Modern WisdomAmerica, Power, AI & The Future Of The World - Joe Lonsdale
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,052 words- 0:00 – 4:48
How Joe Identifies Talent In Others
- CWChris Williamson
You mentioned you'd just been with, uh, Peter there, I was explaining an idea from-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a friend earlier on, George. Uh, he talks about non-fungible people.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like N-of-1s. Mike Israetel, good non-fungible person.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
He's an N-of-1.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Uh, who are some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across your-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
I mean, of course, you know, you have to go with Peter Thiel 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 kinda living, like, i- in poverty, teaching chess, and was, like, this chess master sensei who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I, I've had some interesting, crazy people I met over the years, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... who have shaped my life.
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about the story of how you sought Peter out as a mentor.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, Peter was the founder of The Stanford Review, and, and, uh, he was just someone who was, I thought, was just a 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, hardestworking 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 wanna get to know this group. I wanna learn from them too." And, I mean, I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was gonna be Peter Thiel 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 li- 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, in history, in philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet, you know, through The Stanford Review, I think th- we, we got, got along intellectually.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. 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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, yeah, how, e- everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, it's interesting you s- it's interesting because you said earlier when we were on, but I'm not gonna say who you were saying it about. But, you know, anyone who, like, there's the one guy we both know who's, who've done a lot of drugs and he's still pretty sane and functional, and that's really impressive, right? It's extreme.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And so similarly, when you get people who are really, really bright, like really off the charts, mind's working great, most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world, but yeah-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm...
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... 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 t- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And, and, and y- 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, I'm 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, uh, intellect, and that, that's a good combination.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
I, you know, I think I, I, no value judgment, everyone can have, like, different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things. And, you know, to, to me, the, 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 Palantir, which kind of broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare, education, those are gonna, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So you're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people's skills, skill sets. You might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads, right? A tech lead or whatever it might be. But, uh, and I guess you're gonna be pulled up in front of fucking Congress or, or some board and you're gonna have to defend yourself. And if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not gonna look right.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, I mean, I, and I, 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, who's my co-founder at Palantir, 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-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... it's like, it's like, it's like when you, when you're running a military brigade and, like, you have an operation, you, you might have, like, a drill sergeant where you, like, 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 wanna come into the office and you just, whatever. You kinda have to tolerate it a little bit.
- CWChris Williamson
Tolerate, yeah. That was the word.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And you ha- and you have to protect them because most big corporations, they will spit these people out, right? A, a big corporation, standard corporation, they want you to fit in a box.
- 4:48 – 9:39
Lessons Joe Learned From His Mentor
- JLJoe Lonsdale
- CWChris Williamson
Right. What did you learn from your time with Peter? What are the things that have stuck with you?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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. So ev- every time I see him, I learn something. Uh, you know, I, I, I, I wrote this piece online a while ago, like, with my team about 15 years ago, it's like main lessons from Peter Thiel. So I won't re- 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 'em was you have to break down, like, the 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
The f- those were really big. One thing that he had 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, 'cause there's that last bit of effort. And, like, it's, it's one of those things where, like, I think being 99th percentile is worth so much more than being 90th percentile also-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... because that means you're number one, and being number one is worth a lot. So there's, there's a l- a lot of things like that, that
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... he just kinda gave me all these concepts that we all kinda learn when we work with him.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you find it difficult to not divide your attention?In that way, you-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 I was Palantir, whether I was Addepar, whether that's spending months on a thesis at AVCC and a framework at AVCC that we're going to work on for our investing, it- it is really important to focus. And, you know, you get to a certain point where you- 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, you know, for- for the things I do.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So an advice for talent is to not divide your focus at all?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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-"
- CWChris Williamson
Because you're hedging.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
"I'm afraid to go all in or 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.
