This Week in Startups - BAYC at Sotheby’s, Loot, Tether Canada ban + 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale: Palantir, China, Cicero | E1278

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

First Jason covers the $19M Bored Ape Yacht Club bid on Sotheby's & the Loot NFT collection launched by a Vine co-founder (1:42), and briefly covers Tether being banned from Canadian exchanges (11:07). Then serial founder and investor Joe Lonsdale joins (19:53) to discuss his companies (Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov), his new podcast "American Optimist," what regulations need to be fixed in the US, China's bold moves & more.

Okay, we have an amazing episode for you today. Palantir's co-founder and investor, Joe Lonsdale is with us. He runs 8VC, and his bio is just too long to read here, but he is a baller investor, founder, and iconoclastic thinker. We probably don't agree on a lot of things, but we probably agree on most. We talk about American cities, we talk about making government more effective, we talk about China and more. But first, I'm going to cover the board, Abe Yacht Club, and their massive $19 million dollar auction going on at Sothebyes and the Vine co-founder's Lute Project that went Supernova over the weekend, as well as Canada banning tether from their first two licensed digital currency exchanges. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you

by Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has been providing banking and financial solutions for every step of the startup journey. Learn more at SVB.com slash Twist. Real Good Foods is modernizing frozen foods and has become one of the fastest growing food brands in the US. Everything Real Good Foods makes is low in carbs, high in protein and made from real food ingredients, from enchiladas to Italian entrees to breakfast and more. Real Good Foods can be found in the freezer section of your local grocery store, Walmart or Costco, and Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get

$1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Okay, in our first story today, Sutherby's, board ape auction has secured, I kid you not, a $19 million bid. So if you don't know, Sutherbees is auctioning off a set of 101 board ape NFTs in basically a combined collection, somebody who got in early apparently has a hundred and one of these board apes. An NFT, if you've been under a rock and you don't know, is a non-fundable token. Think of it like a digital baseball card. Think of it like a GIF or a JPEG or something like that. But that is one of one.

And that can only be owned by one person. In other words, there is, I guess, this term providence, you know, where it came from and who it belongs to. So people like Southerbees would do that for a painting. baseball card collectors might do that to prove it's not a fake. Well, the blockchain does that really well. The blockchain is famously immutable, fancy word for you can't change it. Well, not being able to change a database that's public is kind of gnarly and horrible, right? What if somebody posted something illegal there or your password or your address or something even worse?

So an immutable blockchain, another way of saying a non-changeable database is a way to think about it. that is a terrible thing and incredibly inefficient in 99% of use cases. You would not want that for something like your bank account or your password manager or a database of employment data, et cetera. But if everybody's participating in an ecosystem, well, having this immutable blockchain does allow some benefits. Everybody knows who owns something. Everybody who knows who sold it.

And when they sold it, you get the idea. So back to board apes. this is basically a collection of beautiful art. It actually speaks to me. I think it's gorgeous, beautiful art. If it was like a painting, yeah, I might pay $1,000 to put it on my wall and get that value. So if people pay $1,000 for it and they want to reward the artist, I think that's actually really cool.

I've been super critical of crypto because although the underlying technology, which is really a collection of technologies, is amazing, I think it's largely filled with scams, pump and dumps, and basically people trying to get suckers to buy in and become what's called the bag holder. In other words, the one who pays the highest price, and then when the music stops, there's no chair for you to sit in, and you're the one who lost your money. Putting that aside, board apes is called B-A-Y-C, board apes yacht club. It's a collection of 10,000 of these board apes. They created something called a serum that lets you change the apes into new apes, and they've been doing something called an airdrop, which is basically like you give the people who own these NFTs, these non-fungible tokens, these baseball cards, a new baseball card. So that's something you can't do with baseball cards.

Imagine you bought a comic book and you bought, I don't know, Spider-Man. And then a new character shows up in Spider-Man, the Green Goblin. And because you bought Spider-Man, the original comic book, they gave you a Green Goblin, or you owned the original X-Man and then they gave you Wolverine number one. That's cool, right? Like, if Marvel could do that kind of stuff, people would be more into Marvel Comics. And in fact, I predict Marvel will do at some point NFT types of comic books that gain value and gain functionality.

And that's really interesting, the gaining of functionality. I talked about this last week. You want to go back and listen to episode 1275 when I talked to the co-founder of a website called Infatuation, I-N-F-A-T-I-O-N. Fat-U-A-T-I-O-N. Fat-U-A-S something I can relate to.

Although I'm 20 pounds off the peak and I've got 10 to go. So thumbs up for your boy on that one. Co-founder Andrew Steinthol, he was on episode 2075. Side note, also a huge Knicks fan. I think we're 29 days away from Nick's basketball occurring again. I cannot wait.

And he talked about why he bought and is still holding after his ape went up 15 times. I think he paid 9,000 and it's worth close to 200,000 now. So congratulations to him. My advice to people who have seen this kind of appreciation is sell half of what you own and buy a home if you don't own a home. Then let the other half ride. You want to be diversified. You own one of these things and your net worth is 225K

and the monkey JPEG and NFT is 200 of it. Maybe take $100,000 off the table and put a down payment on our apartment. I don't know. Something that gives you a little diversification in case all these NFTs crash in value, which I predict they will. Of course, this is a very heated market. So Sotheby's is getting in on this. The auction will close on Thursday at 10 a.m.

And we'll give an update on Thursday show or Friday show. And $19 million for 101 apes is $188,000 per ape. That's bonkers. And if you go to OpenC, and we had OpenC's founder, Devin Finzer on the podcast, episode 1255. So we're on it for you, like this week in Startup's audience. We are on whatever the huge topics are. If you listen to this podcast, you know it. You get a big edge.

We've been talking about Bitcoin here since it was at a dollar. If you listen to this podcast, you're going to be smarter. And that's why I do it because it makes me smarter because I have researchers. And I have you DMing me or on the Slack telling me, you know, what's going on in the world. And this is the way for all of us to have an edge on everybody else in the world and just be more. informed generally. So OpenC is a platform. Think of it as eBay for NFTs. So OpenC, SEA, you can, one of the interesting things about these NFTs is you can trade them on any of these platforms. And I think you could just do a peer-to-peer as well, or actually, that's how it occurs as peer-to-peer.

But you can see on there is the floor price for any of the monkeys in the board Aib Club is $133,000. The floor price means the lowest price to get into the collection. Now, you can also get some benefits from being in this. So what they think is going to happen with the board ape yacht club is it's like a membership club, right? They put the word club in it. They're going to have a graffiti wall where you're going to be able to post on the graffiti wall. Maybe they'll have some chat rooms. But this is becoming like a bit of a phenomenon. And you'll see on Twitter spaces and Clubhouse, the people who own these make it their icons and they're talking about it constantly. And they're getting other people to buy in. So the most cynical look at this is it's a

multi-level marketing scam. They're trying to get more people to buy into this. The more people will buy into it, the more they can clear their apes and get real fiat currency or more Ethereum, if that's what they're into or Bitcoin, whatever you bought it for, and then be able to put that to work in other places. And thus, the flipping and the bag holding, you know, gets moved on. So if you were uncomfortable with, I don't think these things are worth $180,000, I'm sure they're not worth that. But if you sell it and somebody else is holding the bag, now you can go by 20 of the next NFT project and the next NFT project happened this past weekend. Dom Hoffman, he's the co-founder of Vine, which Twitter bought.

They made short videos like TikTok, maybe a decade before TikTok even arrived, and they screwed up and they just totally bungled the Vine acquisition. It's just one of those just terrible things that Twitter did, eventually shutting it down. But he created a project called L-O-O-T, and it lets users mint 8,000 bags of loot, and there are lists of loot that would appear in a video game, like example, Grimshout, grave wand of scale, hard leather armor, divine hood, hard leather, but you know, nerd stuff. Things that you can make.

So basically just a list of items, that's it. And here's the quote from DAPRR. Every single loot NFT consists of eight characteristics, each pertaining to the following. Chest, food, hand, head, neck, ring, waist, and weapon. However, interpreting the various combinations is entirely up to the community. As with a lot of these projects,

lots of people are creating derivative art, which is then making the money. The current floor price on these is nine, Ethereum. So this is also crazy. So we'll keep an eye on these two things. If you have any thoughts on Sutherbees and the auction or loot or any inside information on NFTs that we should cover maybe what the next big thing is, what I want you to do two things to talk to our producers. One, go to this week and startups.com slash slack and join our Slack. Producer Rachel, producer Nick, Justin,

Charles, and myself are all on there and you can DM with us and just give us tips or tell us what you want covered on the show, or you can DM our Twitter handle, which is TWI Startups, and you know I'm at Jason. I'm taking a bit of a Twitter break, but you can always ask me questions there. This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep founders up at night, and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high-growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions, along with insights and expertise that many other banks just can't.

