America, Power, AI & The Future Of The World - Joe Lonsdale

You mentioned you'd just been with uh Peter there. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. Uh he talks about nonfgeible people like N of ones. Mike Israel, good nonfungeible person. Yes. Uh who are some of the most nonfgeible people that you've met across your I mean of course you know you have to go with Peter Tail and Elon Musk but also people early in my life. My original chess teacher, Richard Sherman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like a intelligence officer and he dropped out. I think he faked his own death and he was kind of living like in poverty teaching chess and was like this chess master sensei who taught me eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting crazy people I met over the years you know really shaped my life. Talk to me about the story of how you sought Peter out as a mentor. Well Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review and and uh he was just someone who was I thought was just fascinating intellectual character at the time and you know honestly what it was also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been interested in is what are the most interesting, brightest, hardest working people doing. And a lot of the smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal. And these are people I was really impressed by. So I said, "Wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want to learn from them, too." And I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be Peter Teal and Elon Musk and who they are today and that that all these companies would come out of it like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and, you know, 16 others, but I but I did I did know it was a lot of the brightest people and I wanted to learn from them. And you know I had a very strong interest not only in computer science but in economics and history and philosophy which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet you know through the Stanford review I think you got got along intellectually. How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful and it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need to assess founders. You need to assess businesses. Uh yeah, how everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes. Well, it's interesting. It's interesting because you said earlier when we were I'm not going to say who you were saying it about, but you know, anyone who like there's the one guy we both know who's who's done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional and that's really impressive, right? It's extreme. And so similarly, when you get people who are really really bright, like really off the charts, minds working great, most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world. But you crazy means lots of things, but but not able to be to keep themselves functional in the real world because they're just too off the charts and a little, you know, too wacky. Maybe it's like extreme autism. Maybe it's something else. But but when you have people who are just off the charts and able to function in the real world, it's actually a pretty small subset and and and and I think you can usually it's a different type of person. It's like a certain type of ambition, a certain type of way of functioning. I'm not not saying that, you know, these are necessarily the most social genius normal people, but they're still able to function with that kind of intellect and that that's a good combination. What is the advantage of being able to function in the real world? I think there's a lot of glory placed on the reclusive madman genius working away in the back room on his own. I, you know, I think I no value judgment. everyone can have like different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things and you know to to me to do the things that impact the future of civilization to build the stuff that's really hard to build whether it's SpaceX or Palunteer which kind of broke through these things in government whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare or education those are those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization so that that requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things right so you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills skill sets. You might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads, right? The tech lead or whatever it might be. But uh and I guess you're going to be pulled up in front of [ __ ] Congress or or some board and you're going to have to defend yourself and if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not going to look right. Well, and maybe I'm a little off and stuff, you know, too, but but I think I can at least still talk to the people, understand the systems, work with them. There are some people, we call them artists in our company. Alex Karp always, my co-founder of Palantry, I always refer to them as artists who are just absolute geniuses. You kind of have to protect them and put up with them, right? So, it's like it's like it's like it's it's like when when you're running a military brigade and like you have an operation, you you might have like a drill sergeant where you yell at them and you have to do this and do the push-ups and run and do this and get this done by this time. And that's not at all how you deal with these like super genius like slightly different technical people. Maybe some days they're 100 times more productive and some days they're just, you know, they're working on something weird and they don't want to come into the office and you just whatever. You kind of have to tolerate it a little bit. You have to protect them because most big corporations, they will spit these people out, right? A big corporation, standard corporation, they want you to fit in a box. Those artists will come in, they won't fit, they'll be gone even and it's stupid because you're getting rid of someone who could have made you win in this whole category if you just could figure out how to morph the or around them and use them. So, so we definitely do work with these people, but they're not the kind of people maybe who could run the organization, right? What do you learn from your time with Peter? What are the things that have stuck with you? Oh gosh, so many things. He's always he's always approaching the world from some kind of like orthogonal perspective and finding new ways to pick apart the most important reasons for things. Every time I see him, I learn something. Uh, you know, I I I wrote this piece online a while ago, like to my team about 15 years ago. It's like main lessons from Peter Teal. So I won't I won't repeat all of them here, but there were nine key lessons. I think one of them was to really value intelligence really highly. I think that was absolutely key. And so it just turns out the very brightest people matter a lot. Um, one of them was you have to break down like their actual reasons for things and their core components. And usually the number one reason should be like much bigger than everything else. So if you tell me I have four reasons for doing this business thing, it means you haven't really thought about it enough. There's probably like one thing that's dominant. Those were really big. One thing you always talked about was that uh effort on any project is convex. And what convex means, it's a shape of a curve where if you spend like 80% of your time focused on something, that's maybe half as good as spending 90% of your time focused on something because that last bit of effort and like it's one of those things where like I think being 99 percentile is worth so much more than being 90th percentile also because that means you're number one and being number one is worth a lot. So there's there's a lot of things like that that you just kind of gave me all these concepts that we all kind of learn when we work with them. Do you find it difficult to not divide your attention in that way? It's very very hard and I think the most important things I've accomplished has been when I've been able to really focus on something for a while and whether that's Palunteer whether it's Adapar whether that's spending months on a thesis at HVC and a framework at HVC that we're going to work on for our investing it is really important to focus and and you know you get to a certain point where I have obviously a lot of financial resources now a lot of influence in the world and so I'm able to help others who are focusing but anything I invest in or do it has to be someone really amazing is making it their main thing and some someone the CEO has to be all in and you know for for the things I do right so an advice for talent is to not divide your focus at all you really just need to like be courageous I think I think the a lot of people in our culture nowadays a lot of them want to do incubators or they just want to do a fund never having built something or they just want to say I'm going to help five different projects and that that's actually kind of like a form it's a it's a type of cowardice it's a type of saying I'm afraid hedging I'm afraid to go all in I'm afraid to say this is the best and I'm going to crush it and like 99.9% of the people who are crushing it and who are changing the world and who are really you know building the future of our civilization they're they're focusing on something how do you come to think about risk it sort of um built into the conversation around courage is fear and uncertainty and risk and dealing with risk and stuff like that how do you assess it you know I think we're all really lucky today versus the past I think it's true that the conditions under which all of us evolved if you go all in on something and you fail, you might have starved to death. You might have been eaten by lions or or some kind of giant old cave bear. You might have been crushed by the local tribe. So, I think we all evolved uh to have existential risk and to be really afraid. And it's not that it's great not to have money in our society. I can't I can't speak to that. Obviously, it's not not great, but come on. Like, we're it's not it's not like 3,000 years ago where you might just get you might just die if you don't succeed. So, I think I think there is enough of a safety net. And at least it's easier for me to say that coming from a middle class family when I grew up that I knew my parents would be able to take care of me if something didn't work out. So obviously I had some privilege, but I think a lot of people with that privilege still aren't willing, you know, to take the risk they should be. What about obsessing over perfection? Something else that I think Peter that's very big on 100% that really ties into the 99.9 percentile thing is like getting something just to be the absolute best. I remember working with him. I was 21 years old and there was some speech that was going to go on in New York the next day and we were like basically pulling an allnighter with a few of the guys in the office to be ready to like have this thing was it was about inflation versus deflation and the risk for both of those and it was just it was just a natural thing to do to just try to make it like absolutely perfect before we're going to go present to the investors and it was really funny actually was with Ken Howry who's an ambassador now to Denmark he was ambassador to Sweden last time he's a good friend who's who's our age and very successful guy in the background and we were just like going back and forth with him and a few others just like working hard then jumping on the plane and sleeping on the plane and on the way over and it's just like everything has to be as good as possible and pushes you push as hard as possible which is if something was wrong you would like this totally unacceptable. How do you avoid that from holding you back? Uh because perfectionism can be procrastination sort of masquerading as quality control. It's like you know the classic west coast move fast break things mentality. Is there a tension between these? 100%. I think if you have really tight fast deadlines is probably good. So it had to be as perfect as possible given that it was coming due in the next day, but we we weren't going to be able to work on it for 5 weeks, right? So I think I think there is something about about really making things as strong as possible, but but sprinting and having really tight deadlines and getting it done right away. I think I think if you use perfection as procrastination, then it becomes a problem. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm still interested in this sense of not getting distracted and trying to keep the main thing the main thing, especially if your main thing becomes a varied thing, right? like built into a lot of people's lives, especially as they end up getting to the kind of place that they want to is well, you don't have to do things you don't want to do that much anymore. No one tells you what to do. So, you end up in a world where you think, well, I get to choose, but with that comes a lot of responsibility cuz I have to choose now. As opposed to before where I just sat on the set of train tracks, it's God, do I want to go left, do I want to go right? The same for yourself. Do I want to invest in or should I sit down and spend six months working on a thesis? Um what about the skill set of learning to sort of let go of what was there of how you operated previously? The sort of courage to to do something uh new even as you've got something that's given you success in the past. No, it's that's totally right. You do have to constantly keep adjusting for what makes sense today. And it's it's interesting. There's different versions of this. One version is as you're successful something you would have been really excited about before, you have to be like, I don't have time for that now. And because all of a sudden you could just have things you were really excited about before 10 times a day. And I I do fall into this myself sometimes because there's lots of really exciting things to do and you have to so it's like really hard to say no enough when you go through periods where you don't say no enough. You might be feel like you're getting stuff done but not actually getting things done. And that's it's really tough. And but you know you said what you said earlier about like things you don't want to do. To me that's like one of the most important things that we focus on is what do you like to do? And as you're successful, you should probably mostly only do things you like to do. Because when what would like to do means to me anyway is that it's like stimulating your entire brain, right? So if you look at like a grandmaster chess player and the very best chess players, when you map out their brains when they're playing, there's all these emotions that are turned on. There's always full parts of their brains that are turned on and it lets them be a lot better what they're doing. And I think this is true in anything we do. If you really love it, then your whole mind is engaged and and you're just able to bring like this this power to bear on things that if it's something you don't really like, you're probably never going to have just that top top ability there. You know, it's almost matching up with what you said about being sort of the 99th percentile within an industry accumulating the 99% of your brain power onto this. You have to you have to be obsessed and love something. And like this is not to say that like everyone should only do things they love to be successful cuz you got to do all the grunt work too. But then once you have a certain level of where you are, you should structure your company and structure your life where you do the parts that you love and you're good at and other people could do the parts, you know, that you're not as good at that you don't love. Joe Hudson, uh, who has just become the head of human performance at OpenAI. Uh, he's like kind of an underground hero coach type person. I'm aware that coach has got a lot of icky uh, associations with it, but this guy's [ __ ] legit. Really, really great. And he says, "Enjoyment is efficiency." And that's kind of I think referencing what you're talking about here, which is if you absolutely love something, it takes fewer inputs to get more outputs. 