- CWChris Williamson
How do you come to think about risk? It sort of, uh, built into the conversation around courage is fear and uncertainty-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and risk and dealing with risk and stuff like that. How do you assess it?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
You know, I think we're all really lucky today versus the past. I think it is true that- 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 some- some kind of giant old- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
So I think- I think there is enough of a safety net. And listen, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
What about obsessing over perfection? Something else that I think Peter-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
That's- that's like-
- CWChris Williamson
... is very big on.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 all-nighter with a few of the guys in the office to be ready to, like, have this thing. It was- it was about inflation versus deflation and the risks 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, I actually was with Ken Howery who's an ambassador now to Denmark. He was ambassador to Sweden last time. He's a good friend. He's- he's- he'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 and then jumping on a plane and sleeping on the plane on the way over. And- and just, like, everything has to be as good as possible and push, you push as hard as possible, which and- if something was wrong, he'd- it would be, like, just totally unacceptable.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. How do you avoid that from holding you back? Uh, because perfectionism can be procrastination sort of masquerading as quality control.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
It's true.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, you know, the classic West Coast move fast, break things mentality. Is there a tension between these?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
100%. I think if you have really tight, fast deadlines, it's 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 five weeks, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- 9:39 – 12:49
Having The Skillset To Let Go
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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 because I have to choose now, as opposed to before where I just sat on the set of train tracks. It's gone, "Do I want to go left? Do I want to go right?" The same for yourself. "Do I want to invest in it 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, uh, 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?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 it- 'cause all of a sudden, you could just have things you were really excited about before ten times a day. And I- I do fall into this myself sometimes-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... 'cause 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- that's- that's really tough.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And- but, you know, you said- what you said earlier, uh, 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- when- what- what 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 all these full parts of their brains that are turned on, and- and it lets them be a lot better at 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 gonna have just that top, top ability there, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. 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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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, 'cause you got to do all the grunt work too.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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 fucking legit. Really, really great. And he says, "Enjoyment is efficiency." And that's kind of-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I think referencing what you're talking about here, which is, if you absolutely love something, it takes fewer inputs to get more outputs.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
100%. You can get into the flow. You could just be great if you love it. And, 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 let's then do more of those and do less of the things you don't like. Uh, but have someone else do them if, if they're necessary.
- 12:49 – 16:38
Avoiding Cynicism In A Modern World
- JLJoe Lonsdale
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. How do you avoid cynicism? It's a-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... very easy trap in the modern world.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
This is, uh, this is the debate I was having with Peter Thiel earlier about stuff. He tells me I'm too naively optimistic and he's like, "You wanna be kind of optimistic in general, but you don't wanna be, you don't wanna be, like, overly so." And, you know, in general, I think it's easier to be pessimistic and cy- 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, it's kinda like a, it's kinda like being, like, the hero warrior champion to say-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... "Even though, even though this is a mess, what are we gonna do to make it work?" And, and, and, and that'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 oftentimes things can be.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you ever read, uh, Endurance by Alfred Lansing?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
I haven't. Ne'er read this one.
- CWChris Williamson
It's about, uh, Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Oh, very cool. I know. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So it's the best, I think, the best retelling-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Amazing.
- CWChris Williamson
... of that. And, um, it's really interesting 'cause 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-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and what he's thinking privately. And it's almost like a Bruce Wayne/Batman type split personality.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, what was he thinking privately?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, he is just swimming in self-doubt and uncertainty and fear. He has no idea if it's going to work. He d- he d- he doesn't even know if he, 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..." and such and such. And, um, it r- it was the first time that I'd ever really thought... 'Cause 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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah. Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And that you can't share the burden of.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
That's-
- CWChris Williamson
And, uh, everybody, everybody has main character energy in their own life, right? Everybody is the lead star. They're the front man-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... or woman of their own existence. Um, and I think that 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. Okay, there's gonna be some prices that you're gonna have to pay for that.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 'cause 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 'cause you end up sometimes having to be their therapist a little bit 'cause there's no one else they can talk to-
- CWChris Williamson
I imagine so, yes.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... because no one can show them 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 16:38 – 19:10
Most Common Challenges Fellow Work Leaders Suffer From
- CWChris Williamson
What are the most common challenges, aggregated challenges, that the leaders that you work with are, are suffering with?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Oh, man. It's just... There's all sorts of different versions of this. I think, I think one of the most common challenges that's the hardest to diagnose, 'cause 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 'cause right now, there's just so much money for the very best people in the stuff in AI that's starting to work. And so you, you get, you get this, like... I think it's actually one of the most dangerous challenges is, like, this overinflated 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 qu- quite right 'cause you can paper over it with the money you raised. So that's why, that's probably the biggest challenge is that side.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 gonna 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 gonna quit because you're, because, like, it's not quite working, and then you gotta 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Which is-
- CWChris Williamson
Your Shackleton coming out and saying, "We know this is the direction. Don't worry, don't fear."
