prevalent. Absolutely critical. This is the future of warfare is like lots and lots of manufactured smart weaponized autonomous drones whether they're flying, whether

they're on the water, whether they're under the water, whether they're on the land. That is the future of warfare as far as I'm concerned. So you know people, one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is obviously, I'm just extremely curious of what your thoughts are. But another reason is, I mean, you know, I've been reading reports on CNN, people are posting the neighborhood watch groups and the Facebook groups and stuff, and people are, they're freaking out.

And what I find probably isn't a coincidence because I believe in a higher power, but you have, you founded EPROS. And EPROS is a directed energy, basically a directed EMP weapon. And it is, I mean, it seems to me from the reading I've done on it, it's defense against drones. EPROS is a really important company. I mean, it seems to me from the reading I've done on it,

it's defense against drones. EPROS is a really important company. I'm proud to be a co-founder there with it. It's not just, I can't take credit for it by myself. There's a few other people who are critical. Nathan Mintz, Beaumar, other guys, Grant stepped in and played a key role. The background on that, by the way,

is I'd gotten out of defense for a few years, because after Palantir, it's just not, it's hard. You have to go talk to senators, you have to go to the DOD, it's like this is stressful stuff. I built companies elsewhere, like you mentioned. But then we saw in the early 2010s, we saw a lot of our smartest friends in China were being forced to have their engineers

work on military projects. And we said, wait a second, this is not good. And then we saw our defense primes were not able to attract the best talent at all. So we had in America, these defense primes had all consolidated in the 90s. And obviously Palantir had to compete against them in software side and crushed them.

But their hardware side was also going downhill. It was also getting worse. And this is a big problem. The China's getting better, it's getting worse here. And then it turned out that Xi Jinping guy is clearly a commie who's going to try to confront us. He's going to be a serious adversary. And that got scary.

And then a bunch of my friends, three of the best guys from Palantir with Palmer Lucky, started the Andrewl. And so we backed out early. And it basically convinced me, you know, at the time looking at all these things and looking at Andrewl, we better get back involved in defense.

So we said, okay, we're back involved in defense. What are we going to do? We need to get more of our best and brightest from the tech world, which I'm lucky to come from and have access to, to work on these problems. And we mapped out about 20 different areas and we decided to start EPROS first and decided to build that because exactly

the future of warfare seemed very clearly to be heading towards drone warfare. And it's just not sustainable to fire missiles at drones, right? You're spending a million dollars or $100,000 to shoot down something that costs a lot less than that. So you need a one to many effect. You need to be able to shoot cones of energy drones, right? fast. They can help you control power on very small time scales and get the power to hit the emitter and then fire way farther than anything anyone else was doing.

And so the emitter was called gallium nitride. It's a super efficient way of shooting. in other places too. that when it hits the drone, when it hits the electronics, it fries them, it destroys them. And then there's all sorts of things you do to kind of tune the burst and figure out how to actually do it most efficiently and effectively to fry these things as well. And you know, we're now,

I'm not supposed to say quite that far away, but you're shooting things down from miles away, you're shooting miles away, and it's not just the little tiny DGI drones or whatever they're called. It's like, you little tiny DGI drones or whatever they're called. They can take down quite a far distance away. You're doing it for bases, you're doing it for forward attacks.

You can put smaller in one of those missiles and you can and that one's not going to work that as far as it's a smaller Form factor but that missile can get up and get pretty close to the bad guy drones Fire a bunch of them and then come back and land and so there's things like this that you do now, too so how many How many drones could like one of these what do you call the actual weapon? Is it Leonidas Leonidas is the is the first version of product that's do you call the actual weapon? Is it Leonidas? Leonidas is the first version of the product

that's being forward deployed with Sancom. It's just going out actually in the next month, fire, fire. You know what's great? So you know why it's called Epirus? So the Epirus was the bow of Theseus. Theseus was the guy who started Athens in legend, right? And in legend, his bow had infinite arrows. And so that's the point here is you're firing electronic powers, you effectively have infinite arrows. See, this thing could fire thousands of times. And each shot costs almost nothing.

Wow, wow. I'm just, so that gives us hope. So basically all these drones in New Jersey, Wow, wow, I'm just, so that gives us hope. So basically all these drones in New Jersey, if we wanted to, they could deploy a Leonidas and take it down that way. I don't know if they want to, they could shoot down right now with any number of different types of missiles, I'm not sure. But this is exactly, I mean I think there's probably rules from the FAA

about there's always regulators about what you could do on shore and where you could do it and how you could do it. But I mean, eventually you'll probably have things like Leonidas protecting stadiums, protecting airports. That's another reason we started it, by the way, is when we were building Palantir, one of the big focuses was stopping terror attacks. And we're working in partnering to stop terror attacks with the United States intelligence community,

which I think we're very helpful in doing. And so I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a sick thing, but what's the bad guy going to do? the United States intelligence community, which I think we're very helpful in doing. And so I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a sick thing, but like what's a bad guy going to do? You kind of have to put yourself in the bad guy's shoes and figure it out. And one of the things a bad guy could do,

which would be horrible, and I shouldn't talk about it too much, is you can attack a stadium. So I think our stadiums are going to need to be defended by things like this. Well, yep, I mean, what... Yeah, I mean, we just... I had a former CIA targeter in here just a couple days ago. We just released the interview now and actually yesterday. And she's talking about, you know, there are at least 1,000 very well-trained terrorists within our borders right now. Yeah, it pisses me off, man. It's crazy. There's some really amazing judges I know

who are, one of them actually was just involved in this, well, it doesn't matter, really great decision against the SEC last week. But they would go down to the border and they assign them to help because they're overloaded with the cases. And some of the Biden administration judges were letting in people on the watch lists.

And they're like, what are you doing? You can't let them in. He said, no, we're instructed to let in everyone. And I, it's like, I still saying it. I don't even believe it, but this is what I'm told by multiple people. There's been, I think Chip Roy, the congressman wrote about it as well.

Isn't that crazy? They're like, they're letting in these people into our country. What are they doing? What do you think they're doing? I think it's like this weird ideology where they just, I mean A, they're probably like trying to spend a lot of money while bringing down inflation

by bringing in more people. And B, it's just some weird open border ideology. I don't understand it. But the fact that you'd let people in, even on watch lists, I guess they think it's not actually dangerous. I don't know. At least people don't think in terms of like you and I,

in terms of there's bad guys, and there's good guys, and we gotta keep people safe, and we have this adversarial relationship with some other countries. It's almost like they're just extremely naive people who live in a different type of world than we do. It's weird stuff, man. Do you think that they want something to happen

for a particular reason? To start a war? It's possible. I mean, if they come in. Yeah, it's possible. And do another terrorist attack, then we go right back to war. That spends up the military industrial complex. There could be someone who's that sick

in the military industrial complex. I mean, I fall in between these factions because on one hand, I think we wasted trillions of dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq and probably shouldn't have been there in the way we were. I obviously think we had to do something after the 9-11 attack, but we probably shouldn't have gone and stayed there and spent all the money and all the lives.

But at the same time, we do need to stop the bad guys from causing problems. But yeah, I think there are some pretty sick people who are much, much more aggressive about just like always being at war, which is terrible. Yeah, you know, that's one of the things, that's one of the things I love about what you're doing is, you know, with the traditional military industrial complex companies, you know,

we're shooting down $500 drones with million dollar missiles. It's crazy, man. It's not sustainable. With a company like what you have, Epirus, I mean, it's not that way. It's an energy. It's an energy weapon. This is the goal, is we're not cost plus people.

I think there's this really sick disease of people that their whole incentive is cost plus. They just want to use more of their stuff and sell more of their stuff. And their incentives are pretty screwed up. I think the better way to do it is exactly, you got to make things much, much, much cheaper and better and then change the incentives around,

have it be more like a software thing, not like a thing where you're just selling as many as possible at 6%. I mean, you got to, that brings up a whole nother topic. I mean, what about your personal security? I'm genuinely curious. I mean, you've gotta be pissing off, you know, Lockheed.

Oh, for those guys, that's funny. I always thought you meant like killing all the terrorists, but yeah, that's interesting. I'm, I mean, I listen, I think the guy who runs Lockheed, Jim, he ran American Tower. He's a great businessman. He's like, he's not from the guy who runs Lockheed Gym, he ran American Tower, he's a great businessman. He's not from the military industrial complex himself. He's been brought in to figure it out and fix some things

because there's some things that are broken there. He seems like an honorable guy to me. I don't think those kind of guys are, you know. And then the other thing, let's be honest, I'm a step down from Peter Thiel and Oscar Carpenter. They're both 15 years older than me. They're both important mentors to me. They're my co-founders. down from Peter Thiel and Oz Carpenter. They're both 15 years older than me. They're both important mentors to me.

They're my co-founders. I think they're the ones who have more security than me. We have my security guy outside. I'm not that worried, though. Right on, man. There's a lot of money at stake here for those companies. Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman. It's interesting, though.

I think, Sean, that's not actually, in in this case I think it's not the right way to think about it because it's not like there's like some evil genius behind Raytheon or something, right? Raytheon is like a conglomeration of all this stuff that merged together in the 90s. There were some great families, great people, maybe in the 1940s, 50s, 60s,

who created some of this stuff. And back then, by the way, it was legit. It was the best stuff in the world. And so you have this conglomeration, and then you have all these bureaucrats and all these committees. And the problem with the military industrial people is they become more like the broken bureaucracy

in government. So, and these bureaucrats, they're mostly cowards, right? They're mostly like people who just like automatically want to like do more, fill out more forms. They want to like go along with whatever's safe. So I think part of the problem with these companies is the fact that they're actually not bold, and they're not thoughtful, and they're not courageous.

