Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder On Iran Threats, AI PSYOPs & CIA Funding | PBD 751
Palantir co-founder Shervin Pishevar traces the company’s rise from CIA-funded fraud-fighting tools to a $38B government data integrator, dismissing early investor skepticism as shortsighted. He warns of China and Iran weaponizing cognitive warfare—amplifying anti-Israel sentiment via TikTok and funding U.S. divisions—while advocating a "Roman" solution for Iran’s regime. Palantir’s AI-driven hiring wars and VC firm A16Z’s $10B+ exits (Quince, Cognition) reflect his belief in tech as capitalism’s evolutionary engine, though he criticizes California’s wealth tax and praises Texas’s outcome-based education model. Ultimately, he frames Palantir’s mission as safeguarding Western democracy from both authoritarian data misuse and domestic polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.
Nobody is angry, you might not be doing much.
Why do so many people not trust you?
Why do so many people not trust Palantir?
We have to eliminate probably about 10,000 terrorists.
The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex?
Then what?
What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building?
Then what?
What's scary to me is if Isa Far Republic elects a really, really bad person.
Who today is your biggest enemy?
Or like the extreme populists on both political sides.
So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mancho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved?
If these guys were trying to kill Trump, it means if they're still around after Trump's president, they'll probably try to get him and his kids again.
Why was Palantir started?
Protect the West against Islamist terrorists.
That's truly the mission.
That was truly the mission.
But is Iran really Iraq?
But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that.
I don't know.
Maybe this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman.
So the Romans would do, you'd go and you wipe out the leadership class.
You're all dead.
And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge.
We're going to make a deal, or we're going to kill all of you, too.
You know, this whole thing with Vag Timmon and P-B-D podcast started with a phone, me and Mario.
That's it.
And it grew today to, you know, 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full-time employees.
And that relationship, or you watching us and supporting us, wouldn't happen without you.
But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel?
And it would mean the world to us if you could press that subscribe button and notification.
Why it allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you.
So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button.
It would mean the world to us.
Thank you so much.
Did you ever think you would make it?
I feel I'm so excited to take sweet victory.
I know this life meant for me.
Adam, what's your point?
The future looks bright.
Handshake is better than anything I ever saw.
It's right here.
You are a one-on-one for Sendry.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
Great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Patrick.
Yes, and I know you'll like these mics.
Credit clearly.
Yes, Jake and the crew.
Jake, who picked these blue mics, by the way?
You did.
Okay, so credit goes to him.
But co-founder of Palantir.
We started that 23 years ago.
Yes, the story you have from co-founding Palantir to then, I think you were an investor in Free Press with Barry Weiss, if I'm not mistaken.
You were somewhat involved.
Yes.
I gave Barry some money when she started because, you know, we need to rebuild our institutions in this country.
It doesn't make it better.
And you moved to Austin.
You're building a university, University of Austin.
You're doing another thing with Cicero, which we'll talk about.
I want to get your opinion on Cicero and Cato because those are two different mindset.
Two statesman.
Yes, two different statesmen.
One had a temper his way or the highway.
The other one was compromised, open to, which is kind of the route you guys went.
And then recently you put, I think, some $11.8 million into a drone company in Nigeria.
Well, that's random.
I run a big venture capital.
Yeah, we're doing a lot in AI defense.
AVC.
Yeah, AVC.
It's called AVC.
And listen, most of the best defense stuff, we focus on America.
Of course, I do think in Africa, working with the very, very best group that we could find there, it's important because there's a lot of bad guys there, too.
Yeah, I agree.
So that's interesting.
So we'll get into that because I'm curious.
The drone business is very important.
We're seeing with these wars with Ukraine and Russia.
If you would ask the average person five years ago, if Ukraine and Russia go to war, what will be the most important tool to use?
Nobody would guess drones.
Millions.
Millions.
Millions of drones and blowing up all these other things.
But okay, got a lot of questions.
And the timing of this interview is phenomenal because we got Iran stuff going on.
We got El Mencho that was just killed.
And, you know, with what's going on with Mexico, we have...
I wouldn't want to be in Puerto Vallarta right now.
No.
No, and we, you know, it's a place where we used to go to a lot because for vacation spot, Americans go to Cancun, they go to Puerto Vallarta.
They hit the Costco, man.
They hit it out of all the places.
The airport too.
It's scary.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I want to start off with your background.
Palantir, when you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.
Drones And Ambition00:15:39
You know, it gets good if they know who you are.
One of my favorite signs on the old Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he had a sign on his desk and it said, if nobody is angry, you might not be doing much.
You know, do you subscribe to that?
Oh, totally.
Okay.
Totally.
At what age did you subscribe to that?
Pretty young, actually.
I was a pretty obnoxious kid.
Were you?
Oh, yeah.
I had all sorts of opinions.
I always have.
Tell me about your parents.
Who were your parents?
My parents, my parents are awesome.
My mom passed away a long time ago.
My dad's not doing well, which is sad, but they're amazing people.
My father was very competitive.
He was one of eight kids.
He brought them all out to California.
He was our chess coach when we were little for fun.
He does a chemical engineer.
And we won the state championship when I was a kid.
My brothers did too.
And we thought we must be really smart.
And then he kept winning 20 years in a row.
So he's just a very competitive guy, everything, every game, every sport, but a really optimistic, positive, competitive guy.
Chess.
So you guys play chess.
How old were you when you won the championship?
I was the K-6 champion twice in a row in fifth and sixth grade.
And we won the Nationals in junior high school.
But it's like, it's because we worked really hard at it because he was a good coach.
You got to spend, you had to spend 30, 40 hours a week to be the best.
And this is in Fairmont.
We grew up in Fremont, California and Silicon Valley, and these were tournaments in California and around the country.
Who were you in high school?
I was a public high school.
I was a nerdy guy.
I was a valedictorian.
And I had a bunch of really smart friends who taught me a bunch of stuff about, we went way ahead in math and science and stuff.
So at what point did you and Peter Thielen cup?
I think when I heard a story about you were still in college and you were doing something with them.
How did that relationship start?
You know, a lot of the smartest kids in Stanford Computer Science were going to PayPal at the time.
It was something where I really admired the talent that was there.
You have to realize that company, there was one company started by Peter Thiel and a bunch of his smartest friends.
Max Lovchin started it and David Sachs.
All these guys were there, Eric Hoffman.
And there's one company that Elon Musk started with Roloff and a bunch of other really smart people.
It was called X at the time.
And X and Confinity merged to make PayPal.
They were fighting each other and they merged.
So it was all the smartest friends around both Elon and Peter.
No surprise.
It was a place you wanted to be.
They actually rejected me in my freshman year, but they let me in my sophomore year to go help them.
Was that like the place everybody wanted to work in?
Not everyone, but I think it was for me, it was where I noticed a lot of the smartest, most interesting people going there.
So it was when I was trying to find out.
How was the story coming to you guys?
Because, you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, at that time, when you look at the numbers, it's not like Elon is today's Elon.
No, no, it wasn't.
They weren't.
But how did you know that these was there?
Would they talk about it in the small circles?
Well, but I mean, I was a computer scientist.
I was already ahead.
I'd already done most of the undergrad work before I got there, which is normal nowadays.
And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists, and they were all trying to go work there.
And so their smartest friends were working there.
And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review, which Peter had started.
So I met people that way too through it.
Got it.
So Peter's way, how proactive was Peter of trying to get it in front of all the smartest kids coming out?
Oh, this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses.
So Peter was very good at that.
That's what we spend a lot of our time on now flying up to see all the kids at Harvard MIT this week.
We spent a lot of time on this.
So walk me through it.
So what does that look like?
Is it, you know, do you, do you go straight to the top?
Do you establish relationships?
Are there programs to go meet the kids?
How does that, how does it work?
Actually, it's a good question.
People don't ask.
So Palantir, we had a whole playbook when we started it.
You know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent.
And so you'd have your fellows, you'd have your spies, you have your advisors, you have all these spies, these young men and women on your team, and they're like talented computer scientists, and they help you map out who the other best people are.
And they help you throw parties and they help you get to know them.
You know, professors there as well.
And you're just, you just have people who are young, smart, technical people who are social and they're there and they're mapping it out and they're helping you meet the right people.
So when I come in, there's different groups we've met, people who want to work with us.
We want to learn from them.
So it's a mutually beneficial thing where you're getting to know all the top talent and you're helping connect them to your top companies and it becomes a way to work with them all.
But how do you filter them out?
Like, how do you know?
It's like a chicken and egg you start with.
Like you see, I'll have a superstar from my portfolio who's like one of our best engineers who just came from MIT.
And they had like five or six of their smartest friends in a younger year.
You'll go meet those kids who are the smartest guys you know.
So it's a network.
It's purely word of mouth.
So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys and they would say, you have to meet John.
He's the smartest guy I know.
So you're asking him who's going to be able to do that.
Yeah, then you might talk to him and you might work on projects with him so you get to know a little bit.
But yeah, you're just purely through the network.
I mean, it's a lot of things.
It's the same way if you're a football coach or you're a baseball coach, you got to do this for talent and tech.
But what do you look for?
So in football, you may look for speed.
You know, like right now, I met with one of the law firms that represents a lot of young talent.
Nowadays, they're recruiting kids at 10, 11, 12 years old.
I said, so what do you look for?
They said, coachability and personality.
I said, why personality?
Personality equals sponsorship.
You got personality.
I can get some sponsorship money.
You're coachable.
We can put you.
Of course, you got to have the physical abilities.
What did you guys look for?
You know, it depends if you're hiring an entrepreneur or hiring an engineer or engineering leader because they're different.
Give me both.
An entrepreneur needs to have opinions.
In my mind, entrepreneur needs to be able to say, here's my hypothesis about the world.
Here's why I'm right.
Usually they want to have some chip on their shoulder, something they're trying to prove.
They will have to be someone.
You can tell they're ambitious.
They believe in things.
You don't necessarily, you need smart, interesting, curious people to build things, but you need to have like a certain level of leadership and opinions about the world, I think, to build things.
Is the mindset of recruits?
That's all four, right?
You were at Palantir 04 to 09.
We were also at PayPal, and they categorized you as being part of the PayPal mafia, second, you know, I'm 15 years younger than Peter.
I'm 12 years older than Elon.
I was a junior kid there.
I don't get any credit for PayPal.
Well, you were still there.
You were still there.
I was still there learning.
I was learning from these guys.
And were you in meetings?
Were you watching them?
Were you there?
And what was that like?
What was Elon like in meetings?
What was Peter like in meetings?
What was that like?
Give me some of the.
I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon, be honest, but I mean, these guys were just very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast.
No tolerance for things that are broken.
You fix it right away.
You know, you work through the problems.
You get everything done today.
You don't talk about what you're going to do next week.
You just use move.
People would be there late at night fixing problems, just passionate about their work.
What was the demo of the age?
What would you say the average is?
Would you say 25 is a bunch of guys in their 20s mostly?
In their twenties, where you can, as you can be demanding of getting them to now, at the same time, was Ilan and Peter also there driving, working with them.
Yeah, in different contexts, right?
Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the thinker.
He's not the one, he's not the technical guy himself.
I think Elon is more of the operator.
He's more there in the room.
I mean, I was in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago, right?
And I was meeting a friend and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at XAI.
He's just there working, working, working.
He's kind of the more of the workhorse, just pushed through, solve the details of the technical problems.
Was the level of intent, like who was the most intense guy at Apple?
The most intense?
I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working, but there's other engineers who are just there all the time pushing hard, right?
I think when you're in operation mode, guys like Max Slipch and others were just, as far as I could tell, just always working.
Who were some of the guys that you worked with that were maybe junior guys like you that came out and became big stars as well?
Yeah.
So I mean, a lot of the guys who were there, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal that quickly became billion dollar companies, right?
So, and a lot of these guys were older than me, but it was the guys that, you know, Chad and Steve who built YouTube.
It was Reed Hoffman who built LinkedIn.
It was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX.
I mean, you know, there's guys who built Iron Port.
There's just, there's just so many things that came out of there.
Got it.
And so from there, how did the opportunity to be a co-founder of Palantir come up?
Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund.
Okay.
And I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized.