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As you remember, on episode 1232 of this week in startups, we number them sequentially. We've done over 1,200 episodes. I think it's more like plus 50 because I did the angel episodes and we didn't count them in the original series as incrementing here. So in episode 1232, we talked about Tether possibly being Crypto's Black Swan, and then in episode 1243, we went over Tether's investigation with Bitfinext,

which is an account that is obsessed, obsessed with Tether and believes it's a complete fraud and, you know, like a huge potential Black Swan. What's a Black Swan? It's an unexpected event. Nassim Taleb came up with this term. You can go read his book, Black Swan.

It's incredible. you'll get about, if you're like me, 10, 20%, you'll understand. So I've now read the seems books like two or three times each. I listen to them on audio and I get like 10% more each time because it's so dense with great information. According to Coin Geek, quote, a Canadian Secureers regulator has barred the country's first to register digital currency exchanges from trading tether, which is also known as dollar sign USDT. If you don't know, if you go on Twitter and you put a dollar sign before a stock ticker like Uber or hood for Robin Hood or for crypto like USDT, you can see everybody who is talking about that.

So it's kind of like a hashtag, but with money instead of the pound symbol. CoinGick notes that Tether is currently the only prohibited digital asset in Canada. I wonder why. CoinBerry and Wealth Simple are the two registered currency exchanges with licenses in Canada, allowing them to quote, offer digital currency trading services across all the provinces in Canada, according to Coin Geek. So what we're seeing is countries realize that cryptocurrency is not going away. A large percentage of people in the world, it might be 5 or 10 percent are actively participating in this, and it probably will grow and go 5x or 10x, who knows.

So it's going to be regulated. And we knew this was coming. And as regulation happens, what I've seen is that what the regulators do is they try to create a framework. to protect against the most, I would say, unethical, risk-taking, smar-mey, untrustworthy actors. So they know that the good actors are going to do the right thing, right?

Like, people like Coinbase are backed by a lot of serious people who have serious reputation risk, if it goes bad. And, you know, Circle, Jeremy O'Lear's company, and Jeremy said he was going to come on the pot in August, But Jeremy, where are you? Come on the pod. Let's talk about USDC, his stable coin, which is backed actually dollar for dollar now. We talked about that in a previous episode.

So what you're seeing here is the New York Attorney General banned Tether from operating in New York. Now Canada is banning them. This is the trend. When these insiders know something's up, this is my interpretation. When they know something's up, they just start to, even though they may not have certain parties dead to rights yet, and they might not have them under indictment. Maybe they do. There's some speculation that the DOJ is going after Tether.

And we talked about that on previous episodes. But basically, they're going to try to protect citizens. That's what these regulators do. They try to just make rules of the road. You can go 65 miles an hour on this road. You need to have airbags. You need to have review mirrors. They know that most people are going to obey that.

But there's always some jerk who's going to go 110 miles an hour, you know, with their seatbelt off, leaning all the way back and put everybody else at risk. In fact, I was in New York where it has become totally lawless and everybody's driving on the Bell Parkway and the Gowanus. Like, it's the fast and furious. It is truly terrifying. Young people, please do not do this. Your life has so much promise.

Do not drive like the fast and furious. You will die like tragically. The poor guy, Paul Walker was doing stupid stuff in a car apparently. As fate loves irony. And my God, for him to be, have that much life. ahead of him and be in this franchise and then to die in a car speeding? Apparently, it's just so stupid. It's so unnecessary. So in the Coin Geek article, Canadian lawyer, Christine Duhame mentioned that the endless legal battles by Tether and its sister company Bitfinex as a key factor for the ban

in Ontario stating, quote, until some digital currency companies tied themselves to a jurisdiction with transparency and where digital currency holders have rights, they can exercise if things go awry, I suspect they won't be permitted to operate in mature regulatory jurisdiction. So that's a fancy way of saying, you know, transparency. You need to tell us what's going on. And that's the big problem people have with Tether is this commercial paper. And there is a big real estate company in China that people are speculating that Tether owns. I haven't seen any evidence of that.

But you may see something in the news in the coming weeks about a big real estate company. People have been DMing me about this. I don't want to go into the details yet because it's pure speculation. But there is apparently a Chinese company, according to people who are chatting about it now in the back channels, that could go belly up. That owns a lot of commercial paper. And perhaps that commercial paper is owned by Tether. Who knows if that's true?

But I'm just telling you what the buzz on the street is. I don't have any evidence of it. Disclamor, disclaimer, disclaimer. So, Canada, doing the right thing. And, you know, anybody who would allow Tether to be involved. in any country that has got any rule of law is crazy in my mind. If the New York Attorney General and the DOJ might be looking into and the New York Attorney General took action and they're kind of smarty and the CEO's MIA and the CFO and nobody knows where they are and the co-founders don't

really, you know, face the music by talking to the press, where there's smoke is fire, folks. That's what I've learned in my career. Where there's smoke is almost universally a fire. Maybe there could be dry ice, but, you know, I've never seen dry ice just emanating from a startup. When I see smoke, it's almost always a fire. Sorry to make a horrible metaphor. There's a lot of other news going on in the world. But today we have Joe Lonsdale on the show. That interview is coming up in a moment. Tomorrow on the show, I'll probably talk about El Salvador becoming the first country to adopt Bitcoin as its national currency. We've talked about that before. I'll also, a lot of you asked me to talk about Solana, which is an Ethereum rival that's now the seventh crypto,

and I will get into that. I have to actually do some research on that. If you have any information on it, feel free to DME. And then I'll talk a little bit about 1099 and labor laws and my personal feelings on that. Altos is an anti-aging company, basically live forever, longevity that's raised at least 270 million. I'm going to talk about that tomorrow. And I want to touch on this McDonald's broken ice cream machine story. That's become an FTC investigation. It has to do with the right to repair, which is a fascinating concept. You know, companies like Apple, Tesla, the people who make this ice cream machine that makes the McFlurries, they want to, for a lot of times, I think, a good reason, be the people who repair these, but then there's hackers out there who want to be able to repair.

I have some strong feelings on this, I think, and maybe a middle ground for people. Eric Schmidt thinks the U.S. should connect their military in Silicon Valley. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. I happen to agree with him. Oh, and I also want to talk later this week about the framework laptop. There's somebody named Nirov Patel who's working on a laptop that allows you, speaking of the right to repair, to open up and change the ports on your laptop. I think it's a really great idea. And I'm really fascinated by the idea of an extendable, awesome laptop that people can just pull out the ports and change them like you could in the old days. So back to the future there. All right, let's get to the Joe Lonsdale interview. We all know how hard it is to eat healthy

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Good Foods on social or go to realgoodfoods.com right now. Okay, welcome to the family. All right, everybody, we've got another interesting founder and venture capitalist on the program today. His name is Joe Lonsdale. You probably know him as a serial entrepreneur. He also is the founder of 8VC. Some companies that you may have heard of that he's been involved with.

He co-founded a company called Palantir, which recently went public and has a ginormous Market Cap. He co-founded that with Peter Thiel. OpenGov. We recently had Zach on the program, episode 1267, just a couple weeks ago. And at a park, if you're in the wealth management space, you probably know that company which helps manage people's wealth. Welcome to the program, Joe Lonsdale. Thank you, Jason. Good to be on. So, and you also recently now, you're not just a capital allocator and founder. You've also started your own podcast. We have American an optimist. I'm an optimistic guy. I'm trying to spread the optimism. What makes you optimistic about America today? Well, you know, every single one of the problems we

face, I think there's really good solutions. And these solutions involve innovation and they involve greater consciousness. And, you know, I think there's ways we can make our society continue to get more competent. I think we're living in the best time we've ever lived in as a species. and even though there's huge challenges, there's also just great solutions to everything we're facing, and I think we can figure out. Why do so few people share your opinion? In fact, maybe here in the United States,

are pretty vocally upset and or perturbed, anxious about the future. You know, I think that anxiety cells, pessimism cells, I think the media loves to spread fear. You're going to click through things more if you see something you're afraid of. So you get a lot of that. You know, I also, I think it's easier to be pessimistic than optimistic. It's easy to see what the problem is. It's not as easy to see the solution.

People are generally been pessimistic throughout history. It's kind of a risk-averse nature. It's how we evolved. If you weren't really worried about all the risks, maybe you'd probably get eaten by a lion or run out of food or whatever. So I think our species is naturally a little bit pessimistic. But the, but you actually think about it and figure it out, the reality is that none of these things are unsolvable problems.