And so I'm not really afraid of the bureaucrats, I'm kind of just disgusted by them. Does that make sense? It does make sense. It does make sense. All right, let's break from warfare for a second and let's rewind. Let's go back to your life story. Where did you grow up? Grew up in Fremont, California, the East Bay,

near Silicon Valley. Brothers, sisters? I'm the oldest of three boys. I have two amazing younger brothers. I was with one of them yesterday in Miami. They both live in Austin, although one of them spends a lot of time in Asia. Right on.

What did you like? I mean, what did you grow up doing? What were your hobbies? A lot of sports, a lot of video games. What kind of sports? As a baseball player, as a swimmer. Got the gold medal in breaststroke for the East Pacific League.

Nice. Nice. My family's very competitive. We're very competitive, whether it's sports, whether it's games. Each of my brothers and I were state chess champions. My dad was the top chess coach. We thought it was because we were smart. After we left my elementary school, We're very competitive, whether it's sports, It wasn't about being smart, it was about my dad training us and we had to do it 30 hours a week if we wanted to stay on top.

So it was a very serious commitment from the age of like six to 12 or so. Who's the best chess player in the family? I think I am. Don't ask my brother, Jeff. Are you teaching your kids chess? We're starting to, it's actually really funny. So my oldest kids are daughters, you know, I have five kids.

So my daughters are, the older ones are four, I have five kids. So my daughters, the older ones are four, six, and seven, and a half, and they do little tactics with me and stuff. But I came in the other day when I was trying to teach them, and they said, daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore. They're getting married. I'm working on it. Nice, nice.

What kind of games were you into? Like every Nintendo game, we played baseball, a lot of it was a pitcher. We played a lot of video games. How old are you? same age, so yeah, you grew up with Nintendo. All that kind of stuff. What got you so interested in tech? I was lucky to grow up in Silicon Valley. Obviously I was nerdy myself, but I had even nerder friends who were way ahead in math and stuff.

I got these guys teaching me how to program at 9, 10, 11 years old, which is normal nowadays, but back then that was pretty unusual. One of the friends, his dad, was at Intel, and they got this rig where you'd figure out how to overclock them and use liquid nitrogen or whatever to cool it off. It was in that whole scene and a lot of my friends' older brothers and people were building companies. Very interesting. Where did you go after high school. When you read it, you're like, screw this kid,

we shouldn't let him in anywhere, he thinks he's the coolest guy ever. It was terrible. It was 17. at PayPal, learning from the PayPal office. Yeah, so all the really smart and interesting programmers, I met a bunch of them who were a little older than me. I was lucky to be a little bit ahead in programming already, because before I got there, so Iiel was. He founded the Stanford Review, which I was working with,

and I became a big editor of, and they actually rejected me in my first year I applied there. So I applied again, I got in sophomore year. No kidding. What was it like, I mean, I don't remember what it was like back then, but Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sachs, Reid Hoffman, I mean,

were these big names in the space? They were definitely not big names. No one knew who any of these people were. Not at all. There's got to be a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of it. There are actually two groups. It was Elon had x.com and Peter had Confinity. They're about eight companies in the space, in the payment space. These guys were at than destroy each other. And the companies merged. And I hear Elon kept trying to rename it X,

he finally got his way later. So. But no, it was an amazing group of people. I was just a kid, I get no credit at all for anything that happened there, but I learned a hell of a lot from all these people. That's a hell of a group of mentors. It's really fun.

You keep in touch with all these guys? A bunch of them, yeah, yeah, a bunch of them. David Sacks has that show they let me on last week. They're all in things. Nice. It's entertaining and, you know, Peter's someone I see a lot and he still backs a lot of things I do and Elon, you know, lives in Austin, Texas now and is a good friend. I text him and bug him sometimes.

I'm trying to be helpful with the stuff going on in government. Yeah. Oh, you are involved with that, right? I do my best to help. I have a bunch of friends who are involved full time, and I've passed a bunch of people in, and I'm obsessed with the policy world, so yeah, I'm trying to be helpful there.

Good. It's good to have you in there. Yeah. So, after PayPal, you went on to build in social media. What were you doing in there? Oh, I didn't build anything in social media, but I worked for Peter Thiel after PayPal, and he had a global macro hedge fund, What were you doing in there? with my roommate from Sanford. What caught your interest in national security?

Because it sounds like you made a switch there. You know, so I'd always been pretty interested in it. If you look at, so computer science is like maybe a young man who likes things that young men like. There's like games and there's cool defense stuff. And when you grew up in computer science in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff And when you grew up in computer science, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff the NSA was doing

and the US government was doing, that way ahead of everything else back in the 60s and 70s. So it was almost this mythical thing where there's just like some of the coolest, most talented guys were there. done by the NSA in the 70s, that the very top academics at Stanford and MIT, etc., only figured out 15 years later what the heck they were doing and why they were doing it that way. So it was just this like, like this is what the cool guys are doing, and they're the smartest people are doing, they're working on these problems.

And then, you know, I mean, as a kid, you watch James Bond and you look at this stuff, you want to get the bad guys, you want to stop the bad guys. And so I was always fascinated by that world. And at PayPal, the thing that came up, by the way, which was central to this, was the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money. You know about this?

This was like, yeah, so PayPal was losing like several million dollars a month. Back then that was a lot of money. And it was very unprofitable because you'd go use your card down the street at 7-Eleven and the cashier there is not getting paid very well And so they're like secretly like taking the numbers and they sell a hundred numbers online to the Russians For like 500 bucks and then the Russians would take those numbers run them through accounts pretend you did transactions And you get this thing later. It says PayPal $200. You're like I didn't do people $200 So you say no to your credit card company. It's called a charge back. PayPal has to eat it So this was happening at massive scale on PayPal and its competitors were we're going under thanks to this It's called a charge back.

and then turn them into Secret Service and FBI. So I ended up getting to know a bunch of these Secret Service FBI guys around 2001, 2002. Ben, I don't remember that at all. Wow. How long did it take you guys to solve that problem? It was kind of a cat and mouse game because every time you figure out what the bad guys are doing, they changed their method. and that made it profitable. And so the anti-fraud thing was a big piece of what made PayPal work. And so they'd come to us for advice. And I got to know quite a few of them. They come to me for advice on other stuff and we start chatting with them.

And you know, because cyber crime was a new thing and you're helping them out. And then 9-11 happened and then we kind of saw the government spend billions of dollars trying to build new tools to help them do better, you know, stop future stuff. And the stuff they were building horrified us. It was stuff that was based on principles

from maybe like 20 years ago. And we're like, wait a second guys, like Silicon Valley exists, we've done all these It was stuff that was based on principles We've got to figure out how to get involved What is Palantir? So there was really initially four pillars a pound here. It was data integration, search discovery, analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is like a really big hard product. So what happens if you have a government department, you know, at the time government was spending say $36 billion gathering data. So you're you, it's your job. The problem is to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all can be seen together,

show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? and you know, bringing things in more easily. So it's a hard problem to solve. From a layman's term, it seems like very, it helps predict. There's some prediction, but what you're really doing, so Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information

to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data. Because there's no way that any single human is going to be able to keep, you know, 5,000, 20,000 databases of stuff of different formats in their mind at a time. So you're going to have to organize it in a way you can interact with it, ask questions, preserve your investigations, share with others, collaborate.

So that's the problem. Now, it turns out that organizing all this information in all these ways is very powerful to then apply AI on top of it. So that's a problem. these kind of data organization, ontology workflow problems, here's the data you should be looking at. And we brought it together with our partnership and did it. And then the Army Brigades said, well, we need this too, because they needed it badly.

And they couldn't pay for it, of course, because they have some giant bureaucratic process. We just gave it to them. We said, just show us the lives you're saving. That's all we want to see. That's really inspiring to our engineers. And they started showing us the lives they were saving. And then it came up for bid.

It's called the Defense Ground Control System, DSIGS, remember, his was his call back then, I remember. And of course, some general gave it to his friend for like $5 billion at some other company. And everyone protested, like, we're using Palantir, we don't want to wait years for this giant contract. So we ended up suing the government, and I never sue anyone, but Palantir had to sue

because they purposely just gave it to their friends, and we won. And it took years, but they eventually used us. You know what was shocking to me is when they finally, but Palantir had to sue because they purposely just gave it to their friends and we won. And it took years, but they eventually used us. You know what was shocking to me is when they finally eventually used Palantir, I'd met a bunch of the guys and they all said, it's the best thing ever, it's amazing. We thought you guys were fake.

We thought you guys were liars. Because the people who were competing against us had just like talked shit about us for years. But we finally got in and made it work. Man, that had to be pretty enraging. It's pretty frustrating when you're saving lives and you're doing it for free and you have always forward to play people just working their asses off

to really help and then they treat you like crap. But you know, because Palantir went through that and because SpaceX went through something similar with their whole competition, we've paved the way now where a lot of the generals and admirals in Congress is more on the side of new innovation. Now they're more open to it. They're more willing to let it, let it then let it compete, which is important.

Cause that's a much better place we're in now than we were 15 years ago. Man, that's great to hear. I don't have much trust in anybody in government, but. There's some good ones every once in a while who really care and you just got to partner with those. You know, being coming one of the top serial entrepreneurs There's some good ones every once in a while who really care. Being coming one of the top serial entrepreneurs in the 2000s,

what are some lessons learned when it comes to building companies? First of all, I come from this background in Silicon Valley, these tech cultures. It's there and you want people lining up from the top places to try to come in. That's a very hard thing to build, but to me that's number one, if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company. There's absolutely A++ tech culture,

because what you could do with a really great tech culture is just you can try like 10 things or 100 things at a time that the other guys are still building their thing. And you impress people, you make it work, you iterate. Like with Palantir, we'd be back and forth every couple weeks to DC that have all these objections. We'd come back two weeks later, we would have done the equivalent of six months of work

for a typical contractor in the two weeks. We showed them, look, it's ready now. We did what you said. And we do that over two years, 50 times. Eventually you get somewhere really fast. So I said tech culture's number one. I'd say number two is you have to have a vision about like this is a gap in the world

that you're really confident in. Because building companies is really hard. Things go against you. Things take a long time. No one else actually believes in you and believes you're gonna make it. So you gotta be really sure there's this gap that you're going after and really sure you're right.

