Joe and Taylor Lonsdale detail their move from California to Austin, Texas, driven by 2020 lockdown concerns and a mission to counter "woke" ideology through the University of Austin. Drawing on Joe's Palantir background and their libertarian values, they advocate for homeschooling pods, early parenthood, and hiring professors who understand opposing views like Hegel while excluding radicals. They criticize elite universities for stifling intellectual courage, support Palantir's ICE work, reject gentle parenting, and warn of a decade-long threat from the far left, aiming to cultivate patriotic students with high SAT scores to restore American exceptionalism. [Automatically generated summary]
So you've been, I would say, one of the longest term outspoken tech Republican donors.
What eventually turned you from someone who grew up in a very liberal enclave to, I would say, seeing the light?
My whole life, I've kind of had a very strong appreciation for liberty and for the Constitution, that we're dealing with this like massive threat that could destroy our country.
You, along with Barry Weiss, co-founded university.
What was the moment you said, I need to do this?
I think a lot of people who are our age don't realize what's happened at these universities like over the last 10 years when the woke zone and the illiberalism took over.
All the young people that I hire out of these top schools, we hire for our companies out of Stanford and EO and Harvard and all these other places.
And they're very smart people, but they're all afraid.
And everyone's taught and say the correct line and don't actually think for yourself.
And this is really dangerous.
Like that's how you lose the Republic.
Do you believe in gentle parenting?
I actually think that kids need firm boundaries.
Life is not kind.
Life is hard.
And I think to a certain extent, you want to mimic those conditions inside your own house so that if they make a bad decision, they do feel a little bit of the sting of making that decision.
Yeah, you don't want to train spoiled whims.
not good.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller podcast.
We're so excited to be in Austin, Texas today, joined by Taylor and Joe Lonsdale.
Thanks for doing this.
Yeah, it's nice to be here.
So Joe, you are famously known as a co-founder of Palantir, among many other things.
And your beautiful wife, I would like to say she's well known as being the founder of a school and doing what many moms across the country wish they could do.
And so I want to start there for a second, which is there is a big movement across the country, especially you've seen, I've seen it this week on the news with, you know, more students than ever are leaving schools in Chicago, in Minnesota, in New York City, and they're choosing to do something different.
You've chosen something different for your children.
Can you walk us through how you made that choice and what that looks like for your family?
Yeah.
When Joe and I were thinking about school for the kids, we had a few objectives and looking around at the schools that were available in Austin, we didn't see anything that really inspired us or felt like it was the right fit for us.
And I would say the two things that were the most important to us were really faith and liberty and combining those two so that they would form the core of the kids' education.
So I think as a parent, you want your kids to live a life full of meaning.
You want them to be happy.
And similarly, as an American, we really wanted our kids to appreciate what they have in this country and also to grow up to contribute to that, to protect it.
So that was kind of the start of it.
And I had this crazy idea that in order to do this, we would just have to homeschool.
And I was pregnant with our fourth child at the time and our kids were in preschool.
So this is actually kind of a crazy thing to do.
It was in the middle of COVID, so it was a great excuse to start.
And you now have six kids.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
So not a small family.
You actually practice what you preach, unlike many people.
Yeah.
Well, once we got going, we just, we thought they were so great.
Thought the more the merrier.
We have five little girls and we have a son.
So I'm surrounded by lots of female energy here, which is awesome.
Taylor and I, I mean, she's at Stanford, she was there after me, and she was also the editor of the Stanford Review, which is kind of a more liberty-focused kind of paper.
And, you know, the stories out of the private schools in California where we've been living were just insane.
I mean, this is even like our friends who are many of them on the left themselves.
They're like, our first grader was yelled at for thinking there were two genders and they were lecturing the kids about that today.
And like, what do we do here?
And so it's not just that we got to get away from that craziness.
It's also that like if anything that tries to be values agnostic these days ends up imbibing the values of the culture, which is not, which are not our values.
In order to teach American exceptionalism, pride in our country, pride in liberty and Western civilization, we felt like we had to build something ourselves.
But you've now expanded that to other children and making this opportunity for more than just your family, which I think is really important.
Yeah, we got going and the homeschool was kind of a disaster because I'm a terrible teacher.
Trying when you're in the first trimester of a pregnancy and you're feeling sick and even homeschooling in preschool is probably, it's not a great time to start homeschooling because they're too young to do a structured curriculum.
But as I was going along, I started talking to other friends in the community and other Jewish families in the community.
And there are a lot of people here who share the same values.
They're very patriotic.
They wanted their kids to understand American history, American founding values.
And similarly, we all felt really strongly about passing on our Jewish heritage and traditions and a really deep understanding of Torah and the Hebrew Bible.
And so we started having these conversations and other people said, yeah, I'd love to do this with you.
So we formed a learning pod and started figuring out together.
We hired some teachers together and it really took off from there.
And I think it was really incredible to be able to get together with a group of families who share the same values to do school together.
And it's only grown from there.
It's still a small community, but we'll probably be about 35 kids next year.
And so it's been a privilege.
I'm really lucky that Joe has supported this journey.
It's not very profitable yet, but she's well, he's come home more than a few times to find me like crying in the bathroom, like trying to figure things out.
She's done an amazing job.
These things are a lot of work.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
I ran a pod for one year with six kids.
And I said, never again will I be a school principal.
Like I gave up on the pod concept because I think for a lot of moms who say, okay, great, a traditional school is not for us to the points that you make is, you know, you want to be patriotic.
You want to teach math, science, reading, and like just do the basics.
And that's no longer an option in most schools.
It's like, well, where do you turn?
And for most parents, then you start a pod and you realize how quickly those challenges are running your own school, so to speak.
Yeah.
And there are some new grade schools popping up here.
Alpha is an amazing school.
For us, you know, I really admired some of the old best classical Christian schools.
And we're Jewish, so it's kind of classical Jewish school.
And, you know, Taylor's building a bigger campus now.
Who knows?
Maybe we'll have a couple hundred kids if we scale it up.
Yeah, we pulled our curriculum from Memoria Press, which is an amazing Christian classical curriculum.
And they also run a big classical Christian school in Kentucky.
And so we really benefited from the partnership with the classical Christian world.
So it's been great.
And I've also, I feel like we've learned a lot as well.
In particular, it's been so great to immerse our kids in the study of the Hebrew Bible.
It's just such an important foundational document for our religion, but also for our country.
And I think it's, I think probably the reason we've kept going is because I find it so interesting and I'm learning all of that.
Taylor's really into this, all this too.
And it is fun.
I think they speak better Hebrew and better Latin than both of us now.
So it's just kind of neat.
So we're going to now switch over to Joe for a second and take us back.
So you started your career as an intern at PayPal.
That's right.
What were some of your initial job duties?
Oh, gosh.
At first, they tried to have me set up PeopleSoft, which was a disaster.
I actually found out the reason it was designed that way is you're supposed to have to hire a consultant.
So that was, I almost, actually, I almost wanted to quit.
It was so terrible as a 19-year-old.
And my dad convinced me not to quit, which I really appreciate because it was good to get to know everyone there.
You know, I grew up in Silicon Valley and my friends all taught me to program at a very young age.