And I started bringing in my smartest friends to help.
And there weren't really other managers there.
So I'd help start building things.
And a bunch of my smartest friends I brought in one summer to help us.
They weren't interested in finance.
They thought it was boring.
And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about, you know, at PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money.
And so we got to know the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys.
There was Secret Service and the FBI.
And right after this happened, it was 9-11.
And so these guys were spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought didn't make any sense.
And they were really, they kept asking us for advice.
They were confused about how to do things.
It was, I mean, President Bush created what was called the Department of Homeland Security at the time.
I shouldn't be too mean about it, but you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department, people can't really fire people in government easily.
So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire.
And then instead they just push them into the new department.
So it was a bit of a mess.
Push them into the new department.
So therefore, the whole department didn't really know very well what it was doing at first, was my impression.
And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff.
And it became really obvious to us that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things that were going on up there were just way ahead technically of where the government was at that point.
And this was a problem because the government was using all the government was spending $38 billion a year gathering data, looking at the data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also abusing our civil liberties.
So it was a mess.
So we said, you know what?
There's actually a really important problem here to solve.
A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and go get them instead.
B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any controls.
That's crazy.
And so that's when you said, why don't we go do it?
You guys said, let's go do it ourselves.
And I started having my friends I brought that summer to help build a prototype, which sounds even crazier than finance, but at least it was interesting.
They enjoyed helping me build it.
And my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later, he moved down here to Miami.
He and I controlled the team and Stephen Cohen, my co-founder.
And when he started building it up.
And CIA was apparently one of the first investors in the company.
They eventually gave us money.
I think it was the second or third round, but it was only $2 million.
And we actually bought them back.
The reason we needed them is that Peter, basically, no one would give us money.
First of all, Alex Carf and I went all over Sandhill Road.
Like, you guys have all this talent because they can measure talent even back then.
Like, why aren't you doing social media?
Why aren't you doing something new and exciting?
Working with the government's crazy.
What's wrong with you guys?
It's not possible.
So he didn't think it was a good idea to do it.
No, this is Alex and I talking to the investors.
So all the investors were basically telling us you guys are crazy.
No one does this.
Why are you doing this?
It's not possible.
It doesn't make any sense.
These are some big names.
Credible.
These are the big names.
These are, we got turned down by everyone.
We got turned down by Excel, by Sequoia.
The guy at Kleiner Perkins at the time, and they're a great firm.
I admire them very much.
But the guy at the time, he was no longer there.
He started laughing at us on the phone because Alex didn't have a technical degree.
He's like, he doesn't even know what you're doing.
It's a doctorate, but it's not even a relevant doctorate.
Like, they're laughing us out of the room, basically.
And what is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of the room?
What's he telling you?
Because Alex is a very unique type of guy himself.
We were not happy with these people.
Peter Thiel told me it was probably really good for me because he gave me an even bigger chip on my shoulder to make sure we succeeded after being mocked and turned down by like 30 of these guys.
And Peter couldn't just only fund it himself.
He needed other people to fund these things.
So when we got InQTEL, which is the CIA's venture capital arm at the time, to give us a little bit of money, and Peter gave us even more.
That was really critical.
And then how long later did you guys pay the $2 million back?
I think we bought it for a much higher amount.
We had some option.
I forget.
It must have been five or six years later.
Okay.
So they still made some money on it.
Oh, they made plenty of money on it.
And, you know, more importantly, we saved the government billions of dollars versus what they were doing.
I mean, you literally had things going on.
The DHS guys, I remember there was some Unisys thing where it was like $3 billion to integrate all the data.
And we came and we showed them we could have done the same thing for them out of the box in a month.
Like, don't waste billions of dollars.
So it turns out competence saves the government lots of money and protects civil liberties.
People don't realize it's both of those things.
What is the desire to constantly use names that are from, I believe, Lord of the Rings, right?
Where does that come from?
Peter gets credit for naming Peter gets credit.
You know, but I'm a fan of it.
I think, listen, and we wrote about this at that time.
So at the time when we're creating this, we said, this is a dangerous thing to create.
But we believe it's a worthy thing to create.
And it took a lot of courage.
Like, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on.
We could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things.
But it was really important to both help.
We helped eliminate probably about up to 10,000 terrorists that might not have got eliminated.
We worked with the work with all sorts of amazing groups in the government alongside them with the technology and with the ability.
And we help protect civil liberties and make sure the government watchers are being watched.
Now, of course, you create this technology.
If it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the audit trails, who knows what could be done with it.
So there's good and bad here.
Yeah.
So, and we'll get in, I want to get into that as well.
But going back to the meetings of going, meeting with investors and them saying, you know what, you guys don't know what you're doing.
You don't even have the real degree.
Alex said in one of the interviews, I think he may have said it to you.
He said, I wish we would have told them to F off and just so polite.
We were so polite.
They would have probably respected us more if we had just like.
Were you naturally polite or were you intentionally becoming polite because you needed the money?
That's like what you were supposed to do.
We needed the money, man.
I didn't know what you were supposed to do.
Got it.
So, but, but it's, it wasn't naturally because you're a disagreeable person.
Well, yeah, at the same time, I think both of us are not the kind of people.
We're probably a little more arrogant now that no, we've done it.
More arrogant than we didn't know that we didn't know for sure we knew what we were doing.
We felt we were doing something smart, but it was our first time.
He said, I think it was, I wish we were more arrogant in certain areas and less arrogant in certain areas.
That's well said.
You know, it was interesting when you're creating our company, we kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch.
And in some cases, it was probably frankly genius.
In other cases, we could have just hired someone who knew what they were doing.
And it's like when you're building a company, I talk about having adults in the room.
There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring into a startup because you don't want people running a machine in a standard way.
You want to be creative, but there's certain parts that once you get there, you probably do want the adults to show you how it's done.
So there's some things maybe we could have learned from others.
What was your strength in the partnership as a founder?
What was his?
I was really good at recruiting the first few hundred people and kind of pushing forward on the kind of like the product strategy and whatnot.
Alex was really intuitive about institutions, about how the world works, about how we come across, about how to get into certain places, about how to make deals happen, about how to communicate in the right way that you're coming across to create value for the other person in a way they understand, the way you can get it done.
Alex is a philosopher and he understands how people and organizations work and how to navigate the world.
Got it.
Got it.
So his, was he more the one selling the vision?
You were more recruiting the people both.
I think recruiting is a lot about selling vision as well.
When we gave people their offers initially, this is really early on at the beginning.
We give them three options of like higher salary, middle or lower salary, and higher upside, middle, lower upside.
And I'd put on the sheet of paper, the lawyers hated this, but I put an asterisk that it might not be exactly right.
I'd say, okay, if the company is worth $5 billion and this much solution, here's what your shares might be worth.
And it'd be like, or you know, you're here, the company's worth a billion dollars, here's what it might be worth.
And people would say, Joe, you can't show people if it's worth $5 billion.
That's totally unrealistic.
But you had to say, no, here's why it could be worth $500.
And now it's worth, what, $335?
Or now it's worth $100 billion?
Yeah, it was a lot bigger than that.
So you couldn't say it's worth $5 billion.
People thought I was ridiculous.
So let me get this straight.
So you're sitting in front of me and you're telling me, Pat, you can take 200K salary, 350.
I'm just making up numbers.
500K salary.
Okay, 500K salary, if it's 5 billion, you're going to get $10 million.
Yeah, but up here, it's $50 million.
$20 million is going to be $50 million.
That's literally what you guys are doing.
Something like that.
Lower salaries, of course, but yeah, exactly.
Wow.
And so based on what I would choose, would you judge me and put me in the totally?
I told you.
If you choose the high salary and low upside, then I have to go be very skeptical of you.
Would you still hire me or no?
Sometimes.
But usually, you know, it works out.
We measure everything.
Signing Up for Better Policy Solutions00:15:38
Sure.
After the fact, all the very best guys chose a low salary.
All the very best guys choose a low salary because they want to skip in the game.
They want to be part of the mission.
Yeah.
And by the way, how much, especially since you said you recruited the first few hundred people at Palantir, and you were at PayPal and you watched how they recruited you.
How much have you noticed recruiting change from then till today due to AI?
So, oh, no, it's not just AI.
It's that people recognize talent so much better.
So Palantir was getting the best of the best.
We get the top people out of the top schools.
Facebook and Google kind of caught on to some of this.
They started giving big signing bonuses.
And so what I, in like 2009 or 2008, 2009, they started giving 100, 150k signing bonuses, which at the time that sounded like a lot of money for a 20-year-old is ridiculous.
Now, the top AI companies, it's like multi-million dollar signing bonuses for that.
I saw this one guy got a billion-dollar offer.
He turned it down.
This was like nine months ago, 10 months ago.
Yeah, that's like the very best guy.
He's probably taking some knowledge from one place to another.
So it's a little sketchy kind of what they're paying for there.
But for this, the raw talent, you're still getting millions of dollars for coming into companies, just being the most talented kind of math Olympian.
As a young guy coming in, yeah, but it's like, think about it.
It's like, it's like, it's like, you know, you hire a young guy for a basketball team who's the best basketball player.
Similarly, the gold medal programmer in the world who's going to add this unique ability, what's that worth?
So it's worth a lot.
Wow.
So today, it's not uncommon for a young guy to get a $5 million signing bonus.
I don't know.
It's like being a top athlete.
How do you protect yourself if the guy walks in six months?
Is there a clawback?
Yeah, you structure it in some way that it's built in.
I mean, if he walks in here, he might be able to keep it, but hopefully he contributed a lot in a year.
But he's getting equity and he's vesting into his upside.
So you don't want to leave too soon.
If the company's doing well, he's going to stay because he's going to earn that equity.
He's going to get the equity for the next four years.
He's going to want to stay and earn that.
So you got the signing bonus, you got the salary, and you got the equity.
And sometimes the signing bonus, you might ask to take his equity if he's bullish, which, by the way, the best people often do.
They want to own a bigger piece of the game.
So I either give you $5 million or I'll give you $5 million worth of shares today that could be worth $100 million.
Maybe he takes a million of it in cash and he gets comfortable and he has $4 million of it in shares because he's smart and he wants to make the big money.
Yeah.
So that's one thing that's changed with recruiting the cost, how much it costs to.
It's the cost.
And what else has changed?
I mean, so at Adipar, my second company after Palantir, it's a very successful.
It's like $10 trillion in this platform for wealth managers.
And, you know, a guy used to work for me, Scott Wu, he had won the gold medal in programming three years in a row.
So like, it's like king of the nerves, basically, right?
Everyone knew who he was in these competitions.
And he worked for me and then he went on.
Now he's running one of the top AI companies.
But the fact that I was able to hire him and people like him just by like showing up at these contests and hanging out, now there's like hundreds of other firms going after these contests, sponsoring these contests.
They all know who these kids are.
The game's gotten harder.
You have to look harder for these top people now.
And it's harder to recruit them.
And you better, I have an advantage because of everything I've built, but you better have a reason why they should be coming to work with you.
If you're just a random new person, it's really tough.
What's the differentiator?
I mean, I've built multiple different multi-billion dollar companies.
And the next, and this is my main thing I'm doing.
Come work with me.
That's a pretty good pitch versus you never heard of me before.
Right.
So it's just, it's a lot harder.
Got it.
So the differentiator is moral authority, previous track record.
I've won before.
We're building something big again.
Come join us.
I'll tell you the best thing is this is this other guy you know is there who's a genius and you want to work with him and learn from him.
So it's all about chicken and egg.
You got to start with the best people than the other best people.
That's how Palantir really did it.
We started with a bunch of the best guys.
The other ones want to be with them, want to learn from them.
So you got to have a nucleus you start with.
What else did you do at the beginning?
The first few hundred of Palantir you recruit.
I mean, that's a big thing to say.
That's the foundation.
What other methods?
Did you look at certain schools to recruit from this?
We had teams at about 20 of the top universities.
We have playbooks for flying there.
We would raid other companies.
It sounds really bad when you talk about it.
The most ridiculous version, this guy, Nathan, who was helping us build a company early on, he had worked at eBay because eBay bought PayPal.
He didn't have PayPal.
And we went and got a conference room at eBay.