And just, you know, it takes a certain, it takes a certain over take a certain overconfidence almost to be willing to go after that and do it. You'd be a little bit crazy maybe. I didn't ask this about your childhood, but I'm curious. Did you grow up in a fairly wealthy household? Or I'd say more middle class. Middle class?

My dad, you know, one of the most obnoxious stories I remember is when I was like four and a half and we were flying on a plane economy and I asked my dad, I said, dad, why aren't we in the front? And he said, well, you know, this costs a lot more money and we're comfortable here. I said, dad, but you're really smart.

You're smarter than all those people. Why don't you have enough money to be in the front of the plane? Super obnoxious kid. My dad, he was really smart and he just prioritized spending a hell of a lot more time with family. He was one of eight, and he brought, I'm the oldest of 19 cousins, so he brought them all out

to the Bay Area from Massachusetts, and he did a great work, but he never really, he grew up a little in middle class, so for him being middle class and having enough money was fine, he didn't care, which I admire, by the way. As a kid, I was obnoxious, but there's a lot less than that, it was really cool. I didn't care, which I admire by the way. I was a kid, I was a kid, I was obnoxious.

How did you get going? You're talking about lessons learned and basically what you're saying is hire the best tech people there are. How were you able to find the capital to afford to bring it? That's a good question. You know at Palantir and also at Adapar and my other companies, we actually usually try to pay lower salary, higher equity. So you give them more upside in the company, so they have to believe in the company.

It was interesting, whenever we gave someone an offer, we'd give them three choices for the offer. You could say you could take more cash, but they get a little bit less. Medium cash, medium, or take less cash could take more cash, but get a little bit less. Take more upside. The very best people, the ones who are the really best, they always wanted even less cash and even more upside. It's like they're just confident, we're just going to freaking win. And it was fun, I used to give them a table, here's what their shares would be worth if we had a certain level of success.

And the biggest option was if we make this company worth $5 billion, here's what your shares are going to be worth. It's 160 now, but that took 20 years. What kind of percentage of ownership are shares? For an early, really strong engineer, depending on where we are, you might get a really strong one early on. But it gets diluted over time. Let's say you started with a quarter percent,

you get diluted down to.1%, but.1% of a few billion is still a really big number,.1% of 100 billion is a lot. So a lot of these guys did really well. Oh yeah, you actually, really a hard time where people are just like giving up. And I think I convinced a couple of them, let's just push for six more months because we have these other things coming. And, you know, and Alex Karp did a really great job

of figuring out how to get both the FBI and CIA to move on something. And all of a sudden we had these bigger contracts and it was good that we were building. But it came really close to dying early on. This stuff takes a long time to build, right? And like I said, you got to be a little bit crazy because it's just, you just got to push really hard.

You're building a bridge and you don't know if the island's there or not that you're building it too. Man, that's super inspiring. So from Palantir, what was next for you? I ended up, so I was helping Peter with the hedge funds, my other passion, and I did a lot of the finance and was mapping that world out. And it was after the financial crisis in 2008, we were thinking like,, and I did a lot of finance, and was mapping that world out.

And it was after the financial crisis in 2008, we were thinking like, well, there's a lot of things that are not organized in this space, and they're messy. And we realized that one of the ways to really make things work better in finance would be to have a platform with root access to everyone's wealth and organize those problems, organize better from there. And I also had just made some money myself,

so I had what's called a little bit of a family office, like a small one. And I talked to people, how do you run your family office? or from there. I said, I'm going to build a company that fixes this space. I thought it couldn't be that harder for running data globally for all these intelligence agencies and defense stuff to do this little finance thing. So we started it off and it turned out it was a really hard problem as well. It took again about three years to get it to work. It's called Adapar. by far number one in the country. So it's a leader in that space now. So if you think of like a big investment advisor, or a big bank with wealth managers,

those guys are probably running their family office and their wealth off of Adapar it's able to bring in and help new solutions work and help people actually break into it. So I think it's been a good thing. Very interesting. We're talking about all things, pretty much AI. in this amount of energy from what I understand. It's one of the biggest investments we've ever made in infrastructure on our civilization to power all this or of course with Nvidia chips and everything else nuclear, but right now we don't have a lot of nuclear Is that actually a realistic option for AI? The problem is, it's actually funny, there's this term I like.

There's another term called intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is stuff that's not always on, which is wind and solar. So if you're going to use intermittent energy, first of all, we've probably oversubsidized that because if you have too much intermittent energy, it just screws you, right? Because it makes energy cheaper when the sun's shining and then everyone's screwed and there's not, you know, you have to pay people even more who are running all the time when the sun's not shining.

Batteries are getting better, but, and there are certain things, for example, with air conditioning, that works really well, because you need more energy anyway when it's sunny outside. So, listen, I think solar is a big part of the solution. But, you know, I think for the base load, I think natural gas and nuclear are the obvious things to scale off for now.

Do you know anybody that's working with cold fusion? There's a lot of stuff. You know, there's a few different companies. There's one called Commonwealth in Massachusetts that a lot of stuff. and you kind of graph that, right? If you graph that, it was like 0.2 10 years ago, so you only got back a fifth of that energy out, and it kept going up and up and up. It starts to get really economic, and really I can all make it two.

but there's people on both sides, including Bill Gates, including all sorts of other guys, who are putting just a ton of money into this fusion research, these fusion companies. I think we're going to get there, and I think it's really, really good for our civilization if we do. If we have cheap energy, man, that helps everyone, but it helps the working class more than anyone else. Because it just makes everything cheaper.

And I think it's a really good chance we get there. Can you go into a little bit of that? Because I don't think people understand, you know, why cheap energy would really help the economy in middle class, lower class homes. Oh yeah, I mean, this is the cost of everything, cost of food, the cost of driving your car, the cost of building stuff, so the cost of like building a manufacturing plant

for things you buy, the cost of running the manufacturing plant, everything comes back to energy. If you make energy cheaper, you make everything cheaper, and it means all of us can afford more stuff. And by the way, it's not just like, if you make energy cheaper, it's also then cheaper to clean the environment, it's cheaper to make things more green.

So there's all this stuff that's just like in our society, like they're just tied to that. And if you look at the standard of living in the last couple hundred years, for the poor middle class, it's tracked like almost one-to-one in a lot of cases, And if you look at the standard of living And the whole back on the fission side, which is what we should be scaling up now, is that we have an insane regulatory apparatus. And so we had this like,

this atomic energy group in the US that was very innovative. And we used to do things very quickly in like 50s, 60s, and we built a ton of plants. And then in like the mid 70s, they shifted it and it became what's called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

as far as I could tell, and all my friends could tell, had a mandate of just stopping anything new. So if you graph like new nuclear stuff, it was like this and then it flatlines. And these people, like it's just crazy. So basically like my father for his job actually was at something called Raychem and he was selling heat tracing.

And he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants. And sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants. And sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he had to sell it to a nuclear plant, he had to bring like 60 binders that they had to work on and all this stuff of just nonsense information. It made it ten times as expensive for him

to sell to nuclear plants. So what these bureaucrats did is they created so many rules and so many laws that made no sense whatsoever. And by the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just like way aggressive beyond that. And so the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just like way aggressive beyond that. And so it made it unprofitable to do new nuclear plants.

And so what happened is starting from the mid-70s, you no longer could innovate on this technology, and you only had what you had. And so it really crushed the industry for really almost a couple generations now. And finally, finally thanks to great work by a lot of people I know, one of my friends who started Airbnb, his wife is a model who's a big nuclear energy promoter. It's really cool. They're just really into this. And a bunch of other friends who are pushing nuclear energy. It's finally coming back as a bipartisan thing.

It's cleaner for the environment. It's good for everyone, including the working class is good for American business, we should be innovating again in nuclear energy and building it. So it looks like we're going to start fixing the regulations and allowing us to do more things there. I think this new administration, Chris Wright's coming in, Secretary of Energy, he's a very big fan of it. So I'm seeing really good things. So that's going to come back there. That's what's been blocking that. On the fusion side, we just haven't had the technology,

but this big investment might get us there the next decade. And do you think that big oil and gas lobbyists have something to do with it? It's very possible, it's very possible that part of the reason, there's probably like, if you look at Germany, the Green Party in Germany, which is a left party, was basically founded around an anti-nuclear energy framework. So there is like a crazy part of the left

that's against nuclear energy, but I bet you on the right, there's some interest from oil and gas that I can't go back in time energy framework. Nah, they're not really anymore. just like let's do what's best for America. So I think we're going to break through and fix the regulation, I'm hoping. I mean, a lot of people, me included, are very concerned about our power grid. You know? Yeah. And so I would like to kind of hang out on this subject

for a little bit. Sure. A lot of people are seeing rolling blackouts. Yeah. You know, power grid structure is extremely outdated. It's old. Doesn't seem like it's getting updated anytime soon. You know, how much is the, is extremely outdated, it's old, these grids, they need to be modernized. The way we've built them right now, Sean, is the

regulation again is a problem here. The incentives are all screwed up. You're only allowed to charge certain amounts or spend certain amounts. And it's very much like one of the areas of our society. That's like one of the common areas of our society economy. I mean, it's like controlled by top down by government and told about to do. And so, you know, I have two concerns. One is it's not ready to work with what we're going to need as you of future demand in the next five or 10 years. Two, it's not protected very well at all. So if I was an adversary who wanted to go to war against America or wanted to harass America, probably lots of ways to break in, hack in,

take down these utilities. And it's kind of crazy. We spent all this money on defense. We haven't defended any of that stuff at all. I think we usually leave it to the local towns, but I'm sorry. These small towns aren't going to know how the heck to defend against the top hackers in China or you know so so there's there's definitely a lot we'd be doing to fix that. Are you concerned that China manufactures a lot of our energy equipment? Oh yeah. Oh yeah it's uh I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base. It's nearly as big as it needs to be.