Well, let's take the first one right off the bat. We have a highly dysfunctional government. It seems like it's never been worse from, you know, across multiple presidencies and across both parties, the incompetence, the grift and the ineffectiveness seems to be at an all-time high. I think you would agree with me. Why are you optimistic about our chances of fixing that? Well, you know, I guess what I'd say is is that there's probably like a 30, 40 year period where the brightest and most successful and most competent people kind of felt like it wasn't their job to go into government. A lot of my mentors who I know were very successful in their 70s or 80s especially,

like the people in that generation really only got involved in government if there was something wrong with them. Maybe they were super egotistical, you know, for the most part, most of them thought this wasn't their thing to solve. And I think there's a lot of young people now seeing this and saying, wow, we have to get involved because if it's not us, it's going to be these idiots. And this really matters at this point. It's really broken. We actually have to fix it. I think there's a huge acknowledgement of the fact that we have to get involved. We have to fix it. A lot of my friends who would never talk to me about government, never talked to me about politics, who are super confident people. They're all talking to me about it now. And so I think we're going to have a lot of our brightest minds go after this. And it is a hard problem given how the media and given how social media kind of brings out more of our tribalism. There's a lot of real challenges there. But, you know, I think I think we're capable of higher levels of consciousness here and how we approach this. And I think that we're going to have a lot of best minds on it. And I think there are like a lot of positive sum solutions. If there was only negative sum solutions, if the only answer was to like kill all the rich people and take their money, that's obviously an extreme. But if the only answer was like to tax people or to like

be really mean to the poor and let them die or or ruin the environment. Like if there's all zero some stuff, then yeah, we'd be in trouble. But the fortunate thing is there's like really good positive some answers to all of this. And so therefore, I think we're going to find those positive. Some answers we're going to push ahead with them. Well, you just dipped into the one that I think a lot of people are concerned with, specifically this week when we're having extreme weather or climate-related events occurring. I know that you're a bit on the right or libertarian, I think, is probably how people would describe you.

I don't know how you describe yourself. I believe in liberty, but I think libertarianism tends to be dysfunctional. So, you know, I think libertarianism tends to be about like yelling at people to get off your law and complaining about the governments and just saying how stupid and broken it is, whereas I think like a better way to be a leader in society is to take your values and propose, propose solutions and per se here's how we solve this problem. So I think libertarianism is like a negative philosophy that has a lot of truth in it,

but it also is just not useful. It's a bit cynical and not very pragmatic to say just have less government and let it be individuals do whatever they want. Yeah, I think it's a little, I mean, I think we have to say like, how are we going to make sure that we can bring down the cost of living for the poor. How are we going to make sure everyone can have health care? I think these are important problems and we should work as leaders in society to actually go after those problems as opposed

to just yelling about the government. I mean, so you're a conservative who believes in global warming. I believe global warming is occurring. I believe some of it is manmade. I believe it's a real problem. I don't believe it's the most important problem, but I believe it's a real problem and I believe it's worth us working together to use innovation to fix it. I think there's lots of ways which carbon sequestration and innovation of that area is very important. I think carbon markets, I think nuclear, I think there's a lot of these answers that we can move towards to have pretty good solutions there. Yeah, I mean, if we look at nuclear alone, we see France gets the majority of their energy

from that, and then Germany deprecated their nuclear plants exactly after Fukushima, and now they're unable to provide, you know, enough clean energy for their government. Well, and now let's superimpose that over the dysfunction and tribalism. I think it's kind of like one of the most interesting test cases because when you talk to people, they immediately say, well, maybe we shouldn't do nuclear because it sounds super dangerous without any research or knowing about how much progress has been made and how unique an event Fukushima was and probably not going to reoccur. Everyone says they believe in science, but they don't actually really believe in science sometimes

about these types of issues. Yeah, exactly. Nuclear just seems to be like a really interesting one that I think we could get a quick win on. What do you think it's going to take for us to embrace nuclear? And does it feel like we're trending towards that? It feels like we are trending towards. The data is really, really good. You have, like, actually, majority is supporting it now. You have these new really simple reactor designs that are 1,000 times safer,

that are really tiny, safe fission designs, very efficient. I think you had the first new mini-fission design approved by the Department of Energy in the last few decades recently. And, you know, there's enough spent nuclear fuel in our country. So this is nuclear fuel. It's already been used on bigger plants. you could reuse it with a smaller design. There's enough of that around to power the whole country for 300 years.

So, I mean, there's some really good solutions here. Small modular, I think, is the industry term for these new ones that I think Gates, Bill Gates is working on one, etc. And so how do you think we get that through this right-wing, left-wing debate over, you know, on one side? I think you have maybe some climate deniers. On the other side, you have people who are very precious about the environment and don't understand that this is actually safe now. It's almost like they both have absolutely a different set of wrong beliefs that are holding us back. Yep. They're equally wrong.

I think that's right. And I think what happens is you get a lot of inertia in the regulatory state. So what happened in the 1970s and 80s is we got really afraid of some of these technologies. There were some reasons to be afraid of certain parts. And we put just like an insane amount of regulation in place. I remember my father is a chemical engineer. and he was involved in selling something called heat tracing to lots of plants around the world. And when you sold to a normal plant, you'd have like a binder of documentation.

When you sold to a nuclear plant, you literally have like a truck full of documentation. And it'd be about inane stuff. So it's like the regulators were purposely trying to kill it. You're like, it's like you have to document certain things about the mines where some of the metal came from and like giant binders. There's no possible way that documentation was ever used. It didn't make sense. It didn't help keep anything safe. It was like paperwork created to kill nuclear, basically.

And so there's ways in which you. can use regulation if you don't like something to really hurt it. And that's what we did with nuclear. We just destroyed innovation there for 30, 40 years. And so hopefully we can have sane people come back in and review some of the regulations. And it really is about the regulatory state. I'm actually pretty obsessed with the regulatory state in lots of areas. This is one of those areas where the regulatory state's going to decide. And we really have to approach it and make it logical and make it not break it. How do you solve the nimbism around nuclear? What are your thoughts on, hey, where are we going to put this and how do you convince communities to approve putting it in certain places?

Or do you see other opportunities to put it in places where people aren't, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, we use about 3% of the land in the U.S. There's lots and lots of places if we wanted to put it somewhere else. As you said, these small modular designs, they're small and modular. Like the ones we're building, you know, my friends are building something called Oclo. They have, it's like the size of a box car from a train. And you've buried underground. Then I'll touch it for 30 years.

And it doesn't put out any meaningful amount of harm for radiation, especially if it's underground. it's like you can't even measure it. So I mean, that's like, I wouldn't mind having one of those nearby. And so I think we just need to educate people. And, you know, there's enough room to do these things. Yeah, I was thinking it could be like very interesting incentives as well. So if you lived, if you did have that concern in a community lived in that area, you could actually give them an incentive.

Reverse auction. Reverse auction and off. Exactly. What do you have to pay people? I didn't even think of a reverse auction. That's brilliant. I was just thinking of a tax credit or something. But in your case, if you said, hey, we need.

one of these in Texas and who will pay for somebody to have it. We'll pay. And then we'll pay them and we'll pay the area around them. And yeah, there's mechanisms we could do for it. And listen, it's not quite as cheap as natural gas, but at some point we care about this enough. If you actually care about global warming, we should have some kind of carbon markets that probably helps these.

You can have some kind of minor incentives. I think it makes it worth it. Let's talk for a minute about the situation in China. This has become pretty cute. The last couple of weeks, we have education startup shut down. We have Jack Ma and other CEOs, bite dances CEOs, kind of disappearing and maybe reemerging in their oil painting, according to the Wall Street Journal. Pretty interesting colloquialism. Yikes.

Obviously, last year we saw Hong Kong get taken over and Freedom Fighters imprisoned, probably to be tortured. and Apple newspaper in Hong Kong being shut down. And then today, they are limiting the number of hours. I know we saw today's story, but limiting the number of hours that children can play video games to one hour a day on the weekends for three hours total a week. And you're not going to be able to IPO your companies in the West.

Sounds like my friend's tiger moms. That's like, I mean, there's going to be like a collective groan from the teenagers of China, right? This is this is this is like totally crazy three three hours. I listen, these computer games are like drugs. So I totally get it. I get the concern. These computer games are like perfected drugs that are so much more addictive than when

you and our kids. When you and I were kids, I know you must have had Nintendo or Sega. I was a toy 600. I was long before you. I was born in 1970. I was playing tank and defender and missile. You got a decade on me.

Well, I had a Nintendo to Super Nintendo and N-64. And this is really fun. But these, these games now, it's like the drugs are 100 times worse. So on one hand, I see where he's coming from. On the other hand, this is terrifying. This is like the most powerful authoritarian guy in the world who's clamping down on his rivals. The thing I understand it is that he has lots of people in tech who are like these billionaires who are very influential in the country, very major power center. All the smart people who are powerful and rich kind of follow these billionaires and follow the tech.