And I was like 2021 at the time.
And we were interviewing people at eBay to come join our company.
And I felt a little bit awkward about it.
But I'm like, I guess this is what people do.
Turns out you weren't supposed to do that.
But anyway, did it work?
It was such a badly run company that they didn't even have any idea that it was going on, which is you do that in my company, I'll mess you up, man.
That's not cool.
I'll be like, oh, your mobster friends.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, listen, you almost have to have that mindset if you want to build something.
You have to like fight people.
It's like, but eBay was like a scleronic group of like MBAs who didn't really have strong opinions about the world.
At what point did you know Palantir was special?
Like it really had legs?
You know, it was, for me, it was like when I had some of these people joining Bob McGrew, when he came in from, from, you know, he had been Stanford PhD and had been at PayPal and was a superstar.
That was part of the reason Peter gave us money for one round is when he joined and he ended up writing a bunch of stuff at OpenAI after being at Palantir for 10 years.
But when he came, these other guys came.
When we started to get into the FBI and, you know, it's just like three or four years in, it was, it started to really work and all this top talent started coming.
It was very special.
And what happened?
So when you're saying FBI, what does that mean?
Like they're approaching you guys.
You're solving their problems.
They're seeing.
You know, you know, it's so hard to sell the government.
And I used to, so it's the CIA.
I used to think it was like the CIA.
It's actually like 200 competing orgs that don't like each other.
And the FBI is like that a little bit too.
There's lots of parts of it.
And so we are working and doing pilots with both sides, but we couldn't get a breakthrough.
And at one point, we finally, it's kind of funny, they were jealous of each other.
They wanted to be first, but they didn't want to be first.
Government's very funny.
I've done other things we sell the government.
They both want to be able to tell everyone how innovative they are, but they don't want to take any risk in being the first one to do something because they can get fired.
And they're very risk-averse people who tend to be bureaucrats.
And so we were doing all these things they needed, but they were afraid to do the big contract.
And I think both of them thought the other contract was going ahead and then they both signed at once.
And then we got in and we started to add real value.
And listen, this company took a long time to iterate and figure out how to help.
But it was once you started breaking in and iterating with them, it was clear we were going to get there.
And what role was Teal playing?
Teal was like the chairman of the board, co-founder, strategist.
He stopped us from making some really key mistakes in years two, three, four.
There would have been some bad partnerships we were going to sign.
He made sure it was funded.
He made sure the vision was the right direction.
Are you comfortable sharing one of them?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, there was a company that was going to get us our first few million dollars of revenue if we partnered with them in DC, but they would have kind of locked us into something where they owned a big piece of the whole thing long term, the way they structured it.
And that would have capped the value.
We might probably would have been a better chance of being worth $100 million and no chance of being worth $60.
That big of a difference.
I mean, because they would have owned a piece of the market the way they wanted to structure it and had some rights.
And for me, I'm just trying to make this thing work.
So you're like, oh, he's going to give us millions of revenue.
We'll be able to get over here.
But it would have really like taken away a lot of the upside.
And he's very smart about how to structure these things, how to protect yourself.
And he's always been the thinker behind the scenes who you check everything with and you make sure you're going the right direction.
Why was Palantir started?
It was started to protect the West against Islamist terrorists and to make sure we save the government money and protect civil liberties.
That's the mission.
That was the mission.
That's truly the mission.
That was truly the mission.
And you're saying that to me in the interview when you're recruiting me.
You know, I don't know if we used, yeah, we used a lot of words like that when we were first starting out.
We were having a lot of people.
What are you telling me at the interview?
Are you literally telling me we're going to save the free world?
Yeah, we say, listen, the technology cultures that exist in the West Coast, which if I'm interviewing you, you know, you're one of the great technologists and you know your friends are amongst the very top.
The things we know how to do here, they do not know how to do that in this part of the world in D.C.
They just don't.
They're way behind and they're broken and they're wasting tens of billions of dollars and we're getting attacked and they're abusing our data and they're incompetent and we're going to have to do this for them to come in.
And it's important that at least some of the best people in the world go and help the government be less stupid.
I mean, that is my view on the matter, you know?
Got it.
But that mission was full-on bottom.
You, Alex, Peter, you guys are on the same page with the mission.
Yeah, save the shire, we used to put it because this comes from the Lord of the Rings.
But you're save the Shire is this Western civilization.
It's protecting the innocent.
It's going off and doing the mission for them.
Let me ask you, the process, is it, okay, pre the idea of Palantir?
You're sitting in them, guys, this is a problem.
We have to save the free world.
We have to save the Western ideology.
Here's the enemy.
What they're trying to do.
How can we solve that problem?
And then do you think about what company can we develop that can solve this problem?
Does it go mission first, solution second?
What is the first?
Well, the tools that were built at PayPal to stop the fraud system.
This is the Russia one you were talking about.
The Russian and Chinese mosquito.
We had to be able to stop those guys.
So we built those tools.
How nasty was it?
They made all of our competitors go bankrupt.
Everyone else was going bankrupt, basically.
This was existential for PayPal to solve.
What kind of money did they get?
I mean, it was like $70 or $8 million a month.
That was back when that was a lot of money though.
You have to remember.
Early stages of PayPal.
This is like, I mean, it's like $7 or $8 million a month at a time when it's scaling.
It's enough to make it unprofitable.
Got it.
I don't know the exact numbers, but it was enough to make it unprofitable versus profitable.
It was really key.
And it was annoying because you had to not accept certain things if you couldn't stop these guys, right?
So it'd break a lot of stuff.
They'd run money through the system.
They'd take it out.
You might go to 7-Eleven, buy something.
They're going to get your credit card, sell to a group of Russians.
The Russians are going to open accounts, transfer a bunch of money.
You're going to then skip PayPal $300.
You say, no, you'll charge it back.
And then we have to pay the other companies to pay it.
And so there's all this fraud you got to deal with.
And then it turned out that like the types of problems we realized we were doing for investigating that, you could extend those to a lot more types of problems and build investigative software that didn't exist and be able to like look into all the data, bring the data together, basically how the human mind extended into the $38 billion of data and make sure you only access what you're allowed to access and make sure you have auto trails to do it right in order to get the bad guys.
And so that created so much pain and annoyance that led to the mission.
And it inspired from there to start a company called Palantir that prevents what Russia and China did to you guys.
Well, 9-11 happened after that.
And we saw, and we got to know these guys and we saw them reacting to it badly.
We said, wait a second, we got to help at the same time.
Yeah, it's those two things.
Got it.
Why do so many people not trust you?
Why do so many people not trust Palantir?
You know how when you think about every decade, there's a company that people look at as evil.
You got Monsanto, you got Enron, you got all these guys.
You know, 20 years ago, they hated these companies.
They hated AIG.
But man, when you think about Palantir, a lot of people say, what is your motive?
What is the vision?
What are you guys trying to do?
Well, I'm not running it anymore, first of all.
So I was there the first decade, but I'll tell you, you know, first of all, when you're really successful, people attack you.
That's always going to happen.
And second of all, this is an unusual area.
You have a company that is helping the government, you know, eliminate bad guys.
It's helping the government do things it wants to do more effectively, more efficiently.
And some of the things government's doing right now, people are not happy with.
And so I think it's an interesting question, like, should a tech company stop helping the government when it disagrees with it?
And I think Alex Karp's spoken really well on this.
And I know, listen, Alex Karp comes from, you know, he had an African-American mother.
He's had a kind of Jewish professorial father.
He comes from the left, obviously.
Peter Till, obviously, is more on the right.
And, you know, so we come from different political sides here, but they both agree that it's better for the world to make American government and America more efficient and work better and not throw sand in the gears, not break things.
And so the question is, like, should Silicon Valley get to decide policy or should the government get to decide policy?
And our view is we want to watch the watchers, but the government should get to decide policy.
Our Republic has a mechanism for deciding it and we should follow that mechanism first as being in charge ourselves.
The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex?
Then what?
What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building?
Then what?
Well, it's see, that's not what's scary.
What's scary to me is if Isa Fari Public elects a really, really bad person and they try to get around things and use technology and power in ways they shouldn't.
Palantir.
It's very possible.
Which is very possible.
That is scary to me.
That's why we all have to fight to be part of the political process for our views there and to make sure we have checks on power, which is core to the U.S. Constitution.
What Alex is doing, he doesn't get the data himself.
Alex is running a company that builds technology for our clients, right?
I should say our clients.
I'm an advisor still.
I'm a proud founder.
I'm not running Palantir these days.
But Palantir is helping them use their data.
We're not data ourselves.
You see what I'm saying?
helping them see things and do things they couldn't do otherwise with their information.
It's not like Palantir itself has all the information.
How many of the events that happens in the world where we're watching like, you know, is Palantir involved in?
For instance, and I know you're not involved today, like Maduro, was Palantir involved in capturing him?
El Mencho, the Mexico, you know, the cartel guy we just killed in Mexico.
Were you involved in gathering that intel?
Because if you're thinking all these intel, and by the way, a lot of agencies use you, right?
It's not just CIA that uses you.
So you know what everybody is doing.
No, no, but we don't actually, because the people who know are the people who have the clearance to see what's going on there.
So there may be things that happen that Alex, even if he's running the company, may not have the top secure clearance for that particular operation to be involved in that thing.
Is there anybody in the company that has the clearance to know what everything's going on?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
That's an interesting question.
I doubt it's very powerful.
I doubt they do because a lot of Palantir's work is with allies all over the world and different allies have different clearances and different things they do.
So it'd be very unlikely for someone to see everything.
Now, the real question, though, is do you want this operation to be done efficiently and effectively as possible or do you want it to be done slightly stupider?
I mean, that's really the question we're asking here.
Should this be done in a slightly stupider way or a slightly better way?
Because that's all Palantir is doing is on site with them, helping them do it in a better way, given the information they're allowed to use.
So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mancho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved in that?
It's very likely to me that the technology was involved and its capabilities were involved and that it helped them do it in a better way than they would have done it before, especially with the U.S. operation.
I don't know about the Mexican operation or not.
I'm not just beat on what they're doing there.
Meaning the Venezuela operation.
The Venezuela one, I'd be surprised if it wasn't involved in some way.
But again, Palantir is a tool being used by others in our government who are in charge who are making the strategy.
Maybe explain that.
So how is that tool used?
What does that tool help you do?
If I explain different technology, I can say, here's what HubSpot helps you.
Here's what Salesforce helps you.
Here's what this technology helps you.
How does Palantir help in that process?
So what Palantir is, I mean, it's a lot of things at this point, but Palantir is bringing together data from a lot of different sources in the government.
Like I said, when I started Palantir, government spent 30-something billion a year to gather data.
I bet you it's a lot more than that now.
So there's literally hundreds of thousands of databases.
There's literally signal intelligence, human intelligence, and there's all sorts of rules about who could see what, what they could do.
So they're not, for example, people are not allowed to spy on unicyzes and use that data.
That'd be illegal.
Palantir would flag that and say, this is against the rules.
You can't be doing this, right?
So the whole thing is a rules engine that has very strict rules.
And then so there's someone who's using it.
They're getting all the stuff they're legally allowed to be doing based on the policy of our republic.
And they're bringing it all together and they're putting it together because it's very complicated if you have lots of data basis.
Is this the same person over here?
Is this person over here?
Is this Muhammad the same as this Muhammad?
Is this guy?
Is this guy's common Hispanic last name?
Is Sarah, the same as this, Becerra?
And they're mapping it all out and they're taking all the information they can and they're using that with AI along with their judgment to ask questions and make plans and figure things out and connect the dots and then get things done better.
At the beginning stages, who didn't want to see Palantir succeed?
Military Exploits Primes00:15:05
The Primes, all the Primes.
So in America, the Primes are the big defense companies.
In America, we had for a long time the most competitive best defense companies.
In the 20th century, there were maybe 80 or 90 of these.
They just were dominant, best in the world.
After the Cold War ended, we had to lower the budget.
Probably a good thing.
I'd rather more money goes towards other things than war.
Cold Reds, the Primes all domerged.
They merged to these five or nine six of them.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe even eight or something, but they're much smaller, much fewer number, much bigger companies.