- JLJoe Lonsdale
I'm in a palantir 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 gonna, like, run the global intelligence, you know, framework. Like, what is even going on here? I, I can't do this anymore. I have these, all these other offers to p- 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, and it worked, and then there, you know... I think a couple of them are still running their company there now, which is great. So, but it's li- it's like these things that are really hard to, to push across the line sometimes.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Uh, how would you advise...... uh, the guys that, that need to keep their feet on the ground. Is this guy gonna hang out with some of-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
That's tough.
- CWChris Williamson
... your friends from school and tell them to shit talk you a little bit? Like, what-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 themself, themself in 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... because it, like, te- cuts the pride down a little bit, but it's-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
So, like, there's sometimes those are types of things that someone like me maybe is uniquely suited to handle, (laughs) having, having been there myself and being sure I could conquer the world-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... and like (laughs) , you know, especially in your early 20s and you get t- w- th- late 20s you get this energy that's just like, "Nothing can stop me."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And that's why I say it's both healthy, but also has to be really careful how it's filtered, you know?
- 19:10 – 26:42
What Motivated Joe To Co-Found University of Austin
- JLJoe Lonsdale
- CWChris Williamson
Speaking of mentors, University of Boston.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Our new place of-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Just came from there.
- CWChris Williamson
... new place of residence. What motivated you to co-found that?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 others. 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, I'm personally deeply concerned about just like, you know, you used to have these young people would go to these places. You'd go to Harvard and it's like this, like, pathway to the functional elite and it's elite that's, like, has a sense of duty and that has a sense of excellence and they're, 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, and 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, the virtues in Rome and, and here's what the Judeo-Christian wisdom was and here's all the 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 u- 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 the 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 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 is terrible. And so, and, and then on top of that, though, 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?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 of, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think other institutions are getting right at the moment?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 v- 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 that's gone wrong with pretty much every part of the humanities where it's been conquered by ideology that there's just this, there's this... And, you know, the other thing that's crazy is the administrations at these top universities have tripled in size on average. So you, you have more administrators at Harvard and Yale than you have students.
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah, it's crazy. It's like you, you think it's fake when I say it.
- CWChris Williamson
What are they doing?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Uh, they're doing, like, lots of policy 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that still going? I, 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-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... 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 pen- ti- uh, the tent pissing out as opposed to outside of the tent pissing in, uh, it, it does give a different dynamic. But I kind of got the sense that how can these after the Yale scandals, after Harvard issue, you know, all of the things that we saw, uh, over the, what, eight- last 18 months, forget going back further, like, is this really still continuing to ramp up? What's your perspective on this?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Are we... I don't know if ramp up is the right word, but what happened is that there was a march through the institutions, right, as the famous communists 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 are activists. And so, and these activists have conquered these institutions. It's not like... It's this, it's, 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 'cause they don't wanna get pissed off the donors and get fired.
- CWChris Williamson
Wave the flag.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
So they're gonna, they're gonna, so they're not gonna, they're not gonna... But, but are they gonna keep controlling things the same way with these insane values? Yes. And are they gonna, like, all of a sudden not conquer the institution anymore or give it up someone else? No way. So, so, so there's a lot of naiveté in our culture. Just because the cultural pendulum has swung one way doesn't mean the institutions themselves...... were fixed.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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, 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 n- none of them are gonna get fixed.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Which is, which is why you gotta 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, let's build new great ones. That's what we're trying to do.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, just because you can say the word retard on Twitter without getting banned now-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
(laughs) That's the word of the year.