100%. You can get into the flow. You could just be great if you love it. And so that's that's how you should structure your life as much as possible is what are the things that you love that you're good at that are worth doing? And that's and then do more of those and do less of the things you don't like, but have someone else do them if they're necessary. How do you avoid cynicism? It's a very easy trap in the modern world. This is uh this is the debate I was having with Peter Teal earlier about stuff. He tells me I'm too naively optimistic and is like you want to be kind of optimistic in general, but you don't want to be you don't want to be like overly so. And you know, in general, I think it's easier to be pessimistic and and cynical. I think it's like an easier thing to be. I think I think it's like you can just always say why things won't work. And it actually takes it's a little bit of a challenge to say, "Okay, this is really broken. The system is really broken. Other people haven't been able to do it. How are we going to make it work despite that? It's it's kind of like a it's kind of like being like the hero, warrior, champion to say even though even though this is a mess, what are we going to do to make it work? And and and and that's it's it's a it's a leadership quality that I think if you bias towards that it can be figured out often I've just found oftenimes things can be. Have you ever read uh Endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic. So it's the best I think the best retelling of that. And um it's really interesting cuz all of the guys had their their own individual journals or diaries that they were writing in. And what you hear from everybody else except for Shackleton is what Shackleton's saying. But what you read in Shackleton's diary is what Shackleton was thinking. And it's this really interesting dichotomy between what he says and how he needs to show up as a leader. Yeah. And what he's thinking privately. And it's almost like a Bruce Wayne Batman type split personality. What was he thinking privately? He is just swimming in self-doubt and uncertainty and fear. He has no idea if it's going to work. He he doesn't even know if he know if if this is the right. But he goes out there and he needs to say to the guys, this is exactly the way that we're going to go and we know that this is going to work and we're such and such. And um it it was the first time that I'd ever really thought because obviously the the consequences are so dire. But it really made me think about huh there are prices that leaders pay that nobody else pays and that you can't share the burden of. And everybody everybody has main character energy in their own life. Right? Everybody is the lead star. They're the front man woman of their own existence. Um, and I think a lot of the time we want to port that across onto the teams that we work in, the organizations that we're a part of. You go, okay, there's going to be some prices that you're going to have to pay for that. As as a as a leader, you have to suffer things that no one else suffers, and you have to deal with the things no one else deals with. And it's actually really interesting because I I I invest in a lot of great leaders now and try to help them and try to mentor them. And it's very funny because you end up sometimes having to be their therapist a little bit because there's no one else they can talk to. Show the company what's going on. And you know, we we didn't really grow up with therapy in my house. It's not something I do at all, but I think I imagine it's something similar when people are dealing with struggling through something really hard like this. Temperature plays a huge role in how well you sleep. But traditional bedding often falls short. 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What are the most common challenges, aggregated challenges that the leaders that you work with are suffering with? Oh man, it's just there's all sorts of different versions of this. I think I think one of the most common challenges it's the hardest to diagnose because they don't come to you is is this like excess is excess pride and and like not not and like just like having so much money thrown at them because right now there's just so much money for the very best people in the stuff and AI that's starting to work. And so you get you get this like I think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges. just like this over inflated ego and sense of it's like a I think all of us who are entrepreneurs have some narcissism. I think that's like a natural thing but when it gets to a real extreme that's really dangerous and you stop questioning and you and you stop admitting when things are not going quite right cuz you can paper over it with the money you raise. So that's that's probably the biggest challenge is that side. I think the the other the other side of things is just this like even the best people will have a lot of doubt about what's actually going to work and self-doubt and and then and then when things are just about to work and they've had to push really hard, there's almost always this thing that happens where like a bunch of people are going to quit because like it's not quite working and then you got to convince them to stay a little bit longer. I mean, you have to like find that like belief in yourself to push to those other people, right, to get it over the line. Your Shackleton coming out and saying we know this is the direction. Don't worry, don't fear. I mean a palunteer about three years in like a few of the really key people were just like this is taking too long. We don't have any major contracts like this is just ridiculous. We're pretending we're like these kids who are going to like run the global intelligence you know framework like what is even going on here. I can't do this anymore. I have these all these other offers to pay me a lot more money and you know these shares are not clear they're worth anything and it was like really hard to convince them to stay. And then when they did of course it worked and then they're you know I think a couple of them are still running their company there now which is great. So, but it's it's like these things that are really hard to to push across the line sometimes. How do you advise uh the guys that need to keep their feet on the ground? you say going to hang out with some of your friends from school and tell them to [ __ ] talk you a little bit like Yeah, sometimes I'm a good person for it because usually I'm a lot more successful than them and I can make fun of myself having similar narcissistic tendencies and and and then you kind of like can bring them down a little bit by seeing like maybe theel themsel and you and like you can like if you can like if you can like respect them by attacking what's wrong with them by attacking it in me maybe they at least listen now because it like cuts their pride down a little bit but it's so like there's sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle having having been there myself and been sure I could conquer the world and like you know especially in your early 20s and you get late 20s you get this energy that's just like nothing can stop me and that's it's both healthy but also have to be really careful how it's filtered you know speaking of mentors University Boston our new place came from there new place of residence what motivated you to co-ound that well uh we thought it'd be great to have a world-class university here there's no top private university in Austin um we wanted to compete with Stanford Harvard MIT these We think there's some things that are still good about those universities, but there's a lot that's gone wrong. There's a lot that's broken. I'm I'm personally deeply concerned about just like, you know, you used to have these young people would go to these places. You go to Harvard and it's like this like pathway to a functional elite and it's elite that's like has a sense of duty and that has a sense of excellence and and it's like it's clear where they're going when they're there. And and I think I think we taught just implicitly in our civilization, we taught courage, right? We taught we taught like like pride in our civilization and the in the duty we have like that we've built this upon hundreds of years of progress from the enlightenment and from our classical values and here's what the classical values were and the virtues and Rome and here's what the geochristian wisdom was and here's all stuff that came from that and this is all stuff you kind of like you kind of built the great men of our civilization with with these values and nowadays you go to a top university and there's no sense of duty there's no sense of pride in civilization I think most of these kids couldn't even tell you what classical virtues are anymore or have any idea about about why they were important. Most of them, if anything, probably are dismissive of like wisdom from Judeo-Christianity as opposed to appreciating how that shaped our civilization in positive ways, right, with the radical equal dignity of human life. And most of them, they've lost the lessons of the Enlightenment and how that was filtered into our government and what that means for the West and why America has been an example, right? If anything, I think we're taught about why America's terrible. And so and then on top of that, I think the worst of all, so you miss all the wisdom. But then the worst of all is you're basically taught the opposite of courage. You're taught to shut up and go along. You're taught that if you speak out, there's something wrong with you, right? You're taught that you're taught you're taught that everyone's supposed to virtue signal. And so if if you have a whole generation of our supposed elite that are all taught to be like like beta and and wimpy and scared, that's terrible for our civilization. That means that means we're going to give up everything. And so, you know, I think even having one university that starts to to teach the wisdom, but but try to create people who speak up, who debate, who, you know, have the intellectual humility not to say this is just the way my way of thinking of it, but to have actual debates where they listen and they learn and to go out in the world and to model that culture and model that courage for others. That's a really big deal for our civilization. What do you think other institutions are getting right at the moment? I think that some of these institutions are very good at teaching very narrow advanced topics. Right? I think if you want to be really really good at certain types of physics or chemical engineering or computer science, there are other top universities with other really smart people there first of all. So there's a great network of smart people and there's professors who are very good at these at these certain certain narrow fields and that's that's positive. But I think there's like so much that's gone wrong with science. So much has gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology that there's just there's this and you know the other thing it's crazy the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average. So you have more administrators at Harvard and Neil than you have students. No way. Yeah. It's crazy. It's like you think it's fake it. Uh they're doing like lots of policies for virtue signaling and for making sure that they can hire other bureaucrats and making sure these bureaucrats like put out all sorts of like you know like stuff about whatever the woke topic of the day is and and and whatever programming they need for the students to make sure the students are you know feel guilty about their race or whatever. I don't know. The whole thing is crazy. Is that still going? And I I'm aware that it was a hot topic to be spoken about either as a virtue signal or pushed back against as you know sort of a a flag that you plant in the ground to say no further than this. And that seems to have died at least a little bit. There's always a sense that uh those sorts of news stories catch fire when the rebellious outer party is the one that's pushing against it. And I think that, you know, if you're inside of the tent t the tent pissing out as opposed to outside of the tent pissing in, uh it does give a different dynamic. But I kind of got the sense that how can these after the Yale scandals, after a Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw over the last 18 months, forget going back further, like is this really still continuing to ramp up? What's your perspective on this? I don't know if ramp up's the right word but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions right as the famous communist discussed and these institutions were conquered by extreme ideologues right there's been multiple studies of this where like the administrators are pretty much universally to the hard left of the professors and they're are activists and so and these activists have conquered these institutions it's not like it's this it's active conquer right and so now are they going to be virtue signaling as much about things like DEI in today's culture of course they're going to be a little quieter about that because they don't want to get pissed off the donors and get fired, wave the flag. So, they're going to they're going to so they're not going to they're not going to but but are they going to keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they going to like all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up to someone else? No way. So, so there's a lot of naivity in our culture. Just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves were fixed, right? And