And they became so dominant, but they became more like the government themselves because they interacted with it so much.
They became big bureaucracies.
And these big bureaucracies, a lot of the best tech guys, they all fled.
They all fled to the tech world, to the best places in Silicon Valley, to other places.
And these places got really good at what we call innovation theater.
They're good at convincing Congress they're innovating, but they're not really innovating anymore.
And they stopped innovating.
And there's only two companies that broke through these primes.
It was Palantir and SpaceX.
Both Palantir Space Station.
It was really hard.
It was really unfair.
They beat the crap out of us.
We do things that would save huge numbers of lives.
I'll tell you, so we worked with the special forces at first because special forces are like the most elite soldiers doing really important missions and their lives are on the line a lot.
So they wanted the best tools.
And when Palantir went somewhere at first, it was very often special forces guys using it for key missions to save their lives.
Now, at the time, we were in Iraq and there were army brigades in Iraq and they saw us saving lives in special forces.
They said, can we use it too?
And the government wouldn't pay for it.
So we said, of course, you can use it for free because we're patriots.
That's the whole point.
So go use it for free.
Just give us the data back legally.
Make sense.
Who's reaching out to you?
This is like all sorts of people in the military working with our guys in the military, embedded, working with these guys.
Not PMCs.
These are actual guys.
Like lieutenant colonels in the military.
So lieutenant colonels are reaching out to them.
The government doesn't want to fund it.
Can you help us?
Getting a general's permission, pushing it in.
Wow.
These are guys on the ground.
Because listen, their buddies' lives are on the line, right?
Sure.
We have a lot of great soldiers without the approval of the U.S. government.
No, no, people would approve they can use it for weeks.
We're not going to pay for them.
Pay for it because we don't want to get in trouble stopping you using something that's going to work better.
And so in this case, we stopped tons of deaths from IEDs because we were able to track where the IEDs most likely were.
We all track all sorts of things going on.
They reported back all these deaths that we stopped.
And then there was like a five, whatever, three or five billion dollar bid for the defense ground control system again.
And we'd already been used better than anything they were doing before, way ahead, everything they wanted.
And they just like, no bid, gave it to a prime.
And we actually sued him at this point because it's not allowed.
You have to consider others.
We actually won the lawsuit.
The generals in charge of getting into the prime were ordering people behind the scenes to destroy the records of live loss.
But some guys had saved the lives that we'd saved.
So the general couldn't hide it.
It's like totally corrupt.
It's totally corrupt.
So we had to break through.
And then a lot of others saw this.
And this has really shifted the culture in the military now.
When SpaceX broke through and Palantir broke through and now you underreal, of course, they're starting to say, wait a second, we got to be open to the outside stuff.
We can't just only do the primes.
But that was a big fight for us for years.
Which of the primes are bigger than you guys right now?
Everyone's still bigger on revenue because Palantir is still a smaller company.
Palantir is about half government, a little bit less than half government revenue.
So it's like, you know, it's in the single-digit billions for revenue.
And there's primes making tens of billions of revenue.
They're much bigger than us, been around forever.
But we're growing much faster.
That's why we're valued highly.
But market cap-wise, you're higher than the prime.
Market cap-wise, we're higher, but revenue-wise, we're still much.
I mean, you're not a part of a since 09, you're an advisor.
Is there any situations where Palantir has to deal with the Prime?
Oh, yeah, all the time.
The Primes still run a lot of stuff.
And by the way, there are still parts of things that Primes do.
They're the best in the world, and you have to work with them.
The problem was, is early on, if Palantir tried to do anything, the Prime would say like, oh, we'll take 99% of the value.
We'll give you 1% of the value.
We'll take credit for your work.
It's like they just beat you because they're in charge.
When you say 99, it's $100 million project.
They literally pay you a million bucks.
They would give you a million bucks for something, and then we'd actually do most of the work.
And it would drive us crazy.
So in 09, which is 17 years ago, what's top line revenue that year?
Oh, I don't remember, but it was.
Is it in the millions or billions?
Probably in the 10 millions.
We didn't cross a billion for 15 years.
Took a long time.
So in 09, companies been around for five years, and the revenue was in the millions.
Tens of millions, probably.
Tens of millions.
Yeah.
Got it.
It might have just been crossing 100.
I don't know the exact numbers.
That's probably tens of millions.
So if that's who didn't want you to exist at that time, who today is your biggest enemy?
You know, and I really can't speak for the companies.
This is just me now, the founder looking at them from the inside.
I would think the biggest threat to Palantir are like the extreme populists on both political sides who don't want our country using better technology to succeed, basically.
And, you know, there's a lot of, there's 1,200 laws right now in 50 states trying to ban different types of AI for things that I think are just ridiculous.
I think most of them, by the way, some of it's good.
You got to protect children.
You got to protect content creators.
There's legitimate things to push back on, but a lot of this stuff is nonsense.
And if those nonsense passes, it's not just an enemy to Palantir.
It's an enemy to like thousands of our best innovative companies right now.
So I think that's actually the biggest threat at this point because Palantir is so dominant and adding value to so many thousands of companies.
Can we like specify who would be far?
Are you saying things like a non-interventionalist politician?
Is that oh, no, no, no.
What do you mean far?
I'm talking about laws that are, I'm talking about laws that are like Bernie Sanders trying to stop all new data centers or something crazy like that.
Or people who are saying we want to throw developers in jail if things don't go right with AI or something, which there's laws like that.
They're housing in Maryland, Virginia.
Or there's people saying, you know, it's a lot of people who are technically illiterate writing state law to block things, to create new regulators to stop you from deploying.
Stuff like that would be a disaster.
And I see the presidents working to deregulate and kind of still keep it open source and allow you to compete without making it too regulated.
Yeah, David Sachs is working hard on this for because he's the head of AI for the president.
And, you know, my view is that we should have certain regulatory frameworks to protect kids and protect content creators and have reasonable law, but we shouldn't be having each state have its own regulatory code.
That'd be crazy.
Did you see this recent movie that came out called Mercy?
Have you seen Mercy?
You haven't seen Mercy?
Oh, my God.
You got to watch Mercy.
So it's a movie with Chris Pratt.
I've been telling everybody to go watch this movie.
Specifically, you.
Like every employee at Palantir needs to go watch this.
So Mercy is a story of this actor, Chris Pratt, who wakes up, he's locked into this chair, okay, handcuffed shackles, and the judge is that face on the top.
If you see the face on the top, that's the judge.
It's an AI judge.
You have 90 minutes to prove to her why you didn't kill your wife.
In this case, in a movie, he killed his wife.
He's like, what are you talking about?
And she has access to every video to pull up.
Can he go to this state?
What happened that morning?
When I walked into that?
That's scary stuff, man.
Well, do you see a day in the next 20 years where we could be living in a world where judges could be AI, politicians could be AI.
It could be based on models.
That's not the world I want to live in.
How do we prevent that from happening?
Well, you know, the Constitution is pretty clear about the rules.
And so I think we should make sure we stick to the Constitution.
And we, you know, if we're going to, if we're going to amend it, we should be really damn careful not to not to give AI random power like that.
That'd be my view.
The whole point of how America was designed is checks on power.
The reason America is a truly great country that's lasted as long as it has.
It's our 250th anniversary this year, is because our founders were philosophers from the Enlightenment, and they thought a lot about this.
And they realized you have to check government power.
You have to set it up with lots of different checks on itself.
And the whole point is for the government itself not to be allowed to ever be evil.
And by the way, that was how we built Palantir is to have audit trails and to watch the watchers and to have checks.
You have to have checks on power.
Otherwise, government is dangerous.
Yeah, but if we're going into the robot era of developing robots, and if all of a sudden you have 400,000 robots that you program from your headquarters and your competitors got 200,000 robots and third place has got 17,000 robots and all of a sudden somebody becomes evil, then what happens?
Well, this is why it's important for the military to have the most powerful robots and not some kind of corporation.
That obviously is very important.
And by the way, China is trying to build those faster than us.
And that's why right now we're trying to make sure we stay ahead of China.
And it's, listen, our military, how it's controlled by our government, that's a very important thing.
Our public has to get right.
But obviously, our military has to stay ahead of anyone else.
That'd be very bad not to have a monopoly on power.
You said it eloquently of who you think Palantir's enemy is.
Who do you think is the enemy of the state?
Top three enemies.
I think our top three enemies are probably our adversaries, right?
I think our country right now is very polarized.
It's very polarized.
And I think social media unfortunately does that.
But our adversaries take advantage of that.
I think China using TikTok finds ways to polarize us more.
I think Iran, very clearly, the guys running Iran, I'm a very big fan of the Persian people, but the guys running Iran are a bad guy theocracy.
And you saw when we hit Iran with Israel last time and the internet went down, you saw 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away.
And you saw a bunch of bots that are guys who pretend to be Christians who hate Jews in Alabama also got turned off for a while.
All right.
So they're trying to find ways to divide us, man.
They're trying to find ways to pull us apart.
What a powerful thing right there.
The 15% of Christians who hate Jews in Alabama.
Well, 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away.
Sorry, that was another point.
Iran was mining 15% of all Bitcoin in the world.
We found that out because it went away as soon as we hit them.
But then there's literally hundreds of thousands of bots that were like just angry at this bottom.
They're angry at America because they're pretending to be Christian guys who hate Jews.
They're pretending to be crazy people in America who had different extremes who are arguing.
So there's a lot of stuff that's planted, that's planted to make us fight.
Let me ask you, if Ilan was able to, who actually knows?
This is an interesting thought.
I'm curious what your answer will be.
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Does an Elon, if he wanted to really run a report with the data that he has, is he able to see who is behind the fake bots that are causing retweets to happen for a certain message that's going to undermine a certain way of thinking and pin people against each other?
Somebody should know.
Yeah, Elon did something very courageous with his team a couple of months ago.
And I don't know where it is now, but they put all the country of origin up on all these things.
And you saw all these like very divisive stuff.
Like you had this like APAC is evil report APAC thing.
And it was like a European account tied to an Iranian account tied to a Pakistan account.
Like, wait a second, you guys have been saying you're from the South.
Like, what are you doing?
You're obviously a foreign lobby who's doing this now, right?
And you had a lot of versions of this where all of a sudden all these accounts that were stirring up trouble on both sides were actually foreigners.
Yeah.
I think it'd be interesting to see to see numbers.
I haven't looked at that.
Well, I mean, if if you're a data company, a palantir or ex also a data company, any of these guys, I would assume they know exactly who's behind it.
You know, the problem is it's very easy to create accounts and be a real person or not be a real person.
So I don't know if they know everything.
I think there's a lot of bot farms.
You can't see where it's coming from.
But if you're really good at this and you're a state actor, you can use different IP addresses.
You can use different spoofs.
You can do things to make it a little bit harder for them to tell.
And so you might be able to create a lot of fake accounts.
Who is using bot farms?
Who are top customers of bot farms?
Chinese are using probably the main bot farms.
To create so division and to push things and to make the crazy politicians more popular.
The Chinese love making socialists more popular in the U.S.
They know it weakens us.
They have a word for like crazy white person, which is like this kind of woke white, crazy person on the left.
And they love to, they know it's a problem there.
They want to ban it there, but they want to push it in America.
They think it weakens us culturally.
That's one of their models.
The Chinese do cognitive warfare.
You know this, right?
So there's like land, sea, air, cyber, and cognitive.
And they have a whole branch of their military that's just doing cognitive warfare using all this stuff, whether it's especially TikTok, but all these other ones as well.
And they're very good at it.
What other tools?
Outside of TikTok?
I mean, all the social media stuff, all the protests, like they are big funders of they'll figure out something like a Black Lives Matter thing, or they'll figure out something going on with some environmental thing.
And both Russia's done this too historically.
They funded a lot of green movements in Europe because they knew it was good for them to do that.
And they'll figure out, and you know, China nowadays, they take all the data they can.
So there's companies like, you know, I'm told Air Wallocks does this.
I don't know myself.
I'm told Air Wallocks has all their data that goes through China and the Chinese government has access to any data in China at all.
And then we'll use it to model.
They have models of you.
They have models of me.
They have models of everyone.
And they try to figure out how to use those models to influence us and influence people about us for their ends and for our divisiveness.