We were kind of math and chess champions and pretty nerdy.
And a lot of the smartest people of Stanford were going to PayPal when I was a kid.
So I tried to get in freshman year and I remember arguing with Max at the whiteboard.
I don't think he remembers.
He was Peter's co-founder.
Didn't get in freshman year, but software ainger.
They hired me and got involved in a lot of stuff there.
The most interesting thing going on at PayPal was the Chinese and Russian mafia were trying to steal all of our money and we had to figure out how to stop them.
That was a pretty crazy time.
Would you say you were getting coffee back then too?
Or is like that was not the same intern responsibility?
It was not quite that, although I'm sure once or twice I must have gotten like someone coffee, but it was a little more substantive than that.
So just walk me through.
So you're like, you say, you know, new college graduate starting at PayPal.
And how do we get to Palantir?
Yeah, sure.
So I was working at PayPal while I was at Stanford, which was really cool.
And bringing in my friends to help.
And I ended up working for Peter and finishing Stanford early in my senior year and spending time with him and helping with a bunch of companies.
So he invested in Facebook at that time and was doing things there.
He invested in something called Zoom and others.
And you know, I was a trader on his macro hedge fund team and I really, really liked the finance side of things too.
And I brought in a bunch of my smartest friends who were from the math and chess world who were like getting their PhDs to help us the first year.
And they just hated finance.
There's a lot of people just not what they're interested in.
And so we started mapping out based on the experience at PayPal how to get the bad guys because a lot of the people who run FBI and Secret Service who were in charge of getting the bad guys, they were not really technical.
So my friends and I, for fun, were helping them after PayPal because they're still doing this stuff.
And we started sketching up different ideas with that group.
And a bunch of those ideas ended up kind of growing into what became Palantir.
Taylor, you've also involved in tech.
Do you guys frequently at that time, once you had met, like bounce each other, bounce ideas off of each other in this?
Are you going to tell the embarrassing story?
Yeah.
Which one?
Where I couldn't come meet you because of the I worked at Palantir from 2013 to 2015.
And I was no longer there though.
I was introduced to the company through a mutual friend of ours.
And I worked on the healthcare team there.
It was an amazing experience.
I was really, really lucky to get to work there.
But it was kind of funny.
It's a highly meritocratic institution.
The culture is very hardcore.
And so the idea that as a female employee, you might be dating one of the founders was very, that was not cool.
You should not advertise that.
Very taboo.
Well, you didn't, I didn't want to be perceived as having used that to get ahead or use that as like a part of a status game.
So he was under strict orders to keep it very, very secret.
I wasn't any orders.
I wasn't already working at the company.
Yeah, I know.
No, he wasn't working there, but nonetheless, the optics were bad.
So I remember.
I had orders from you down to San Francisco.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He would come and pick me up for dates and I'd make him park like three blocks down in Palo Alto and I'd run out of the office and kind of look and then go jump in the car.
Palinger, we started in 2003 and I was more active there the first 10 years.
But you left out the whole thing where I didn't show up in China.
You have to tell her that one.
Oh, okay.
Joe almost got me fired from my first job.
Before we were dating, yeah.
I was working for an angel investor in China who had raised a fund with Sequoia.
So he was like 2009.
9, 10, 11, before we knew China was evil, like a lot of people, she was there for three years.
Right after I moved to China from 2009 to 2013, right after college, it was in the wake of the Olympics.
Everybody thought that it was reforming and opening up and that it would liberalize.
So there was this huge surge in Westerners going and living the expat lifestyle in China and trying to build some kind of cross-border career.
So I landed in Beijing and I got this really great job with a local angel investor who had started a company called New Oriental.
He was kind of at the forefront of early stage tech investing in China.
And the first year I was working there, he wanted to organize a tech conference and he wanted to bring somebody from Silicon Valley to be the headline speaker.
I said, well.
Yeah, that's embarrassing.
I know this guy named Joe Lonsdale, and I bet I could reach out to him and see if he'll come speak.
And so I did, and Joe agreed to come.
I was like 28 at the time, and I had been in China once, so I didn't know how it worked.
Yeah, the day of the conference, I get this call in the morning, and Joe is at SFO, and he's panicked, and he says, I'm at the airport, and they won't let me onto the airplane.
I said, well, what do you mean they won't let you onto the airplane?
He said, apparently you need a visa to go to China.
I said, Joe, communist country, of course you need a visa.
They're not just going to let you come in from the United States.
We weren't dating or anything at this time, so it's a very good thing.
I didn't go to the process of the day.
And it's a great testament to his personal generosity and magnum.
You bought your old boss, you mean that I didn't fire you?
He didn't fire me.
He was very, very nice about it.
But yeah, Joe didn't end up coming.
It was several years later that we dated, so that almost ruined it for me.
Did you hold that against him when you started dating?
Visa Issues and Communist Countries00:15:25
No, no, no.
I think I just learned my lesson about knowing what you don't know and trying to prepare proactively for it.
I thought the conference would set up whatever I needed.
I was busy.
I didn't know.
Well, that was technically my job, so I guess partially my own fault.
I'll take the blame.
So you've been, I would say, one of the longest term outspoken tech Republican donors.
What eventually turned you from someone who grew up in Palo Alto, grew up in San Francisco, grew up in a very liberal enclave to, I would say, seeing the light?
Oh, well, you know, my brothers and I were reading Austrian economics as like 11, 12, 13 year olds and Ayn Rand.
And Milton Friedman was a mentor of mine when I was at Stanford, the famous economist.
He was at Hoover there.
And so my whole life, I've kind of had a very strong appreciation for liberty and for the Constitution.
I remember as a teenager, one of my father's friends had a bunch of these books called The London Magazines, which is all the primary sources from the 18th century.
So you could see the arguments back then between, you know, like Alexander Hamilton and Lord North, you know, of London in the early 1770s.
And all these guys, if you read the primary sources, were all pretty much libertarians back then.
And I think that's why they don't teach them in the schools anymore is they made people too pro-liberty.
So I always had that bias.
And I just, over time, like the left became more and more dysfunctional and more and more corrupt and moved farther and farther away from those values, which caused me to want to fight it more.
But listen, I was even outspoken as the editor in Stanford Review and getting attacked all the time at college.
So I guess I've always been on this team.
When President Trump was running, were you still that type of Republican?
Because I would say that's when a large part of the Republican Party kind of some went MAGA.
Some said, no, no, this is not what we're doing here.
Yeah, you know, I have a huge amount of respect for President Trump and I support a lot of what he does and I have for a long time.
I come at it from the principal perspective and the principles really, really matter to me.
And so I'd say like 80 or 90% of the time I agree with him and 10% I might not.
But that said, I think he's identified correctly, as has your husband and others, that we're dealing with this like massive threat that could destroy our country.
And so I think there are a lot of Republicans that say, well, these are my principles and therefore I'm going to lose in a principled way.
And I think that's pathetic.
I really admire what the administration is doing is to fight and win and to do it in a principled way as possible is my preference, but we have to win against the bad guys.
I asked this because you're one of the most prolific people on X when it comes to talking about your political views and what you think in any given moment.
What do you think of his X post?