And then you have a whole separate power center, which is the, which is obviously like the old government power center. and the gold government power center says, guess what? You guys thought you were more powerful? Uh-uh. And they just like went and just like they're slamming them. They're like they're taking away their companies. We have a friend who started New Oriental,

which is like a 40, 50 billion dollar market cap Chinese company. It's pretty much totally destroyed by this, right? It's down to, I don't know a couple billion or something. And we'll see if it's even around. And like, I mean, this is, this is really scary. And like, is shot up preparing for war or are they doing something? You know, I think what it is, is that they're seeing how the U.S.

kind of has a bunch of egg on its face right now has a bunch of our own problems. and they're saying, okay, U.S. is weak enough as a rival that we can do the things we want to do to our rivals in China. It's going to hurt China a little bit, but that's okay because we have some breathing room here because the U.S. is also screwed up. So I think they see themselves as geopolitical rivals. They have room to have internal fights right now because of our problems. That's my view. They have a, yeah, we, they feel we're weak and distracted. Therefore, they can use that crisis, whether it's COVID, Afghanistan, racial strife in the country, the political parties warring with the other. each other and the tribalism. And who knows? Like maybe they take, maybe Xi Jinping and his

government power center, they've obviously neutered now the tech center sector. I mean, what's next? Taiwan? I mean, it feels like they might make a run. It feels very scary. It feels very scary. I was talking to that Prime Minister Harper last real, uh, prime minister of Canada about this a few weeks ago. And he, you know, he's he's a close friend. And he, he, he was very, you know, he thinks this could happen much sooner than people think. Xi Jinping is close. I mean, what's going to happen. All these young men are pissed off. By the way, there's 60 million young men in China, more than young women who, you know, aren't not going to have enough wives. That's a classic, you know, this is what the Muslim world did, basically, is they had, the powerful guys had

multiple wives in the old days. So there'd be young men with no women and they'd have to constantly fight wars and send them off to war. That's how it works when you have too many young men. So it's just, it's a very strange, weird setup here for, for a very nationalistic, you know, very aggressive geopolitical stance. It's pretty scary. I wonder if this move of the video game one. I know this sounds really stupid, but a lot of revolutions have been started by people starting to feel oppressed,

you know, whether it was, you know, the person with the fruit stand, you know, started the spring awakening, etc. You know, some minor thing like this

can really start to explode. If a lot of young people... Yeah, you probably have a few million pissed off young men right now or like, I'm going to do something when I grew up to take this fucking government out. That's probably what they're,

thinking, you know. Also, they all of a sudden find themselves with an extra eight hours a day of time, on their hand. It's a very, it's a very strange choice from that perspective. I, yeah, I don't think, I don't think they thought this one through properly. It's, uh, I mean, I get what he's trying to do, but it, but it's, it's going to be interesting to see. I really hope that there's backbone and the people to eventually stand up. A lot of people say, oh, there doesn't, it's not backbone. They prefer their government. It's better than ours. But I still think Liberty is a universal value. And I think people are going to want it in China. Yeah, the interesting theory I've heard people discuss is it's going to be harder to do a revolution today.

And I'm not sure, I believe this, but it was an interesting theory. Somebody floated me because they have control over all the data, all the information. They're the new Stasi. They're the new KGB. They can basically squash any revolution before it even starts. They make you disappear right away. It is going to be hard. You'd have to be really good because they're tracking everyone.

They're seeing what you say, what you think. and they're watching the smart people really closely because they know the smart people are the most dangerous and they know who the smart people are. So, no, it is very scary. It's a very dystopian totalitarian society. What should the West's reaction be to a suddenly unpredictable China? Well, this is why the Afghanistan thing is just so frustrating

because we need to be a place that works with our allies, that stands behind our allies, that shows that we're going to have our allies backs, because we need to get the allies to work with us right now to stand up to China. We need Japan, India, UK, Germany, and a host of other countries to be able to say to China, when it does certain things, this is not acceptable. If you do this, we're all going to have to cut off trade with you. We're all not going to tolerate this.

And there needs to be a coherent response to them. I don't think this is in 1950s anymore where we're going to have presidents approaching this in uniporal way the same time. We can't have presidents who are too cowardly about it. We have to stand up and be strong against them. with everyone else. Hey, everybody, I thought I would bring Christina Tassiopo. I pronounced it correct.

I'm hoping, Christina. You got it. Yep. All right. You're the founder of Vanta. People have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year. And I thought it would be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created Vanta and what SOC2 is and why it's important people get it right.

So let's start with what is SOC2 for people who are just realizing they have to become Soct2 compliant. For sure. So stock two is. Two is at a high level, it's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security. Got it. And when you do a SOC2 report, how often do you have to update it? And what is that process like? Because my understanding is you don't just do this once in the life of your company. You do it continually every year, every quarter?

Right. So you actually do it annually. Yeah. So often, so the way these reports work is they've got dates and time periods on them. And sort of like a pen test, it's something once you start doing, you'll just renew every year. All right. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on and telling the audience why you should get your sock to when you should get it and how you should do it. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them $1,000 off, which is a really significant and generous offer. Go to vanta.com slash twist. V-A-N-T-A-com slash twist to get $1,000 off your sock too. Thanks, Christina. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers now. You'd think we should have left Afghanistan, left some troops there. What is your take on it? You know, I thought that the original mission in Afghanistan to take out a bunch of terrorists and to punish them for what happened was appropriate. I think it was very naive to try to do the nation building stuff. I think that, you know, I think there were 1,200 tribal leaders we got together right after we were in and asked them what they wanted.

And 800 something of them wanted this, well, the old king back. And if you look at a lot of the Muslim world, there's a lot of stability with some of these monarchs and some of these monarchies. I have a big admirer of some of them. obviously they'll not admire at all ways. They're not perfect and there's lots of problems, but I think it's a hell of a lot better

than a fake government that's going to crumble as soon as we leave. And so I would have tried to help with the monarchy and then left and, and, you know, maybe kept a small

counterterrorism operation there. I think, you know, we can't go back in time. You know, if we go back in time six months, I would have,

I would have defied and we decided we wanted out. We probably should have been out earlier. If we're going to be out, I mean, come on. It's like you drop a plan for how you leave. It's like everyone's,

making fun of it, but it should be made fun of it. You don't give up your Air Force Base. You don't completely withdraw until you have a plan to get your allies out. These have been people for three years trying to wait to get visas who helped us. We want to help them and their families. Our State Department is probably the most inept of all of our political apparatus in D.C. Like, we know we're supposed to be giving these visas out. We're just taking years to do it. And then we leave and then don't save them. And, you know, a bunch of them are being killed and tortured. A bunch of being rescued right now, frankly, by private people as well. But it's disgusting. Like, get the, get the allies out first. Get our people out first.

get everyone out first, then get rid of your troops, then get rid of the Air Force base. You know, pretty basic. Yeah, the sequence of events. I mean, there's no perfect way to lose a war, and we lost this one pretty clearly. But yeah, it did not seem well thought out. We lost it. We lost it ourselves because we weren't willing to do what it took to defeat them. And I think that's probably right.

What it took to defeat them is something that a modern democracy in today's day and age was not going to be willing to do. You know, so therefore, we shouldn't have been there. But then when you leave, you have to leave intelligently. Yeah, if the people there are not willing to fight to be a democracy, I don't know how we install one other than running the country ourselves. Let's talk a little bit about some of the companies you co-founded. Palantir went public. Palantir is a pretty secretive company, I think. What does Palantir do? Sure.

So I started Palantir. And then tell me about the founding of it too. Yeah, I started Palantir 18 years ago with my roommate from college. and then there were a couple other few other key people as co-founders, obviously Peter Thiel. We brought in Alex Carp. You know, Alex was pretending to be the CEO at first for us because we needed an adult in the room.

And then it turned out he was actually a good CEO. He was a philosopher before that. So pretty cool background. He had a lot of wisdom about people and institutions. The rest of us were computer scientists. And so that makes it really well. And, you know, what does Palantir do? Palantir, the high level goal of Palantir was to take the top technology cultures

of Silicon Valley and apply it to the most important problems in Washington, D.C. on the East Coast institutions. And so the idea, the idea was there's like this $100 billion plus being spent on various types of data and services around important problems with, you know, analysts and intelligence defense world, the problems there as well as for big companies. And we wanted to be able to say, okay, some of these things, rather than being services could actually be done with products out of the box. And so we looked at like 50 government contracting, you know, messups where they spent between 50 million and a few billion on these big projects.

And these things always went over budget. They always been over time. They never quite solved problems as well as they could have. And we said, how can we create a single platform that does most of all these 50 out of the box and solve these really important problems? And then, you know, how can we make sure we're both protecting civil liberties as well as, like, bringing all the data together in distributed world and making sure they get the bad guys.

And so most people in Silicon, I don't know if I can say most, but a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, do not want to support our government in military, namely Google. What are your thoughts on people? I have to give credit to Eric Schmidt and Alphabet because they do have some really cool things that they are doing. And Eric is, I would say Eric, Eric, himself is a patriot. I've attacked Google in the past for not being a patriotic company. I'll stand behind that. It comes from a university culture that's very globalist, very skeptical of our military, not very patriotic, very, you know, not not very pro there. But I think Eric Schmidt himself, I think some people are on Google.