I mean, they're very good at it.
I mean, we saw they did that with TikTok, right?
And to the point where we saw what happened with Gen Z and LGBTQ and the tie between it, the percentage of going up.
It got to a point that Bill Maher had to talk about employing it.
The Chinese very clearly saw a few issues were very helpful to attack us with.
One of those issues is Jewish people.
Chinese have decided that it's very helpful to create divisiveness around Jews in America because they see attacking Jews as something is very, very useful to do to rip us apart.
And it is.
It is.
It's actually caused a lot of problems.
Unpack that.
Go a little bit deeper.
So I think the Asian people maybe are a little more racist in some ways than we are.
They think of things more of those terms.
They just are.
That's my experience.
And so if you stop and think about this, there's a lot of Jews that are very successful.
And the successful Jews in America, they see as an edge for America.
And they see that it's, but they also see there's a lot of resentment.
So that's a really easy way to create divisiveness against something that's helping us.
And so that's like, they go right at it.
And they're very smart about how to do it.
You go all over TikTok.
You go all over everything they do.
And it's like, boom, let's just stir that up.
Let's stir up the Black Lives Matter stuff.
Let's stir up this other thing over here.
They're very good at it.
But have you ever seen, how old are you, by the way?
I think you're 43.
43 now.
43.
I'm 47.
I just turned 47 a few months ago.
Have you ever seen the Jewish story and the division being this high, temperature-wise, in your lifetime?
In our lifetimes, this is the highest it's been.
And it's not just China.
Partly what's happening here is this is the first war that Israel's been involved in in our lifetime with social media.
And if you go on social media, just the ratio of people who are passionate against Israel versus for Israel is 100 to 1, probably, just based on the number of Muslims in the world.
There's a lot of good Muslims in the world.
There's going to be a lot of extreme ones who are really passionate about this issue.
It doesn't mean they're not good people.
They can disagree with me.
And so that itself is going to create a lot of passion against Israel and Jews, right?
First War With Social Media00:03:41
And so that already exists.
And then you can exploit that to push it forward.
How do you address that?
How do you address it?
I mean, man, this is a very, very tough issue.
I mean, you're the brains.
How do you address that?
How do you fix something like that?
Because it doesn't seem like the temperature is getting any lower.
Well, you know, I would like there to be peace in the Middle East.
And I think for me, the only way to have peace in the Middle East is to free the Iranian people and all around sponsors of terror around the Middle East.
And I think that leads to a very positive outcome.
And hopefully Israel and Saudi and UAE can all sponsor and create peace in Gaza together once the theocrats are gone.
And hopefully that's a much more positive outcome.
As long as the Iranian theocrats are there, which is going to be a recurrent issue for us.
So I really hope we take them out.
I'll be honest about that.
You really hope we take them out.
Well, I think they're evil, evil people who've spread murder and terror and more terror to their own people than anyone else.
It's a horrible place.
Yeah.
It's one of the most beautiful places in the world and one of the most wonderful places in the world, if we could get rid of the bad guys.
Oh, if you do, I mean, there's a song by a singer named Moeen, and he says, De la Michod Be Sfahan Bargardam.
My heart wants me to return to Esfahan.
Esfahan is one of the richest cities in Iran with history.
When my mom and dad were still married to each other for those 10 or 11 years, the only vacation we ever went on was Asfan.
And I have pictures till today as a kid going there with my sister and my mom and my dad.
Great memories.
But yeah, that's Esfan right there.
And Moin says, De la Mikot Be Esfan Bargardam.
I'd like to one day return.
My heart wants me to one day return to this city, Esfan.
One of my favorite books is Cyropedia, which was written about Cyrus the Great, the great leader.
And it was used actually to train European aristocracy princes for like 2,000 years.
And there's all the wisdom of Cyrus.
And you just, you kind of get this really sense of the greatness of the Persian people from that.
And it's like very optimistic.
It's about virtue.
It's about, you know, Machiavelli ended up becoming like the thing people use after him, which is the opposite.
Machiavelli is like this very cynical take, which is a dialectic.
It's also true, but I really like the Persian idea.
And you grew up, my mom's side is Jewish, and just like what the Persians did for the Jews and the natural alliance, it's been there for thousands of years.
That's what we still feel.
So I really hope this is something that can become a positive.
Why do you think no matter what happens, it's always the Jews' fault.
No matter what happens, it's always the Jews.
I think you're going to blame the people who are outsiders, who are different, who are successful.
I mean, like I say, it comes to you.
I think it's slightly annoying sometimes when you're like, it's like this little neurotic, like smart person who makes more money than you.
You kind of want to punch him in the face, you know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
You tell me.
I can see that.
Did you hear what Thomas Sowell said?
Thomas Sowell said.
I love Thomas Sowell.
He said something so funny one time.
He says, You know what my advice to Jews are?
For the world to start liking you a little bit, start losing.
Start losing.
His mentor was Milton Friedman, who was the LGRS guy.
Yeah, Milton Friedman.
I have a painting in my house with Milton Friedman in it.
I love him.
I got to spend lunch.
I got lunch with him like 20 times because I was the editor of a paper when he was there at Stanford.
How was nice?
He was amazing.
He always had, he was always interested in the new ideas and he's really shaped a lot of my thinking on economics.
Amazing, man.
Milton Friedman.
You spent 20 times with Milton Friedman.
Yeah, his wife was off in there too.
They were in their early 90s when I was at Stanford.
And he was at Hoover.
You know how hard I've tried to do an interview with Thomas Sowell?
Their family won't let him.
It's too hard.
He's such a great man.
I mean, listen, him, the two of them, the debates, when you would watch them do the debates.
What's the one book he wrote?
Is it called Reader?
I think it's called Reader.
Rob Attacks Reader00:05:21
I don't know what the.
Can you type in Thomas Soule Reader?
I just had my son finish this book two years ago.
He's 12 years old.
He had a conflict of visions that I love.
Click on that one, Rob.
Which one do you mean?
Yeah, Reader.
Oh, my God.
It is like a must-read.
My son read this at 11, 12 years old, and he breaks down ideas in the simplest way.
You know, this guy would be so much more famous if he wasn't black, because because he's black, the left doesn't want anyone to know that he's conservative.
Well, here's what's funny, though.
Conservatives today are not talking about him enough.
I think conservatives need to remind what Thomas Soul said.
But go back to that with Iran.
So, Iran, right now, at any point, you and I are talking right now, at any point, anything can happen.
It was supposed to be this week.
I think there's a negotiation on Thursday, is my understanding.
I don't know.
I shouldn't be saying that.
I thought they said they're not going to do anything.
I thought Witkoff and Kushner Wachta said, no, we're not renegotiating.
Rob, do you have that one clip I sent you from the foreign minister where he's being, did you see this one a few hours ago?
Oh, no.
The foreign minister is being interviewed, and he's asked about, hey, I noticed you said that there are 40,000 Americans that are in or in surrounding areas of Iran.
And if U.S. attacks, that's open game for you.
I send it in the PBD podcast group.
If you don't have it, Rob, I'll just send it to you.
Do you see it?
It's right there.
Bottom clip.
Right there.
Yeah.
And she says, Are you saying you would do something to Americans?
And you should see his answer.
Go ahead, Rob.
50,000 American personnel in the Middle East right now.
In Iran's letter to the UN Security Council, you seem to threaten them because you said America will bear full responsibility.
You said you don't want war.
But if that's what happens, all bases, facilities, and assets of the hostile force in the region will be legitimate targets.
Are you saying Iran will hit U.S. bases in the Gulf, or will you also bomb the Gulf countries that are your neighbors?
Well, I'm not going to say what we are going to do exactly.
Obviously, we defend ourselves.
If the U.S. attacks us, then we have every right to defend ourselves.
If the U.S. attacks us, that is the act of aggression.
What we do in response is the act of self-defense.
And it is justifiable and legitimate.
So our missiles cannot hit the American soil.
So obviously, we have to do something else.
We have to hit the Americans' base in the region.
That is a fact.
I'm not so sure.
What do you think is going to happen?
Listen, I think these guys sent someone to assassinate Donald Trump.
We know this, so the regime caught him.
They were told if they missed, that he'd probably lose the election.
So wait and try to get him again after he lost the election.
This was the official instructions we found.
So these guys were trying to kill Trump.
It means if they're still around after Trump's president, they'll probably try to get him and his kids again.
So if I was the president, there's no chance they'd be around after as president.
That's all I'm telling you.
I mean, and by the way, I think it's very good for the world to eliminate this evil for your people and for all of our peoples.
Yeah, a lot of people are worried it could turn into another Iraq and we spend a few trillion dollars.
But is Iran really Iraq?
I don't think so, but a lot of people think it could turn into something like that.
You know, you hear the two arguments.
I think they're going to do a surgical mission the way they did Venezuela, and it's going to be clean, and here's what's going to happen.
And then the other side is like, how do we know that for a fact?
So if I was in charge, I'd be very Roman about it.
So I don't know, maybe this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman.
So the Romans would do, you'd go and you wipe out the leadership class that you're all dead.
And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge.
We're going to make a deal or we're going to kill all of you too.
It's up to you.
Because it's going to be IRGC, who's in charge again, probably, right?
Because they're the guys with the guns.
They say, okay, now here's what we're going to do.
We're going to make a deal.
Here's what's going to happen.
Here's how your republic's going to work and to be free people.
And if you don't do that, then we'll kill you all in six months.
And then we'll give you another chance.
But I don't think we should be occupying ourselves.
That's bullshit.
I think Iraq was terribly run.
I think trying to go and have people over there is ridiculous.
But should these guys who have acted like they've had, who spread terrorism around the region, who have tried to kill Trump, who have killed so many people, should they be allowed to get away with that?
No way.
I wouldn't let them get away with it.
I'll tell you that.
How much do you think the attack is going to be a collaboration with Israel?
Or do you think it's going to be...
Well, Israel has really good intelligence there in the region.
And so obviously, if you're doing something, you need to work with your allies to do as good as possible.
The same thing is like, you know, we were talking earlier about are you going to use Palantir to do an operation?
You're going to use whatever you can to do it as best as possible.
And I think in this case, that involves Israel.
It probably involves other allies too, hopefully.
Is Israel a customer palantir?
Yes, actually.
We started working with Israel.
It was one of my most proud moments because they're kind of like the NSA where they don't really want to work with outsiders and they don't really buy for anyone else.
And it took us several years to break in, but we did break in to work with while you were there or it was something that happened.
It was something that I was working on even as an advisor, like shortly after I got it.
Is it recent, like five, 10 years?
No, no, it's been a while.
It's been a while.
So, okay, so they've been a customer for a while.
There's over 40 countries, as far as I know, who are allies who work with Palantir.
Israel is not one of the first several, but it is worth the key countries originally were the five eyes, right?
Which are the core five allies, which is Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia.
Yeah, I saw somewhere where you, is there a structure where if there is a, who can't you work with?
Is it basically sanctioned?
Well, I mean, first of all, the company is a mission-driven company.
We never have wanted to work with our enemies.
We're not going to work with them all.
You're not going to work with Russia.
You're not going to work with North Korea.
Why Not China?00:05:20
I'm not going to work with China.
But not because of regulation.
It's a choice.
I mean, at this point, it's definitely regulation against it, too.
I think early on, if we had tried to go work with those guys, maybe we somehow could have because the government wouldn't have noticed, but that would not have been ever something we wanted to do because we had a mission-driven company to fight for the good guys in the West.
But meaning, even if you try to go.
These days, if you try to, because of what it does in the Department of War, of course, it wouldn't be allowed to.
And by the way, I'm not even allowed to go to China anymore right now.
You're not allowed to go to China?
No, I mean, I mean, I've had friends who are running other defense companies who are planes going for one case to Taiwan, and they made the force of planes to do an emergency landing in China and searched all his stuff.
And then they let him go because he's American citizen.
But they actually did an emergency landing, searched all his stuff because he was a key defense executive, and then let him go on Taiwan.
So I'm not supposed to go there at all, nor are a lot of other people who've worked in these areas.
I've started a few big defense companies now.
I'm not supposed to do it.
Yeah.