Do you ever say that one went too far?
I see you sneaking on and liking him.
You say you're not on it at all, but I see your little name pops up.
I have to say, X is becoming more and more sticky.
It's hard to stay away.
The content is getting better and better.
Yeah, I mean, I totally support, I mean, we share the same principles at the end of the day.
And I think there are times when I perhaps would have phrased something a little bit differently.
But the substance of what the substance, we're always 100% aligned.
And so, So yeah, I think it's great that you're willing to speak up and share your beliefs.
I think there's a healthy balance where because I'm so out there, it's usually better for her.
It doesn't have to be.
You've got much thicker skin than me too.
You can handle the heat on this.
Well, you'll be fine.
Just uncle look at the comments on the podcast afterwards.
Where do you primarily get your news from?
You know, I have a pretty big policy team.
I've teamed in 23 states and a lot of different experts there.
So they're constantly sending stuff to the list, constantly arguing on the tech side.
Obviously, I have 70 people at my firm in ABC.
They're constantly sending things for me to read and study.
And so you do see some things on X and some things on the different sites you try to go to.
But for me, it's mostly just inbound from a massive amount of people, the things I'm doing.
Given your, I would say, great depth of caring for the future of the country and other people's perception of liberty and free speech and important issues that are also important to you.
Have you ever thought about purchasing a newspaper to help drive thought more in the direction towards where, you know, the thinkers you just mentioned?
Yeah, you know, I think we definitely need better media.
So, you know, I got to know Barry Weiss about eight years ago and the conversation, it was maybe about then, the conversation was we have to kind of recreate institutions in our society that are broken because they are broken and they're conquered.
And you're not going to reconquer Harvard.
You're not going to reconquer Yale.
You're not going to reconquer the New York Times.
It's just, it's too hard.
And so, you know, I backed her in the free press, which is, it's probably like slightly left of where I am, but I think overall it's like much better than everything else.
I think she's done a great job.
I'm proud to be one of the very first checks into that.
You know, one of my really talented colleagues has built something called Arena Magazine.
And I'll give you a copy in there later.
It's like a, you know, I used to love Wired and Scientific American as a kid.
And these things are all just like over, like, they're trash.
They're trash now.
So I want something that's, that's substantive and smart, but also patriotic and also interested in what we're doing.
And so we're building that.
It's Arena Magazine.
It's growing really fast.
It's a great thing to check out.
So we're trying to explore and create new forms of media for sure.
We have to do better at this.
You were born and raised, as I mentioned, in California, but you guys moved to Austin in 2020.
What was your aha moment where you're like, we got to get out of here?
Okay.
This is a good story.
So during COVID, I think the lockdowns went into effect in San Mateo County around March 20th, 2020 thereabouts.
And I was on an email chain with a lot of friends from around the country.
And about two weeks into the lockdowns, I said, guys, don't worry.
You know, people at some point are going to wake up and say, hey, my business is failing.
My kids are suffering because they can't go to school.
We're going to see massive civil disobedience in protest of the lockdowns because people just can't live this way.
It's too damaging.
And then, you know, six months go by.
We're still under lockdown.
Nobody's protesting.
I look around me in Northern California.
I'm like, where is the civil disobedience?
Where are the protesters?
And meanwhile, I opened the New York Times one day and I see this article on the people of West Texas.
And they're interviewing people like in Lubbock.
And the people there are saying, well, we're not going to wear masks.
That's stupid.
I'm not doing it just because the government tells me to do it.
And I looked at Joe and I said, I'd much rather have those people as my neighbors.
Those are the people that I want living next door to me.
You know, the people who are skeptical of government power.
And it was just terrifying to see how quickly Californians rolled over in response to government coercion.
And you just look at Taylor and we're like, yep, you're great.
Let's go.
Yeah, we've been talking about, should we leave California for a long time?
I mean, there's a question, you know, so I created this group called California Common Sense with a bunch of Stanford students, like 2008, 2009, where we put all the data online for California compared to other states.
And it was great because I used Stanford students.
And so there was like a thousand attack pieces on the students from the unions.
Because of course, when you show off the data, you realize certain areas are reasonable and certain areas are spending like 50% more because they're corrupt.
And so since then, we kind of been watching California spend.
And Taylor had been pushing me because I pay a lot of taxes when we have wins.
It's great.
We're doing very well.
And then California takes a lot of money.
So he's like, is it ethical to be funding California to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars?
And she's been pushing me harder and harder on that.
And so it'd been something we'd kind of been talking and thinking about.
And with our kids, just being at the age, you know, I think at that point we had just three children, right?
And you're pregnant with the fourth.
I don't know, it's pregnant with Annabelle with a third.
You're pregnant with the third.
That's right.
I was flying back and forth between San Francisco and Austin in the middle of COVID.
And people are looking at this pregnant lady on the plane.
You're crazy.
No, but it's like we had to figure out like schooling.
We had to figure out we're going to build our life together and our family.
And we just put all this effort into this stuff in Woodside in California, but we realized it's not where we want to have our family long term.
What are your thoughts on the billionaire tax in California?
Do you think more people should have heeded your advice and gotten out sooner?
Well, you know, I do think it's unethical to send money to a corrupt and broken government that you disagree with fundamentally.
So I think people who live in New York, people who live in California, should think about the ethics of the dollars they're paying because by paying money towards those governments, you're supporting a state that you think is wrong.
And I mean, obviously, expropriation, you know, stealing people's property is just beyond the PL.
It's totally un-American.
You can't allow that.
I think any revolution necessary to withstand that is appropriate.
Fortunately, it's probably not going to pass elsewhere this time.
Probably not even there, but we'll see.
But I'll tell you what, it's really kind of cool that it's woken up a bunch of my friends because there's a bunch of these people who are fine.
Like, wait a second, we got to stand against this.
So obviously a horrible thing.
I kind of love that people are kind of seeing what's going on now.
Polymarket has a 22% chance that Mandani is also going to pass a 2% millionaires tax in New York before 2027.
Do you think it happens as well?
Or is you thinking it's going to run the same course as what happens in California?
I think that people like Momdani, unfortunately, may be strategic.
Their goal is to overthrow the entire system of the United States.
They're against fundamentally what our country stands for and its values.
And so I think that in order to achieve his ends, he's probably going to wait and try to do things nationally.
It wouldn't be a smarter thing as a bad guy for him to do.
So I hope he makes the mistake of doing it and showing what a dumb idea it is there.
But my warriors, he's smart enough to try to do it nationally instead, which is terribly destructive, but would probably be a better strategy if you're a crazy Marxist, you know?
Probably.
So when you left Palantir, did you immediately start your VC firm?
So I started something called At a Par, which has about $9 trillion reported over.
It's a major wealth management.
So it didn't do well at all.
It's doing pretty well.
Everyone who manages money knows it.
It's like a wealth management thing.
And I started OpenGov out of the California Common Sense.
And we had 3,000 cities and state agencies with my friend Zach co-founded and a couple others.
And it actually fixed a lot of that stuff in government.
We sold out for a couple of billion dollars a couple of years ago.
So I started these two companies, but I was helping a lot of my friends at Palantir as they left figure out what to build next.