these things are still completely conquered. And I think people are they think of it the wrong way. They're like, "Oh, well, it'll probably just fix itself." Like, no. These people are in charge. The the layer of administrators are in charge. The professors run their departments, the lawyers at at the university set the rules. And then the board of trustees has been completely stacked with people who are either terrified of being controversial in public or on the side of the administrators. And so there's no none of them are going to get fixed, which is which is why you got to build new ones. I mean, this is and that's that's fine. You know what? These are somewhat broken. It's sad. Let's build new ones. You know, let's let's build new great ones. That's what we're trying to do. Yeah. Just because you can say the word [ __ ] on Twitter without getting banned now doesn't mean I know it is. It's we're so back. Someone has to buy Miriam Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year because they're not going to do it themselves. Ah, very good. Uh, I learned about Sullivan's law earlier today. Have you encountered Sullivan's law? Remind me. I think I know which one. We're going to have I'm going to have to outsource it here. What's Sullivan's law? Well, there's Conquest Law and there's Harding's Law, which is Yeah. So, yeah, that's Solan. There's different ways of putting it. Basically, this is really interesting. And so another way of putting it for some people they say if you don't explicitly make an institution rightwing it will get conquered by the leftwing. That's what a lot of people believe and that tends to be what happens but I think it doesn't have to be quite so partisan is that like the goal of uh is not to be a partisan institution. And by the way it'd be a failure if it was a right-wing institution in the sense that there weren't I mean you want to have the smartest and best people there and you want to be arguing with people who disagree with you in classes and with professors, right? It's not a healthy intellectual environment if if only one side dominates. What you can do and this this is a little bit more controversial I guess but what you can do at the administrative level you can say we don't want to be conquered by illiberal forces. What are illiberal forces? Illiberal is stuff that's against kind of the the values of freedom in our society against free speech. So illiber liberalism is communism that's specifically an illiber liberal force. Uh other authoritarian things are identity politics and that whole culture that does seek to impose a lot of those things top down is very broken. It's a kind of a morphed new form of communism. And frankly, things like Islamism, like the implied authoritarian framework of that is also something that's an authoritarian force. So those are the types of things you say, we're not going to let those conquer our institution. We're going to be explicit about it, but it's really important to have free speech in the institution and have people with different backgrounds and views. So what are the other than the ideological leaning, what are the other biggest problems you see in higher education at the moment that you're trying to fix? Well, well, you know, so, so when you have an institution like this, you want to bring in the top entrepreneurs in our country, the top innovators in our country, and you want to expose them to the students in a way where they're helping shape the courses, but you also want to have a lot of top academics on on on the on the humanity side. So, we have what's we have what's called intellectual foundations on one side where we think every top college student going to a top university should be given the intellectual foundations of our civilization with history and economics and philosophy and the great books and just is have that foundation, right? But then you also want to have courses that are shaped not only STEM, but stuff that's shaped by, you know, I have I have over a hundred friends who are founders of billion-dollar companies who signed up to be on our talent network and to give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're going to come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I think having both of those is very rare, right? So I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education. Exactly. I think having both and and this is a dialectic. I'm obsessed with these dialectics, but there's there's like truth for why both of those extremes are important and you need to merge them and have them there. And by the way, when you merge them properly, it's really fun because you can get different debates about what's going on in the innovation world at a startup and you could argue about that from a philosophical perspective and you can apply some of the old, you know, debates from a long time ago and old wisdom from a long time ago. Like imagine applying a xenophone, you know, who was this is a guy who was writing in 300 BC and and and he wrote about Cyrus the Great and his values and his principles and why he became so successful and all the young European princes for like 1500 years were trained were read Zenapon and read about Cyrus to train like here's the values of who you should be to be a great prince and a great leader and what that meant and be able to have that and then talk about that in the context of a startup leader we're arguing about and the principles is fun. You can mix these things together. M what else is there to say on dialectics? Give me a 30,000 foot view of how you use them. You know, just in general, a lot of things are not simple truths that are either on one side or the other. Most of the time in the world when there's debates, there's actually deep truth on both sides. So, if you want to apply it to the innovation world, I always love the dialectic in the product organization where on one hand you have like Steve Jobs or you have like the guy who ran Sod in the 80s. Steve Jobs basically said, "I don't care what the consumers tell me they want. I'm I'm gonna figure out what's best and I'm going to show them a breakthrough and then they're going to love it. Right? And there's some really deep wisdom in that. It's not what they're asking for, right? They didn't know what to ask for a car, right? You know, they would ask for something with horses. So, so what's the breakthrough we're going to give them? But then there's another thing that's actually really true even at Apple, which is that once you have a product, there's like a hundred things that consumers want that bug them. Especially in enterprise, there's like ways they're not able to use it for some reasons. They have like product needs. So you need someone like 14 hours a day like mapping out all these needs and understanding them and prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it so it's as good as possible. And so how do you you know if you if you only have this Steve's Jobs Genius thing, it's going to end up being something that's like too clunky and people aren't happy with it and won't get better. If you but then if you have these guys over here iterating taking over, then you never get the next burst of genius and it's really terrible. So how how do you keep that genius like I'm going to tell them what they want alive along with a feedback thing? And I'm I'm slightly better. I've done a lot of products where I create them. I usually have someone else who's better than me at the 14 hours a day iterating process, which is really important. They're two separate things. So, you holding both of these in your mind at the same time. You have to know. Yeah. You have to know they're both important. And then you have to know when to bring out different sides and how to make mix them together. And usually with dialectics, the truth is on the extreme. It's not in the middle. It's not like some sloppy middle. It's same. It's it's like you you you want you you want to have you want to have like like the really crisp reasoning of like just pure invention with like nothing interfering and you want to have the really crisp reasoning of iteration, you know, put pushing it back. So So you know, in general, you know, I'll give it like there's other one um there's the whole Nitian there's a whole Nitian perspective versus the geochristian perspective. And so, you know, I'm my dad's Catholic, my mom's Jewish. I grew up Jewish. Uh, and yet I was pretty obsessed with like the whole niche framework as a 14-year-old. I thought it was really cool. I don't know if you've read Frederick Nich, the Will to Power and all this stuff. And you if you get too into it and like one of the thing he talks about is how is how the most the world's mostly driven forward by like the top 1% of like talented people in Uber Mench and they're the ones that kind of build the future and that they're the ones that matter in a sense of what the future's going to look like cuz they're creating it. And if you and there's lots of truth that the very very most successful people and most talented people and you know Thomas Jefferson called them the natural aristocracy they do run things and drive things forward and that and it's really key. Now if you only have that side of the dialectic it's really dangerous. It turns out by the way that Hitler was very obsessed with that too and and and that's dangerous right and so so what's the other side? Well one of the great insights of Judaism that became the great insight of Judeo-Christianity is the radical equal dignity of all human life. Right? This is something that Rome did not have. Right? Rome celebrated like making watching people kill each other and whatever and they're not us and they're slaves and and there's all sorts of kind of pretty nasty stuff and and one a big breakthrough with Christianity with Judaism and then Christianity which spread it all around was that actually every human life matters and every human life has equal dignity and that our whole civilization is based on that respect for everyone and for every life and and that's a dialectic right because on one hand it's true the top 1% are driving forward the future but it's also true that like every life matters and that you're not a good person under the geochristian framework if you don't understand how to protect and help everyone and so and so does that mean that all of our money should go towards helping disabled kids and nothing should go towards like the most best gifted kids that's what they've done in a lot of blue cities now which is which is they've failed they've got just only one side of the dialectic right they've only helped the the bottom but but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either you got to help both it's like a U right so there's things like this that I think if you understand okay there is a dialectic these both matter how are we going to keep both of these in mind as people running a society as leaders in society it becomes helpful framework to understand and is the middle way you go to die that it's like oh we're not yeah if you don't if exactly you don't want it's just it's just sloppy thinking we're gonna you know you don't want sloppy thinking you actually do want to help the very least off in ways that are very expensive and and it's right thing to do it's an it's a ethical thing to do that we're helping the very worst off and that we're investing a lot more in them but you're also sacrificing your future and you're not building a great future for 50 years from now if you're not also accelerating the very top very aggressively which is something we've stopped doing in a lot of parts of our country because because these because these really brightest kids by be able to pick them out and then push them further ahead. They do create the future and giving them an edge. It's not that it's it's not that it's inequity. It's that we I want there to be like an like 100,000 extra super genius kids getting pushed way ahead. They're going to make our future. They're going to cure diseases when I'm an old man. They're going to figure out how to make me live 10 years longer and much healthier. They're going to do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone, right? So, it's like you kind of want both. Yeah. I suppose uh you need to be that the product needs to be as good as it can be. It needs to be perfect. You need to obsess over perfection and quality and also you need to ship at a rate that's sufficiently quick that you can iterate and start a great dialectic like how do you do perfection and how do you do not not procrastinating and taking too long is these and these these are and it's tough dialectics are hard because there's no perfect answer but you have to you have to play with both extremes. You're right. Yeah. I you need to narrow your focus but also be open to new opportunities at the same time. Yeah. This is why it's so hard in the world is that there are these conflicting truths. It's like a I guess they called it a a a cone I guess in Japanese wisdom, right? There's all these different just there's two different sides of it. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before and that's because frankly I'm dependent on it for the last 3 years. I've started my morning every single day with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need, nothing that you don't. It's got a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other junk. And it plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is like a beautiful sweet, salty, orangey nectar, and it is the ultimate way to begin your day, and I genuinely feel the difference when I don't take it. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy. So, you can buy it and try it, use the entire box, and if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back, and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modern wisdom. My friend Alex and his wife talk about this is um a problem to be managed, not a paradox to be solved. And uh I think that that's that's kind of like an interesting frame where you go um Scott Alexander refers to it as thinking in superp positions. So you know you have sort of these these two positions that exist at the same time. Cat is both alive and dead and people try to collapse them down into a single position but that's actually where stuff often goes wrong because these two things don't exist together. Exactly. Work on ex. Exactly. And then there's a lot of things like that where you have to keep it separate. What else? What are what are some of the other dialectics that you often sort of see appearing in your life? reread my piece online before I came. This is this is this is a this is a tough what what are some of you know I I apologize nothing like right away is coming to mind. I wrote this long piece about this like 12 years ago. No. Well, there might be something that pops up in a bit. Anyway, um AI in education. So, the party that uh we were both at during South by Southwest. We went to that big dinner party and uh I was sat next to this fascinating guy and he was giving this what might as well have been a 90-minute long [ __ ] TED talk. It's probably Jamont. Correct. Um, I was keeping it I was keeping it uh keeping it quite bad. I mean, you're you're better friends with him, so you can say what you want. Um, he's great. I really appreciated as well that he wants to sort of be doing the thing behind the scenes without putting himself in front of the scenes, no matter how much I try and bring him on the podcast. Yeah, I shouldn't I shouldn't I shouldn't talk about it. No, he likes I mean it was a it was a [ __ ] dinner party but me and the sort of four people that were within earshot before the next you know whatever territory of conversation bubble that took over each one each person had a territory grab. This is such a key thing to push education forward this way and the only reason it's not happening at greater scale is because there's no market mechanism right now of competition in education. Just because you have the best thing doesn't mean people are allowed to go to it. So we're trying to put market mechanisms in. Can you can you explain what it is that he's trying to do? Yeah. and and you know in general it turns out that if you personalize uh the app and personalize the learning where you can map out like an ontology or a schema of everything that the kid needs to learn in an area you can and you can have something interacting with them. You could see where they're good and where they're not good. And a lot of times what happens for example is a kid will get like way behind in one area. They're like two grades behind and they never get caught up because they never no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills. But if you have an app that's really good at like measuring and teaching, then it turns out with two hours a day, you're actually able to get kids way way ahead. And I think you can get the majority of the kids, you know, in in in alpha school, for example, I think are 99 percentile. And some of them are are are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead and this with this personalized AI learning that like teaches, you know, to how they need to learn and what they need to know. And it's it's amazing because in two hours a day, they do the academics and then they have time for projects and for life skills. I think there's going to be schools they're doing where like kids get to play video games cuz these young men aren't studying otherwise. Being designed by the guys that did Fortnite, I think he's doing some really cool things with that. There's there's other schools for sports and for kids who want to get way ahead in sports. You're going to stay ahead academics for two hours, then you're going to train and you're going to be the best at the sport you want to play. So, I think there's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and and we could try out education. And it's it's awesome to see successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this, you know, for our country. It's really amazing. Yeah, I I found it very interesting. He was talking about the massively reduced prevalence of ADHD in these schools because if you're running around for 4 hours a day and you're only strapped to something which is probably a bit more engaging and is at your level of of education and is helping you to 100% all these kids are just being tortured. I I think a lot of the way we teach school right now is just like this torturous daycare that's terrible for kids and to actually exactly to two hours a day of the at your level you need to know you're going to be more focused more interested than being able to run around be in charge. I think I think the alpha school model is built on top of what's called the Actton school model and and Actton Academy is this really cool breakthrough uh where they just basically gave the kids a lot more control of the school and then got to build their own constitution, their own frameworks and give them a lot more responsibility which I think is a very cool kind of libertarian model for the inmates are running the asylum. That's what you're telling me. It's awesome. And it creates this like responsibility. It's just it works. It works if it's done right. You still have guys and adults there but it works. And then and then I think on top of that he's put like competitions. He's put like really good AI and and listen, it's just like smart people getting together and building and this is what you education clearly to me should look like, you know, in 10 20 years in America. And the real question at this point is how do we roll it out to other places and unfortunately we have some really powerful special interests that don't exist for our kids, they exist for their own employment and the school administrations right now. And so that that's going to be a big battle in our country. Is this department of education stuff a little bit? It's much more just like the just the teachers unions in general and the administrations locally in the school districts. Texas for example has something like 1,200 school districts and they're not accountable and they're overpaid and it's just like in terms of these administrators and stuff and I don't even know what they're doing. It's just it's the whole thing is just like very sloppy and there's a big war right now for school choice in Texas, but we're only fighting over putting $1 billion towards school choice which is not big enough anyway. So, it's like hopefully we can make that a lot bigger next time and just get a lot more parents able to send their kids. Like the ideal situation is the middle class can afford to reallocate the money the government's giving them for education to go to one of alpha schools or another school of their choice and not be stuck on something that's not as good. Is there a place for AI in higher ed? Yeah, you know, in in general in general, I think a lot of like any kind of learning of math and science and any of that like can be driven forward with AI and you're going to start seeing a lot more of that too. um you know and there's probably lots of ways in which I think people already are learning in higher ed like what would Plato think of this based on this and where can't it interject what what what will it struggle at you know you've thought a lot about the university experience you guys are trying to give a more classical sort of approach I suppose yeah well I mean a lot of the university experience is about being around other young adults who are exploring the world and learning and and and interesting professors and having intellectual environment where you're where you're you're socializing with and and you're and you're exploring ideas with with other people and and I think it's like it's really important to have this in-person experience. I think that's that's a key part of what makes universities this amazing thing. And so I think I think I think that's not going to be something you just have with AI is to not you know you have to have people around you. You have to be learning you have to be debating things in a classroom and can can AI make some of that better and augment it. Certainly I mentioned uh university for me was kind of like Navy Seal boot camp for socialization but it lasted 5 years and um it you know it it it is it's the people's skills for the most part. I I uh I was in the dorky fraternity at Stanford and I have friends who were in the cool fraternity. So then sometimes they would still be my friend back then which was nice. Ended up working for me later so it's good. But but like but the dorky fraternity and I remember going to spring break and back then my friends like Joe you can't tell the girls that you're a computer scientist. It's not cool. You have to pretend you're like American studies or something. And I have some bad stories. We figured it out actually. Uh have you seen what Jordan Peterson's doing with Peterson Academy? A little bit. Tell me about it. uh it's he's trying to give a university level education online and he's got some really really interesting uh lecturers or teachers I suppose and they're trying to get certification and they're trying to sort of assess whether or not people have gone through the course and all the rest of it and I think it's great but kind of like the realization that maybe many businesses have come to understand postco that there are many intangibles that are borne out from water cooler talk and and from being being around other people for me if at least at least if you're trying to do something that's like the high-end western civilization university experience like like that's Oxford that's Cambridge that's Harvard that's Stanford and these places now are more broken than they were but but there's still a lot of wisdom to how they were structured and why they were structured that way and why you had your eating clubs and whether it's a fraternity or some other kind of you know group or whatever. I think I think having these these things in your life are tough. So I think I think what Jordan Jordan's a really talented guy. I'm a fan of his. I think he's going to have something that's very interesting to learn online. I think, by the way, I think I think we may do things we learn online, too. I think it's a very positive part of that, but it's not the full experience. Can you explain to me what the [ __ ] going on with these tariffs, Joe, please? Well, this is always a dangerous thing to talk about for many reasons because I'm helping the administration and like I'm like advising people in the DoD and the HHS, which is healthcare part with, you know, all these different areas and I'm helping friends in Doge and I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on and tariffs. Tariffs are very complicated topic. So that the kind of typical like libertarian framework is just all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage, right? And and and you have people who can specialize and and like and there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all. For example, if you have like tribes people making you vanilla or coffee they're growing and they're very poor, but they're making a little more money now because they're selling it to you and then you say, "Oh, we have a trade deficit with you." Like like the guys growing the vanilla aren't going to start buying all of our products, right? So, it's okay to have some trade deficits. Now, the part where I think the administration, frankly, is like completely correct is there's a lot of like really unfair barriers everyone's put up against US companies all over the world. And it's not just tariffs, right? So, tariffs is one problem, but the other problem is they just make all sorts of crazy rules that effectively mean no one other than their companies could sell in certain sectors. And every country does this, but like like like just like the the fruits have to be grown here or have to only be sold within a certain amount of time or certain amount of distance from where they're where they're grown or or the cars have to have like all these exact specifications and it's designed specifically ahead of time where someone whispers it to all their companies and they no one else passes the test other than them or but there's all there's always like different ways you can kind of cheat and make rules to keep people out and like all these countries do this and it kind of made sense. America was so dominant after World War II and it kind of made sense for how we were like building a global order with allies that we kind of gave them an advantage a little bit to work with us and and they did take away a lot of our manufacturing, you know, in certain areas and then it and then like we had this naive view that like if you just give China this like WTO entrance and you trade with them and make them rich, they're not going to be communists anymore. And that naive view was shown to be totally wrong about 10 years ago. You have this crazy communist in charge. He's murdered a bunch of people. He's like he's like completely in charge. He's not he's not he's not a pro market guy. He's not a freedom guy. He's he's clearly like he's you know in his youth he would sing poems about harden your heart to destruction of America. He's clearly doing things to hurt America and and and so and so these people have taken advantage of us around the world. China's definitely not become free. It's definitely stolen away a lot of our manufacturing base. And so what are the tariffs that are good? I'll give you a few examples. One tariff is definitely good. Let's say it's cheaper to manufacture something in like Indonesia or China because they're polluting and because the pollution to not pollute costs a lot of money. So that's obvious first tariff that right away, right? Because you don't want to just let them pollute, right? That's I don't think anyone would disagree with that no matter what your view is. I think another one that's good is that we need something for our defense industrial base where we need to be able to make it here in order to have our defense, you know, department or or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever. Like like obviously tariffs some of that supply chain. We need it. We need it here. We need to build it here, right? And subsidize it here. I think those are obvious. And then you get into more complicated things. You know, I'm generally pro- free trade, but if you look at what happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, she was very pro free trade and she opened it up to the EU. And in 1989, she said it was one of her biggest mistakes she ever made because what she didn't realize is that when she opened up UK to the EU market, they basically put Brussels as a bureaucracy in charge of everything, which was terrible. It's a total mess. And so, so you got to be very careful what you're opening yourself up to in terms of other people being in charge effectively. Now, of your rules, you give up sovereignty. So that's a reason it's bad. And then and then I mean finally and this is where it gets like everyone really argues but like in general I don't think small consumption taxes are bad. I think overall they're better than income and capital gains taxes. So I think a small one probably makes sense. So I mean so listen there's and there's and and then and then I guess the very last one of course is yes we went from 30% manufacturing to to 10% you know over the last 30 years. Should all of that be in the US? Probably not. Some of those jobs are just not things we want. Should more of it probably be in the US for more of what we do? Probably. So So listen, it's not it's not totally insane. I I there's there's there's dumb tariffs, which is like tariffing coffee or vanilla, and there and there's tariffs that are too high to to break things with our allies. Uh but there are tariffs to let us take away these barriers I talked about, and then put things back here. So it's it's not