I think from a geopolitical perspective it's extremely dangerous and if And if we want to be ready, so in World War II, it wasn't that we had like a bunch of big defense contractors, it's that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war. And if we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base, and I think we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this, he shifted it back.

I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country, where a lot of people on both sides now agree, we need to fix this. But I mean, this is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are not totally insane at all. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah.

I mean, how do we, where do we start with updating the grid? Are we talking, I mean, we're talking everything from power lines to power plants to transformers. with updating the grid. We're talking everything from power lines to power plants to transformers. I think an effort to do more advanced manufacturing here and to give some kind of general subsidies and have a competition is not totally insane again to rebuild our manufacturing base. And then, you know, I think you have to look again at how it's being regulated and what

the incentives are for people to update these things. And you need people to have the proper incentive to update them. Let's take a quick break here. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind-the-scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes, end-of-the-month live zoom

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Let's get back to the show. All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We had a little side conversation about the incoming administration and we're both pretty fired up about it. Who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular that you're most excited? I'm most excited about Elon and Vivek and the Doge effort because this is something I've wanted to see forever. I'm probably one of the only guys in tech

that's done a lot of policy on the right, on the small government side for the last 10, 20 years. And it's like the world just shifted this way. The vibe shifted exactly in line with stuff on the right, on the small government side, There's guys picking me, Joe, we need another engineer for this. So they have what's called their day one priorities and they're just focused in sprinting on everything they could do day one And I think they're gonna have a lot of stuff ready for day one. I mean, where do you think they're gonna start? Are they you think they'll go from agency to agency to you know what I mean? Do will they do it in sections or will be all one big sweep at different? I mean, I mean they're they're bringing in like at least like well over a hundred people the doge effort and there's gonna put A few of them directly into each agency a lot of the transition team itself hiring people to put into these jobs at least well over 100 people for the Doge effort.

And there's going to put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs. There's these policy placements that are all working with Doge and being liaisons with Doge. They're going to come out of the gate with a bunch of general things, a bunch of moving certain regulations. There's all sorts. I can't go into the details exactly of what they're going to be doing, but it's going to be really aggressive right from the start. How much pushback do you think they're going to get?

And will it affect their effort? I mean, it's a really good thing that the Supreme Court of the United States right now is controlled by the pro-liberty side that's skeptical of the special interests of government bureaucracy. The government bureaucracy is one of the most powerful special interests in our country.

It's such like a strong force. So you know what happened is that in the late 1970s, in a very, very kind of like government union biased Congress, of Jimmy Carter's Congress, they just put in all these crazy rules to try to make it impossible to hold people accountable. I'm sure you've seen this a lot in government too. And so they will fight it really hard,

but a lot of us believe, and I think the Supreme Court believes that the intent of the constitution is that the president is supposed to be in charge of the executive branch. It's supposed to have unitary authority to remove people and to fix things. And there's another thing called the Empowerment Act

from the 1970s as well. They tried to force Nixon to say, you know what, you have to spend every last dollar that we procure, you know, and tell you to spend. And I'm not sure that's constitutional, either that's an unconstitutional, like, you know, thing coming from Congress on the presidency. So I think controlling the presidency,

controlling the courts, we only partially control Congress because you really need 60 senators to really do something bold, but we partially control that too. We should be able to get a lot done here. Man, I hope so. The whole world's watching, man. I was with someone, even like freaking but we partially control that too. They're out of control, they're unelected, they think they're in charge, they're laughing

and saying, no, we're going to be here forever, we're going to stop whatever you do. It's just like level of like broken arrogance. Like we have to. If Elon and Trump and Vivek and like a bunch of my other friends, oh, my smartest friends are going in to help right now, if these guys can't do it, it's not possible. So we all have to root for them for the sake of our civilization

because if we can even, you know, get part of what they're doing right, that's a much brighter future for everyone. Who else are you excited about? There's a lot of great people coming in. I think we were talking about, I think cleaning out the DOJ with Kash Patel is going to be just so much corruption,

so much mess there. The stuff you see coming out, it's like they're spending all their time going after white supremacists as opposed to real criminal. The whole thing is just crazy. And by the way, there are good people in the FBI. There's still people in the FBI trying to find communists, trying to find bad things happening in our country.

So, yeah, be careful. It's not that the whole agency, like if you have friends in the FBI, they might be a great person, but there's just so much corruption, so much waste, so much nonsense in these places. Yeah, I'm ecstatic the cash got in there. I think he is going to do a phenomenal job.

What do you think about Chris Ray resigning? Why do you think he did that? I think these guys are probably afraid at this point. I don't know. Or maybe he just knows, you know, there's a vibe shift. He knows he's not supposed to be in charge anymore. You know what, the vibe before, it was like, it was bureaucratic.

It was cowardly. It was guilt-ridden. Like that was like the vibe from like the whole, like woke movement. And now instead the vibe is greatness, it's courage, it's joyous ambition. I mean the whole country has just shifted away. Like these guys, there's this like over value on

credentialism, right? It was like fake credentials. And now we're shifting towards like you and judgment and common sense. Like it's like nature is healing here, man. And now we're shifting towards like you and judgment and common sense. Like, it's like nature is healing here, man. And things are going back to the right way. And I think a lot of people know that their time is over.

Do you think we're going to see a lot of, you think we're going to see some mass burdens? I'm scared of that. I'm scared of, I don't know. I mean, I get him pardoning his son, although the way he did it was super sketchy because he basically did it for the whole Ukraine period, which, you know, I hope he could still do that investigation

and find out what went on. I mean, the guy, it's such a corrupt family, it's just terrible. You saw that thing where he paid one of my friends and like a booklet with his art that was made with his own shit, I can't even say it, it's just crazy to see this stuff. It's like he literally was 300,000 behind on rent,

so he tried to pay it with the art made from his shit. It's like, and he did, he got away with it, he's pardoned now, so I don't think he can go after him for anything. Yeah, I'm worried you're going to see a bunch of more mass pardons, I really hope not. The joke is he'd pardon SBF, because SBF gives so much money to the Democrats,

and the crazy guy, I really hope not. It's just the whole thing's crazy, man. Do you have any concerns with the upcoming administration? Yeah, listen, I think you can't agree 100% with anyone. I actually posted on X recently, like I disagree with the longshoremen decision that came out recently. For what?

So Trump said that we're not going to automate the ports and we're not going to, and that it's a waste of money to automate the ports. And I know about equipment and it's not worth buying this equipment and we should just let, and it's a waste of money to automate the ports. I know about equipment, and it's not worth buying this equipment, and we should just let the unions keep going. And what I posted is I think Trump's clearly wrong on this, but you know it's okay to disagree with someone

and still respect them and follow them in other areas. So I don't think we have to agree. I'm never gonna agree with someone 100%. I'm never gonna be afraid to say it. I think that's how America is supposed to work. And if people don't think America works that way, too bad, I'm just gonna keep speaking out. So I 100% love to keep speaking out.

And so I 100% love the Trump's president. I agree with a bunch of stuff he's doing. But giving in to these crazy corrupt union mafia people, not what I would have done. I get it in the sense that A, there's a vibe shift where you want the union vote for the right. And B, he doesn't want a giant strike to deal with as he comes into office.

So I respect that, and that's his decision. I wouldn't have done it in a way that attacked automation. as he comes into office. radar, what was going through your head when it started? With the apres when it got started? Yeah. So the thing was, the thing we were talking about earlier is basically we realized that China was going to be an adversary, that this like crazy guy is actually communist is coming in, that he's forcing his best

and brightest to work on new ways to get us. And we said, okay, what does the war look like in the 21st century? Like what is the war for going to happen? It's going to have happened. And you're going to have these massive numbers of drones is by far the best way to fight. And you're going to need ways to stop them.

And so what is one of the most important weapons? Well, if you get out force fields, if you have the Star Trek shields, that's pretty freaking cool. And it turns out, in venture capital, there's two things. In venture capital, there's where's the best talent in the world and what's possible now that wasn't possible before.

We have access to the best talent, we're lucky to have that. So what's newly possible? Well, it turns out these chips are now fast enough to control power on small time skills to make our electronic warfare weapons work way better. So he said, okay, this is a really key area because we know there's new possibility here,

let's prove it out. And it was really fun because with about 30, 40 million dollars on our side, we're able to go to the desert and have a competition against guys who've raised and spent and given and we'd sort of dollars of contracts. And it's because there's these new possibilities that they didn't know how to do. How was it developed? Where'd you guys develop? El Segundo, Nathan Mintz, Beaumar, a bunch of guys,

Andy Lowry, a bunch of really key guys on their team. And the DNA was a combination. We had the DNA from the Silicon Valley world, and we had the DNA from the electronic warfare world. So there's some people who have worked at some of these other places places because there's just certain expertise that's been built up in America that no one else has that you need to build on what already exists

and build on the kind of knowledge of how gallium nitrate can be worked with as well as what's nearly possible. Is Leonidas an offensive weapon as well as a defensive weapon? There's lots of ways, yeah. It's core, it's really, it's a defensive thing in a sense that you can have something

protecting a city or a base or a squadron, but I mean, if you're going to be attacking the bad guys and you're going forward, you want to have these things. You want to have ways of stopping the drone and other attacks from getting you during an offensive. Or you base, by the way, you want to just turn off the area you're attacking.