And I was actually working with a dozen new companies.
So a lot of my mentors kind of convinced me, Joe, you already are doing all this.
You should have more money and more people helping you.
And so it started the fund for that.
What's been your biggest success that you've invested in?
Gosh, I mean, famously, probably being in the first couple rounds of Andrews, pretty amazing.
That's the top defense company.
You know, leading the seed round in Quince, which you love is colonel if you know this one yet.
It's like it's like super high-end luxury for affordable prices, like for like a fifth the cost.
I mean, they just manufacture the exact same thing, really high quality, and it's doing billions of revenue there.
You know, Saranic here in town is building ships for the U.S. Navy.
It's the fastest-built big ships in the country since World War II.
And we're delivering hundreds of smaller ships as well.
We helped create that out of the firm.
So we've got a lot of things that have worked out.
And what's been your greatest failures?
You know, there's been, there's been things that went to zero.
There's been, there's, there was one where it not only went to zero, but the founders defrauded me and then it went to zero and they fled the country.
So that was bad, you know?
So it's venture capital.
You know, you're doing really well on venture capital if you have a, if you have half of a mark, which is about where we are.
And so, you know, it's just in general, in general, like sometimes these things just really don't work.
Because I think about this when someone says, oh, I'm a VC or do, you know, and you're starting something from scratch or you want to become an entrepreneur and you only want to get in front of somebody like yourself, right?
And it's to say, what are the keys that you've seen are successful?
And then what leads to where even someone like you doesn't see like, holy mother, this is probably not going to work.
You know, I mean, there's one thing where we helped Lady Gaga start a company, which was really fun.
And she was sitting in the engineer's laughs.
It's before me too.
So I guess that was okay back then.
And it was entertaining.
And we did really well for her, but then it didn't skilled other performers and it went to zero.
And that was, we were probably distracted by the fact that we were working with Lady Gaga back 10 years ago.
It was fun.
I mean, in terms of things that really matter, it's having a very great tech culture really matters.
So the same way if you're like running a professional baseball team, you have to scout players, get the best players.
You really have to scout the really top talent in the world.
Like one of the biggest success stories we're in right now called Cognition, the guy who started it, he used to work for me at Atapar.
He won the gold medal in programming three years in a row.
So he's like the king of the nerds, three years in a row.
There's gold medals in programming?
There is.
There's Olympics for programming.
It's the IOIS, the Olympic programming contest.
There's also, there's also Physics Olympiads and Math Olympiads.
And he was a top math performer too.
And he hired like 20 other kids who'd done really, were the top gold medalists and silver medalists at these Olympiads.
And, you know, this is the fastest growing company I've ever been in.
And not that big a surprise with that much talent there.
You still have to get other things right too.
But I'd say number one is like the depth of the technology talent.
And they should all own a piece of the company.
They should all fill stators.
And so you've worked with throughout your career multiple founders and multiple CEOs who are household names now who are incredibly successful.
From your perspective, I'm going to go through just like the three off the top of my head.
And you're going to tell me why you think they're successful and what comes to mind when you think of them.
Palmer Lucky.
I was texting Palmer yesterday.
He just really, really high raw horsepower IQ, of course, which is quite true for all these people.
And just very creative and just willing to like go outside the bounds and have fun in a creative way.
I was at his wedding actually sitting there.
You were there.
We were sitting next to like Senator Cruz and Peter Thiel.
And there's like really fancy flowers and people in dresses between violins and the music goes off.
And all of a sudden the top dove music comes on and this helicopter flies right over us.
And he in his classic, you know, I think it's, I think he actually had tails on this time, not the Hawaiian shirt, but he landed the helicopter next to the thing, got out, went up to it, took off, went away.
And then his wife came in the traditional way with her father.
But he's just having fun.
And he's America's Ironman.
Peter Thiel.
So I've written a lot about Peter and lessons I learned from him.
There's like a bunch of stuff online.
Sure, we're looking for the stuff that's not written.
Okay.
Peter, well, Peter, Peter just, he comes at the world from a contrarian perspective.
Like he'll find, he'll find like the view that others are missing and he'll put a lot of weight behind it and he'll identify like the one factor that matters people aren't thinking about.
And he's really, really good at talent and he's really, really good at just coming out from an angle no one else is and just pushing that and being right.
What do you think stuck out about you specifically versus all of the other people who have come before Peter that are looking for similar mentorship or opportunities that he's been able to provide so many peoples that have come from that network?
I think Peter has a pretty broad footprint of intellectual interests, whether it's in history and economics and philosophy and otherwise.
And I think I'm pretty similar in that regard.
I probably was, I was able to keep up with him and argue with him in a bunch of these areas.
We both have very high confidence in ourselves and are willing to kind of push back even in areas that are somewhat new and extrapolative.
So being able to converse with him and have opinions and debate and those things probably was pretty relevant.
Alex Karp.
Alex is awesome.
My co-founder from Palance here.
You have to understand these backgrounds.
Family Values in Your Mid Twenties00:16:14
He was.
like the star philosophy student to like the top philosopher in Germany.
And it's very funny if you haven't explained this to you because it's like in America, if you're like on the NBA, like all these women will follow you around.
He claims anyway that in Europe, that's what happens in philosophy.
Philosophers.
And so because of that, all the billionaires want to be philosophers in Europe.
So he's like this like super cool kid that all the realities want to hang out with.
And he just somehow, through this whole thing, like within like a minute or two, he'll like know all these things about someone.
It's like a magic trick, actually.
It's like it's a weird form of wisdom where he'll just interact with you and he'll know tons of things about you and know if he wants to hire you or not, know how you fit in.
I'm sure there's tons of stereotypes being involved there that are inappropriate, but he's like, hey, because he's black and Jewish, so he gets to do what he wants.
But it's like, it's like, no, he's just a genius about people and institutions.
He really is.
Elon Musk.
Elon is the most alpha of all of my friends, I'd say.
I'm willing to go three or four standard deviations too hard in terms of working too hard and pushing people and being bold and just cutting nonsense and driving towards things.
And that makes me a great entrepreneur.
Elon's my only friend who's like clearly a standard deviation further than me along those lines.
So it's just like just the most alpha of all the guys.
So I think you're the most alpha of that.
Thank you, love.
So we just did a heavy section on men who are in tech.
I want to go to a bit of a softer subject, which is motherhood.
So you have six children.
How do you guys manage a typical day?
Well, we have a lot of support at home and we really couldn't do it without our support system.
So they get huge kudos for keeping us on track.
And yeah, I mean, you're working, but you are basically popping in and out throughout the day to hang out with the kids or take them outside.
Yeah, I went upstairs to say good morning to everyone and most of them were in good news and a couple of them were grouchy this morning and give hugs and hang out and chased Ava around our three-year-old a little bit.
Yeah, we've got four in school, which opens up a big chunk of the day.
We hang out with the two little ones.
Joey and I, Joey's not quite two.
We were throwing around this ice snowballs outside.
It's all frozen at this point because it snowed this weekend.
And we were having a lot of fun with that.
And then he slipped and fell and it was sad, but he's doing fine.
Typical dad thing.
He actually fell and then I got freaked out so I fast over to him.