it's not as crazy as people think. I think the way they implemented it was maybe a little too aggressive at first, but the reason they did that is to get everyone's attention. So we'll see. Yeah. I can't work out. It feels like I'm in a I don't know, opposites day meets Groundhog Day back to back to back. I'm like, is this a 7D chess move? Is this an error? And uh I I'm unable to [ __ ] decipher what's going on, which maybe says everything you need to know about me and mine. Well, let's let's be honest, President Trump uh I think he has very good intuition in general. I think he also in general loves to be the center of attention and have to have everyone come to him. So, I think making that the maybe my personality would not have been to do as quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, ah, I freak out everyone. Print it off on a piece of PVC. But a that's his personality and b now they're all going to come make good deals. So, you know what? There's there's different ways of doing things and and this is this is who this guy is and you know, if he makes some great deals over the next few months, it could it could actually end up being a great thing. So, so I I I think you have to say that there's there's a logic in what JD Vance and President Trump think they're doing and and al and the jury is still out is is my view. How important is this to US-led global order continuing stuff like that? Well, I I they've definitely they've definitely made a decision that they want to change the terms on which on which we're engaging. America has been subsidizing a lot of things around the world. Uh and that way we've been subsidizing it, they would argue, has been very good for people like me who are building the biggest companies and have a lot of capital and are able to to invest here and around the world and partner has been not as good in their estimation for some of the people in our working class and some of the communities that that have got hollowed out. And I think I think they want to change those dynamics a bit. Like I I I am concerned to have America still be a very important powerful force of the world for good. I I don't like the fact that even today thanks to the B administration's actions. If you look at the ships that are going from Europe to Asia, they're going around the Horn of Africa because we weren't strong enough to like enforce like like freedom of navigation on the Red Sea. Like if you look at a graph, like a flexport graph, you can get, you know, it's just a company that tracks all these containers. It's like all the dots go around the bottom instead of going through the middle because the world order is starting to break down because of how we're handling things. So there are things like that that aren't good and I think we should be stronger on them. Um but there is going to be a changing relationship for sure. The let's think about the intersection between two of your worlds. Uh one being maintaining some US-led global dominance and the other one being war. Uh, and sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what feels like everywhere except for us over here, I guess, just because there's two really [ __ ] big oceans on either side. Um, what what concerns you and what do you think is overblown when it comes to people's worries about sort of global stability and stuff like that? What concerns me the most right now is the regime in Iran. Um, this is a regime that was actively promoting lots of different terror organizations. They were, we've now find incontrovertible evidence that they funded the October 7th, you know, attacks and rapes and murders. Uh, they've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthies, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about. And this is Oh, that's the that's there. That's why they can't get through the Red Sea is the thing. And and so for me, and it's actually really sad because I work with a lot of Iranians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, just the Persian people, others, and and they're some of the most talented people in our companies. There's some amazing people. And it's what's really interesting is like the Iranian people themselves love America and even love Jews in Israel. But the people, it's like this country was conquered. It was communists and Islamists together and then the Islamist and then the Islamist killed off the communists and just took charge. And this it's like it's like a modern-day country conquered by like crazy theocrats, right? who then like whip people and like execute 16- year old girls for being raped because it's your fault if you're rape under Islamism. I mean, the whole thing is just like crazy. You can't you can't make it up. It's like these are insane people who've conquered a country and are taking the money and sending it out to terrorists and and and we're at a really interesting point now where we've basically cut off some of their most powerful like like crazy terror people and then there's these people in the country who desperately want to be free. So for me and yet they're working as hard as they can to getting a nuclear bomb. And so for me this is very scary and and they walk over American flags every day at their government. they walk over, you know, and so they they talk about death to America. They're trying to build a nuclear bomb. I think these people truly are crazy. And I think that's to me that's a really big danger and we could end it for a long time. So I'm hoping we do. That's that's that. In terms of terms of overblown, I actually listen, I think there's a lot of unfortunate conflicts in Africa. I think Christians are being attacked all over Africa by Islamist. That's a separate problem, but also one I maybe there's something to do about. I think mostly the world's actually more peaceful today overall than it has been for a long time. Obviously, we're all very worried about China. Uh the Russia Ukraine thing is is is a is is a is a mess, but but I think overall, like it's not like it's not like Europe's in like tons of conflicts right now. I think I I think I think overall we're a pretty good place if we can like take care of these few crazy people. A quick note, I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, Function run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. And then they've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, then your testosterone levels might be the problem. 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Well, you know, after founding Palunteer for a while, I didn't do defense cuz it's so annoying to have to work for the government. I built companies in other areas. And then I went back into defense about 10 or 11 years ago cuz really what happened is we saw Xiinping again take over China. We saw him forcing a lot of our friends to have their best engineers in China working on on things with the PLA. And it was clear he was becoming like very militaristic. And then it was also clear that they were innovating and doing things that were ahead of some some of what we do here. Well, like well they had better hypersonics in certain areas. They were starting to do swarms of drones. They could they attack in different ways. And it just it was just none of our defense hardware companies, none of the big primes, you know, have. So what a prime is is that in the 1990s the cold war ended and we had all the best companies in defense but we weren't going to spend as much on defense anymore. So they all merged and they formed these like nine giant companies. These companies started to become very bureaucratic almost like they were arms of the government and then in the late '9s all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating and so it's these these big companies just fell way behind in software way behind and all these new possibilities and and so China had this like new dynamic sector and we had this like kind of old sclerotic legacy failing things. We're like, "Oh my god, we got to get our best people to work on this." And so my friend Palmer Lucky, who' backed Oculus before, he partnered with three Palanteer guys to form Andre, which is a very famous company now raised at 30 billion plus valuation. Uh, and then shortly after that, I'm like, you know, so we backed that and we we went all in and then we started Epis. Epis is named after the both of Thesus, which had infinite arrows, but it's the best EMP company. So we could shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation, right? So it's just it's really cool at turning off swarms of drones. And so what's happening now is you have swarms of drones in the air. You have swarms on the on the water. Here in Austin, we're building hundreds of smaller ships. We're teaching the Navy how to use AI to, you know, weaponize autonomous vessels. And and then you have things under the water that are new. You have things in space that are that are fighting. And so you have all these new possibilities, new missiles, new ways of turning off bad guys. And all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control. And so yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on. Is this the quickest moving that sort of warfare technology has ever gone? You know, warfare's changed a lot over the years. One of my favorite books was a shield of Achilles, which is like this thousandpage book on constitutional government in Europe and it shows how every time there's like a new form of warfare that's best. It changes the government's the structure of governments as well because the structure of government has to be able to support that form of warfare. So if you example if you need like if like a knight who's fully armored with modern technology could take on like 50 peasants everyone needs to make knights which means you have this very feudal society that forms and the feudal societies conquer Europe and and then the another example of this is like if you have all these aristocracies that came out of the feudal societies and run certain ways and then suddenly you're able to like massproduce rifles and give everyone a rifle. Uh the aristocracies have to sort of become republics of some sort because you can't give everyone a rifle and have them fight if they're like kind of your you know your slaves or your surfs or whatever. you have to kind so Napoleon goes after Europe and it forces the aristocrats to basically like give up a lot of their power and arm everyone to fight back and so it totally changes the form of government and and and there's and it's so you have had warfare change a lot over the years and you you have this concept which is interesting to me is defensive versus offensive warfare so so the question is what's better so it used to be defense was much easier it's really hard to take a town right when the Ottoman Empire at its height you know even even even even by the 17th centuries you know September 11th 1683 the height of their empire the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and save the town cuz it was taking them too long to take it before the Polish and French knights could get there. And and and and then of course the cannon become stronger and all of a sudden with the cannon it's just much easier to build like just like massive empires all over Europe. And and you know, I I think right now we're going through interesting change where I I do think things are moving more towards defense than they have before, thanks to EMP, thanks to the way swarms can can cover shorter short distances and like kind of block things. And so so I do think this does favor asymmetrically uh city city states in small countries once again to be very very powerful. It's you for the cost of one aircraft carrier, you could have 100,000 missiles in space that can land on anything effectively with these with these rods. So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard uh to to break through defenses. And I hope that's where it goes because in some sense it used to be at all these free city states all around Europe. That was a good thing. Then you have the kind of jerks build the empires and like take away their rights and maybe we can have like small states again because when you have lots of small states, you can you can kind of if someone gets to be too annoying, you just go to another one. So So I hope that's where things are going is that defense is stronger. But that's an important question. We'll see. What was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against? What happened over the last 40 four decades or so? What was it that were the innovations there that we're now trying to push back against? Oh gosh, there's all sorts of these things in different ways, you know? It's it's I mean I I I mean I mean there's all this like smart bombs I think were like the big thing for the desert storm that we hadn't had before where you were able to basically just target everything and take it out really precisely and just like just like completely like surprise and wipe out you know Susan's army in a way that was just it was like a whole generation ahead because of how you could target and how you can do things from the air and and and you know I think I think the new thing today that we're seeing in Ukraine of course is that is that it's like you can all of a sudden have like 20,000 or 100,000 things at once in a in a semi-coordinated way actually move and attack and and swarm and it's just just really really really hard to to beat and so so you you are seeing things just change entirely. So the EMP solution is a way to stop using million-dollar bombs to take down $500 drones. We have this video for Eperis where there's like these like thousand drones coming at you and then these like oldfashioned people are trying to fire the missiles at them and you can take out a few and like what are you going to do? Like it's and it's crazy. Even people who only have like five drones attacking our ships, we're spending these super expensive missiles. Exactly. Million dollars to shoot down something that's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars. And yeah, so if you can get It turns out that you want to have all the power uh hit the gallium nitride, the emitter about the same time. So you have these AI chips that can control power on very small time scales and you get all the power hit the gallium nitride at once, which means gallium nitride is an emissive material. It's the most efficient emissive material for for like for like sending out like a real like a 10,000 of a second burst of microwave radiation and and if you do it with enough power, the microwave radiation is so strong that it can like even turn things off, you know, miles away depending how you do it. So, and so basically, you're effectively frying the circuits of these things coming in. It's like a Star Trek shield and you turn them off. Uhhuh. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I had uh I've had a bunch of conversations. Eric Prince was on and he was explaining to me about sort of what's happening in in Ukraine at the moment. And uh it's so funny how we've got a sort of evolutionary mimisis happening in warfare where uh you have tanks. The tanks have some vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The drones are created so that they can be flown into the particular weaknesses on the tanks. The tanks weaknesses get patched up. The drones get a little bit bigger, a little bit more sophisticated. They can fly further. the tanks, but netting up the drones have uh like sharp things on them that can cut through netting and you I'm not I'm not bullish. I'm not bullish tanks five years from now because there just too many things coming at them. We can try to put EPA on the tanks. We could defend some of them. You know, you know, we we have a company called Overland AI and they've won all these DARPA challenges. We're the best in the country just driving over complex terrain and so everyone's using them for that. a vehicle of some kind, any vehicle driving over terrain is what we're realizing is just similar to how Seronic here in Austin's building thousands of smaller vessels for the Navy and we're going to start building larger ones too and having them swarm for the Navy that are, you know, armed and autonomous. We want to build thousands of overland vehicles. And it's really interesting doing these things because when you spec out the vehicle, the traditional defense solution is like it needs to have these 37 capabilities, needs to have this armor, it needs to do this, needs to do that. And you're like, wait a second, you could give it all 37 of those capabilities or you could build a thousand of them for the same cost with like 10 capabilities, right? So, so it becomes this like fascinating problem where this is a really important point in warfare. Like warfare has this engineering aspect to it. Like if you want to build a bridge and you want the bridge to never fall down. If you give me a billion dollars, I could build you a bridge that will never fall down. It might be ugly, but it'll be like so much metal, so many supports, it'll never fall down. But the point of engineering is not to build a billion dollars. It's how do you build it for $50 million, never fall down just as much, right? That's it's a similar thing in warfare. You always have scarcity. So it's not it's not about what are all the really cool specs on your jet or on your tank or whatever. It's okay. If you're going to spend a certain amount of resources, I'm going to spend a certain amount of resources and we're going to we're going to fight. Let's let's do something that just overwhelms even if the tank has better in all these ways. I have, you know, I have a thousand times as many vehicles. I'm just going to swarm you and crush you and keep going. Right? So, there's things like this now where it's it's all and this is why advanced manufacturing, going back to the tariffs, is so important to be good at because if we're not good at that here and the other guys are good at it, that's that's scary. What is the likelihood that in five or 10 years there's that many troops on the ground as well? Are human personnel going to be that important? I think people are still very important in a lot of different things. I think the way warfare is morphing is it it goes towards a special forces model. So I think I think Elon Musk has been really clear like obviously you don't want like tons of troops like running forward and then there's like tons of drones coming. That's terrible. I don't want to be that guy. I'm This is like the really sad thing of World War I where like the British aristocrats have been treated like crap for 30 years and they if the aristocracy your role was a warrior who defends society. That was like kind of how you were taught. And so they were so excited when World War I came. They get to like finally fight and show their honor and defend their side and be proud. And they all jumped on their horses and they all charged and they were all mowed down by machine guns. Like the whole generation was killed. It was terrible, right? So you don't So even even like a hundred years ago, you didn't want people charging that way. Now it's insane. But what you do have is you have a special forces model where there's like you probably have everyone have like multiple robots around them and they're controlling them in different ways and complimenting them. You probably have them calling in air strikes, calling in drone strikes, like figuring out what's going on, using the tools, but you are going to want people on the battlefield or near the battlefield. They're just going to be like using a lot of stuff around them, but you're probably still going to want them there for quite a long time is my view. What were you saying about rods from space? What are rods? Yeah, this is one of those things that is always like not clear how much one should talk about. I don't have clearance these days, which is good cuz I can not get myself in trouble. But it's just is pretty obvious that, you know, a fighter jet is a missile delivery system. And if you can have the missiles be in space and be extraordinarily accurate what they're going to hit and, you know, for any kind of ground target or even other things and then it's like that's probably a better way of doing it, right? It's just much cheaper. It's much cheaper now thanks to thanks to Starship, right? Be very very cheap to get I mean right now I think it costs as much as an aircraft carrier to get 100,000 of these in space. That could I don't know what the ratio is. could go to a million of these in space for the cost of a carrier at some point. It's just like obvious how you want to be spending the money. M it's so interesting to think about most military vehicles as being just missile carriers like it's just in many cases some degree of intermediary whether it's the thing that the carries the missiles takes off from whether it's the thing that carries the missiles whether it's the missile itself it's a huge part of I mean when we do these sonic ships with the navy and they seronic is a company that just raised $600 million at a 4 billion valuation that we helped helped some of the amazing talented guys start Dino Dino Marukus is a Navy sailor who started here in Austin and so it's an awesome based company that's building like hundreds of these weaponized vessels and you know I think the current ones are mostly 24footers and they could do certain things and you know I think if you build unmanned all unmanned for now and if you you have 130 footer mostly unmanned but maybe make people go on if they want that let you shoot things that take 80 foot of ship to to fire otherwise you couldn't fire from 24 ft so so yeah it does become like about carrying weapons and maneuvering and supporting other vessels what's the world of uh autonomous submarines looking like that to me seems seems like the most obvious place to and again it's it's it's about the scarcity the scarcity question as well right because it's like what does it cost versus having a swarm of things on top of the water you want both I think so yeah and which again I'm a big investor in with Palmer and my friends are running uh they have I think a facility in Rhode Island that's pumping out a couple hundred of these a year and there's these very advanced submarines they've also just I think last week introduced these like new underground cent new underwater centuries that can like detect certain things and do certain things underwater too I think you can use them as minds and stuff as well and all sorts of possibilities. So, so yeah, you definitely want complicated things underwater and it's interesting that becomes again a game. How do you detect things underwater? It's very hard to detect things underwater, but there's a lot of new technologies where if you for example string fiber optics along the along the bottom of the water, uh then based on the gravometric distortions, you can detect whales, you can detect all sorts of other things moving around. So, so I I always wonder like how advanced is China in this area? How advanced you are we in these areas. Actually, it's a little scary because that's a way to detect the third part of the nuclear triad out too easily right now at this point. Oh, yeah. Well, I wonder I kind of have this sense in my mind of um people not wanting to show their hand and people different nations understanding that if you have that you almost have this trade-off. In fact, this this actually happened I think in World War II once the Enigma code had been cracked. There was a um value judgment that needed to be made. We know that they are going to try and attack these three ships. But if we always avoid all of the ships from being attacked, they're going to know that something's up. So, you're tolerating how much of this do we decide to use? How much do we show of our knowledge? And I kind of get the sense when it's China does something in Taiwan at some point and you go, okay, how how if 10 is unleash everything, how far of that can we go? because yes maybe it's really really good in pushing back this particular assault or or or defending yourself or whatever it is but also completely shows your hand in this is the technology and this is the capability that we've got so that I mean you can talk as much as you want about the uh introduction of AI the sort of uh retreat of uh physical soldiers from the battlefield that is a value judgment that really just it's done by committee hopefully very smart committee but it's done by people that go [ __ ] go to town or go to eight or go to whatever there and there are certain things we work on even at some of these companies I mentioned that they aren't putting into Ukraine for example because they don't want Russia and China to learn about them and learn how to respond to them which is not my judgment by the way I'm not I'm not in charge so they aren't doing more to defend Ukraine whatever paler and are doing a lot but it's it's not up to me we have leaders and they these are the technologies that are available you choose which ones you going and they're going to be rational by the decision and you're right I mean when it comes to nuclear deterrence this is a very scary topic and you actually probably don't want perfect knowledge on either side cuz it makes it makes things more likely to happen and you actually don't want anything to happen. Say more on that. Well, the whole point is like you have the nuclear nuclear triad and the different ways you could respond, you know, in nuclear nuclear war and you want them not to know everything and to be unsure they know everything and to be worried because if they're get to be very very confident they know exactly what it is and they could be potentially could be confident with some strategy that they've found a way to get out and stop it and then they could strike and then they can know they could strike and so it's actually good for both sides to be a little bit unsure about these things. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. What what do you know about us and what do you know about what we know about you and the the vacuum of information, the uncertainty is a deterrent in and of itself. Exactly. Which is probably healthy. None of us want nuclear war. Like the reason I work in defense, probably 20% of HVC, my firm is a defense. We're doing things in bio to save lives and healthcare and other areas. Uh and I work in defense to deter the bad guys and to have the make sure that we have the best technology there so they're afraid to fight us. I don't want there to be lots of war. Like I said, I I do think freeing the Iranian people is a good thing, but in general, like I don't think what we did in Afghanistan for that so long was right. I think we've wasted a lot of money on crazy adventures. In general, I want less war is my bias. And that's the goal with the better technology. Yeah. To just a very big, very smart deterrent. Yeah. Traveling should be about the pleasure of the trip and not the stress of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of Nomatic. This travel pack, the 14 L travel pack, is what I wear every single day. It is the biggest game changer and it genuinely makes spending your day lugging your possessions around infinitely more enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything. 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There's some things where it's I think crony and corrupt and broken into that that's I never I didn't know much about sort of the background and how they work but that's such a fascinating situation to get yourself into where you're the preferred partner the preferred supplier or whatever. Um but that if you have a vacuum of talent that gets sucked out of you to a place that's able to be more exciting, more sexy, pay you better. And then what happens is they try to lobby and block the other people. And they mostly succeed at doing that because so they become these bureaucracies whose main job is to do innovation theater or pretend they're innovating and it keep and then to keep new things out. And so both Palanteer and SpaceX were the first two companies to like break through and become new primes. And they both in both cases they had to sue the government because they were being treated totally unfairly and they were destroying records. They were people ordering not to tell people that something was better because they were going in and out working at these primes. Like you work for the government, you work for the prime and they're all friends. And so they're just like don't let any of these like obnoxious weird tech guys in. Like I didn't know how to play golf with the right people or anything. We're like the weird outsiders. And so even now we're the outsiders, but we've broken in enough that we're in some parts we're in the undeniable in Well, I mean, what is it the percentage of payloads being put into space by SpaceX? It's 80% or 90% or something. SpaceX just dominates that now. Palier dominates certain other areas. But if you look at the overall revenue the government spends with companies in defense, we're still tiny. We're tiny. No way. I think Palanteer is like still well under $2 billion of revenue of like you know couple few hundred billion in the same areas and it's because all the defense companies are paid cost plus and so they're in that cost that means you get say you you go and you say I spent uh $10 million on this so pay me $11 million for delivering it to you and so it becomes this really weird incentive where you purposely get all these expenses and spend way too much money on something so you can have a little profit so that your profit's bigger from the government and so and so this weird model Oh, you're incentivized to be inefficient. Exactly. This is how we've built this for 50 years. And so you have things where Palanteer or Androl as an example will come in and do something at like a tenth the cost better. It's just like crazy. It sounds like I'm