I think some of the Alphabet guys, they have done some good stuff there. That said, you're right. Most of Silicon Valley, ironically, does not engage your defense. Of course, you know,

I'm sure, obviously Silicon Valley started off by engaging with defense. That's where a lot of, Sheila Packard and everyone came from, and we lost that for a while. So, you know,

because of this, you know, there became this huge gap. And this is why we started a Palant's here. It's also why we started a couple other companies more recently. There's a huge gap

between what's possible in the defense world and what you're seeing in the defense world. You're just, you're not getting in the defense world of attacking these problems. And this is what you do as a venture capitalist,

this is what you do as an entrepreneur. You look for gaps in the world. You look for things that are like really broken compared to what they could be. And sadly, our defense has gotten really broken in a lot of areas because there's no one else is there. That's why Palantir was able to be such a big company. Like no one wants to work with Palantir when you show up when you're like a bunch of 22, 23 year old kids from Silicon Valley.

You didn't serve in the military. You're not from their culture. You're not about you haven't hired like 22 generals to your company. like they'd much rather work with the guys they know. So the only way you're going to win is you have to be like 10 times better. It's the only way you're going to be able to do it. But you can be 10 times better because Silicon Valley has gotten to be so far ahead of the East Coast. And so that's why it's like it's a great business opportunity.

It's also critical for our country to get talent working on these problems, especially in a world where China is obviously going to be saber-raddling. I think the best hope for peace in the world is for China to realize that we're still innovating and that they're not getting ahead of us in defense. If they think they're ahead of us in defense and can make a fool of us, they're going to be very tempted to do so. What do you think that stands right now? I think China's innovated a lot faster than us the last 20 years.

A lot of people say, oh, but Joe, we spent so much money. Like, if you think of things in terms of World War II, it was about like how many planes, how many tanks, how much gear. It was all, it was very, I mean, obviously, a tech matter, but it was very much like a formula where you apply all this money and you win. And we live today in a very asymmetric world, right? As you know, too, like the very best tech companies, You could have 10 or 15 guys, you have 19 guys, you know, whatever, 12 guys build WhatsApp and sell up for $19 billion.

You have very small numbers of people, big, huge breakthroughs. And so, you know, you'd have countries like Israel, you know, play in a global stage because it only takes a very small number of people to make major technological advances. And China, China has its very best people working on defense last 20 years. They don't have any of their option. A lot of them are nationalists that are excited to. We have not. So they've been gaining on us very dramatically. We have a lot of waste.

A lot of what we spend on defense in America. it's kind of a jobs program in part. It's just like the left has welfare. The right and left both have their defense welfare. Lots of bases we don't actually need. Lots of things we build for the wrong reasons. We're not going to need like these giant ships and near adversary conflicts. There's other things we should be doing.

We're not doing. So yeah, so we've been slipping. I think we're still ahead of China. We are still ahead of China militarily. But we're slipping a lot. They're getting really quickly. And it is a crisis to start applying our best and brightest to some of these problems. If a war does happen, how do you think that war will play

Yeah, cyber? Yeah, there's a good book called 2034 that has one example of a cyber attack. It's like, you know, it's not exactly, yeah, it's not exactly how I see it playing out. But I think it's, I think it's worth people reading to kind of shock their system to start thinking differently about our incompetence versus their confidence. I tend to think cyber is a very big part of it. I tend to, I'm actually pretty scared about, I don't know I should talk about these things, but the space weapon stuff is really scary where like, it's like you can, you know, you can send up things into outer space and send them down very cheaply that are much more powerful and cruise misconduct. They can go block 15, just dropping a crowbar on you and you wouldn't see it coming. And it's very accurate.

And you can send up a lot of these very cheaply now. And it's like, so there's all sorts of like who controls outer space. Can stop other guy from getting out of outer space and then you win if you have enough up there that stops them from getting up there and you drop them they want. So you basically you're at their mercy at that point. I think submarines are really important. There's a big question if we can attack submarines from space or not. That's like a really big thing right now that people are kind of figuring out. There's just, you know, I, you know, what happens is they have so many submarines now.

if they just keep getting a lot more and we keep building our big stupid ships, they basically, as soon as they go to war, they just hunt and kill all of our ships, because they have submarines tracking all of our navy around the world, and they can just take them all out at once. That's not very good for us. So there's just lots of scary scenarios where you just don't want them to get too far ahead of you. Winning space is critical for national security versus China, period. Yep.

Winning. I did this. I mean, people liked making fun because it was Trump, of course. Trump's probably a good person to make fun of. But like the space force actually really matters, yes. Yes. And having weapons in space is critical. You have to.

I kind of think you have to. I mean, I think it's really beautiful and quaint that people are saying, don't send weapons to space. If we didn't have an authoritarian country or three who were really interested in being in space as well, I would have a different view of it. We have no option because, yeah, exactly.

It's like, are we going to, is it China is going to be sending all these things? Are we going to get to audit everything they send to space? I mean, come on. This is ridiculous. No. And if they can take out all the communication we have and then they start dropping things like you're saying, my goodness. I mean, the nightmare for me, what if they target our 10,000 most competent people, which they'd probably be able to turn even better than us if they're doing it intelligently.

And then all of a sudden we have, you know, and we have nothing left. And there's all these really scary scenarios where they're not going to want to have a hot war. But if they get far enough ahead and they take Taiwan and then just make a fool of us for anything that comes over there and say, listen, guys, we're not trying to hurt you. but anything you sent here, we're going to wipe out. And if you attack us, we're attacking you back the same. I mean, just think they have a lot of power in their region if they want, if we're not innovating faster. Looking back, I want to go over your entrepreneurial lessons and then maybe capital allocator lessons.

What do you think is at the core of building a giant company that does, you know, achieve unicorn status, does change the world. You've done it a couple of times yourself. also, and you obviously have a lot of friends who have as well. What do you think is the core you've learned? You know, and we're still building a lot of these. I've got a couple new ones that are multi-billion-dollar companies now, too. And I think the key thing, oh gosh, I mean, there's so many things.

But I think there's a very high level. One is that conceptual gap in the world. You need to be focusing on an area where there's a much better way that's possible of doing something that exists right now. It's kind of obvious, but the gap has to be big enough or it's not worth it. It's not going to be huge. There's obviously platform and network effects that really matter. everyone listening probably knows what those are.

That's really key. You have to have, you have to be attracting top talent. You need a culture that lets top talent self-actualize, I think is the way I put it. So you want the very most talented people to be there. And they need to feel that as part of being there, they're learning and they're expressing like the best versions of themselves

and they're solving hard problems and they're self-actualizing by being part of your company. I think that's really critical. That's one of the hardest things to get right is to build these kind of cultures like that, most of the time these days, the average company, you're like, Joe, how do I find an engineer? I have a great idea. I really need a CTO. I really want to find an engineer. And like the very best startup companies that I want to be an angel investor in, they have like a line out the door

of the very best engineers wanting to join because the first five or six engineers there are like legends. And they're all like, everyone's like, I want to work with these guys. This is so awesome. Right. So like tech culture is absolutely critical, is my view. So you find a problem set where it can be greatly, greatly, greatly, greatly improved, whether that's government and you have OpenGov, whether that's data analysis for the government, you have Palantir there, At-A-PAR, wealth management software. Yeah, At-A-PAR as part of the Smart Enterprise Wave where there's probably like 300 platforms in different vertical industries that like just needed to go to the cloud, needed to use big data

and needed to improve how things worked. Last year, we have something early last year that started the pandemic. We started a resilience bio, which is recently raised like, you know, money at well or $5 billion. We started with Bob Nelson. And what that was is kind of like AWS for advanced biomeufacturing. There's all these people pitching me and saying, Joe,

I need $120 million for this gene therapy or et cetera. And we realized the U.S. didn't have this advanced biomeufacturing capacity. But if it did, instead of having to raise 100 or 150 for the first round, they could raise 10. And we could do the backend forum. And so we did this with MRNA and cell therapies.

And so there's all these new possibilities of bio. Similar to Ginkgo, I guess, is doing a similar kind of, that would be the contemporary. I think, yeah, I think Ginkgo is a really impressive company. It's in this same area. There's, there's huge numbers of new companies going after these areas and we need kind of like, we need platforms in the back end to manufacture these things without having to each learn how to manufacture, which is kind of crazy. So synthetic biology, becoming a platform, more entrepreneurs

can then build on it instead of them having to build the infrastructure to do these big slurry tanks to create things in the world. Totally. The thing I described, it's really key here is a cell therapy part, which is that, you know, it used to be drugs were about molecules in the mid-20th century. And then it was that you have like biologics. You could have like a peptide or an antibody. That was the 80s, which is an N-tech in the valley. And now in the 2010s, you actually have whole cells. And so if you have like, if like one of the books behind me is like a peptide or an antibody, like the whole house is a cell, right? And so you can actually program the whole, these whole cells, put them into people. You can solve basically any disease could be

solved in theory by cell therapy. We're already solving some cancers. There's a bunch more we're probably going to solve soon. So there's going to be this like giant, way of the companies and we need to help accelerate that with the tools and infrastructure. So that that's the trend we're kind of working on there. And which dovetails with your initial discussion about being an optimist. We're sitting here with this crazy pandemic, dovetelling that with China, who knows if that was a lab leak or I don't know, sort of where you stand on that? What do you think if we had to set a percentage that it was made in a lab?