So I fell too next to him, but it wasn't too bad a fall.
And we both nice slid and we both slid together.
And then he was crying for a few minutes, but he's okay.
Oh, I'm sure it's toughened him up.
Yeah, exactly.
And then usually I'll do homework with the kids and they get home from school.
And we try to do family dinner together as often as we can.
I probably make family dinner three or four nights a week.
And then we try to always make it on Friday unless something really unusual is going on.
So almost all the time there, it's a show-out dinner.
So we do that.
And then we have sort of a three-hour bedtime extravaganza every night, which is shocking that it takes that long.
I think we start at 6.30, but basically by 9 or 9.30, everybody is actually.
It's 8.30.
That's a huge part of parenting is getting them to go to school.
A huge part of parenting is like the bath to bedtime run.
I do a lot of stories for the kids.
We do stories with the big girls.
I always make up new stories.
It's a good time for quality time because everything's kind of quieted down.
And so we can do individual time with them.
We have like a whole fantasy world with like all these different lessons we try to teach and stuff.
And it's funny because like one of the daughters is like, I want to hear the story to be more about business.
And the other daughter says, no, that's boring.
I want more magic tonight.
And so Nina Bay is fun, though.
There's a well-reported ongoing fertility crisis, not only here in the United States, but across the world.
yet you two are people who are married, have six children.
What would be your message to other young women and men who are either delaying waiting till they're older or not understanding the importance and truly the satisfaction that it's very clear both of you have from raising children?
What do you think?
I think having kids, ideally you found your life partner before you have kids.
So you don't.
you don't want to rush into that.
But, you know, when I was in college, I went to Stanford.
And so everybody was very ambitious, very career-oriented.
And nobody really ever talked to you as a young woman about, I think my mom brought this up a few times, but nobody really talked to you about your fertility window and how much time you had and how much harder it was to have kids as you get older.
And I'm sort of an unashamed, should I say shameless sort of ambassador for more babies.
When I meet women and men who are still in their 20s, I say, you know, your husband or wife seems pretty nice.
Why don't you have babies yet?
Come on.
And so people are like, oh, okay.
The grandparents always love us.
We're always pushing their kids to make babies.
Yeah, I think that it's maybe a mistake to wait until you're, quote unquote, have everything figured out financially.
I know my grandparents got married when they were 20 and 21 right after school.
And they had a great marriage together.
And I think it's just, it's nicer to be a younger mom if you can swing it because you have more energy, you're healthier, you have less complications.
Yeah, women's bodies actually evolved to have babies in their teens and 20s mostly.
Yeah, we started when I was 30.
Exactly.
And the older I get, the harder it gets.
And it's harder to recover.
And I feel tired.
I hope.
You're doing great.
I hope our kids will have babies in their 20s.
I think that's actually, I mean, and you should wait.
I don't know.
I can't say what's exactly right.
I feel like you keep changing to your mid-20s.
You don't want to like lock down the wrong life partner or something in your early 20s as it's complicated.
But I feel like by the time you're in your like mid to late 20s, if you find someone and you have babies, I think that's the right thing to do.
Yeah.
And for me, having kids is the most meaningful, exciting, fun, challenging thing that I've ever done.
So do you think that it's caused by young women who want to be in the workplace, who want to derive value from a career?
Or do you think it's that young men are not understanding the value of having a life partner and the support that that ultimately brings to their career?
It's probably both.
It's probably both.
I mean, I think the culture is just broken on this score.
Like I saw something the other day where it was like a warning at a concert, like be careful what choices you make tonight.
You might be changing a diaper in nine months or something instead of coming to another concert.
And it's just, it's kind of sad.
The culture is just instinctively anti-baby and anti-thress of it and something.
And I think our culture, everything has gotten really easy, right?
I think it's like everyone just press a button and food comes and just there's not much effort for anything.
And I think children involves a lot of effort and a lot of things you have to do that are inconvenient.
And so I think if your whole life's set up instinctively to avoid inconvenience and to make it more and more convenient, there's something a little bit unhealthy about that.
And it kind of pushes you away from families.
And it's too bad because I think even though it's hard to be sleep deprived, I mean, you know, you're living this right now.
I find that service to another person and the self-sacrifice and the kind of the sense of duty and responsibility is just infinitely more exciting and fulfilling than, I guess, it's still good to do things for yourself and take care of yourself, but it's tough to get her away on the airplane to party or something.
We get away every once in a long while.
Yeah, I just think it's great to be able to do that for another person.
Do you think this is over time that society has pushed this onto women and it's the feminist movement?
Or where do you think this kind of originates from?
I think there's a modern strain of thinking that Joe is alluding to, which says that your self-actualization, your own happiness, your own comfort is the highest pursuit, highest value.
And I think that's a completely incorrect paradigm for looking at the world and life happiness and fulfillment.
Yeah, I mean, I'm very obviously pro-markets and pro-capitalism.
There's probably some part of our consumer culture that's frankly pretty unhealthy and it's tied into like getting ahead by being like, by having what other people have and by having these like higher end experiences.
And I think if you're focusing too much on those and too much on your own fun with those, you're missing the things that really matter in life.
And there's, I don't know, it's probably the lack of faith in religion is probably also a big part of it.
But there's just a lack of centeredness in our culture, so they don't realize what really matters.
Do you think it's the loss of communities and the individualism that has kind of led to?
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly easier to raise children when you're in a community and you have support.
You have the older generation helping you out.
American society has always been very mobile.
So I think that's a unique challenge for American parents in particular.
And when it comes to feminism, yeah, it's been kind of a double-edged sword for women.
I personally feel really happy to live in the 21st century with all of the legal protections and the opportunities and the options as a woman.
But I think that we're biologically different.
And it's also, it's good to acknowledge and value the fact that we can help continue the species.
And that's also really, really important and should be honored.
I mean, there's this crazy stat I'm sure you saw where people on the right now are having a lot more kids than people on the left.
And it's something, listen, I mean, also like young women who are on the extreme left, I think half of them have mental health issues right now.
There's something really broken about the state of mind of how we're treating women and where women are politically that's probably tying into this.
We briefly talked about newspapers and the importance of shaping thought.
You, along with Barry Weiss, co-founded university.
What was the moment you said, I need to do this in order to help kids be more educated in the way you wanted to be educated and the way you want your children to be educated?
Yeah, you know, something I've been talking also about with friends for a very long time.
And, you know, things were not as crazy when we were in university.
You were there right after me.
It was like, I did get, I got my first B ever after I argued in support of John Locke or something.
So it's like there were some things that were like more left, but it wasn't like, it wasn't the end of the world.
And it was really, I think a lot of people who are our age don't realize what's happened at these universities like over the last 10 years when the Wilkerson and the illiberalism took over.
And it was, you know, Neil Ferguson, who's also our co-founder with Barry, he's probably one of the great living historians in the world, has taught Oxford and Harvard and et cetera.
And so he's exposed this more intimately.
And it got to the point where if you are in these fields of sociology or education or history and you believe in markets and you don't think the British Empire was necessarily the most evil thing ever, you're just not allowed to go to these places anymore.
So there's really, really great talent that Neil was actually seeing that we were talking about, who were some of the great minds of our generation, and they just couldn't get hired anywhere.