Imagine if there's an area you're going after and all the electronics go dead. That's probably pretty useful right before an attack. So what would you point the weapon at? and all the electronics go dead. So what would you point the weapon at? Could you take out a city? You turn off the power in a cone that goes, again, you could definitely turn off an area of a town or a city,

and you could move it to turn off more. It's pretty crazy, right? We used to think about this in terms of when I was a kid, you thought about the E take out a nuke? Mid-flight? It could, so it's frying electronics. So if you think about it for satellite defense, for example, which is not what we're doing right now,

but it's just me talking out of my butt, so excuse me if I get something wrong. But my bias would be that if something's targeting a satellite, it needs to be adjusting its flight in order to hit it. And so you probably, what you'd want to do with the satellite is you'd want to blast this and you blast it a certain number of miles away.

And then you could just adjust slightly and the thing's not going to hit you. Same thing, a cargo plane's a better example probably, right? So I think if you got a big slow cargo plane and the bad guy's trying to take it out, which is key for contested logistics, you can put one of these on it. You always see the movie where the missile's trying to follow the guy.

You blast the missile, now it's a dumb missile, and then you turn. Right. So there's things like that we're probably going to be doing for defending planes and things like that. Wow, so these might be deployed on planes. I think some version of these will definitely be deployed on planes at some point if we're going to be having battles.

Now, the question is what type of planes and drones we have or use in 10 years, but yeah, you definitely want cargo planes no matter what, I think. at some point if we're going to be having battles. Hopefully thousands and thousands of these smart, autonomous, weaponized vessels. That could be one of the things you put on an autonomous vessel, obviously, during a battle, is to be able to go around and turn things off with this. So I think you're going to have stuff like that too. which takes out a certain distance, it's much farther. If, for example, this was put in an Andral Roadrunner, there's only a small cone inside the Roadrunner,

so there's only a certain amount of stuff you can put in there, that might only shoot things effectively like 20 or 30 meters, for example. fly next to a swarm and shoot a bunch of times, co-founded this with my friend Palmer. on Facebook for being a Republican, And all these people were really nasty to him. A lot of people have come out from Facebook and apologized to him now, because he's now this really important leader in our country doing great things, and they realized they were wrong to treat him that way.

So it's like a whole saga in his life of being beaten down and out and discarded. Not bad, he's a billionaire. Just because we're talking about Palmer, I was at his wedding, he's not going to like this maybe, I was at his wedding and I was sitting next to Peter Thiel and Senator Cruz and all these people, and it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy, when he's getting married. I was at his wedding and I was sitting next to Peter Thiel

and all these people and it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy when he's getting married. And all of a sudden all the music goes off and the top-cup music comes on and then the helicopter flies over us. He comes out in tails and he never dresses up nicely. The helicopter goes away and then the normal music comes back on. His wife comes in normally with her dad. He's a basic America's Iron Man. He's an inventor guy. to my Palantir guys and they start Yandere.

launch, and if it's not used, it comes back and lands and waits and gets used again, which is not something that I think the generals knew to ask for, but if you think about warfare, it's all about dollars per effectiveness. If you have a bunch of things attacking you, fire 50 of these things, use 10 or 20 if you need, and have the other ones come back and use them again. By the way, this thing is like a tiny fraction scratch, you know, what makes the most sense. Wow. You know, you would kind of mention that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, like these companies, the big guys, you guys are, you know, underneath them. I mean, do you see that flipping?

we need to know how to do to keep America safe I first wrote the check in the Andrel, it was 2016 I think, I had a bunch of people who we work with in the bio world say, we're not going to work with you anymore if you're doing defense, this is so wrong. You're just as evil, why would you do this stuff? It's just wrong to do it. And a lot of fun just wouldn't even mean it.

So it was like a thing you weren't supposed to do. And it was really cool, with the bio shift that's totally changed. You have a lot of the best people going in. It's popular now, which maybe it's too popular now, but that's another problem. You know, you had mentioned Facebook kicking them out because of a billboard. What do you think about Zuckerberg trying to get in with the conservative crowd? Pretty interesting to watch the, you know, I mean, four years ago you kicked the president

off your platform. Now you want to buddy up? I mean, what's going on here? Do you think? There's a lot of that going on. Listen, Zuckerberg is an interesting case. He is fundamentally, himself, not super political, and he himself, and I get a lot of flack for this,

but he himself has always had an appreciation for some of the Liberty side and some of the conservative side, which is shocking given how his company does things. But I've sat next to him not that long ago, at a wedding or whatever, and he's interested in his kids learning about some of these ideas. Like the Tuttle Twins or whatever, these conservative libertarian shows and stuff.

I think he's open to different sides. I think the culture inside of Facebook that comes from the universities is so poisonous or whatever, you know, these like these conservative, censoring conservatives and stop doing the wrong thing. So I think he's maybe a little bit soft, maybe I would say a little bit cowardly sometimes about these things, despite being amazing in other areas. But he himself is not really a driver of that. And you know, what happens is a lot of these guys, maybe I'd say he started off moderate, moderate left, but with an appreciation for both sides.

And he'll start like a foundation, it's called the Chancellor Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI. And what'll happen with these moderate leftists is they're not good at keeping out the crazy far left. And so his philanthropy org becomes run by these activists. And he's busy with his business. And his wife and him, I guess, don't want fights or whatever, so you get these crazy activists

and they just start doing terrible stuff. And they're very good at sounding maybe to him like, oh, it's a reasonable thing, it's not actually affecting things. But when you saw it actually changed the 2020 election the way they put the hundreds of millions of dollars to work, my guess is he didn't even understand or might not even still understand

how much they would screw things up. Which is not an excuse for him, but I think that's just the reality of how these orgs evolve with these crazy activists inside of them. Yeah, I see what you're saying. So you're basically saying he wasn't necessarily the catalyst, but he...

He wasn't the George Soros. He's not George Soros. He wasn't like doing the crazy bad stuff himself. I think in general Silicon Valley, people who are moderate on the moderate left have been way too tolerant of letting these crazy activists take over their companies, take over their philanthropies and break things.

And if we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls. We need we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls. We need these guys to have a little more boldness, a little more courage, and they need to come out publicly and like excise these parts of their orgs and say, you know what?

I was way too tolerant of that. There's 47 people I just fired because they were all found to be doing this crazy stuff, centering conservatives, turning things down, screwing with them, shadow banning them. We're not going to let them do that anymore. Like that's what he needs to do. And he can still be on the moderate left if he wants, centering conservatives, turning things down, How have you kept that rot out of your companies? You got to be really disciplined how you hire. I work with a ton of people who are on the left, on the right.

This is not about left versus right. This is about the activist. and as soon as you see that, you can't tolerate it. Do you build culture under your companies? You have to. You have to explicitly have these values and say this is what we stand for, this is who we are or you know, we're you know, we're principled optimists. We're patriots. We're you know, we're Going to fight for the truth and you know, you want to live in a world I think I think the vibe shifts that we've been talking about is like is like a lot of people are comfortable living with lives

Safely, and I think it's important that a lot of people come over to live with the truth even if it's dangerous It's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it back to the future of warfare I mean what what are some things that other countries are getting involved in that concern you? Well, I mean, I think the fact that we let China and Russia become such close allies is ridiculous. I think that was a huge strategic mistake. And I think they're not necessarily natural allies. I think that was something where we drove into each other.

So that concerns me. I think the biggest concern right now is Turkey and on top of that. Turkey. Yeah, so Russia and China, obviously the biggest concern, Iran, obviously, but Turkey is like the biggest kind of wild card going out right now. So Turkey, Auditor created Turkey

as the first really successful secular Muslim country in the modern world. And it was a really big deal. And there's a lot of problems historically with Islamists, today with Islamists. So he built all these institutions in Turkey to stop the Islamists from taking over, because he knew that would always be a threat.

And one of the most important institutions was the army, to make sure that Islamists did not run it, and that his job was to fight and stop Islamists if they were going to take over society. And Erdogan knew this. Erdogan, we thought, a lot of us thought, when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate when he came in 20 years ago. That's how he ran. But he secretly, we thought, a lot of us thought, when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate

when he came in 20 years ago. That's how he ran. But he secretly, like very strongly on the Islamist side. And so in order to make the Islamists win again in Turkey, he had to take out these organizations in society that had been built to stop Islamists. And so when he did the coup eight years ago, a lot of us believed, a lot of intelligence agencies

believed it was purposely tripped off as a coup in order to get all these people to come up and see who's going to be anti-Islamist and then wipe them out. And so what happened in society is he ended up killing and torturing tens of thousands of people eight years ago when this happened.

Anyone who was going to be against Islamists, anyone who was kind of built in to stop that. And so those people were all eliminated. The people in the army who were against Islamists were all eliminated. And so for the first time, all of our Turks protections are gone. So now you have this like very Islamist leader who's very pro-Islamist and he just like with his forces conquered Syria because

of what's going on in the Middle East for Islamists. He also now is wiping out like reportedly huge numbers of Kurds. Like you can go look online. I think a lot more Kurds have died in the last month than people in Gaza have died this entire last year. And you're not hearing protests about it because I guess because there's no Jews involved, of Kurds. a lot of their territories inside Turkey, a lot of them are inside of Iraq, a lot of them are inside of Syria, and they're the Islamist enemy. The Islamists don't want these guys to have their own country, so he's wiping a bunch of them out. And I'm very scared what Turkey does next. Turkey has nuclear weapons, you know, because it's in NATO. It's a wild card.

Like, are they going to go after and help the Islamists take out the Jordanian king? I don't know, but there's like lots of really scary things. So I think Iran's on the run. We need to finish off the whole story with Iran But now there's this other Islamist threat there that's a wild card that we're gonna be dealing with and figuring out It's pretty scary to me. Yeah, I didn't even that wasn't even on my radar. What about technology? Are you worried about is China developing anything that you're aware of that we should be concerned about or as Russia?

Have any technology that they overplayed their hand? should be concerned about, or does Russia have any technology that they overplayed their hand, maybe? You know, China has a bunch of advanced new technology in all sorts of areas, whether it's hypersonics, whether it's massive numbers of submarines, whether it's all sorts of new projects they're working on that I'm sure I don't even know about, all sorts of things.