- CWChris Williamson
... doesn't mean ... I know. It is. It's g- it's ... W- we're so back. Um-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Someone has to buy a Merriam-Webster with an LBO just so we can officially make it the word of the year, 'cause they're not gonna do it themselves. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, very good. Uh, I learned about Sullivan's Law earlier today.
- 26:42 – 36:02
Biggest Problems To Be Fixed In Higher Education
- JLJoe Lonsdale
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. So what are the ... Uh, 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?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, well, you know, you ... So, so when you have an institution like this, you wanna bring in the top entrepreneurs in our country, the top innovators in our country, and you wanna expose them to the students in a way where they're helping shape the courses. But you also wanna have all the top academics on, on, on the, on the humanities 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, just have that foundation, right? But then you also wanna have courses that are shaped, not only STEM, but stuff that's shaped by ... You know, I have like, I have over 100 friends who are founders of billion-dollar companies who've signed up to be on our talent network and they give us input. What do you want people to learn if they're gonna come work at your companies or build companies with you? And so I, I think having both of those is very rare.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So, uh, I think there's always this sense of practical application versus a sort of classic education.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Exactly. I think having both, and, uh, and this is a dialectic. I'm obsessed with these dialectics, but there's, 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, 'cause 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 could apply some of the old, you know, debates from a long time ago, an old wisdom from a long time ago. Like, imagine applying a Xenophon, 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, and all the young European princes for like 1,500 years were trained, were ... read Xenophon 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 to be able to have that and then talk about that in the context of a startup leader we're arguing about and the principles, it's fun. You can mix these things together.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. What, what else is there to say on dialectics? Uh, give me a 30,000-foot view of how you use 'em.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Y- 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 wanna apply it to the innovation world, uh, I, 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 Sony in the '80s. Steve Jobs basically said, "I don't care what the consumers, they, tell me they want. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure out what's best and I'm gonna show them a breakthrough, and then they're gonna 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 how to ask for a car, right? It's like, y- yep, you know, they wouldn't have asked for something with horses. So, so what's the breakthrough we're gonna give 'em? But then there's another thing that's actually really true, b- even at Apple, which is that once you have a product, there's like 100 things the 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 or prioritizing and responding to them and fixing it, so it's as good as possible.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And so how do you ... You know, if you, if you only have the Steve Jobs genius thing, it's gonna 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 gonna tell 'em what they want alive," along with the feedback p- thing? And I, I'm, I'm slightly better. I've done a lot of products where I create 'em. I usually have someone else who's better than me at the 14 hours a day iterating process, which is really important.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And there, they're two separate things.
- CWChris Williamson
So are you holding both of these in your mind at the same time?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 n- make, mix 'em 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 actually-
- CWChris Williamson
Say, say more.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
It's, it's like you, you, you want, you, you wa- you wanna have, you wanna have like, like the really crisp reasoning of like just pure invention with like nothing interfering.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And you wanna have the really crisp reasoning of iteration, you know, put in, put, pushing it back. So, so, so in, you know, in, in, in general, uh-You know, I'll, I'll give an- an- like, there's other one, um, there's the whole Nietzschean- there's a whole Nietzschean perspective versus the Judeo-Christian 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 Nietzsche framework as a 14 year old. I thought it was really cool. I don't know if you've read Friedrich Nietzsche, the will to power and all this stuff. And you get- if you get too into it, and like, one of the things he talks about is how, is how the most- the world's mostly driven forward by like the top 1% of like talented people and ubermensch, 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 is going to look like because they're creating it. And if you- and, and there's lots of truth that the very, very most successful people and most talented people, you know, Thomas Jefferson called them the natural aristocracy, they do run things and drive things forward. And that- and that'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 that's dangerous, right? And so, so what's the other side? Well, one of the great insights of Judaism that became a great insight of Judeo-Christianity is the radical equal dignity of all human life. 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, then Christianity was spreaded 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 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 Judeo-Christian 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 that they fail. They've got just only one side of the dialectic, right? They've only helped the bottom. But it, but it also doesn't mean you should only help the top either. You got to help both. It's like a U, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 a helpful framework to understand.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. And is the middle where you go to die? That gray area?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah, you just, like, go, "We're not..." Yeah, if you don't- ex- 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 it- and it's right thing to do. It's an- it's an 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... because he's- because he's really bright as kids, but being 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 gonna make our future. They're gonna cure diseases when I'm an old man. They're gonna figure out how to make me live ten years longer and much healthier. They're gonna do all sorts of other wonderful things for everyone, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