One of these economists I met who he would have been like a famous guy at Harvard in their generation, the only place they would hire him was West Virginia University.
And I stole him out and he became my head of policy and his head of policy or Manhattan Institute now, just a genius guy.
And it's like even he maybe probably couldn't get hired anymore at these places.
So like we have to, you know, so that's one thing.
And then I'll say the other thing is that basically all the young people that I hire out of these top schools, we hire for companies out of Stanford and Yale and Harvard and all these other places.
And they're very smart people, but they're all afraid.
They're all been taught to kind of narrow themselves and not walk outside the bounds.
And you see it in our cities.
You see it in the fraud going on in our country where there's really broken stuff.
And everyone's taught, don't look that way.
Just like virtue signal and say the correct line and don't actually think for yourself.
And this is really dangerous.
Like that's how you lose the republic.
And so, you know, our goal with the university was to have one great university that competes with the other top universities that's not run by communists and where the kids are courageous.
Did any of, you know, what strikes me now about any university across the country is that when a conservative goes to speak, they have to have armed security.
And no liberal has that same problem when they step onto a university.
Is that something that goes into your mind about how only one school of thought is accepted today?
Oh, yeah.
Now, listen, we were also friends with Charlie.
He was supposed to visit a month after when he got shot.
And I, you know, you don't want to like maybe put this out in public too much, but there are a couple of things I had to reconsider where I didn't want to necessarily go.
I have six young kids.
I didn't necessarily want to put myself in public in front of a thousand kids at a place where you just don't know if there's a crazy person there or not.
And it does, it's sad because it does definitely like partially silence.
That's not going to let it fully silence me.
Obviously, they can't do that until they feel off me, I guess.
Hopefully it doesn't happen.
But I still want to keep speaking, but you do have to be more careful.
And it's definitely coming from the wrong side.
What surprises you most about the response to the University of Austin so far?
You know, it was interesting.
We had some really talented people help us get it going, but it was kind of funny seeing some of the people come in who are from that industry, who are trying to bring the standard way of doing things, even from other universities that frankly is not how we want to do things there.
And it's just so hard whenever you do something to make it different because there's so many people who are used to how everything else is working.
So I think we've done a really great job now with Carlos as president being really bold and really making sure we're driving in the correct direction where it's a very patriotic mission and where we're going to make sure these kids, kids learn intellectual courage.
But it was surprising how hard it was to kind of overcome the pull of just the standard way everyone else is working.
Is there something you're doing differently to screen teachers or professors, I should say?
You know, and this is, I think it's really important to differentiate between like how you run the university, between the kind of ideas that are there.
So we have professors who are both on the right and the left, I'd say.
And I think it's probably a pretty good balance.
But it's really important.
The reason I got in trouble, there's like a big hit piece on this last week in Politico, you may have seen, where I'm like, I basically, the reason you can't let in the radicals, like the commies and the extreme socialists and the other people, is that those are the people who cancel other ideas.
And so it's really important that the professors are able to have discussions and respect differences of opinion.
And frankly, if someone comes in on the right, I want them to have to understand Hegel and Marx and everything else and have to debate it and have to be good at debating it because otherwise they're not going to be as good at being a smart person on the right.
And if they're on the, if someone comes in, there are some students coming in, let's say on the left, moderate, left, and they should be exposed to both sides and be forced to defend their ideas.
I think microaggressions are a good thing, actually, intellectually.
They should be uncomfortable, you know?
What's your vision for the university in 10 years, 20 years?
Well, we're scaling up.
We're doing our third class right now.
Each class is getting stronger.
A lot of these kids are turned down to the Ivy League.
I think the average SAT score is about 1500 now.
And the new one is coming up for the high 1400s.
And we want to be a place that steals away the very best talent from the top schools.
We want our students to be so much more successful within those schools that we force them to consider more of our ideas and ways of doing things because otherwise they're just going to lose all their best students.
Are you extrapolating what you're learning at the university for the homeschool and vice versa?
Yeah, I think so.
They're driven by a similar energy.
You know, with an elementary school, the mission is much more, Joe mentioned having values-free versus value-laden education.
I think all education is values-laden.
It's just that some people are more honest about what their values are than other.
And I think when you have a quote-unquote values-free environment, it actually is a certain set of values you probably don't agree with as a conservative.
So yeah, with the school, we're much more forward, obviously.
You know, by the time a child's entering university, young adult, they should be able to step into a marketplace of ideas with a lot more confidence.
In the elementary school level, I think where you're starting from is, hey, There's a lot of things that are true and good and beautiful, and we're going to teach those to you as truth.
And then as you get older and mature, you'll be able to argue against those.
But I think certainly the focus in the early years is much more about saying, here's our values, here's our truth, and we're going to teach you about that because we actually think it's the best information for you to get as a kid.
At elementary school, I think for who you hire, you have to be more explicit about what heresy is not to teach there.
We're not going to teach the gender heresies.
Teaching Truth Before Conspiracy Theories00:06:05
We're not going to teach the eco-heresies.
We're not going to, you know, we're not going to, there's just a lot of nonsense you just want to keep out of these places.
If you're not careful, there's going to be a nice, well-meaning teacher who bubbles along and is like, then we're going to learn how it's so important to recycle and like protect the earth.
And actually, it turns out the majority of recycling is economically inefficient.
I don't want my kids being taught like bad economics.
How paper straws are like just as fat as it just turns out a lot of these ideas are wrong and they're just default ideas in our mainstream culture.
And it's almost like a religion to these teachers.
Like they're, they're less Christian than they are eco, you know?
And that's not, that's not energy I want in my in my kids' school.
Now when they're older, let's debate everything and learn everything, but just like keep it out with the kids.
So in every episode, we play a fun game of would you rather?
I want you both to answer.
Don't look at each other to like one person bail you out of the other one.
Okay.
Would you rather always be 10 minutes early or have an hour of extra sleep every night?
Hour of extra sleep for sure.
Hour of extra sleep.
That's not true.
Every time we're on time, you're nervous.
That's fair.
Joe loves to be on time and he'll never be late.
In theory, I think she's right, but I don't like making people being late.
That's different than not being 10 minutes early.
Theoretically, he would like the extra sleep, but in real life, he's always on time.
And God forbid you stand in his way.
Okay.
By doing your hair for too long.
Would you rather your kids walk in your office during a serious Zoom meeting or rearrange all of the apps on your phone?
Walk in my office during a serious Zoom meeting for me.
I don't really have any serious Zoom meetings.
I have to say.
They're all important, but they're not too serious.
Taylor's always on with the architect for something or other.
But now we're designing the school campus, which is the most exciting thing.
Would you rather every college student take a course in entrepreneurship or on ethics?
I would say ethics.
I think entrepreneurship, because I'm not sure the ethics is going to teach him anything anyway, unfortunately.
But they're both good things.
Would you rather have endless tacos or endless barbecue?
Barbecue.
Oh, tacos.
I'm allergic to barbecue in Texas.
What?
In some cases.
And Tex-Mex.
Yeah, not to the barbecue.
The barbecue is just too salty and sweet.