They're trying to copy SpaceX, thank God we have SpaceX and they don't, but they're trying to copy it. I don't know if you see the videos that blows up when they try it, but they're gonna get there eventually, probably, you know? I mean, Elon's really smart, copy SpaceX, thank God we have SpaceX and they don't. But they're trying to copy it. They're going to get there eventually probably. Elon's really smart, we have a really great program, but eventually they catch up and they do things in space which scares me.

I mean, what don't want there to be wars in space. It would screw up a lot of stuff for the world. At the same time, if someone else weaponizes space and we don't, we're kind of screwed. What's going on? I have no insight into what's going on in space. So I don't have any clearances around this, so I might piss people off talking about it, but I'm not clear, so I'm just going to go ahead

and tell you a few things. But the number one thing I'd say, there's a natural network effect in space It's very easy to see if a lot rockets being launched and you can just take it out So there's a network effect that really scares me there was gonna be a war Whoever conquers and how ever has stuff up there first, that's really good You could probably stop the other guy from getting stuff up there And I don't want stuff exploding in space But like it's just it's just such a powerful thing to own for any future battle that we need to be thinking about it

I think some people are thinking about it I'm not sure our budget reflects that we're thinking about enough by the way So why a lot of us were usually in favor of Space Force behind the scenes. And really glad that President Trump started that. It's obvious you need Space Force. Because it's just like, we're talking about how warfare changes, like the space thing is a scary angle.

Wow, is there anything else true where of going on? I mean, that's fascinating in itself. That's a big one. I mean, the other thing in general is that I guess I'm most afraid of is that China has about 200 times our shipbuilding capacity if you want to say and I think you Probably talked about this before in World War two you get these like I have this cool painting house in Montana or ski house of These American ships hunting down a German warship and taking it out

But we needed multiple ships to do it because the German battleships were actually better than ours I think and now America battleships are destroyed on battleships anymore taking it out, but we needed multiple ships to do it, because the German battleships were actually better than ours, I think. Now, American battleships are destroyers, but American destroyers, everything else, they're way more advanced than Chinese. But if someone has 200 times your capacity, that's really scary, So my friends and I started this company, Saronic. We're going to hopefully build 500 ships in Austin next year. We're teaching them how to use AI to have swarms of these

weaponized vessels and how they can work together with the fleet. And how we can eventually have thousands of these in any kind of mission or battle scenario. cost of one big ship. We're not up there already, you know, and with that one meter thing, when you had mentioned, you know, you could stop anything else from coming up there, I mean, that right there is global domination. Yeah, but we really don't want there to be war in space, because it may be the case that you start just blowing up certain things, they figure out how to get missiles or whatever, and to blow up certain things, and then you have lots of junk up there, and then it's just a giant mess.

I think Starlink's really good for the world. Hopefully no one destroys that shit. Wow. That's fascinating. Let's go into Saronic. That's what we were just talking about. Exactly. The reason this is so important, man, is that there's no interfaces right now for controlling one to many that actually work. That's what we were just talking about, exactly.

There's no interfaces right now for controlling one to many that actually work. There needs to be modern AI enabled versions of this. One of my friends is a of a video game guy who built Riot Games with League of Legends and stuff. Part of what we need to be doing is iterating on and practicing on what interfaces work for these things. Right now if you have a drone, there's five guys flying one drone in the Middle East, which is fine for that project. It's not going to work for a battle with thousands of these ships. If you have a hellscape, it needs to be some AI.

I'm more lucky who got kicked out of California. So a lot of the head people are there. They're making amazing progress. There's probably all sorts of things you can do with Neuralink eventually. It's a little bit scary if you really get a high bandwidth into your brain. I want to know everything about that. concept, if you can kind of, you know. communicate, play games, do all these things, otherwise they were trapped in their head. I mean, this is like a God's gift for a huge number of people. So it's like, is it a good thing?

100% it's a good thing, but sure, if we're going to speculate 30 years from now where society can go if we're all plugged into our brains, we've got to make sure that crazy things don't happen, obviously. Yeah, you know, I read something a couple of weeks ago saying that it's helping blind people potentially see. 100%. There's all sorts of these amazing things

you could do with this. So I think for people who have issues who are injured, it may even be like Elan said at some point, for really bad back pain or something, you could just adjust it and stuff. So there's lots of really, really, I think we're going towards a golden age.

It's really positive. I think whenever there's these positive things, there's always some negative possibilities. And it doesn't mean we should stop doing the positive things, but we should just keep those in mind and do our best to make sure we avoid them. Yeah, yeah. Let's move into fighting for Western civilization and your efforts to combat basically wokeness.

Yeah. When did you start doing that? You know, even at the Stanford Reviews, there's a version of that that was going on there. It wasn't called wokeness back then. It was political correctness, run amok, run out of control. And it wasn't as extreme back then. There were bad things, there were dumb things, but it was always like there's just generally,

you can kind of assume there's going to be common sense in charge and things weren't that broken. And I noticed things really started to get crazy, maybe 2014, 2015. It's like something in society snapped and all of a sudden you just had all these like, irrational activists and it wasn't about truth or what was right anymore and it was just like like everyone had a virtue signal and go along,

and if you're not virtue signaling and going along, you're a bad person for saying anything else. And I remember, it started getting crazier and crazier. There were these like Black Lives Matter groups, which were clearly like they'd be on TV saying, we're Marxists trained, we're Marxists. And then my friends who are not Marxists would be like giving them money. And like guys, these are Marxists.

Like they believe in like creating division. That's like part of what you study as a Marxist is how to divide society and how to break things. They hate you as someone who's building things and creating things. They want to take it and give it to everyone else. And they're like, yeah Joe, but this is like the thing to do right now.

We want to be helpful. And I was like, I've always argued, it drove me crazy. Like why are you giving these people money? This is insane. And it's, and I had like, this is interesting. That was literally their answer.

This is the thing to do right now. This is the thing to do right now to promote racial justice, and we're just trying to like be like good citizens and show that we care about black people. And it was, it was, I just, and by the way, like, what the fuck is that? I mean, if you want to steel man something,

like there have been things in our country from like 80 years ago, 60 years ago, that were particularly egregious, that should piss everyone off, right? Like if you look at like, I mean, all these, just all these, like, you know, in World War, just as an example, in World War II, like they didn't, like Secretary Knox

didn't want any black people fighting in the Navy, and it was kind of a dick about it. And there were even some of these heroes, like I don't know if you know, like Dory Miller in like 1941 in Pearl Harbor, his ships gets attacked. He goes and he saves a bunch of these people carrying him out. Then he's like, he's like not even, he's never even trained.

He runs up to the anti-aircraft gun and he shoots down for the Japanese arrows and just like a total badass. And they still treated him like shit because he was an African American at a time when people were being treated like shit. So I think there's like this generation that's like traumatized correctly

from like how horrible we were and I think that's still in the psyche. So that's like the steel man. Okay, there is something there we should be like remembering and pissed off about. But then like the answer is not to do things that divide us further and to spread Marxism. And so it was a very weird, it was very cowardly,

because everyone kind of knew, yeah, this is kind of wrong. Doesn't really make fully sense, but I don't want to think about it. I just want to go along because I don't want to have trouble with my life. And so it just swept through our country. And when I think of Black Lives Matter, I think of burning towns down.

Yeah, it's just like this anger. It's just like this anger expressed aggressively and righteously. And it was people fanning the flames of that anger and that divisiveness. And it's really sad because I feel like in the 1990s, we got to a really good place in our society where it had become much less racist. Everyone of all backgrounds was much more optimistic on how we're going to work and live together. And I feel like there were frankly these race grifters

who just like reignited a lot of stuff and caused a lot of trouble. That's the perspective from my perspective. And the woke stuff's not just about race by the way. The woke stuff is about just general, illiberal energy and in general kind of like, it's not about truth, it's about conquering things for the far left and demonizing anyone

who stands in their way. And it's a very, very scary time in our society in the last decade. And a lot of our universities have basically been conquered by these forces, by these neo-Marxists. It's all, like if you stand up and you speak out against anything that's part of their Omnicause, they do their best to crush you.

And if you're a professor in a history department, in a sociology department, in an anthropology department, like you do not allow any professor to join who doesn't agree with your kind of woke view of Omnicause and your neo-Marxist view. And so for quite a long time now, we've not been graduating professors who even understand the history from the other perspective.

And you know, John Stuart Mill, one of the great kind of like liberal theorists, liberal in a kind of pro-liberty sense, in a classical liberal sense, you know, one of my favorite things he would say is that, you know, if you don't understand the argument, other argument, you don't understand yours very well either. And this is the case now in most of our society in these institutions, is they don't actually deeply understand their side,

because they've demonized it and they kicked it out and it's, it's very dangerous. How are you combating this stuff? There's a lot of different ways. We got to create new media, right? I think that's really important what she's doing there. We're trying to build more of these media sources. Arena, which we're creating new. Basically what happened is like, And then I think, you know, the University of Austin is based on this as well.

So, you know, my friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson, Neil's probably the greatest living historian, taught at Oxford and Harvard, really, really bright guy. And Barry Weiss runs the Free Press. You know, we thought, listen, there needs to be at least one top university in the country that's not conquered by these goddamn Marxists. Man, that's, I mean, when did the University of Austin start?

Our first class, actually, just started. Took us three years to launch it, which was pretty fast, because there's lots of barriers, thousands of pages of regulation. The new universities don't want competitions. They're trying to block you out. The creditors try to block you out.

But you know, in this case, we found one that's pretty good. And we have got 92 students in the first class. A lot of these kids turned down the very top schools to be there. No kidding. The idea is pursuit of truth. The idea is, you know, it's a patriarchal institution,

but we have people who think on both sides. This is not like a conservative institution. They wouldn't want to be, that'd be a failure because you need to understand both sides, right? But it's an institution that really is going to engage with the last thousand years of great ideas and the great debates that kind of built Western civilization.