So it's like, it's like you kind of want both.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I suppose, uh, you need to be... The, 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-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
That's a great dialectic. Like, how do you do perfection and how do you do not, not procrastinating and taking too long? Because 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, uh, you need to narrow your focus, but also be open to new opportunities at the same time.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah, this, this is why it's so hard in the world, is that there are these conflicting truths. It's like a, I guess they call it like a, a, a cone, I guess, in Japanese wisdom, right? There's all these different... There's, there's two different sides of it.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 36:02 – 43:14
Should We Use AI In Education?
- CWChris Williamson
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, uh, what might as well have been a 90-minute-long fucking TED Talk.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
It's probably Joe Lamont.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Um, I was keeping it-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
I love Joe.
- CWChris Williamson
... I was keeping it, uh-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Sorry. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... keeping it, uh, quiet, but I mean, you're, you're better friends with him so you can say what you want. Um, he's great. Uh, 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.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah, I shouldn't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't talk about it. Speaker 1: (crosstalk) very successful.
- CWChris Williamson
No, like, I mean, it was a, it was a fucking dinner party. But, uh, me and the sort of four people that were wa- within earshot before the next, you know, whatever territory of conversation s- bubble that took over, each one, each p- person had a-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
It-
- CWChris Williamson
... territory grab.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... this is such a key thing to push education forward this way, and the only reason it's not happening at greater scale is 'cause there's no market mechanism right now of competition in education. J- just 'cause you have the best thing doesn't mean people are allowed to go to it. So, we're trying to put market mechanisms in place.
- CWChris Williamson
Can y- can you explain what it is that he's trying to do?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Yeah, in, in, 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 e- and you can have something interacting with them. You can 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, uh, uh, in one area. They're like two grades behind and they never get caught up 'cause they never... no one ever goes back and teaches them the basic skills.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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, in, in, in Alpha School, for example, I think are at 99th percentile, and some of them are, are, are even years ahead because they're able to go ahead in this... with this personalized AI learning that, like, teaches, you know, to how they need to learn and, and to what they need to know. And it's, it's amazing 'cause in two hours a day, they do the academics and then they have time for projects and for life skills-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... and I think there's gonna be schools they're doing where like kids get to play video games 'cause these young men aren't studying otherwise. Like, it's part of the-
- CWChris Williamson
Being designed by the guys that did Fortnite, I think.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
He's doing that. He's doing some really cool things with that. There's, there's other schools for sports and for kids who wanna get way ahead in sports. You're gonna stay ahead in academics for two hours, then you're gonna train and you're gonna be the best at the sport you wanna play. So, I think there's just all sorts of cool new frameworks and, and we could try on education. And it's, it's awesome to see a successful entrepreneur applying and putting a lot of resources towards this, you know, for our country. It's really amazing.
- CWChris Williamson
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 four 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-
- JLJoe Lonsdale
100%. All these kids are just being tortured. I, I think a lot of the way we teach at school right now is just like this tortuous daycare that's terrible for kids, and to actually... exactly, just two hours a day of the... uh, at your level, you need to know. You're gonna be more focused, more interested than being able to run around, being in charge. I think, I think the Alpha School model is built on top of what's called the Acton School model, and, and Acton 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, give them a lot more responsibility, which I think is a very cool kind of libertarian model for-
- CWChris Williamson
The inmates are running the asylum. That's what you're telling me.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
It's awesome, and it creates this like responsibility, and it's just... it works, it works if it's done right. You still have guides 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 e- 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 in the school administrations right now. And so that, that's gonna be a big battle in our country.