lying. They do something like they'll have a drone versus Loheed and their thing will be literally a tenth the cost to make and and it'll have like, you know, 60% more battery life. It'll be like twice as fast. It'll carry 50% more weight and then it'll literally be like a tiny fraction of the cost. And still you'll lose it first because Lockheed or whoever it was Rathon does this really well is they'll write the request for proposal with like a 300page document specifying all these requirements that no one actually needs but they actually make it so it has to be their solution and and so oh this is the same this is the same as the uh foreign country that says the headlights need to be this height from the ground and blah blah blah the same game being played by Germany and even Israel and other countries with their internal trade barriers against outsiders. everyone plays is a game being played by their prime stopping anyone from breaking in. And so these this is what happens what we were talking about outside there is you get people who are bureaucrats and the complexity of the bureaucracy is a feature not a but because they could use that feature to control it for themselves and control access. Yeah. I it kind of blows my mind that there's a couple of areas that I think about this in the first one being uh medicine. anything that's with regards to keeping people alive. Like there's literally no more important job than keeping people alive. Uh and in warfare, you go this it has to be bureaucracy because if it wasn't cutting the Gordian knot of all of the issues, if there was some sort of really serious threat that came along, people go, "Okay, this has been a nice lop for a while. The pantoime's [ __ ] over. All right, like it's time for us to This is what happens in wars." One of my favorite books on this is uh the first world war by Winston Churchill where he's appointed the first lord of the admiral and his job is basically to go in and just like knock heads in the British Navy and get rid of all the old fddy duddies. He was super unpopular, right? He was unpopular as hell. That's why they framed him in World War I and then threw him out and he was out of his career for a while because by virtue of having to fight democracy to fix it, everyone hated him and wanted to like make him look really bad and then and then he goes through this like really tough part of his career for a long time and then shockingly comes back and saves the West. But it was it it really is interesting if you are one of those people who's just really bold and smart and just push through and fix things. Yeah, it pisses a lot of people off. But but it's necessary to win the war. Is what's your opinion around the sort of great men of history in the modern world now? Is that something that can still exist or the bureaucracies and the red tape and the complexity is even more important now? Of course. Come on. That's even more important now. This is here's the thing. This is a dialectic again. If I go back you wanted another the dialectic is there's two things that are true. We have this like inexorably powerful system that pushes history and pushes things in certain directions. It's really hard to overcome the system. You can't just be a great man and just walk up to the system and like slice it all in half. That's not how it works. You're not just like I exist outside of history. No. The way great men work of history is you understand the system deeply and uh the way you know Peter Taylor I was talking to earlier today talked about it is you see there's this big wave coming and you get in front of the wave and you surf it and you use it to cut through and fix things and you use it to build things and you use it to do things because you're working with the system in the direction of it but then but then like fundamentally breaking through the bureaucracy breaking through this other area inspiring people with a better solution. So, so that so it is dialectic where it is a really hard system to change and there are certain things you can't change but then you desperately need the great men who are bold and who do study it and who do like change things and make things possible and thank god we have Elon Mus and SpaceX is just one example like America would be screwed from a defense perspective and from our perspectives oh yeah why I mean space is just absolutely critical to everything we're doing and knowing what's going on in the world and projecting power and and and just it's just I mean certain things you can't talk about with space warfare but you can imagine it's just critical we now dominate that globally and there's no way we we'd be way behind. We'd have nothing. Have you got any idea of China's space capability? They're trying really hard. Have you seen those videos where they try to do the thing where they landed? They haven't figured it out yet, but they're trying. I mean, are they tried to do the chopstick? I haven't tried the chopstick that I saw, but they definitely try to land cuz the smaller ones are self landing without the chopstick. The chopstick's for the really heavy big one. So, they're still they're still back. They haven't got Falcon figured out yet, but they're trying then the biggest starship. They're not even close. But but listen, I mean, the Chinese are really good at copying stuff. It's actually extraordinary he's that far ahead of them. I mean these there's some really smart people there. So the fact that we're this far ahead that's just an amazing fact. It's when you think about intellectual property and this is one of the things that Trump's been bringing up with regards to tariffs, right? That it's not just the difficulty in getting products there. It's the uh replication and the copying of our products over there which means it we don't even need to ship them like every time every time you do something they're so fast at copying. It's actually amazing how good they are at. Have you got any idea what that system is? What it is that they're do? They got some team of crack. I think it's the culture. I think it's the culture of their education system to take something and to learn it and to regurgitate it tends to be how they teach there. So, I think there's something about their smartest people being forced to do that. And it's and then they take things and it's really funny because they copy and they iterate on it and they and they do steal. I mean, I'm not going to say which company, but one of our companies was like training OpenAI and Enthropic on a certain very specific area where they'd measure them every week uh and give them get feedback and and get ahead and and they got like certain scores and they really was open AI they were doing the most with and they would score open AI and they got the to the point where it's really good for what they needed and and then Deep Seek came out. This is when China had their own AI that they trained and they said, "Oh, that's interesting. Let's measure it." And they measured it in the six different areas and and it was exactly the same scores as open AAI from four months ago. And this is something they like trained and iterated on to get there. So it's clear they just exfiltrated it, you know, which is what China's good at. The difficulty that you must face at holding on to commercial patents, not letting people get a hold of your inventions. Uh that's one thing, but when it comes to oh, this is kind of the technology that keeps us safe from a national security or one of the key technologies that keeps us safe from a national security perspective. uh the level of security that you must be talking about when it comes to stuff like SpaceX, when it comes to Raptor engines, when it comes to Falcon 9 heavy rocket stability, all of the belly flop maneuver, all of this [ __ ] that must be locked down is as hard as you can get. People talk about Area 51 and being able to sort of keep secret secret. You go, I I don't really know if the Chinese would be that bothered about using aliens against us, but they'd [ __ ] sure as hell love one of those rockets that can get stuff in the space tube. It's really funny at Palanteer. Not funny, but serious, too. obviously cuz we're running these global information systems for 40 countries and tracking all these things. And I I remember when I was still there a long time ago, there was a PhD student who was Chinese uh who'd been friends with some of the people at our company and they caught him with like like in server room like with like inserting and selling data and he and he broke down crying and he said, you know, I have family in China. I didn't want to have to do this but I'm worried for them. it kind of made me and this was quite a long fully infiltrated and uh and well in that case like like they didn't didn't get it out and he like he left the country right away and so you know and he went back to his family and and like it is interesting at that point on he had to be really careful hiring people with family in China to work in any of the government sensitive areas of course because they could just use the family against them ironically when Peter Teal then spoke out uh at the RNC for Trump in like 2016 Obama's justice department labor department right away sued Palanter for not hiring enough Asians we had 25% Asians but it wasn't Which is just funny though because we couldn't hire people who were born in China and so of course they sued us for that. But is quote DOD agreed with us but labor department disagree with us. It's government doesn't always agree with itself. Yeah. Have a chat between yourselves guys. Work out who's going to sue us or not and then come back. Well, isn't there isn't there all of these rumors? Obviously this I think will have stopped now that the southern border has been tightened up significantly by the sounds of things. But wasn't there a lot of sort of military-aged Chinese men coming across the southern border? I think what that was, I I'll tell you what I think that was. Uh, and this is speculation, but I've talked to a bunch of people. There actually were a lot of uh kind of Chinese mafia operating in Shenzhen, which is like a area that had a lot of this historically and is a very powerful group. And Xi Jinping was doing a really big crackdown in China. And some of his crackdown was on stuff that was kind of messed up. Like I've had friends caught up in it who disappeared and died in the tech world where I don't think were bad guys. I think they didn't just didn't just didn't agree with CCP. But some of it was cracked down on actual criminal elements. I think a lot of those criminals fled and are doing criminal activities now in the US and across the border because they weren't safe in China anymore as they came here. Oh, right. Okay. Imagine that. Imagine being the Chinese government and thinking, "Fantastic. We've actually finally got a ton of military age." Oh, God. They're [ __ ] They're criminal. They're selling fentinel. What use is that? We need you to steal the secrets of Palentia. We don't Well, we don't we don't want these people in our country. And I think some of them probably came here even without China knowing it. But I'm sure they're smart enough to take advantage of it and use them, too. So, it's very scary. I met I think uh the main guy who designed the belly flop maneuver for SpaceX. I love it. Uh at uh Bill Perkins house last year uh during the Eclipse party and I was just listen similar to uh your friend that was giving the saliloquy about uh artificial education. and um he was just explaining it was so it was such a [ __ ] inspiring story that I think he'd been at a very big uh space company previously and had moved to SpaceX and he basically bet his entire career on this belly flop maneuver. The fact that if you have any vehicle coming in from space you wanted to try and accumulate as much air friction as possible and if you've got a tube there's not much air friction to play with in the first place. So you try and put it parallel to the ground. you bring it down and then at the very last minute you swing it. And uh yeah, he explained he said, "Dude, this was uh like as I'm watching this thing happening, I'm basically watching my own career and legacy sort of slowly rotate by 90 degrees to see if it's going to work." But I just loved it. I thought it was so cool and it it really sort of spoke to me about the um we spoke about fearlessness, sort of courage uh earlier on. It's a very unique kind of fearlessness, you know, to sort of back yourself to be to to be innovative. But I just thought it was it was such a cool story. I loved I loved hearing it. It's it's there's something really special about having a crazy idea about something that should work, how the world should work, and then like working with lots of other smart people, convincing them of it, and then like building and iterating towards it. It's just I I love that. It's one of my favorite things. I'm doing a bunch of it right now with a bunch of new things, and it's it's just so fun when you have these big bold ideas. They don't always work, but, you know, with enough smart people around you to iterate on, a lot of times they do. space. Looking at that, I'm fascinated by the world of astropolitics now. So, the politics of space, who gets to own and refine things that are going past us, areas on the moon, bits of territory, whether it's geosync above particular countries. Is this something that you've looked into much? I think you know, the ownership thing is it's it's fascinating. This is a lot like I think you can kind go back and study like the 17 16th, 17th, 18th centuries where there's just like infinite room and infinite space. uh and you know for the new world and all these places you can get and and you can fight over some big land bodies of course that people did but there's just there's just so much out there that it's much more like once you can start using it in a way that's actually helpful and you're using it for something useful it kind of becomes yours and there's so much out there that we're not going to we're not going to like run into scarcity for a long time. So the way we think of it on Earth is probably like today is probably the wrong model cuz we're we have this like bias where there's a certain amount of land and a certain amount of resources and it's scarce and do I own it or do you own it? And there's just so much stuff up there and so much room up there that it's not that's not really the problem for now. Like like we could we could we could every country could have their own moon base uh and like be like doing whatever we want to be doing on the moon and we're not going to like run out of room on the moon for now, right? And then and then same thing with like there's just there's millions of asteroids, right? So, so, so I'm not I'm not too concerned about that. I I think the scarier thing is you probably don't want wars in space, right, at all, because a it will screw up all the global satellite stuff we do, which is I don't know