If you look at Western civilization, for me, there's three great traditions you have to understand. You have to understand the classical virtues, you know, in the classical world, Rome and Greece and all the wisdom that comes from that. That's like a core base of who we are. Amazing stuff. And you have to understand, I think, Judeo-Christianity. I think you have to understand, like, what the wisdom came from

that like gave us modern Europe and really the dignity of the individual, right? So I think if you only have this aristocratic like Uberman, Chenichian kind of classical view, then I think human life becomes very cheap and that's very dangerous. Cause I think Christianity has a lot of wisdom in the fact that there's like a radical dignity to every human life.

And so you have that base. And then on top of those two traditions, you have the scientific enlightenment and the philosophical enlightenment, which really started the 17th, 18th centuries. They kind of gave us this understanding of the modern world with Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and how trade works with scientific revolution, with the kind of led to the industrial revolution

and led to what we have today. So we have these like really important three traditions. And if you want to be a top leader in society and you want to be an educated leader in society, I think our schools should be teaching those traditions to these people. We should be engaging them, debating about them and applying them to today.

And if we're not doing that with our leaders, by the way, that is what our leaders had who created our country. Our founders of this country, they understood deeply and were well-read in all of those traditions. And they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our constitution. We're really lucky to have that. There traditions. And they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our Constitution. And we're really lucky to have that.

There's this amazing thing based on all that wisdom. And if we don't apply that today to our modern problems, instead we kind of go off in these kind of woker nonsense directions, like we're going to break our civilization. So let's have leaders who are courageous and who know these things, you know? Man, man.

So 92 students is the first class. We're going to try to do more than 100 next class. You know, it's very funny. You're not allowed to be officially accredited fully until you've graduated the class. Interesting. So all the trolls are like, oh, the under-credited university.

It's like, yeah, that's the rule. But we're doing our best, man. How big do you think it will get? You know, Stanford and Harvard have like 1600, 1900 kids. I'd love to scale that over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to go too fast You know, Stanford and Harvard have like 1600, 1900 kids. I'd love to scale that over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to go too fast

because you want to have like really top experiences for the students you really want to. And there's going to be things that aren't perfect. There's going to be parts that are amazing that they love. And there's going to be parts that we've got to keep building, keep improving. I want to launch a master's degree in a couple years. I want to compete with Stanford and Harvard Business School

and have it be like an innovation master's degree, where if you want to be part of the innovation world and you want to like work with, like the people who built the top companies, come here and we'll teach you how to be part of our innovation world and then you can kind of bring you as a leader there. And we want people, obviously there's a tech and STEM side, but again, we want to train leaders how to think

about our civilization and how to be kind of fighters for America who are, you know, we call them floss for builders, we want, we call them floss for builders. We need more floss for builders. People like Elon who are going to fight for our civilization as well as build. Wow, how many applicants do you guys have? We got several hundred applicants.

It's interesting, the common app is where most applications come through for most universities now. We're not all out on the common app until we're accredited. So our number of applications, even though it was several hundred of the first class, I think would have been a lot higher, but kids couldn't check it off on that. But we're still getting a lot of great people trying to come.

How are you vetting the professors? So Neil Ferguson himself is a really great professor. And then we have a set of amazing people. We have a bunch of really, really top deans who their job is help recruit the new professors and getting some pretty famous names applying right now and coming in. So hopefully we'll announce some really great,

great new people. But we have a really great set of about 25 really top professors that I'm, yeah it's really fun for me actually to get to go learn from these guys too. So it's a good set of people. Are you spending a lot of time there? Yeah, I'm the chairman of the board

and trying to design this new master's degree, trying to make sure we create opportunities for the students, giving scholarships for really top students to come. Right now all the students are on scholarship, we got extra, I even give extra scholarships for like really, really top students to turn down, you know, the very best places and come.

And just trying to make sure it's a great experience for them. Wow, wow. Any scholarship? What's that? Any scholarships? Yeah, so basically everyone there gets to gather tuition covered right now, which is which is great So we're saying that and we're giving scholarships beyond that to you for great people

I mean it seems like you guys are getting a lot of interest in there. I saw was on 60 minutes Is anybody or any what I mean, what is the media saying that sounds like there's a lot of 60 minutes was surprisingly positive I really appreciate that they came and they looked at it and they and they they gave it a fair treatment It sounds like there's a lot of trolls. We have dozens of donors who have given over a million dollars each. So a lot of good supporters have come out of the woodwork and a bunch more are really helping us. It's a movement whose time has come. In America, it's what you do. If things are broken, if things aren't doing what they can, you get together, you build something new, and it teaches everyone else.

And so right now you have dozens of other universities that are referring to us on their boards that are saying, why don't we do this, why don't we do that, why don't we take these ideas, which is great. That's the whole point is let's bring everything back in the same direction, you know? Man, I love it, I love it. Let's move into the Cicero Institute. Yeah. What is it? Cicero Institute is our policy group.

So basically what we do is we work in states, not in D.C. for the most part. It turns out there's 50 states in our country and our founders intended stuff to happen at the states. This is called the United States. This is an alliance of states. So that's supposed to be where most of government actually happens the most in our country.

Like obviously we have federal, state and local, but states are supposed to be, now federal has gotten too big, so it does too much right now. But states have a lot of power and they're really important. And we've seen obviously people moving between states a lot because some states are doing the right things, some states are doing the wrong things and so

there's a lot of different ideas for how to how to make things work better. You can test and prove out of the state level and what we tend to do is we like to fix broken systems, we like to fix things that governments usually by mistake broken or special interests is broken. So for example, I'll give you one I like is vocational education. Vocational education was a lot more prominent in the U.S. in the 60s and 70s. And a lot of people said,

nah, let's send them to college instead. It's racist not to have everyone go to college. It's bad not to have all poor people go to college. And it turns out a lot of people went to college, they get these studies degrees, they don't come out with any real skills or any real jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily. I think they should be doing what they should to get a great jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily.

I think they should be doing what they should to get a great job. And so, and a lot of people agree with me. So we find these vocational education schools are starting to come back up. The problem is, what if it's a badly run vocational education school? What do you do?

How do you decide to fix it? So for example, in Texas, there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools teaching you to be like a high-end manufacturing job, like really good jobs coming out of these if you do it right. But they weren't working that. They weren't renewing as well as they could. And so what we did in Texas is you said, Texas said we're going to fund these schools based on the average salary coming out. So we're going to tell each of these schools, you better figure out how to get your students succeeding.

And if you do, you're going to get more money. If you don't, you're going to get less money. and convince them it's right. Help write op-eds along with the people in the legislature. And we have to hire lawyers to draft the appropriate law for that state. You get all the stakeholders involved. They say, here's who's not gonna like it. These special interests aren't gonna like it, but here's why they're wrong.

You kind of prepare them ahead of time. We have this 20 step process. And you partner with all these people in the state and you get the law passed. And then it fixes the problem. How fast is this spreading? So it takes usually two or three years to get a law done. And we've been doing it for eight years and we got dozens of laws passed in 17 states last year.

We have teams in 20 states now. And what you'll do is you'll hire someone who used to like, you know, be the lieutenant governor or the speaker of the house or whatever. And they're lobbyists. But it's the coolest type of lobbyist relationship because lobbyists are usually sick of having to help businesses try to ask for things for themselves and these guys charge us way less than anyone else because they get to work on something they agree with. And so you see how these guys are like, yeah, this is really cool. I get to work on this with you and they'll work and because every state's different every state has different, you know, ways behind the scenes to getting things done and so you just you just have to do it and push it through but rather than play the lobbying game For the bad guys is playing it for the good guys, which is a lot of fun Are you guys in Tennessee? We do we already have teams in Tennessee governor billy has been a great guy to work with and he has been he has been he

Has he's a strong he's a strong governor a lot of pro freedom things here There's a there's I think a bunch stuff. We're working on for next time. I apologize I should have checked the notes for exactly what we're doing here. It's all good, all good. I just love that you guys are operating in here. You got a strong set of leaders here. You got, I think that all three houses, that the two, both sides of Congress and the governor are red and there's a lot of bold things

I think we can get done here. Amazing. What other states are you guys in? Do you know? We do a lot in Florida. We do a lot in Texas, of course, where I am now. Missouri, you know, a lot of stuff in Georgia. There's all sorts of places.

We're all over the country. Arizona was a big place for us. It's harder now with the current governor. But even sometimes with moderate Democrats, we get a lot of lots. I'll tell you what happens. Most of the time when our laws pass, we get people from both parties voting for them.

And the moderate Democrats love a lot of our stuff too, because it's like we're helping fix things with incentives, right? And accountability, the far left hates us. Because the far left's tied to those government unions I was talking about, they don't want anything to be held accountable. They don't want spend to be tied to metrics,

because then they can't capture the spend for their corrupt groups. And so the far left tends to be like really against us. And so therefore when you have a left administration, usually you can't get through the far left. But we're still getting a lot done in purple and in red states. What about homelessness?

That's a big one for us. So we've passed a bunch of laws in a bunch of areas there. So I come from San Francisco, remember, originally in the nearby area. And San Francisco is just totally screwed because of homelessness. And what happens is you get these special interests, the NGOs, and these guys lobby for money.

And then even 20 years ago, people are like, wait, we're giving you all this money, how about we tie the money to results, or to outcomes, or to goals together? And they're like, no, no, no, you can't do that. And they scream and yell, and they're so powerful, because once they have all this money, they become the biggest donors. And so all the politicians don't want to piss them off, no, you can't do that. And they screamed and yelled and they're so powerful because once they have all this money, they become the biggest donors.