And Tex-Mex, I'm deathly allergic to one of the spices in there.
So yeah, tacos.
I guess but Mexican tacos.
We have this giant steamer out there.
It's like this summarine.
I don't know if you saw it when you came in.
It's like a big giant submarine thing.
We had our chef go around to the four best barbecue restaurants and like learn from all of them.
It's really good.
That's pretty good.
That has a healthy spin on there.
Yeah, you can see some of that.
What's the best barbecue in Austin?
Franklin's is cherry blocks is great.
Franklin's is really good.
Yeah.
Okay, we're going to finish off this section.
I'm laughing as I'm going to read this.
Would you rather do couples therapy with Elon Musk as your therapist or Ben Shapiro as your marriage counselor?
Ooh, that's a good one.
Can we do both?
Stick one.
Probably Ben Shapiro.
Although Elon would probably be on my side and everything.
That would just be so entertaining.
Both of those comments.
Oh, man.
She's a big fan of Ben Julieno.
Elon, of course.
But yeah, that's funny.
What's a conspiracy theory that you believe in?
I think we have to pass the SAVE Act because there's lots of cheating going on in the voting that we need to fix.
And the people are very naive about why this is true.
Conspiracy theory.
Nothing's top of mind for me on conspiracy theories.
I live a closeted life where I...
Do you want me to give you some conspiracy theories?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did we land on the moon?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Are there UFOs?
No, I don't think so.
I think a lot of those are probably just drones and things that visually look a little bit odd on.
Does glyph phosphate cause cancer?
Does what kind of?
Lyphosphate, this is the, this is the, their.
I would, I would have to read.
I would have to read more of the, I feel like any conspiracy theory, you have to go online or you have to go get some books and you have to read about it before you make a flash.
Was the election 2020 stolen?
I don't think so.
I think it was.
See, this is where we're different.
Was the FBI involved in January 6th?
Like, I can keep going on conspiracy theories.
For this, the 2020 election, I think it comes down to was it stolen in a legal way or not?
I think I would fall on the side of no illegal action, but it could have been legal means that I think perhaps we should change.
I think there's non-legal things and illegal actions so that they're no longer legal, shall we say?
Yeah.
And then, yeah, January 6th, I don't think everyone behaved as well as they should, but I definitely think the deep state was also involved in making it worse than it was.
Do you think Palantir should still be working with ICE to help them arrest illegal aliens?
Yes, 100%.
I think we should be way more aggressive than we are.
And I think that all of the pushback in Minnesota is ridiculous because there were 10 times as many arrests in Texas and you don't hear any noise because there's no corrupt people interfering.
It's like, this is ridiculous.
The other thing about Palantir that I think most people don't understand is that when you use a tool like Palantir, you can be much more surgical and precise in your law enforcement actions than you could be if you weren't using that kind of thing.
And you can audit the auditors.
It's just strictly better.
It creates an audit log to keep people accountable.
What do you think then of Palantir employees who come out and are like so upset that this is happening?
I mean, there's 4,000 people in the company.
There's 10 libt hards.
What are you going to say?
Anybody want to say that?
Do you think that we should continue with mass deportations and try to remove as many illegal aliens as possible?
Or are you in favor of a different type of approach?
I think that in general, we should remove as many as possible, but I would focus that ideally on the ones that haven't been here or working well for a very long time.
So I think recent arrivals, criminals, all that kind of stuff.
But if someone's been here for a very long time, maybe I wouldn't focus on that.
If they're working responsibly and they're not taking Medi-Cal or whatever it is, you know.
Mimicking Real World Consequences00:11:53
What's something you splurge on without guilt?
This is really inappropriate stuff.
It was like, looking, like, you're not supposed to say that.
What are we supposed to say?
I have really nice cigars.
I don't know.
She doesn't like the only smoke cigars.
That's like one of our few points of contention.
I mean, I'm a sucker for skincare products.
It's just a lot of good stuff, and they get me every time.
There's weird rich women's skincare products that I always use.
What's your favorite skincare products?
Do you tell me?
Okay.
Oh, no.
The latest one is a mask that combines two different ingredients to create carbon dioxide.
And you stick it on your face and you leave it there for an hour.
And there's something about carbon dioxide sitting on your skin that's supposed to be beneficial.
She's looking really good for someone in her 60s, you know?
Do you believe in red light?
Cougar relationships.
Do you believe in red light therapy?
Yeah, I think it's a good thing.
She has this ridiculous thing she wears on her head, actually.
Do you walk around with a red light helmet?
And you must have done in private, which I prefer.
Oh my gosh.
I'm trying to bring it within the Overton window.
You should not be ashamed to.
No, it's not in my Overton window.
Do you stand on one of those boards that vibrate too?
No, I've never done that.
I have one at my desk that I don't always use, but there's one that moves and there's like the vibrating machine in there to stretch.
It helps you stretch.
No, no.
These are the ones that like, have you seen this like on Instagram or TikTok where like the woman stands on the thing and it just goes like this?
And it's supposed to, I don't know what it's supposed to do.
I don't know.
I'm going to have to go look that up after this.
You watch like women on like TikTok and Instagram with their red light mask on standing on these boards.
And that's apparently like the ultimate.
Probably helps your core strength a little bit.
You're a wobble.
I'm like, I should do my pregnancy.
She works out.
When we first started dating, I got in way better shape because I was kind of ashamed to have to work out as much as her, which is good.
So what's the workout?
What do we, a lot of hit workouts?
Yeah, you just peloton.
She does like all these like half an hour videos that are really hard.
Yeah.
What's a hill you're willing to die on that nobody else cares about?
I think lately, it's not that nobody cares about this, but in our, in our home situation, I think this is probably, this probably goes for every parent.
You really want your kids to understand consequences and have boundaries.
And sometimes it feels like you're the only one trying to enforce the system against this tidal wave of chaos.
Put some boundaries in.
I guess the little girls are better at manipulating me, though.
We both have boundaries.
And I think it just takes a lot of energy to enforce boundaries.
So that's not something that the world at large doesn't believe in.
But when you're a parent and you're outnumbered, I think sometimes it can be hard.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess the hill I ain't willing to die on that I don't think enough people care about is maybe too obscure, but I think the red states should be cracking down on the blue cities and we should be using our power to stop them and then get away with horrible things for our civilization.
And none of these older R's have the balls to do it and they have to like convince them it's the right thing to do and it's driving me crazy.
Do you believe in gentle parenting?
I think that gentle parenting, my understanding is it means that you should cater to the child's emotions above all and refrain from any kind of harsher consequences that would cause emotional or physical discomfort.
And I actually think that kids need firm boundaries.
Life is not kind.
I mean, life is hard.
And I think to a certain extent, you want to mimic those conditions inside your own house so that if they make a bad decision, they do feel a little bit of the sting of making that decision.
So I would say I don't buy in wholesale to gentle parenting, although I think it's great to be empathetic and for your kids to know that you're a safe harbor, that they can always come to you.
Yeah, you don't want to train spoiled whims.
That's not good.
Yeah, Joe sums it up.
You say it much more eloquently than I would have.
Much more eloquently, which is like, no, one child should not rule the house.