I'm kind of 60 or 70% right now. It's so hard to know for sure. I'd say it's like two-thirds chance it came out of the lab, almost for sure by mistake, if it did. And then it seemed like it was covered up, and there were some sketchy things where China knew things that kept from the world and kept flights going, which is just shocking how they handle it.

It's not shocking if you realize, of course, they're an authoritarian bunch of jerks who couldn't stand to have their country hit without hurting every other country as well. But I think it's pretty clear they handled this with real malign intent. Once they knew what was going on, is my view. Yeah, I don't see how anybody could argue with that. they could have locked their whole country down. They could have made everybody aware of this probably in November or December.

Exactly. And how critically important it was. It's absolutely criminal how China handled it. And it's just ridiculous. The fact that the media is not really clear about that. It just shows we live in a very strange world right now. Well, I mean, if you think about what Trump did to the dialogue, it became so polarized during his tenure. And it freaked people out so much that they can't even have an objective discussion about it, right?

because Trump's involved in the discussion. Yeah, that's fair. I think a lot of people have this thing in their brain where he drives them completely bonkers, even when you're trying to talk about things not related directly to him, but because he's involved in the conversation, yeah, it makes it difficult. I mean, it does show what, you know, style and communication style brings to it. The second he says Wuhan virus, what did he call it, the Wuhan flu?

When he calls it the Wuhan flu, it automatically triggers the lib, on one side, always being racist. And then all of a sudden the discussion is about Trump's branding of the flu and not, hey, did the Chinese do this or not? And I heard a very interesting theory the other day, which I had never considered, because it's pretty obvious that it could be, you know, came from the lab or that's the majority case. Yeah.

It would be really weird if somebody happened to get the same bats and put them for sale in the wet market and jumped. That would be kind of weird. That would be. But if you, if you, this was one, I, I can't believe nobody's had a discussion about this. What about a lone wolf from that, uh, lab? What if there was a person in the lab who was either mentally disturbed, had a grudge, uh, wanted to be famous like people who do crazy things like that and they decided to release it?

Oh, totally. When you say lab leak, I think that has to be at least a certain percent chance at a lab leak side. I think you're totally right, Jason. And this is what's terrifying too is our tools. are getting much, much better at designing and building these viruses. Like, I'm personally involved in creating lots of tools for DNA impulation, you know, that we invest in and my friends build for solving curing diseases. But this is the other side of it.

And so it is very interesting how you have to watch these things. It's going to be a bit of an arms race. But then you have this amazing vaccine, like where we built something in record time. We could have had this vaccine out of it. I wonder how you feel about challenge trials. I know, 100% 100% at the same page. We should have done challenge trials right away, as soon as we had this.

We should have got volunteers. Why didn't we? Why didn't we? Because we live in a bureaucratic controlled risk-averse society where it's run by lawyers and not run by like courageous men and women. And it's just so frustrating. We should have in challenge trials right away. I think there was there's various politics there.

Some people, I don't know. It's just, it's crazy to me that that didn't happen. Explain to me what we're talking about with challenge trials. It's basically if you were to introduce the virus into somebody and half of them had, or let's say a third of them had one vaccine, another one had another, the same vaccine at a different dose, and then a third had nothing, a nocebo, placebo, whatever, you would actually know the impact immediately. And you use volunteers.

This is not like China where you're like making the Muslim population do the challenge trial or something. Yeah, this is like we literally had like young men, women, people stepping up saying, use me for challenge trial. I want to contribute to my society. That would have saved so many lives if we could have done that. So, yeah, it's very frustrating. We didn't do it. Literally a group of scientists in the UK signed a petition.

And now my understanding is the UK, long after the fire has been essentially put out or is being put out. They are now going to do challenge trials. But I thought if it's so low risk and people want to do it, we send people to Afghanistan to fight that war. And we are unwilling to let somebody take the risk of. It's a volunteer. No, it's crazy. This is like a very nanny state thing. You can't volunteer to help save people because it's against our scientific ethics.

Give me a break. Of course you do that. It's bad logic. It's bad logic. We let people ride motorcycles. And in some states, we let them ride motorcycles without helmets. Yeah. We let people go mountain biking.

I had an accident a month ago. So if you do dangerous things that are, you know, that we do voluntarily. Seriously. Are you okay? What happened? I separated my shoulder. It's fine. My friend fell right in front of me and I braked 30 miles an hour and flew over the

handlebars. So it happens. But you had a helmet on. I had a helmet. I had elbow pads. I had knee pads. Well, I mean, that's still separate on my shoulder.

Probably help my knee on the side of my body. They got hit. I actually fractured two ribs I found out today. And the guy was looking at. He's like, oh, this was a fracture. He was like, show me the bumps.

Like, oh, well, that's why I hurt so bad. Yeah. When you get your bruised ribs or your fracture them, like you should know. Actually, it's, I believe there's no treatment for it.

Like, you have to lift your arms, you just be in pain. You just, every time you cough or sneeze for about a month. It's like, Yeah, it's like getting stabbed. Yeah, it's not good. It's fine. Maybe it'll be good for me, give me some perspective on what it's like for some people when they're in pain. Yeah.

Let's move on to capital allocation. Yes. Boy, it's a hot market. Are we in a bubble? There's money everywhere. I love it. Why is there money everywhere? Well, why do you love it?

Well, okay, I don't love it for the future of our society. As an optimist, I think we'll solve some problems, but I think we cause more problems. when we create misallocation of capital by making the price of money too cheap. And I think we've definitely done that with our crazy central bank right now and the people in charge there. So there's the monetary policy has been more extreme. The printing of money is more extreme. We're about to print even a lot more money.

And so, yeah, there's definitely too much money around. Of course, what happens there is you drive up the price of assets. You drive up the price of how we build these assets. It's great for people working in the tech world, right? They're all getting paid a huge amount more salaries or skyrocketing. Cost of living in tech centers, of course, that means goes up, though. It's not good for the non-tech people in tech centers. They're all kind of angry at us right now because their lives are a lot harder if they don't get paid from this.

You know, as an allocator, you got to build more now. We started seven companies last year at ATPC. You know, I usually built three or four. Last year, I built a lot. There's a lot of opportunity. You got to do more early stage. I'm doing a lot more. Why do you have to do more building?

Explain to people as a capital allocator why building is better than investing in this kind of market. Well, in this kind of market, people, so you used to, like, I did a lot of series A's and B's. That's our standard thing to do. And if you used to be a good series A, you put $10 million to work for 25% of the company or something. That's like a normal series. Or even before that was $5 million to work for 25% of the company.

And then you used to be a B, it's maybe like 15% for $15%, like $100 million valuation. Now these valuations are often two, three times as high. So you're getting a much smaller piece of the company for the same amount of money. And, you know, when you're when we work on a company, we want to be able to get in in a fair, good, early price, and we want to be able to help it and help build it. And one of the best ways to do that is to start it ourselves, because then we can leave the first round.

We can buy 30% of it. And we can be really involved and scaling it up. And now we have our share of the company for, you know, three, four, five million, whatever it is. And it's a big, bigger share we get otherwise. And it's just a great way to get exposed. We know the top talent to bring in. Obviously, you can't build everything yourself.

A lot of the best companies you still got out of right checks into. But if you can build some great companies, then that's a huge advantage in this market. You can suddenly have much more of a company for cheaper. So things are overpriced at the A and the B. We're seeing that consistently. So you want to go earlier or just make it yourself. And you want to do things that require more capital.

So there's actually this one good thing about this, or one of the good things about this market, is there's a lot of problems out there that require a lot of capital. I told you earlier I want to own infrastructure for advanced bio-manufacturing. Our A round for that company that we started with our friend Bob Nelson. And our A round was a $750 million round for half the company. And we used that to buy plants and to hire people and to scale it up. And that's like you couldn't have done that three or four years ago.

Not only because the technology wasn't ready, but you just couldn't raise $750 million for half of a company. People would look at you like what the hell's wrong with you. And in this market, we convince people to do it. Where's all the money coming from? Who are the LPs who are driving this? Is it the same LPs putting in more? Is it more new LPs? There's a lot of pensions that have had increased, you know, allocation to this space.

a lot of pensions, they gave allocation to the space five, six, seven, seven, eight years ago with firms like mine and our co-founders of Resilience Bob's firm. Like he sent them back billions of dollars because he did great. And now they're like, oh, you sent me back billions of dollars. Yes, of course I will put $200 billion into your next new idea. And you can do that a few times and you get the money. So you have lots of sovereign wealth funds. This is the wealth funds managed by certain countries that make money every year instead

of losing money like we do. So that's like, you know, Singapore or the Arab countries or other ones. There's the pensions in Canada are very good. the pensions in Australia are very good. There's even pension in Alaska that's not bad because Alaska has all the oil money. It saves money there. It invests it very well. And then of course, there's endowments.