And so all the politicians don't want to piss them off so they don't hold them accountable. And when you look at it, these NGOs, they started giving free houses to a lot of their friends, the people in their groups, because those houses are given out, of course. You started actually having a center to bring more homeless there with super generous stuff.

You started giving free drugs to all these people because that's what the homeless people want. It makes them come. It's just a total mess. with super generous stuff. Well, we want to give homes to people who need homes. It sounds like a nice thing. But, of course, there's an infinite line in America for homes. Everyone wants a free home. It's okay. We have to prioritize people who are more vulnerable. So how do you prioritize them?

This is something that came from both HUD and a bunch of these blue cities. So they said, you get more points towards a free home if you're on drugs. You get more points if you're on drugs. You get more points if you're not in a recovery program, because you really need it better. More if you're not in a recovery program. You get more points if you commit a crime. You get more points if it's a violent crime. More points if your kids are truant.

So basically there's all these points you get for bad things. And they say, well, these people deserve a home because they're going through all these bad things. And I'm like, no, no, no. If you give them points for bad things, you're creating an incentive. So you look at our cities and say, why are they so effed up? Is you literally have insane amounts of money

being given out based on points for bad things. And so we like followed a homeless guy around and a bunch of homeless people around Austin try to be helpful and we map it out. And like one of them goes in, the first time he goes in, he says, you know, I'm trying to look for job training. What do I do to get out of my situation?

And this like young blue haired progressive woman says, no, no, sir, you deserve a home. And I'm not sure we're going to have enough from right away because Republicans aren't funding us enough, but you deserve a home, sign this. Here's how we get your tent. He's like, oh, I, sir, you deserve a home. And I'm not sure we're going to have enough from right away because Republicans aren't funding us enough, but you deserve a home, sign this, here's how you get your tent. He's like, oh, I was going to stay with my cousin. And she said, don't tell me that.

It's better if you have a tent. You're going to get home sooner. So he gives him the tent to go set it up in the city. And he comes back two months later and he doesn't get all quite qualified for a home. And he says, but you know, I heard that if I was on drugs, I'd be more likely to have a home by now. And she said, yeah, that's technically true,

but we don't like to think of home by now. And she said, yeah, that's technically true, but we don't like to think of it that way. You believe that? This is enraging. Yeah, exactly. Why do you think I'd get so involved in policy? It pisses me off. It's crazy.

It's breaking our country. And so we passed a bunch of laws in Georgia and Florida and a couple of other places where we're actually just completely fixing the incentives, completely getting rid of this nonsense. The red states still need to hold these NGOs accountable. in some of the places where we're actually just completely fixing the inside out, completely getting rid of this nonsense. Red states still need to hold these NGOs accountable. There's these really sketchy NGOs and you know,

probably shouldn't be illegal to run one of them in the red state, you're doing because a lot of these things are just actually lobbying groups for the extremes. Do you think any blue states will start to adopt this? I think so. I think it's, and this is one of those things, is you have to first do it somewhere and prove it works. And then it becomes clear that the moderates are going to do it in the blue state to fix it as well. So I think that is the fight. I have a lot of friends who are moderate Democrats in SF,

and they're fighting hard against the far left. That's the battle. It's the moderates against the far left. And I think the moderates are going to win and they're going to start putting in these accountability, putting in these incentives, defunding the stuff that's corrupt. That's what we have to do to fix our cities.

So I'm bullish it's going to happen. It's a really tough battle because there's just so much money for these extremists in our country right now. Like in California, there's over 2 million people working for the government. They all have to give a piece of their paycheck to the government unions,

who then are part of funding this whole complex. So it's just, there's a lot of corruption in our country and there's a lot of money going towards the wrong things. But you know what, I think, like I said, there's a vibe shift. It's a vibe shift away from the bureaucracy, away from the cowards, away from the people who are acting based on guilt.

And you know, it's going towards greatness, going towards courage, going towards courage, going towards kind of like a positive ambition. So I think we're going the right way. That's amazing. That's amazing to hear. I also see you're involved in trying to fix the prison and parole systems.

Yeah, and that's really similar in some ways. The vocational thing we talked about, obviously they're different systems, but think about it. If you're running a probation system, if you're running a prison system, whether or not you're on the right or the left, like there's certain things we want to have happen.

Like we don't want people to have to go back to prison, but we want people to succeed and not commit a crime, right? And we don't want, if someone's got to come out of prison, you want them to have a job, right? You want them to be employed. So what do you do? You want to create incentives in the system for the people running it to hit certain goals,

to have more people come out and be employed. And it turns out there's lots of programs that work to make people more likely to be employed and there's lots of programs that don't. And in fact, right now most of our prisons, they're terrible cultures. The guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards. It's really badly, there's exceptions to this, but there's most of them run really badly and there's bad leadership. And I mean, you can't automatically create good leadership, but you can replace bad leadership.

You can incentivize good leadership. None of our states do this pretty much right now. So it's just stuff like that that we're trying to work with the governors and work with the legislators. And like, let's just make these systems work better for society, you know? Am I missing anything with this?

What else are you working on? That's a lot. I know. That's a lot. You're involved in so many things. You've got five kids, you're married. How do you manage the tech companies, the University of Austin, everything that you're involved in? You have to have really great people around you who are in charge of each of the organizations. Somehow Elon stays as CEO, I don't know,

I think he's an alien, he's great, he's a genius. But for me, I can't be in charge of all these things at once, nor would I be as good at it if I was trying to do all, it was making sense. So you get someone who's better than you at it, and I work as usually a chairman with them, or as a co-founder with them, and we partner together. And the more you constrain yourself with them, and we partner together.

And the more you constrain yourself with attracting more and more great people who come and want to work with you, who are inspired by stuff you're doing and want to be part of it, the more advantage you have. So it does kind of snowball the advantage. You just try to find and get really great people. And we don't always get things right. Lots of our things screw up. There's lots of mistakes you've got to iterate. if you're in charge of too much at once, You use five things and it turns out no, actually, Equity works really, really well. How do you recruit them? We have a pretty big talent network. We have fellows and people we nurture and take relationships with at about 20 different universities.

We have people on our team who spend a lot of time figuring out where is the top talent right now, making sure we're helpful to them, 20 different universities. or one of your ventures that you're the most excited about? I mean, obviously, defense stuff's really exciting. I think some of the bio stuff for me is really important because it's cool because it's saving lives. Defense does save lives too, but there's almost nothing that feels more pure than when you build a therapeutic company or were you investing in one of these things? cell therapies. And so cell therapies, there's been like a trillion dollars invested in cell therapies. They're amazing. So what they are is they used to be that all the pharma guys were chemists and they would

do things with molecules. And all the drugs were molecules. And then with Genentech and others in the 1980s, you had what's called biologics. And so instead of using a molecule to treat you, you'd use like a peptide or an antibody, something that came from the body, right, to treat you. And that was a really powerful way to cure a lot more things. And now, instead of just using that, you're using like a whole cell to treat someone. So, like if this is a peptide, like the whole building is a cell, right.

It's a much more complicated thing. And just in the last ten years, I learned how to program them and use them. So all this is going on. But the simplest form of cell therapy that's been around forever, for example, is called a bone marrow transplant. So if someone has late-stage blood cancer, they're going to die pretty much for sure in six months. What you do is you can give them a bone marrow transplant,

reboot the immune system, good chance it cures the cancer. Now unfortunately it's like playing Russian roulette, you'll die 15, 20% of the time with a bone marrow transplant, right, because it could be rejected, it could just kill you. So you'll only do it if someone's about to die anyway of cancer and then maybe it saves them. Now it turns out with this new cell therapy sorting thing these guys are doing, they're able to make it

so the rejection rate's almost nothing. So as opposed to 15 to 20%, there's very, very few rejections, even those who are not fatal. And so here's what's really cool about this. Not only is that going to save thousands of more lives per year of people who have these blood cancers, it turns out that when you reboot someone's immune system, it seems to cure autoimmune diseases.

So autoimmune diseases are like Crohn's or multiple sclerosis, you may have heard of. We lost my aunt, unfortunately, to multiple sclerosis. We're starting a phase one now with the FDA where we think we may potentially have a cure for multiple sclerosis. So there's stuff like this happening right now with bio that's really exciting.

Man, that's incredible. It's fun stuff, right? There's like the breakthroughs coming out of our top universities with the latest technology. It's fun stuff, right? There's like the breakthroughs coming out of our top universities with the latest technology is just really inspiring. I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can keep things functional, you know? Wow, man.

Congratulations. You're doing just phenomenal things, not only for the country, but for the world. Well, I'm honored to be part of this stuff that all these other amazing people are doing too, that I get to invest in and get to back and try to help. Because we live in an awesome civilization. There's so many smart people doing so many great things here

and we should be more positive about that. I am just honored to have you here and I'm so thankful that we met. You're an amazing human being. Who are three people you'd like to see on this show? Well, at some point you gotta get Elon on, of course. He's the king of the moment. You know, probably my,

I have my other two most important mentors. Clara, Peter, Taylor, and Alice Karp, I'd say. Those are the guys I learned the most from in my youth. And they're both extraordinary individuals. Alex, my co-founder, a palantir, as was Peter. I'm Claire or Peter Taylor and Alice Carpenter. They're both extraordinary individuals. Alex is my co-founder and palantir, as was Peter. Even though Peter was not involved in this election, a lot of the things he created led to this stuff happening. I really admire. Well, maybe you can put a word in for us. I'll let him know.

But, Joe, it was seriously, it was an honor to have you here. And I hope to see you again. I really do. Thank you, son. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. He named one of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamin Show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun.

Draymond Green has a podcast. He was asking Mark Cuban why at the beginning of 2024, Cuban sold a huge part of his company. He's like, did you see how much money I got? I'm sure there's a more graceful answer than that, but dude, I bought it for 200 million and sold it for 6 billion. Like what the heck? I don't think it was that much more graceful than that. Find out more by searching the StackingVenuments podcast, wherever you listen.