about you, but Starling's pretty useful for me. It's pretty bad. And B, it's just like there's lots of things where if you can get good at like doing things in space and then throwing things at the planet, that's really scary. You screw a lot of things up. So, I hope that never I hope that's not something we get. Well, there's also there's a book called Seven Esses by Neil Stevenson. In in the first line, the moon explodes. So, spoiler alert, the moon explorers in the first line. And uh they've got, it's like 500 days to get as many uh citizens off Earth and to the ISS. And they basically build out this new habitat of the ISS. And they say there's going to be a hard rain as the moon breaks out from the seven pieces, seven eaves, the seven pieces that it's in. And it's going to basically shower down on Earth. Everything's going to be [ __ ] for about 5,000 years. And then after a while, if we can survive it, we'll come back down and we'll see. We'll see how all of this stuff goes. Yikes. And uh they're talking about when you're in I can't remember what the particular altitude is, if it's even correct to call it altitude when you get to something like the ISS or distance from Earth that lots and lots of the satellites sort of sit at this particular distance away and it only takes there's quite a bit of junk up there but that's kind of well positioned. It doesn't take much to cause a pretty negative chain reaction of this thing broke which broke this thing which and before you know it ding ding ding ding ding ding ding and entire sort of uh swaths of real estate and and of useful technology that's up there can all be damaged. So yeah, I think anything that involves [ __ ] around in those areas that seem we don't want that. There's a funny technology I saw the other day that was like this robot to like clean up space junk that people are working on. Of course there's a Japanese which I love. This is like what you expect them to do. Of course, there's the cleanest country and it's a dog. It's a miniature dog as well. Shaped like a miniature dog. No, it's great. But it's I mean, in theory, there's things like that hopefully we could do, but it's Yeah, it's it's you don't want a war up there. You know, you're talking about um our map of how land works kind of not working when we think about space, three dimensions, or whether you're looking at sort of the way that orbits occur. Uh I I promise this is going to I think this is going to work. Every time I see a squirrel on a tree, right, hold on. Every time I see a squirrel in a tree, I think about the way that their map of terrain must work because what they see is being able to run forward to move themselves away from something that's on the other side of the tree. So, they're moving around this cylinder. And if you walk, you'll see it and it'll have its head out like that. And as you come around, it'll scoot this way. I I always been fascinated about what it must be like to have the map of terrain that a squirrel has because it's permanently thinking in spirals, right? It's thinking I can go up and down. So, it kind of is a 2D plane, but this 2D plane is wrapped in a 3D way. And uh when I read Seven Eves and I think about that and they're talking about [ __ ] orbital dynamics, dude. Holy [ __ ] like trying to think about the the zenith and the apogee and the way that oh well we've got to do this two more loops in order for us to come back around at the right angle because it's not only the distance the angle the height the altitude the speed all this [ __ ] like oh yeah I just walk forward and back like you think you know you first drive a car and you go oh my god this is so complex I'm never going to be able to do this you realize no dude this is like the simplest [ __ ] thing you can do look at the squirrel if you play the 3D video games you kind of get it build intuition but it's pretty fun it is weird up there yeah it's interesting uh What is the future for you? What are you What are you most interested, most excited about at the moment? You know, we just had our sixth child, so that's a lot of kids. You are single-handedly maybe in collaboration with Elon, reversing population decline. Yeah. Well, my wife Taylor and I are very traditional, but we love having six kids. We're probably done. That's probably that's probably enough. And uh so, but that's that's really that's the most important thing in my life. Uh we're running our firm. We're doing all sorts of new things in AI, backing great entrepreneurs there. There's amazing companies in construction and you know trying doing things in bio. I think there's a lot of ways we could save a lot of lives with the breakthroughs in bio especially applying it to things that save uh that cure rare diseases and help help young kids there. I think there's a lot of new ways of you know doing gene editing with plasmids and stuff that could treat rare diseases that right now kill kids very young that you know so I think there's tens of thousands of children we could save with stuff there. So there's there's a lot of promising things there. And then you know uh on the nonprofit side I have the university which I'm really passionate about. We have getting so many amazing young students there and partnering with them on things. And then I have my policy work. We have teams in 20 states at Cicero and we're just trying to make government smarter and dynamic and less stupid and partner. I was waiting for you to say less something. I was waiting for you to say less. I can't help it. I can't help it. But there are good people, but it's just like just I'll give you just one example. Like let's say we all agree we want middle class working- class people who maybe they're not going to be like the top investor entrepreneur, but they want to have a good job. they go have a good vacational job with skills like like all anyone with the right teaching could get like a high-end vocational job if they're willing to work right and some of these jobs pay 100k 120k great stuff and so all these states all have vocational schools and the problem is a lot of these vacational schools are terrible and so what do you do well here you know average politicians like let's give them more money if there's an idiot guy running it is still going to not do it well so how do you help the 100 thousand people going coming out of these schools well here's one I'll tell you how you do it you say okay there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools in Texas we're going to only give the money in proportion to the salaries of the students coming out. That's not something they can game. Take the average salary coming out for three years. That's interesting. Average salary for three years coming out and we're going to rate the schools based on that. And you know what happens when you start giving them all their money tied to that? This the school starts saying, "Wait a second. What skills we need to teach to get our kids better? Incentives. Incentives. Look at the incentives. What businesses do we partner with?" And I'll tell you what, in Texas, after this was done in Texas over the last decade, uh the salaries have more than doubled coming out of these schools. It's a much more direct route to getting universities to do the thing that the customers students of the universities want. I I would wager that 99.9% of students are not going to university to get a degree that sounds interesting and is functionally useless. That even if the degree is functionally useless, they want that functionally useless degree to function usefully and and this is the thing like so I think vocational schools are a little different from universities. Vocational schools is 100% the profession. There is a theoretical role for moral action and courage and and and other frameworks of a university. But you're right, one of the things we should be doing with our government, by the way, the part of education, another policy thing, is only give loans to students for majors where the major is going to on average repay let them repay the loan. So stop putting people in the debt to get like terrible degrees, right? That's something we can do right away. So there's things like this we're working on. We're making huge impacts on fixing prisons, fixing fixing technical. What are you fixing in prisons? Well, think about it. If a how should how should probation and parole in prisons work? You need to have some incentives, right? You need to have some framework. Right now, right now, if you're running a prison, a lot of the guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards, everyone's miserable, people come out, uh they're just let go into society, a lot of them commit crimes again and come right back, and it's a mess, and there's nothing, there's no incentive to fix it, right? What if you say to the people running probation and parole and prisons that part of your job is rehabilitation? And the part of what you're being measured on is can you run this in a way where you're all working to like have a culture that like teaches skills, gives them exposure the year before they come out, figures out how to help them as they're coming out and figures out how to make them less likely to come back. Isn't that better than what we have right now? I don't care if you're on the left or the right. Like if you're on the left, maybe you want to let all the criminals out. If you're on the right, you want to lock them up too much cuz whatever. Those are both extremes that I don't think, you know, they're both extremes. Like whether you're left on right or right, if they are coming out, let's make sure they succeed as best we can. Let's have incentives around that. Right? There's things like this we could be doing for our society. M and and we fixed a lot of probation and parole programs to like start having the right incentives and it hugely impacts these communities because you all of a sudden care about people. What so I saw do you know Dwaresh Patel? Do you know who he is? Yeah. Yeah. Clever kid. Um really lovely guy. Yeah. He had this really interesting tweet with regards to AI that I'd love to get your take on. And he said, "If you gave any human one millionth, one tenth thousandth of the corpus of information that any AI has ingested, you would have received thousands of new ideas, lots of new novel insights about ways to do things." Yeah. Uh I don't know if this is true, but the criticism that he was repurposing was uh we haven't seen much new innovation that's necessarily come from AI at the moment. Have you got any insight about whether this is a limitation of LLMs at large, whether it's a processing problem, whether it's a sophistication problem? Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like it has the conceptual structures for like solving these types of interesting like problems around the things I was just talking about. Like these are types of things that if I really had the right intelligence, it would be it would be analyzing them and pushing them forward and taking my ideas maybe as like the Chinese and then make them even better, you know? It's like but like no, it's not. You're right. It's not doing that. Yeah. I guess you could say in certain mathematical situations it is doing that. I think I think I think when you see some of the contests where it's actually solving math problems it even Oh, like unsolved theorems and [ __ ] like that. There's stuff like that where I think there's some things that it's doing new methods and like you know the great example was the very famous go game right where it like played that new type of move that was like move 37 and it was like everyone studied it and like wow I never thought of that before and it was like really really cool that it had figured it out. So there are some constrained areas where it's doing that but I think reality is too unconstrained. It's not it's not good enough yet to to to to build the conceptual structures to do that. Can it do that in the next five or 10 years? Very possibly. But but you're right it's not yet. What would you for a muggle like me uh everybody else that's listening what should we expect you think from AI over the next half decade you know it's really interesting I I have to admit is that you know some of my friends were involved in building open AI some guys worked at Palant key there and I was watching them a little bit I wasn't that focused on it and I thought it was pretty interesting but I just I I didn't realize the breakthrough they're going to have so so I have to admit if I would have loved to say I'm so smart that I knew this was coming and the way it was and I I didn't realize the emerging properties that would come out of GBT3 and you know at that point once it that happened you can kind of predict GBT4 and 5 you know it it seems like it keeps getting better which is scary it see it's good for the world in some ways for productivity and other things but it's I don't know where you know I don't know where it asmmptotes I don't know where it starts to stop getting better my intuition is that it's going to asmtote and it's going to not just be an exponential AGI explosion why I don't think for the thanks of things we're just talking about that it's like fully understood all the properties of intelligence it's necessary to to do what we do. I just think it's fundamentally a different type of intelligence. It's a difference of kind, not a difference of degree. And that's my intuition, but uh listen, I have people who are I know who are geniuses who disagree with me. So So this is And because I didn't predict this in the first place. I was going to say you've been wrong and ignorant before around AI. So maybe Exactly. So it's hard it's hard for me to really know. I what I what I do know for sure is there's trillions of dollars of industries already today. We can make twice or three times as productive. And so that's where kind of I'm working. So I'm like I'm like if you're a muggle I'm like maybe like maybe like a mid-level wizard and there is a top level wizards who are actually pushing forward AI and I'm taking it and understand it quite well and understand how to build quite well and I'm deploying it to add productivity and to use it and to push forward new ways of using it but I'm not the guy who's who's like who's like pushing for the LM itself but sadly that's not who I am. Damn right. Joe Lale ladies and gentlemen Joe you're awesome. I really appreciate you man. This is fascinating. So much cool stuff to go through. Where should people check out whatever it is that you've got going on? Well, thanks for having me on. You know, we have a American Optimist podcast myself and you joined us and uh yeah, I'm just trying to trying to learn to follow in your footsteps here in Austin and you know, we got UATX. We got a lot of amazing students still still applying and going there. This is the second class and and you know, we would love to hear from people. Heck yeah, Joe. I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.