There's insurance companies. There's big families around the world. I mean, there's all sorts of places where- Even Norway. Even Norway, which said they don't have a venture strategy is now saying they're looking at it. Yeah. And that would be very interesting because they're like half a trillion, two-thirds of trillion or something. I think they're like the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

if I'm not in that case they're in that case they're a future lane but yeah they're they're they're really big too obviously I have not interacted with them as much for that reason they've never done stuff in our space but you're right it's it's becoming obvious the returns I mean and think about it the top talents in the world is working on these innovative problems because there are solutions that are very valuable so you're attracting all the top talent to the space your money is going to work much harder if it's backing top talent if it's not backing top talent it's like you know you got to think about your money being less lazy right right it's just sitting there it's going to if all

this money's being printed and inflation's going to go up or, you know, there's other people who are going to put it to work and you don't put it to work, you're going to obviously going to be contracting. And then you just think of the people you knew in your high school or your college. Your money could be just sitting at a bank. It's ultimate lazy. Your money could be backing some of them doing like a bar or a restaurant or a little, you know, who knows?

And that's like probably not very good either. And you could be, money could be backing like the smartest three people you knew. And there's a good chance to be working a lot harder for you. that's what we're doing in this sector. Norway government pension fund global. According to this website, number one, 1.36 trillion right ahead of China investment corporation, 1.2.

And then Kuwait, Abu Dhabi investment authorities significantly bigger than 1.3, but they don't just close it. So I think maybe that's part of what's going on there. Yeah, yeah. How do you feel about taking money as an LP from the Middle East or China? So I don't take it from the Chinese government. I've had 10 cent for a long time. This is a small LP.

I think keeping a relationship with them is useful, but they're very small. It's like 1% of my capital or so. I just, that's like the one I've allowed in. Well, they inquire a lot of companies and they invest in a lot of companies. They do. And they're part of our ecosystem and there's smart people there and they're very impressive. Now that it's going to be interesting question what happens. So I've tried to keep a tie there, even though I'm very skeptical of China.

But you know, I think, I think the UAE is extremely, extremely well-won country. I really like, I think UAE is like the Singapore of the Middle East. I really admire people I've met there and what they've done with the leaders there. I'm really excited. You know, their ambassador, Yusufa Al-Taba, is the one who kind of did this peace deal with Israel and Morocco and other things, along with the last administration. I thought was very good. I really admire them. So we do a lot there. You know, I have a few Saudi families that I've had money from. I haven't taken it from the government to date. I just didn't, you know, I don't think, honestly, Saudi has lots of problems. I don't think it's a still worse than like Turkey, for example.

I think Erdogan is usually problematic. I think it was worse than Turkey 20 years ago. Now, I'm not sure. But I just, but I haven't really spent time trying to go over there. I feel like there's this thing where people who can't get money otherwise will spend the extra effort to go to these places that are kind of really far away and spend a lot of time on it.

And that's kind of what some of those regions are. But there's other places there like the UAE, like, you know, like very solid wealth and Singapore and stuff. They're actually very sophisticated and they are part of the inner circles of Silicon on Valley Down, and they're great to work with. And might have a view of human rights and democracy and humanity that is more in line with yours?

I think UAE is much more in line with me than Saudi Arabia and then other Arab states. That's true. Yeah. That's true. I mean, it matters to you who you're making money for. Yeah. No, it definitely matters to me who I'm making money for. We bring in a ton of friends and family into our funds.

We bring in a ton of corporations we admire, groups we admire. So, yeah, no, we prefer to make money for people we like and we prefer not to make money for really sketchy groups. Yeah. So tell me about... I will, I will say that for a long time, we had both some of the Soroses and some of the Cokes in the fund from both sides. Soroses being far left and Coke being really libertarian right. I wouldn't say far right. Libertarian right, though.

And so, and you know, so my approach in business has been not to be tribal as much as possible. I think I've learned a hell of a lot from the Cokes. I've learned some things too from some of the Soros groups. I was really offended when we made a billion dollars from the Soros Groups from Pallantir. And like the woke kids, like had them had them apologize to the press for making money with us. I thought that was a little obnoxious. But in general, I try to be friendly with both sides and business. And we live in a pluralistic society where we all have different views.

I think that's okay. I think it's good to work with people with different views. What happened to our society where, you know, I think when we were growing up, the idea that, you One family across the street was Republican and super conservative. Another one was super religious, orthodox, you Catholic. We could all disagree and still have a barbecue together. And now it's so polarized. You can't be friends with people.

I think our identities are being expressed maybe too much through politics and too much like our tribe. I think without religion, you get a little bit more tribal that way. I think we used to have ethnicities. We don't, I know we still have ethnicities. We still have racial problems. But I don't think people see themselves as much like my grandma is growing up. you know, she's 101 now doing pretty well, but she was like part of the Jewish group. And there was the Irish group that my other grandma was in.

Yes, yes. And there was, and they're all sorts of groups. And like, we don't have those anymore. So I think we are tribal. Our brains are tribal. We need some kind of tribe. So I feel like we've glommed on to these tribes. And it's probably not very healthy.

But this is what we've done since the beginning of time. We've had some stupid tribe always to fight over, you know. Yeah. And it's now holding us back. And it's pretty obvious that both China and Russia are adversaries, China, the major one in Russia, obviously. quite a minor one at this point, I think you'd agree. But they really like, they know this is our weakness. Oh, they're funding all this nonsense online. I mean, there's all sorts of evidence that the

neo-Marxist stuff, the Black Lives Matter, the parts of it that are neo-Marxist, the China's, the cause division that China was pushing. It's like they're doing whatever they can to divide us. It's, it's, and probably on the proud boys, Milo Yanopolis, all those crazy people on the right are probably also being funded. There's, I'm sure, I'm sure. They probably don't even know they're being funded. These people are so dumb in a lot of cases. Yeah. That they're probably just getting money through shell corporations and not even thinking where they got the money from.

And then I remember during the Trump sort of era, they were paying people to go protest and then they were running the Facebook groups to get them to go to the same location. And then, of course, the media that amplifies it. So we wonder about tribalism. It's like the media is taking something manufactured by the Russians. This stuff is super manufactured. Both the privacy and Antifa like centralized groups, manufacturing nonsense. It's in there

manipulating people because people are easily manipulated. It's crazy. And how many people actually identify with these like fringe groups when you think about it? We're on Twitter, so it feels like it's everybody. You're pretty spicy on Twitter. I'm surprised how brave you are. Sometimes I get frustrated and I put things out there. I was so

frustrated with the incompetence of the whole DOD thing, buying the Taliban, all these weapons. You probably know. My friends and I have been sponsoring all sorts of charter flights out of Kabul and now we can't get to Kabul anymore. Or yeah, no, it's just like so, so I'm sitting there like getting calls from because he's just work with Special Forces community. A lot of these guys are very tied into people who haven't got out yet.

And so like, and then my other friend, I shouldn't say his name yet, but he's, he's a really impressive guy. And he's been saving students from the woman from Kabul University, don't want to become these like ISIS or Taliban brides, right? So they're trying to get out. And like he got the Iraqi president to give them a bunch of student visas to go bring them to Iraq. And so my friends and I helped fly a bunch of them out, help pay for the room board in Iraq.

And there's just all, and then now the efforts are harder. You have to fly and try to fly people out of like the other regions because obviously you can't get out a couple anymore. So we're going over land and then flying out. And so we're spending a lot of money on this, a lot of friends are as well. And it's like we could have just bought maybe a few less attack helicopters for these guys and use that money from the government instead to help our allies. Like maybe that would have been a better use.

I think it was like 63,000 machine guns. We bought them. 365,000 or so assault rifles. I mean, come on. Just this is ridiculous. That was. Our mutual friend, David Sacks, felt that was like the entire last 10 years was just a giant wealth transfer to the military industrial complex to send equipment over there. And what did we get out of it?