I mean, that makes sense for somebody like you to go there.
It would be.
I wouldn't want to go there.
I mean, by the way, I used to love to go to Shanghai.
It's a great fascinating part of the world, but not right now.
Not right now.
09, you left.
Why did you leave?
Well, I still stayed as an advisor, but I finished investing and I was starting Atapar.
And Adipar is a very large company in the wealth management area.
So I was actually going to start a third division.
I'd started the government side.
I helped them get going on the early commercial side.
And that's, you know, the company is now about, I think, 60% commercial, basically, working with Fortune 500 and other companies around the world.
I was thinking of starting a third division, decide to build it separately as Atapar.
Atapar?
Yeah.
And so Adipar, it takes the portfolio, it gives you a score, it assesses.
Well, Adipar is a software that you kind of work and live in if you're a wealth advisor.
If you're running a big RAA.
So advisors are using it.
Yeah.
So there's hundreds of thousands of advisors on it serving a huge number of clients.
There's $10 trillion on it.
So if you're like running a big bank with the top wealth management arm, or if you're like a big RA, like iconic on the West Coast, LGL would be, who else would be a customer?
Like Coriant or Omni or all the big RAAs.
There's all these big family offices out here.
The biggest family offices are.
What were RIAs?
Mostly RAAs.
But there's tens of thousands of RAAs in our country.
It's a very big industry.
Got it.
And so as the advisor, I'm seeing this as a database tracking my clients.
Is it also looking at their portfolio?
Is it giving any advice?
Yeah, no, it's helping you run your whole business, everything.
It's doing everything.
You do all your reporting, all your tax stuff, all your, everyone logs into it to do anything.
It's like the place you live when you're doing your job.
I had Anthony Pompliano on the other day.
I don't know if you know who he is.
He's Pompliano, great with his show, big Bitcoin guy, very smart, and his brother, the whole family, all the boys.
And, you know, he's saying advisors will be replaced very soon.
Do you agree with that?
I think a very high end, actually, the relationship really matters to people.
So I think there's ways you can do things without people in some of these areas for some people.
But I think like the contours of the industry and of our humanity is that we want to talk to people.
We want to work through things.
You want to see who you trust.
Yeah, I do.
Like I like talking to my Goldman guy.
I like talking to the Morgan guy.
I like talking to the Chase guys and JP Morgan guys.
Yeah, but we can help those guys serve you cheaper than they do now.
We can help them serve more people more easily.
But I think the relationship's going to be there.
This is where everyone gets things wrong on AI, by the way, because AI does allow things to work in different ways.
But it's like, I saw a great essay online where it was talking about the French garden is where you just like destroy everything and just build a new garden however you want it, whereas the English garden takes the land as it already is, right, and molds to it.
I think Wilma Nidis wrote about this.
And I think that's more what tends to happen in industry is you take the world as it already is and you shift things and improve things and make things, but you work with it as it is.
It's not just going to come in and blow everything up.
That's not usually what happens.
Yeah, it's a fear that that could take place.
Do you think there is a place for regulation to prevent from a bad player getting in?
Do you think regulation is needed for what area?
I'm just wondering if there's a place on what limits of a product I produce.
Well, I think we want to have, so we already do have a lot of regulation in our world right now, right?
So for example, in healthcare, there's like hundreds of thousands of rules.
And if anything, the hundreds of thousands of rules, some of them make sense.
Some of them are actually only there to protect the existing people to keep prices high.
So for example, in healthcare, I think we need new rules that let you try new things, that you have sandboxes, because we could bring the cost of healthcare way down.
And this is existential.
We have $100 trillion of debt in this space.
And I'm really excited, for example, here in Florida and a couple other states right now, we're doing studies with the legislature to try to prepare laws for next year that will allow us very safely to try some use cases that we think are safe that doctors want to try and things like that.
If anything, we need new policy to allow us to try it because that would be great to bring the cost down.
Yeah, I think the part with the one part that you could reduce a lot of costs is trademarks, how they're able to extend trademarks.
So I'm able to protect myself with a patent.
I get a patent for 20 years and then the patent is about to expire.
Whatever I'm selling could be worth 20 cents, $2, $5, $10 to sell.
I'm still selling it for $5,000.
And then I go get a lobbyist.
I extend the patent for another 18 years.
Then it goes 38 years.
That's exciting.
Especially with hospitals as well.
I think Trump was trying to do something a few years ago with hospital, how much the cost was.
And Dr. Ross is doing a really good, good job right now, trying to bring down costs of care Medicaid.
There's a lot of smart things we got to do.
It'll be interesting what happens.
Patent Expirations Cost00:02:43
So, 09, when you leave Palantir and you're an advisor, are you at this point?
Are you married at that time or you're single?
No, no, I got married in 2016.
2016.
Okay.
So you're a rich young bachelor at the stamp.
Is that fair to say?
It's fair to say.
Okay, so how did you protect yourself?
Well, actually, I made a pretty dumb mistake if you read about it.
I had a girlfriend who ended up suing me after I broke up with her and didn't marry her in 2012, 2013.
So you're right.
You've got to protect yourself.
How do you do it though?
Because, you know, I think looking back on it, I was working really, really hard and I had, you know, been a very nice relationship that didn't work out.
And then I had a kind of a rebound relationship with, I don't want to talk too much about this person in particular, but it was something where it was probably not someone I should have been dating.
And, you know, I'd met in New York and she was at, she was at Stanford.
She was 21.
I was 28.
And it was, it turns out you just got to be really careful who you let into your life and how seriously you take relationships, because if you're not careful, then it can cause a lot of trouble.
And that's a good lesson for us.
How'd you protect yourself?
I mean, I think how you protect yourself is you should listen more to your family.
I think it's not my family.
I didn't think, didn't thought there was some issues with them.
And I'm like, oh, no, she's really pretty and I'm busy and who cares?
And it's like, actually, it really matters to protect yourself.
It's common sense who you let into your life.
I was very lucky that by the time actually I'd broken up, it had been a couple of years of my time that they tried to sue.
I already had a new amazing girlfriend who was really wonderful, who ended up becoming my wife and is someone that my family really admired her and her family and respected her a lot.
And that's, I think it's just really important to have, to focus on getting a partner you really, really respect who's the right match for you.
Now, six kids.
We have six.
We have six beautiful young children.
I'm a very lucky guy.
Five, five little girls, which is all his.
Well, you got the money for it.
It's going to be expensive.
They're amazing.
Well, you know why I asked that question?
Because Trevor Bauer, I don't know if you follow baseball, he's a good friend.
And he was playing baseball and he was doing great things, Cy Young, all this stuff.
And then a girl accuses him.
Just for the accusation of pursuing your life.
He lost a few hundred million dollars over it.
It probably cost me a little bit too for about a year.
A lot of people didn't, I became controversial.
It became even harder for about a year.
Obviously, I'm lucky I was successful enough.
I could bounce back and get through it.
But it's just totally unfair to a guy like that to have to deal with that.
And this is, yeah, I think there was a period where you were basically guilty as soon as you were accused.
I think a lot of people now have seen enough people where that's been happened unfairly.
Hopefully our culture is changing a little bit, but it's still very unfair how it handles these things.
How do you, when you're rich and single, identify if a girl is with you for you or for you because of money?
How do you do that?
And I want to push back, by the way, on one thing.
I think it's unfair how things work now.
I think it was probably even more unfair how things worked in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s.
A Different World's Unfairness00:02:52
And I think we have to acknowledge that because obviously I'm not a woke guy, but I think the world was at a place where a lot of men, it was a man's world and a lot of men were really nasty, abused women, horrible things, and just got away with it.
And I think that is wrong, right?
So I think, so I think we have to realize that the pendulum was here and now it's like swung too far the other way.
But you know what?
I'd rather face a little bit of a tough time as a rich guy than have all these women being abused.
So this is still wrong.
It should be in the middle.
But I think it's actually like, it's good that we're actually touching these things.
This weekend.
My wife and I were celebrating her birthday.
So we go to Baal Harbor.
And, you know, Baal Harbor, I couldn't walk anywhere without somebody saying hello to me who's Jewish.
It's like filled with Jews everywhere in that area.
And so we decide one night, we're on Game of Thrones, just to kind of tell you where we're at.
We're at two episodes after the red wedding, whatever they call it.
Yeah, that's kind of where we are, right?
We haven't seen anything else.
And then my wife, she says, babe, thank God I'm a woman born today because how different it was back in the days.
So it was difficult.
It was vicious.
It was a whole different world.
It was a crazy world.
Can I tell you a funny story about that?
So I mentioned Mildred Freeman I used to hang out with.
His colleague who was older than him was Dr. Breichman.
He was 96 when I was at Stanford.
And he had been a reporter in the White House in the late 1930s.
So he was like a window for me until like this completely different time, right?
Because that's like, you know, because he was 36, 20 years ago.
65 years ago from when I met him in the White House.
And I thought the funniest, he's so funny stories.
So he would be in the FDR White House.
It'd be spring break and they'd all go on the train and it'd be journalists.
It'd be senators from both parties and it'd be the guys in the White House.
And the first two stops of the train, all the girlfriends and escorts would get on and they'd all go together.
And these people would be attacking each other like crazy with the journalists for the for the business of government.
But they'd both be with their girlfriends or everywhere else getting in trouble and never would say anything about that.
Isn't that crazy?
It was a totally different world.
It was a man's world.
It was just a different world.
I'm not saying that's good.
It's just fascinating how much the world has shifted.
You can never imagine that.
Yeah.
Do you believe it?
I believe it.
I believe that exit.
Oh, definitely.
Definitely.
You read about it.
You see about it.
You know, it's a very different world.
But going back to it, advice.
Think about it.
Guy's asking.
I read Steven Schwartzmann's book and he's talking about how what it takes.
He says he was going through a divorce.
He was worried about what to do.
He had been married for 25 years.
He says, I get recommended to go see this one guy who's a very successful therapist, a marriage counselor.
And I said, I have four concerns.
How do I, at my age, get back into the dating world?
Number two, what happens with my kids?
Number three, what happens with my money?
Number four, what happens with my friends?
Do they choose her or me?
Logistics Ventures Double Play00:15:36
And the guy gave him very good advice.
That's tough.
He said, your kids are going to be okay.
You're going to be fine.
There's plenty of girls that are going to want to be with you.
Number three, do you have a prenup with your wife?
He says, No, he says, You're going to lose some money.
And then, number four, he says about friends, he says, You're going to lose half your friends because they're going to side with her.
I'm talking like for a guy like you who made money, is wealthy, is single, looking for a wife, how do you tell them apart?
You know, you meet people through friends, you meet people through people you admire.
And I think there's a lot of wonderful families and a lot of wonderful young women out there.
And I think it's the most important to be with someone who you really respect and where you have a shared strong base of values.
And my wife converted to Judaism, and we have just a really strong base of tradition in our family that we're building together.
And we talked a lot about values and what we care about.
And she's someone who, you know, I think if you have a really great wife, she makes you want to be a better person to live up to her vision of things.
Good for you guys.
Good for you.
Respect.
So going through somebody you know and trust that, again, going back to the same way you recruited people.
I mean, I got really lucky.
I'm not sure I could find myself like my wife again.
Sometimes you just gotta get lucky.
Are you gonna hit double digits?
That's the question.
Are you guys gonna reach double digits or six is it?
I think six kids might be it, but we'll see.
We'll see what it gets here.
I was telling you about a guy I met yesterday who has 11 kids with his wife.
He's 46, no twins, no adopting all theirs, and they hit 11 kids.
I think his name was Moshe, if I'm not mistaken, Orthodox things there.
So you left 09 and you went and did other things.
The company you started, we're talking about that.
And then afterwards, you know, you guys, when did you start eight VC?
When did you start making this?
So because Palantir had all this really top talent, when people come out, similar to PayPal, they're starting great companies.
I was mentoring, helping them.
So a lot of my mentors, like, Joe, you're basically already running a fund, but you need more money and more people helping you.
So I put that together.
The first one was called Formation Eight.
We did two big funds and then we started AFC with most of that team that spun out.
And we're on AVC Fund Six now.
So we've done eight really large funds, a bunch of entities around it.
And it's been the last couple of years, I mean, it's gone really, really well.