They should feel like they're a working member of the family and not the center of it.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I think we have to spend time figuring out how to make them have chores and stuff because we have so much help.
So that's like the trade-off we're still figuring out.
But that's important.
Yeah, when kids grow up with a lot of privilege and wealth, I think the biggest danger is that they don't ever experience consequences because they're always shielded.
And I think that's something that we think about a lot because they are going to grow up to have resources and we want them to use that responsibly and wisely and to be a net contributor and not a train wreck.
One of my friends has to ask him to work on the cattle farm one summer because he was too soft and like, I don't know, maybe just something like that.
That's a good idea at some point.
We got to try to make them tougher.
Do you think often about how not to raise spoiled children given your level of wealth and access and all of those things that?
Yeah, every day.
I mean, I mean, I want them to have duty.
I want them to care about the country and care about working hard to serve their family and their community and their country.
And that's something that you really try to inculcate and you just discuss.
And we're still trying to learn how to do that.
I think we're doing pretty well, but it's a lot of work to figure it out.
Yeah, I think it's been really helpful with the homeschooling and the school to build into the curriculum a really good appreciation of history.
I think the Bible is a great place to start with that kind of education for children because no matter how wealthy and privileged you are, if you understand history and kind of the various calamities and tragedies that have happened, I think you can't help but feel that A, you're really lucky and B, you've got a responsibility to try to preserve what's good and avoid those kinds of.
I like to try to expose them to like tough and scary things.
You're the mommy, so you're trying to protect them too sometimes.
I'm trying to show them too much.
I will say, I don't recommend having your kid read the original Grimm's fairy tale 100% of the way through.
We got through about a third of the way.
I think it's great.
Our eight-year-old was coming to us describing the 11 different ways in which people were tortured and murdered.
And I thought maybe a third of the way is enough and we could stop after that.
They are intense.
I mean, they used to expose kids to really intense things.
I don't think it's so bad.
That's how we got to figure it out.
Why do you think so many other billionaires give their money away to causes that would eventually make their children's lives or grandchildren's lives like cease to exist?
Because they're cowards.
Because they're cowards.
Like the vast majority of billionaires, they want to give money towards things that virtue signal because that's how they got here in the first place.
And it doesn't interfere with their business.
And they're not willing to do something that exposes them to criticism and exposes their life to inconvenience.
That's the problem.
So the only really valuable philanthropy that's like really valuable cause-wise is stuff for which you will be attacked.
And the vast majority of these people are just, they don't want to be attacked.
So they just do the milquetoast things.
Why do you think it is then that Laureen Powell Jobs and Mackenzie Scott Bezos, I can think of Melinda Gates, all give money to causes that work.
A lot of them are friends they hire.
I mean, listen, I think Laureen's actually a very bright woman and she's like pretty moderate, but then I think she hires people around her in my experience, who many of them are even far to the left of her.
And I think there's something in these communities.
I've seen it with Mark and Priscilla, the people they hire, and I know Mark's not that left, but the people under him are.
And they let them run wild and they're busy.
And I think it's just like, at some point, it's just like you have to, it's like really tough to be the bad guy.
This is going back to like being a great entrepreneur, something that I have and people like Elon Musk have is you're willing to admit your mistake and change things.
Like when he was working on the America PAC, he just would like keep changing who's in charge, different things there are broken.
And in a way where it's like four different times I replace it until it worked.
And that takes a lot of psychic energy and a lot of boldness and a lot of willingness to be criticized to like change your mind and replace people.
Most of these people who hire people around them that are not working out, like it's just, they're not, they're just going to let them keep doing it.
And it's very frustrating for me.
And, you know, it's partially also because I guess you're just not criticized in our society enough by those places for the damage you're doing when you are helping the far left.
And so I think they just get away with it in their mind and just no one's attacking them for it, you know?
What's been the most luxurious date he's ever taken you on?
Let's see.
Where did we go?
We'll find you some nice places.
Well, when we were dating early on, you flew me down to an event at Hearst Castle.
And I don't think I had ever.
That's fun.
That was an experience I had never had before.
That was very fancy and fun.
Yeah.
Well, I'm always trying to fly her to different places.
And she's usually opt to spend time with the kids instead, which is fair.
So we were trying to figure that out right now.
What keeps you up at night?
Both of you, separate.
She always locks all the doors.
Yeah.
Got to lock your doors.
We have these like big serious, like bulletproof doors.
And then the bulletproof went in and she locks them all.
And she was like, that's good.
She has a gun by the bed too.
Like in this fake thing you can open up AR15 silence and a couple of pistols.
So she's she's like seriously like focused.
Are you rent dates to the range?
We do.
We do.
She's a really good shot.
I'm a huge advocate for women shooting and becoming comfortable with firearms.
It's a great confidence boost.
It's very, very empowering.
I'm scared of losing our country to the far left.
I mean, terrified.
And it's just like, you know, it's a scary 10 years ahead.
And then we got to solve our problems as fast as possible.
We got to teach people about what's going on.
So that scares me.
How do you choose what to invest in as it relates to politics?
doing your own thing, picking a candidate.
What goes through your mind?
For all the other political watchers out there who are like, how can I get Joe Octal's money today?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I really want to fight for our civilization and do things that really matter for the next 10, 20, 30 years for our civilization.
And a big part of that for me is what's going to let us not have the far left wind voting.
A big part of that's also is how well is the average person doing in our country.
So like one of my obsessions right now is bringing down the cost of healthcare with AI because it's like very clear we could do it, but it's going to require legislation in states.
It's going to require HHS.
But like if we can make healthcare cost half as much, which I know we can't, like substantively, it's very clear you could do it, but it's purely a policy challenge at this point with it.
What's possible in AI?
Like that would probably get rid of a lot of the worst of the far left movements in our country and probably some of the other crazies too.
And so for me, a lot of my effort right now is like, how do we fix these things for our country?
We end the podcast with the same question every episode.
If you could host a dinner party with three people that are alive, who's at the table and what are you eating?
Okay, we brainstormed about this one.
That's right.
I think it'd be really interesting to have Jefferson and Hamilton and maybe Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell, that's cool.
I'll best do that.
And then talk about America then and now and kind of tell them how it played out and have Thomas Sowell kind of explain what happened.
And then see if they would change anything about the way they set up the Constitution.
It's tough for me because I'm so interested.
I've built all these defense companies and studied military history.
And so the chance to like sit with like Julius Caesar and Napoleon is like kind of tough to pass up.
But I also love our founders.
So that's going to be like you can be at two separate dinners if you'd like.
Yeah, it's going to be a good thing.
Yeah, it would be a, for me, it'd be like a strategic thought exercise on how we could improve the Constitution.
What would make the American experiment work even better?
What are we rating?
What are we eating?
I think we just have sushi again.
There's nothing better than Japanese food.
You might scare the founders when we're in the future.
I feel like all Jews always gravitate towards sushi because everyone's like, oh, kosher, what can we do?
That's like upscale, but nice sushi.
It's, I mean, I like A5 wag you and caviar and that stuff too, but sushi is really good.
So we can go with that.
Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of the Katie Miller podcast.
Please don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and share.
Thank you so much for joining us, Joe and Taylor, on this episode.
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