- CWChris Williamson
Is this Department of Education stuff?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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... uh, in terms of these administrators and stuff, and I don't even know what they're doing. It's just, it's just 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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.
- 43:14 – 49:37
The US Tariff Breakdown
- JLJoe Lonsdale
- CWChris Williamson
Can you explain to me what the fuck's going on with these tariffs, Joe?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Please.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 the healthcare part with, you know, all these different areas. And I'm helping friends in Doge, and I'm, I'm actually very excited about a lot of other things going on. And, and tariffs, tariffs are a very complicated topic. So the, the kind of typical, like, libertarian framework is just that all tariffs are bad because of comparative advantage, right? And, and y- and you have people who could specialize, and, and, like, and there are certain things where tariffs don't make sense at all. For example, if you have like tribespeople 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, then you say, "Oh, we have a trade deficit with you," like, like the guys growing the vanilla aren't gonna 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 can sell in certain sectors, and every country does this.
- CWChris Williamson
What like?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 a certain amount of distance from where they're, from 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 al- 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 kinda made sense... America was so dominant after World War II, and it kinda made sense for how we were, like, building a global order with allies, so 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, esp- a- you know, in, in cert- certain areas, and th- 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 gonna 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 hardening our hearts for the 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 gonna... I'll give you a few examples. One tariff that's 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 a... 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Steel, stuff like that.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... departments be able to win, or, or pieces that go into making tanks or planes or drones or whatever. Like, like obviously tariff some of that supply chain. We need it h- we need it here. We need to build it here, right? Subsidize it here. I think those are obvious. And then you get into more complicated things. Uh, you know, I'm generally pro-free trade, but if you look at what happened... 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 want 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, 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, 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 that let us take away these barriers I talked about and, and 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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 fucking decipher what's going on, which maybe says everything you need to know about me and mine.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
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 the, the... uh, maybe my personality would not have been to do as quite a big of a splash right away. I'm like, "Ah!" And freak out everyone.
- CWChris Williamson
Print it off on a piece of PVC.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
But, but A, that's his personality, and B, now they're all gonna come make a deal. 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 the... I, I, I think you have to say that there's, there's logic in what J.D. Vance and President Trump think they're doing, and, and als- and the jury's still out is, is my view.
- CWChris Williamson
How important is this to US-led global order?Continuing, stuff like that?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, I, I, they've definitely, they've definitely made a decision that they wanna 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, 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 wanna 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Like I don't, I don't like the fact that even today, thanks to the Biden 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's starting to break down because of c- how we're handling things. There are things like that that aren't good and I think we should be stronger on 'em. Um, but it, there is gonna be a changing relationship for sure.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 49:37 – 53:18
Concerns Over Global Stability
- CWChris Williamson
Th- 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 s- sort of what's going on with the sort of destabilized current state of what f- feels like everywhere except for us, uh, over here. I guess just because there's two really fucking big oceans on either side.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
So 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 found incontrovertible evidence they funded the October 7th, you know, attacks and rapes and murders. Uh, they've been supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, which are stopping the navigation we just talked about. And this is-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that's their doing.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
That's their, that's why they can't get through the Red Sea is the Houth- the thing. And so for me, and, and it's actually really sad because I work with a lot of Iranians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, there's the Persian people, others, and th- 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 they even love J- Jews in Israel, but the people, it's like this country was conquered. It was communists and Islamists together and then the Islamists, and then the Islamists killed off the communists (laughs) and just took charge. And it's, 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 'cause it's your fault if you rape under Islamism. And the whole thing is just, like, crazy. You c- 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, their government, they walk over, you know, and so, and then 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, in 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 Islamists. 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 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 think, I think overall we're at a pretty good place if we can, like, take care of these few crazy people.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 53:18 – 1:02:13
What Does The Future Of Warfare Look Like?