Obviously, it raised a ton of funds, but the last couple of years, things have just accelerated faster than you've ever seen before because AI is just making productivity go up.
It's making a lot of businesses grow way faster we've ever seen.
I think it's four, about four times faster on average for the median top 100 versus the median cloud companies that I was in before.
So it's just amazing what's going on.
Do you think VC has been a net positive for capitalism?
Of course.
Okay, tell me why.
So here's what VC is like the evolutionary engine of our economy, right?
So whenever you have new technology come along, whenever you have new possibilities come along, the question is, how are you going to take those new possibilities and do a better job in your business?
How are you going to do a better job in this area of logistics, in this area of healthcare, this area of finance, media, whatever it is?
And so what VC really is, is taking a bunch of smart, you know, smart builders who have new ideas and it's figuring out how do you empower these smart people to run really hard at creating value in these areas from the new possibilities.
And so there's really, there's only two things that VC: one is the top talent, and two is like what's newly possible that creates value.
So, how do you, how do you do it?
How do you find it?
So, so, so, first of all, you have to be interested in industries.
You have to be interested in how things work.
How does logistics work?
How are these carriers working with the warehouses, working with other people?
How are they getting booked?
What is the brokerage work?
Like, what are all the pieces of the industry?
How is this?
How is healthcare delivery working in America?
Where are all the pieces?
And you have to, and as you start to work on companies helping them, you get to know the leaders.
And so, over the last 15 years, like we'll bring 100 of the top logistics leaders to our vineyard in Napa Valley.
We'll hang out with them and we'll see what's going on.
We'll hang out with the people who build all the hospital systems who are using our things there.
Well, I'm in the Pentagon tomorrow morning.
That's where I'm going up to DC to spend a lot of time with the guys building and running things in the fence.
And so, you have to be very interested and enjoy these industries, get to know them.
And every time you have a success, every time your company helps that industry work better, now you've built a bunch of trust.
Now, you know who the good guys are.
Now, the next one, two, three, four, five are going to be easier.
So, you have these big VC firms that have had a bunch of these wins and the networks get stronger and stronger.
You can learn how to take talent, learn how to build these things.
And it's a huge engine of innovation.
In fact, America is the best in the world with this.
And I think it's one of the coolest sectors that exists in the world.
What's the business model?
The business model is teaming up with somebody else and raising a billion-dollar fund.
And you go find the companies and then you take the 20% of the upside, and then you split some of the money and put your own money in it.
Give me the business model.
So, I think here's the right way to think about it, especially for especially for our generation, people our age, is like you go off and you build a great company and you work really hard.
I get Palatier to work, I get Adipar to work.
So, now I'm one of the maybe 100 guys in our country who's built a couple of big successful companies.
And now I know all these other builders and I know how to build things.
I've learned.
So, now these young guys come to me and they want advice.
And so, I started advising them and I realized, wait a second, I know all this talent.
I have all these ideas.
And then I raise the fund.
And then I raise the fund because now I have the credibility because I've built things.
I know how to mentor.
I know how to coach these guys because I've done it myself.
And I bring people around me who help build these companies as well.
So, I have 70 people on the team who are the top designers, top tech people, you know, ways to manage it.
Then you raise the money and you charge, you charge this.
It's an illiquid vehicle, which means people lock up their money for effectively 12 years, usually is how it works.
12 years?
Well, it's 10 with like three extensions.
And so, these funds usually last 12 to 15 years just because they do, because it takes a while for things to go public.
And so, you lost people give you the money and you get some fee on the money to pay the team.
And then, and you invest and you invest it.
Most of the money goes into the ground the first kind of like you first, first you write like that.
You call it a series A or series B, you lead rounds, you take a big piece of the company, and then you'll follow on with more money in the future rounds alongside other friends.
So, a big part of your job is to help them recruit talent.
A big part of your job is to help them have other people put money in after you, right?
And so, because I know all the other people, you know, when I'm down here in Miami, there's a bunch of big fund managers.
We work together and you're helping them learn how to build a team, you're helping them learn how to work with the industry, helping them learn how to raise the money.
And then when you have, you know, sometimes you sell the company to someone else, sometimes you take it public.
And so it's a business model of kind of helping people create these things, helping them succeed.
How do you find winners?
How do you find winners?
How much of it is a founder, the entrepreneur.
And you know what?
There's no single right answer.
Some people are like, it's about the markets.
Some people are like, it's about the entrepreneur.
Some people, it's about the technology culture and tech talent.
Some people are just like, oh, it's just art and I just know.
You know, there's lots of ways of doing it.
For me, it's a combination.
Like you have, we spend a lot of time on technology culture.
I want a company that's recruiting the very, very best, just like the sports team, the very best athletes in the world, the best technologies in the world.
I want a place where the best guys want to go there because they've heard someone else is there who's amazing.
And then I want an area that we believe is a market that has new possibilities that there is a gap that should be disrupted.
And usually what I really care about is there's a mission.
I really want there to be a mission that matters.
Like I'm going to put most of my money into things where there's great team, a gap.
Because with you, the mission does, the mission brings in the really best people.
The mission makes the best people want to work harder on it and it makes it something that can be a lot bigger.
So Palantir was a really big mission.
Out of parts, the biggest mission at Finance, a lot of my new defense companies, we're trying to help the U.S. scale our shipbuilding with Sauronic.
We're trying to help fix areas of health care.
We're trying to save kids with rare diseases.
So I think these missions really attract great talent.
So mission, the bigger the mission and what process of filtering.
I remember when I raised my first round, you know, and I sold my insurance company, they came in, they did an extensive background check.
You know, they did all this stuff.
I mean, how do you find out?
In Florida, we got to do a longer background check.
You do, right?
Yeah, you do in Florida.
That's right.
That's a good point.
And it looks like Palantir is moving to Florida anyway.
They're not involved.
Yeah.
They're moving down here.
But what do you do?
Are you doing background checks?
That's one of the steps in the process.
It's not the most important one, but it's just good to.
What's the most important one?
The most important one is to know who the founders are and to have them be people you can verify somehow in your network are just from the network.
I have to.
This is my advantage is that I'm tied to hundreds of these like top tech networks now from things I've built, things I've invested in.
And we have to use that network.
So it's not that there's not someone in the middle of nowhere who could be great, but if you're in the middle of nowhere and you are really great, your job is to get to know other people and press them.
What red flags do you have?
There's so many red flags for us.
It's just because we have a very particular thing where we're not investing in small businesses.
We're investing in things that can get to be really, really big and change industries.
And so one red flag is being too obsessed with patents.
Usually people think patents matter a lot.
For most of these things, it's more about the team and the execution.
It's not, I have 20 patents.
It doesn't really matter.
So we talk too much about that.
It shows you're not thinking about the thing that's valuable, which is the execution.
It's a red flag of the person who's not full-time.
People are always trying to do things part-time.
That never ends up being the giant company.
So you need people who are 100% all in full-time.
It's a red flag if they don't plan on doing this for a long time.
This needs to be their obsession in their life.
You know, it's a red flag if they talk a lot about work-life balance because work-life balance is great for some things, but this is like winning a gold in the Olympics.
Do you think the Olympic gold medalists had a good balance?
We're all in.
We're all in.
So it's like those are types.
It's a big red flag.
Is another one that's interesting.
If the top first five or 10 people don't own a good piece of the company.
So if you're keeping it all for one founder and he's paying and giving very, very, very little bit of upside, the first five or ten people, that's a wrong culture.
And it's probably not the very best people because the very best people in our industry, they want to own a piece of something they're doing.
Right.
So give me the, give me the opposite of red flags.
You know, it's, it's like, it's there's people we know.
So mission is one.
Mission, superstar talent is really key.
You know, early pull from the industry, top guys from the industry who want to be advisors, who are eager to help.
You know, but it's usually all comes down to the people and what our network thinks of them.
What's the biggest success story you've had?
Best story so far?
There's a lot of stuff.
We backed Andrew early on.
It's a top defense, new defense company.
We backed a company called Quince at the beginning, and it's now, you know, 10 billion valuation.
It's probably going to double next year.
Cognition, we backed early on.
It's worth 15 billion.
It's like a bunch of these top guys.
Saronics, just raising a big round.
It's building hundreds of ships for the U.S. Navy.
It's doing really well.
We helped start that actually.
That's your niche.
Your niche is national defense, security.
AI, healthcare, logistics, too.
We've done some big sales things we sold in logistics that have worked out.
I love just fixing things that are broken, man, and making them work better.
Do you feel the criticism OpenAI is getting right now?
Chat GPT is getting right now.
It's fair.
Which part of it?
You know, revenue, you know, the conversation about, you know, they may start adding ads in there, even though you said that I thought that was a funny attack on Anthropic, and I'm making fun of them for that.
Listen, I saw that.
Anthropic is very creative on some of the stuff.
Listen, I'm old friends with Elon, and I'm longest his company.
So now after you merge it, I own a bunch of SpaceX.
I did before too.
I'm also a small investor in Anthropic, which is just an extraordinary technology.
And there's people who are attacking them for various things.
But I just, Anthropic has pulled way ahead in the coding area.
It's just 25 now.
I don't know what the 380 posts, but I think that's even cheap for where they're going because they're just growing so fast.
And all of our companies are using this.
And it's really fun.
Like a lot of my smartest friends who are already extremely wealthy and could do anything they want are staying up coding right now because it's so fun what you could do with these tools.
It's this crazy time right now.
Are you more long with Anthropic than OpenAI?
Yeah, I'm most long SpaceX and XAI.
I'm second most long Anthropic.
OpenAI, I do think it could possibly have some struggles here, but I don't know.
Obviously, it's amazing what they accomplished and they really kind of brought a lot of this to the world.
So they deserve a lot of credit for that.
I think Elon, along with Sam, both deserve credit for building that team early on.
No question.
It was at a non-profit open.
And then you turn it to profit.
And then that's where the feud took place between the two of them.
It's unfortunate.
I think these feuds are not productive for our society, but I understand where Elon's coming from.
And I hope they make it work for everyone.
I get his argument.
I totally get Elon's argument.
else are you along with who what else is it that you know i had a call with uh uh my banker i said listen send me the top 10 nuclear companies out there that are finding ways to tap into the nuclear energy And then I said, okay, we looked at some of them, made a decision.
We had a call with their, and then I said, let's look into these three companies, which we did.
And it's done fairly well.
But for you, you're in this world.
What else are you seeing?
Yeah, no, our friends at Founders Fund have a company with a really talented guy building nuclear fuel as well.
I mean, making sure you have that in America.
It's really important to do.
And we're looking into that space.
It's, you know, it's interesting because Elon says all you need is solar energy, which is, which is true at the extreme.
But I think we did kind of screw up the regulation on the nuclear space.
I love the fact that the Department of War is trying to do more of that now, too.
So I think that's a good thing to be doing.
You know, the areas that I'm most bullish on.
So in America right now, we have $5 trillion of wages in our services economy.
That's like every type of service.
And at about 40% of that, in an over $2 trillion area, we've already seen you could double or triple the productivity, at least double, if not triple the productivity.
So this is in companies that we're exposed to.
And it's like the back end of a law firm helping it.
It's like the back end of logistics payments.
It's like healthcare billing.
Healthcare billing sounds small and boring.
That's $280 billion a year spent on healthcare billing.
$200 billion.
$280 billion.
$120 of that's paid to companies.
$160 of that's internal health systems.
It's a massive part of the economy.
We already are tripling the efficiency of that.
So what that means is a lot of this stuff's very disinflationary.
It's creating a ton of value.
And these things are just scaling.
Like my best healthcare billing company with a bunch of ex-Palantir guys, it's going to double from like, you know, probably double to over $100 million revenue this year, but that's still tiny compared to where it's going, right?
And as that grows, it's making the whole economy more efficient.
So this is why venture capital is this engine that's like taking these possibilities and fixing stuff to make it cheaper for all of us.
It's a really positive thing.
Why $11.8 million in a Nigerian drone company?
Okay.
No, you know, there's, listen, this, the guy running it, first of all, Physics Olympian, his co-founder is building our business.
These are super talented.
There's super talented young men there.