It is a military complex thing. That's why I build things in the military right now because the existing ones are just super corrupt. And by the way, this is why I like building startups and then like not being as involved because I think it is like kind of soul destroying to run a large military company at some point. If you get to be too big, because then your incentives are very badly. aligned, right, as we're seeing, you know. Uh, yes, it is very difficult. Let's talk about you were, I think, I'm not sure how long you've been in Texas, but you've been a pretty proponent of Texas. Been here about a year. Been there for a year. You made the move. California, incredibly frustrating, Bay Area becoming basically a bit of a monoculture and going so far left that I think even

many people who are on the far left are regretting some of the decisions. Even a lot of my friends who've been Democrats their whole lives are just furious at how dysfunctional like the left in the Bay Area is the biggest thing for me I'll tell you is I work with a lot of staff and a lot of different contexts in my life. I hire people. I build things. I have people help our family at home. We have three young daughters. We have a lot of help for all the events and stuff. And these people in our lives, they had to drive like an hour, hour and a half to come to see us, even if you're paying like 100,000 a year or whatever, because you can't live on 100,000 a year in the Bay Area. You just can't. It's basically like you're either a service person who has a miserable

super long commute and you don't see your kids or or your billionaire. And so it's like, that's not a healthy way to run a society. You have to allow better infrastructure. You have to allow people to build housing. 40% of the land in the Bay Area is used by cattle. 40%. It's like maybe we should build a few, maybe just like a little bit of affordable housing instead of the cattle.

I don't know. It just doesn't make any sense to me. These people are. And well, every time you try to build a four story building, people complain of the shadow and they downsize it to two. And it's like, it's just so wacky. It's just you can't make, you can't make this stuff. Go to New York or Hong Kong.

Have you been to London or anywhere? It's just so wacky. And it got to the point where like my friends, even in Woodside, which is like the really nice community where we all have like four acre lots there, you know, near Atherton, near Sandale Road and the nice part of Silicon Valley. Like all of us were like, can we do affordable housing and like in our community next to our houses? We will, we're fine with it. Even right next to us, which is not what you usually want in those communities because you know what? It's just morally the right thing.

And of course, we couldn't get it done because there's all these old people. just stop everything. It was happening in Palo Alto. In Palo Alto and up and down the peninsula, they said, you know, you have train stations there. You got Cal trains. You're kind of morally obligated to put up like, you know, some high rises or six-story buildings. Of course.

And guess what? Your teachers, your firefighters, your nannies, your children will be able to live in them and afford them. Exactly. And they're like, no, not in my backyard. It's bonkers. It's crazy. And this, by the way, is this is an urge.

example, this is regulation, again, because this is private, you have private property, you do what you want, you bill it, be fine, but the regulation is exactly what's causing this problem here. Now, you are conservative, you're on the right, but you said earlier, you're for universal health care. Have you always been for universal health care? So I'm, I'm for making sure health care is far more affordable than it is right now. Okay. And then I'm for taking care of the lease well off. I don't think, I don't think the government should be paying for everyone. I think it's a very inefficient way of doing it. I think there's tons of cool innovation possible in healthcare to make it much cheaper.

I think that the way it works right now is in every area of health care, the special interest groups capture and use government regulation to keep out competition and make it more expensive. So lots of people say, oh, we have market healthcare system. We don't really have open markets and health systems with competition. And so if you look at, you look at hospitals, hospitals stop other hospitals from opening up. They stop other clinics from opening up. They put in regulations to make it really tough for competition.

Look at doctors groups. Doctors groups stop nurses for being allowed to do things. There's tons of things you can do with an expert system with AI and a nurse. way better than a doctor. And any kind of test, it's clearly better. And there's regulations saying you're not allowed to do it because doctors want to protect themselves. And if you look at like how selling drugs works, the middleman and the PBMs, they lock

everyone else out. They'll get the IP on drugs. It gets extended way much, way too long to stop any kind of generics. It makes it way more expensive. They have these gag orders on pharmacists. They can't tell them about cheap generics. Like my friends and I got a law passed in the Senate to stop those gag orders. But like, there's like there's like 30 things where the markets are being artificially

distorted and stopped. All sorts of things, telemedicists should be able to be doing that it's not. So I think healthcare could be like half the costs in America. It'd be way more affordable. It could be way better if we allowed markets to function. And if we just like ripped out a lot of these anti-competitive rules. So that's that, that, A, I want to do that. And B, yes, I don't think anyone should be worried about not being taken care of in health care. So some sort of base safety net people maybe under X amount of. We need a safety net for low income people. And and and then we need to like bring down the cost of health care. I wrote an op-ed recently in an Austin statesman, which is a kind of moderate left journal here. It's about here's the types of things we could do to make

Texas healthcare costs not keep growing. We have like seven policy ideas. But there's, you know, I have a policy group called the Cistro Institute. So I'm constantly putting forward policy ideas in different areas. And we actually have a lobbying group that goes and passes them at the state level. So we actually, this is my biggest issues right now is, you know, about half of what we do probably is going to focus on health care because it's just there's so many good solutions to this where we can bring down the cost. We can make it better for everyone. right, entrepreneur, capital allocator, now podcaster, and running Cicero Institute to do public policy.

I've lot of smart people around me, so I just, you know. So, and you're 40-something years old? 38. You're 38. In 10 years, you probably will have done everything you can do as a capital allocator. You think about running for office? You know, I think right now I'm getting more done, not actually being the governor myself. I think I get a lot more done knowing the governors and the legislators and then

helping them and, you know, bringing smart people to do research for them. And we're actually going to be 12 laws passed last year for sister. I wanted to double that and I double it again. And that this is nonpartisan stuff. You say, you know, obviously, I'm on the right in the sense that I believe in markets, that I believe in property rights and I believe in liberty. But I'm on the left in the sense that I think the most important thing any of us could do is to help the least well off and to promote tolerance.

And, you know, you know, I think there's wisdom both from the progressives as well as from the conservatives in our society. So that's, yeah, maybe in 10 years. I mean, it would be, you said earlier that we need people who are from the private sector, who are, you know, well-thought-out, and you would have an unlimited amount of funding to back you. And if I, if I can make a bigger impact running for office than I could with what I'm doing, then I'll seriously consider it.

I think right now I'm making a bigger impact with what I'm doing, to be honest. Well, I mean, I think that is what a lot of rational entrepreneurs and capital allocators or high performers, virtuosos in the market realizes, government is so broken, private sector, so efficient, private sector solutions for nuclear or for solar or what Elon's doing for space. It's almost like the private sector is a better platform. It really is.

You know, my favorite thing Elon is doing, actually, is the tunnels. I have this whole presentation that we're trying to work on in our policy group. If we could do tunnels all around Austin, it's going to make the culture way better because musicians will still be able to afford to live in the city. And it's like, there's stuff like this. It's just so great. Everyone will be. The working class will be.

So it's just, there's all these things with innovation you can solve and just help everyone, which I think that's my favorite kind of thing to focus on. Yeah. All right. Listen, I kept you for well over an hour. You're an amazing guest.

Let's book it again for six months or so or something. Awesome. There's going on and look forward to seeing you in Austin at some point. I enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. Oh, by the way, which one, best barbecue,

best brisket? What do you got to, anytime somebody from Austin's on you, we got to talk about brisket or be fribs. It's like four or five of them, but people always bring up. bring them to my house now. So I haven't,

I still haven't learned the name I like best. So you ask me that in six months and I'll have an, I'll have an opinion. I like, there's Terry Blacks. Terry Blacks is very good. I had, I know,

that's the one Michael Dell sent over. Yeah. Yes, Michael Dell's into Terry Blacks. I like the beef rib there. But then there's La Barbecue. Barbecue? Yeah.

La Barbecue. Which I think has the best brisket. And Franklin's, those two. Franklin's is very good. that's very good job. I think I've tried the barbecue, but it's like, I always have it brought to my house now because of COVID, so I haven't like learned all the names. I'll tell you, Soto's my favorite sushi, very Silicon Valley thing. I have the sushi preference while I'm here. Sotos? Yeah, Soto's

very good for sushi here. Yeah, I think I went there with a friend of ours. Yes, it's, uh, yeah. All right. Listen, continued success. And the name of the podcast is. Oh, it's American Optimist. American Optimist. So if you haven't listened to it yet, I was just listening to your interview with, I forgot. I just listened to your break out on here. Who have you had on so far? Barry Weiss and John, I just did Rick Klausner and Adrian Fenty was the last one and Prime Minister Harper, a bunch of good ones. Ashton Cushar was good.

Oh, you just did Ashton? Oh, very good. Barry Weiss is an interesting one. She's very interesting. She's a clever woman. Lesbian, conservative, but liberal, writing for the New York Times. She's kind of moderate left out of the New York Times as a moderate. She's kind of moderate left, but anti-awoke now.

And of course, she's more anti-awoke after getting bullied. the New York Times. It's incredible. They literally bullied a lesbian, Jewish woman out of the New York Times. She felt she was, and she's a moderate. Yeah. At best, she's a moderate. Yeah.

And they, she felt bullied out of the New York Times. That's, well, New York Times is a pretty extreme place these days, so. It's gotten pretty extreme. I thought that was just fantastical. Like, I was like, what has happened? in that Bari Weiss got, I mean, I used to read her stuff and I was like, wow, she's pretty pretty liberal over here. She's really good.

I follow her stuff, Dr. She was great on the American Optimus. I appreciate it, Jason. All right. Tune in, everybody, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.