- CWChris Williamson
What does the future of warfare look like on the ground? I'm hearing all manner of different stories about, you know, it's just gonna be drone versus drone, it's gonna be magic bullet versus magic bullet. What's your perspective on this?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, you know, after founding Palantir, for a while I didn't do defense 'cause it's so annoying to have to work with the government. I built companies in other areas and then I went back into defense (sighs) about 10 or 11 years ago 'cause really what happened is we saw Xi Jinping 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, uh, 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 and we-
- CWChris Williamson
What like?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Well, they had better hypersonics in certain areas. They were starting to do swarms of drones that could attack in different ways and it just, it was just, uh, 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 gonna 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And then in the late '90s, all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley and started innovating. And so, and so these, these, these big companies just fell way behind in software, way behind in 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 were like, "Oh my God, we gotta get our best people to work on this." And so my friend Palmer Luckey who'd
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JLJoe Lonsdale
... backed Oculus before, he partnered with three Palantir guys to form Anduril, which is a very-Famous company now, it's raised at 30 billion plus valuation. Uh, and then shortly after that I'm like f- you know, as, as we back that we, we went all in and then we started Epirus. Epirus is named after the bow of Theseus, which had infinite arrows, but it's the best EMP company so we can shoot down electronics miles away with bursts of microwave radiation, right? So it's, it's just 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 and we're teaching the Navy how to use AI to w- 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 it all has to be controlled with new forms of AI command and control. And so yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.
- CWChris Williamson
Is this the quickest moving that sort of warfare technology has ever gone?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
You know, warfare's changed a lot over the years. One of my favorite books was The Shield of Achilles, which is like this 1,000-page 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 governments, the structure of governments as well because the structure of government has to be able to support that form of warfare. So for 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 other, 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 mass produce 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 the kind of your, you know, your slaves or your serfs or whatever, you have to kind of... 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 this totally changes the form of government.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And, and, and, and there's, and it's, and so you have had warfare change a lot over the years and you, you have this concept that's interesting to me is defensive versus offensive warfare. So, so the question is what's better? So used to be defense was much easier, it was really hard to take a town, right? When the Ottoman Empire at its height, you know, even, even, even the, even by the say 17th Century, it's like, you know, September 11th, 1683, the height of their empire, the Christian kingdoms unite and throw them back from Vienna and save the town 'cause 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 th- 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 they kind of block things.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JLJoe Lonsdale
And, and so, so I do think this does favor asymmetrically, uh, city s- city states and small countries once again to be very, very powerful. It's, you know, for the cost of one aircraft carrier you could have 100,000 missiles in space that can land on anything effectively with these r- these rods. So there's all sorts of these things that make it really hard, uh, to, to break through defenses, and I, I hope that's where it goes 'cause in some sense it used to be had all these free city states all around Europe, that was a good thing, then you had 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 as, so as I hope that's where things are going is that defense is stronger but that's, that's a b- important question, we'll see.
- CWChris Williamson
What was the offensive capability advancement that the defense is now trying to push back against? What happened over the last 40, you know, four decades or so, what was it that, were the innovations there that we're now trying to push back against?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
Oh gosh, there's all sorts of these things in different ways. You know, it, it, 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 D- for 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, Saddam Hussein'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, I think, I think the, the, the new thing today that we're seeing in, 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 se- 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 it's, you, you are, you are seeing things just change entirely.
- CWChris Williamson
So the EMP solution is a way to stop using million dollar bombs to take down $500 drones?
- JLJoe Lonsdale
We have this video for Epirus where there's like these like 1,000 drones coming at you and then these like old-fashioned people are trying to fire the missiles at 'em, and you can take out a few and like what are you gonna do? Like it's, as, and, and it's crazy, even people who only had like five drones attacking our ships were spending these super expensive missiles, exactly, a 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 at the, about the same time, so you have these AI chips that can control power on very small timescales, and you get all the power, hit the gallium nitride at once, which means it-
Episode duration: 1:35:40
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