As you probably saw, there's a lot of people being slaughtered in Africa, especially a lot of Christians in Nigeria being killed for the wrong reasons.
Security all over Africa is a huge deal.
One of the main reasons you can't build infrastructure and invest in Africa right now is there's a problem with security everywhere there.
And, you know, I happen to know a lot about the defense space.
I've started multiple companies here.
We felt like these guys were really talented and they could scale a lot of production of doing remote-controlled cars, sentry towers, drones.
And we thought that some of our U.S. technology as well could partner with them and help them and help them secure Africa.
And even if even if we get rid of the Iranian guys, even if we make the Middle East somehow have peace, which I hope we do.
And by the way, they're good at making drones.
They sell them.
Shahid drones are very good.
We have to get really good.
We're very good at shooting them down now.
I mean, we're working on it.
But basically, even if that's all peaceful, Africa is probably going to be a mess for quite a while.
I think helping the good guys there is a good thing to do.
Why is it so difficult for drone companies to excel in America?
The regulation here is just intense.
Well, so to build the engines behind these things, you need certain rare earth elements and you need certain refining, which is very messy.
And we just don't have the capacity in the U.S. for that.
So in Ukraine, unfortunately, right now, a lot of the supply chain is coming through China for both sides, which is unfortunate.
A lot of the supply chain is coming from both sides.
Through China.
Supply Chain Challenges00:02:22
There's a lot of the rare earth refining and elements and engines and things they're building.
They're using.
So even like, you know, Eric Schmidt famously is building, I think, hundreds of thousands of drones to help the Ukrainians.
I think it's a very cool thing he's doing there and he built it in Mexico.
But I think a lot of even that potentially would be coming.
Some things are from China.
So there's just, there's just a lot.
And so we're trying to ramp up.
And it is the regulation.
It's partial regulation.
It's actually interesting.
If you ask like Peter TL, my friends there, it's like the regulatory stuff, kill these industries.
If you talk to Elon, who's the other night, was talking about this, he's like, no, we just need more founders who are willing to build these things in America.
And I think he's probably right that as we try to build these things here, you could probably convince them to change regulations to make it possible because we do want it to be possible now.
So I think we're trying to do it now.
We're trying to fix it.
Yeah.
And you think Greenland is one of the reasons that it plays such a big role in this?
You know, I think Greenland is a place where if there's ever going to be an attack on America from the other side of the planet, it has to Russia or China or whatever.
A lot of things have to fly over Greenland.
So I think for the Golden Dome, it's important.
I think there's also a lot of resources there.
I think there's like a certain spirit of expansion.
It's very healthy.
I think you want to be growing and not shrinking.
I think you want to be, I think humanity is in some ways is just very simple.
It's very complex, but it's very simple.
And the question is, are you shrinking and getting weaker and under decline?
Or are you growing and stronger?
And America in its current state where it's expanding and manufacturing, it's like confident, it's expanding the economy, taking Greenland and building things for Greenland.
If Greenland was more part of us, we could build infrastructure there.
We could have ports that would then enable investment that couldn't happen otherwise.
It'd be really good for Greenland.
So I think it actually would be really good for the world for us to do more in Greenland.
I know where it stands.
Yeah, what do you have with tariffs?
With Supreme Court ruling against it, 6-3.
If you look at the Kavanaugh ruling, he kind of goes into depth on how you could have done it legally.
So it's kind of like a playbook for how you could still do it if you want, which I think.
He's giving him a playbook on that.
It was very interesting reading.
It was a very funny 6-3 ruling.
And by the way, I'm not a legal scholar, but from best I could tell, it was like three different rulings.
It was like three here, three here, three here.
But the six agreed, like the three left and three moderate right or whatever you want to call them, agreed that it's not legal.
But then I think at least the moderate right part of the ruling is like, here, well, here's how it could be legal.
So, there probably are ways you could still go back and do it, is my impression.
Yeah.
But right now, the lawsuits, you know, zealing into rooms, and he was like, Look, we don't have to pay the tariffs.
We don't have to agree to do this.
Look what your Supreme Court said to you.
Vocational Paths in Prison00:06:46
So, it's almost like they're undermining him to say you don't have the kind of authority you thought you had.
You can't do it.
So, how do you think?
You know, it's unfortunate, but this is our system of government: we have three separate co-equal branches, and it's really annoying when the branches sometimes check you.
But I think it's good that we have checks on power.
It doesn't mean I agree with that Trump shouldn't be able to do that.
Are you partnered with Curtis Yarvin camp?
We had him on, and I don't know if you know Curtis Yarvin.
I know who he is.
He doesn't like it when guys like me try to fix things.
He's very cynical.
So, whenever we're like, yeah, my policy group, we're like fixing things or making things work better.
He's like, oh, you guys are all naive.
Everything's broken.
That's, you know, he's too negative, is my view.
He is negative, but the way he was arguing it on, you know, he's for a monarchy rather than having a democracy.
And he thinks it's more effective.
It could get things more done.
You know, he just wait until the monarch decides your wife's attractive, man.
I don't know if I, I don't know if I want to live under that system.
Like, checks on power are very wise.
We're going to go back to the train days.
He's going to say, I want to train Anna on your wife.
Give her to me, right?
Listen, all this money you're making, you know, you're one of these guys that's made billions as well yourself.
What is something you buy?
Like, are you a comic cards guy?
You know, do you collect cars?
That's funny.
Comic books?
Are you unique cars?
What do you think of Game of Thrones?
Early running Game of Thrones, I set up the thing in my yard in California back then, and we had the Game of Thrones thrown and we have the big theater outside.
It's fun.
You know, what do I collect?
I have a couple of planes, but they're for business, really.
I have, you know, we have a ski house where I host people.
We have a vineyard where we host people.
Most of my money on the excess money actually goes to the university.
It goes to my policy work.
It costs about, it only costs about a quarter million dollars to like get a mission-driven piece of legislation passed.
It helps a lot of people.
So, for example, vocational schools I care a lot about.
And I think it's really sloppy right now because if you want to spend more money on vocational schools, that's fine.
But if the guy running the vocational school is not very good, it's not going to be good results.
So in Texas, for example, there's 27 vocational schools, and Texas has it so that you fund the schools in proportion to the success of the kids.
So the students coming out, you see their salaries, and that determines the funding.
And what that did is it doubled the salaries coming out.
You took hundreds of thousands of people who would have had tough lives.
I mean, have much, much better lives.
And so getting that law passed in another state takes a few hundred thousand dollars.
For me, that's like really, that's like, that's a really cool form of philanthropy where I could take something and make our country more functional.
So I have teams in 23 states.
So I spend a lot of money trying to just like fix stuff that's broken because for me, that's a really fun way to do it.
So that's your game.
That's your fun.
I love thinking about like, how do we go in and like make healthcare cheaper and better here?
How do we make the prison system like right now, like prison guards and prisoners, it's a mess.
The cultures are broken.
How do you create accountability for the prison guards?
How do you create better results for rehabilitation when they come out?
Out.
How do you?
These things like this to me is interesting.
I, I mean, I did that.
Thinking right of solving problems makes sense.
So you probably have a lot of friends in New York and California.
Okay, you saw the exodus.
California lost a trillion during Covid.
When folks left, he got some people back and now he lost another trillion with the wealth tax.
I moved in Covet, a bunch of other my friends moved to Austin right now.
Yeah, right.
So how is this the worst of it?
Or is California is gonna?
It's just getting started.
I'll tell you what.
So i've had a problem with how California has been running forever, since I have opinions on these things and no one really wanted to listen for a long time.
I'm actually pretty optimistic because right now I have like 70 or 80 acquaintances and friends in California who've made a lot of money and they're like, Joe, you were right, this is broken.
I want to fight for it.
And they're doing all sorts of things to fight for it.
They're they're they're looking at building endowments to oppose the far left unions, to help the moderates, help pro-growth strategies.
They're looking at things to bring in more talent.
They're looking at things to expose more of the fraud.
They're.
They're fighting for a good candidates.
You know the mayor of San Jose, someone who's a very moderate very, very strong mayor.
He's probably moderate left, which is good because it's California, but he's someone we respect from both sides.
A lot of us are backing, backing him.
You know there's just a lot of good talent in California saying, wait a second, we got to actually fight, fight for this place.
So i'm a Texan and i'm doing a lot more in Texas, but i'm proud to see my friends in California waking up and I really hope they could fight back.
It's like it's there's.
There's a few hundred million dollars a year Patrick, that comes from the far left unions, just for people work for the state automatically.
They force them to fund them.
So it's like a few hundred million dollars a year of like corruption and that just like fights.
But if you can get these other guys to step up, we can do more than a few hundred million dollars a year.
So I hope we do.
Yeah, this gerrymandering where which changed the representatives to now they're gonna have control of what 48 out of 52.
It's gonna be on the left, so I don't know how they're gonna be moving that.
That's gonna be a lot of work could take a couple decades.
It's a lot.
It's a lot of work to fight back, but I, I think it's a not, it's a.
I think it's a noble thing to do.
If you're gonna live in California, you should.
You have to figure the good.
If you're gonna do it, you have to get them over, and I live in Texas and I fight for, I fight for the good guys there too.
Yeah, it's very obvious.
Last thing, Barry Weiss, uh, FREE Press.
Why that investment?
You know, I got to know Barry, and we both agreed there's a lot of American institutions that have been conquered by the crazy ideological people that are that are really decaying our civilization.
So our our, our media is broken, our universities are broken, there's parts of our government that are broken.
But and the only way we really can fix, Fix this is we build a new.
And so she and I actually co-founded the new university together.
At the time when I met her, she was also co-founding a new media org.
And I think I was one of the very first investors there.
And I'm really proud of what she's done.
I think she has millions and millions of people listening to her now.
She had a newsroom that was probably about a third left, a third independent, and a third right, which is like the most balanced newsroom in the country.
That was a free press.
I don't know what she has now at DBS, but that was a job.
I assume she's trying to build the same thing as CBS.
And I think that's really, really impressive to have a newsroom this balanced because no one else is doing it.
And I think it's worth trying.
But why do you think she's getting so much pushback?
Why do you think she has hatred?
She's the only left side center.
She's the only one who has both sides in her newsroom.
So people say, wait a second, I thought you were on my side, but you're saying this left thing.
And then people say, I thought you were on my side on this, but you're saying this right thing.
It's a tough place.
You're attacking me on both sides.
And she's attacking both sides.
But you know what?
If she's getting attacked by both sides, that's probably a pretty good sign that she's doing something better than most others.
Yeah, no, no question.
And by the way, you got a podcast.
You got a YouTube.
The American Optimist.
Yes, I love that.
Tell me about it.
You know, I know a lot of interesting friends who are building the future.
And, you know, and I know a lot of friends running the government.
So it's just fun.
I'll sit down with them for a few hours a month and put it out, and people like it.
And you're the best booker because you can get a hold of anybody.
All my friends are willing to do it.
So who have you had so far on the show?
No, you're at Teal.
Who else have you had on?
Oh, gosh, it's all sorts of people.
It goes from Ashton Kritscher to, you know, Senator Tom Conn, a bunch of senators, a bunch of governors, you know, a bunch of people who built the biggest companies in Silicon Valley to during cancer, running AI.
You know, all sorts of Steve's running for governor now.
Interesting Friends Building the Future00:01:18
I saw that.
He's all sorts of characters there.
You know, a lot of my friends.
Andreessen.
Oh, then Boris built Buemo.
You have that on the screen.
And now he's building a company.
It's the first AI for excavation.
We're doing autonomous excavators.
He's raised tons of money there.
People got angry at me for having a read-on because he's on the left.
And meanwhile, Russ, of course, is running the OMB for this administration.
So I try to have both sides.
Have you had Alex Spyro on yet or no?
I haven't had him on yet.
I had Alex Carp on.
I had Maria on from Venezuela before we Venezuela, which was kind of fun.
Yeah, we had her on as well on a Zoom.
And now it'll be interesting to see what they do.
But we're going to put the link below to the podcast.
This was very interesting talking to you.
Keep kicking ass.
Great story.
Appreciate you for making the time to come down.
You're doing great, Patrick.
This is for me.
Appreciate you, buddy.
Take care.
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