Oct. 25, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I don't know exactly how the woke people got in charge here in so many places. | ||
| It's partially because they're so loud. | ||
| I think there's five or ten percent of people here who really believe in that stuff. | ||
| And they've gotten very good. | ||
| I think it came from the universities. | ||
| You look at our big tech companies, the culture of Google is really modeled off of Stanford because it's all the PhDs. | ||
| Same thing with a lot of the other ones. | ||
| So these tech companies are basically taking a culture from a university that's been broken | ||
| for a few decades. | ||
| And these people are really good at punishing people who stand up to them and trying to | ||
| get them. | ||
| So it's not worth people's time to push back. | ||
| If you're just trying to do your job, you're just doing what you can. | ||
| And people get to be in charge. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report Locals Week. | |
| Joining me today is an entrepreneur, an investor, and policymaker at the Cicero Institute, Joe Lonsdale. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Dave. | |
| Good to be on. | ||
| Joe, I've wanted to have you on for quite some time because you're involved in about a billion things that sort of ancillarily are all about the things that I talk about on this show, from tech to politics, free speech, education, all of it. | ||
| Okay, but first let's start with those two words that I mentioned up front. | ||
| Entrepreneur and investor. | ||
| I feel like when you say that to people, people think, oh, you were just kind of like born that way. | ||
| How does somebody become an entrepreneur and investor? | ||
| I suspect a lot of my audience would like to have those two tags. | ||
| Well, you know, there's a lot of different types of this, but for me, it's about, you see things and they work a certain way, and you're frustrated and you wanna fix them. | ||
| So I think having a vision of how the world should work, that's not how it's working right now, that'll lead one to being an entrepreneur, because that's basically the only way to do things to evolve the economy. | ||
| So how'd you get started? | ||
| For the guy out there watching this right now going, okay, I got a regular job, but I've got an idea, or I'm passionate about something, like, how did it work for you? | ||
| Well, technology is a really big part of what you need to be a great entrepreneur these days. | ||
| You don't have to be a technologist, but it's a big advantage to learn technology, learn computer science. | ||
| I grew up in the Bay Area. | ||
| I was very lucky. | ||
| I was born in Silicon Valley. | ||
| I had a bunch of friends who were great technologists. | ||
| They taught me from a young age. | ||
| I went to Stanford for computer science. | ||
| I met a lot of great technologists. | ||
| When I was there, I saw a lot of the smartest people were going to work at PayPal. | ||
| At the time, it was 2000. | ||
| What's this PayPal thing? | ||
| It was a company that had been started by, there's one company started by Peter Thiel, and one company started by Elon Musk, and they merged and they made PayPal. | ||
| So of course, Peter brought his smartest friends, Elon brought his smartest friends, and I said, wow, I wanna work there. | ||
| And they actually rejected me the first time, but I tried again, and they let me in, and I learned a lot from them. | ||
| So I think what you want is follow the best technologists, learn technology, and go study under people who know what they're doing, and that's probably the good way to get started. | ||
| So as a guy that was involved in those sort of magic years of Silicon Valley and of big tech and all that, when you look back on it, does it feel like a dream sort of? | ||
| Like seeing sort of the way big tech has moved and how the landscape has changed and how people generally talk about big tech versus probably what you were seeing when it was being born? | ||
| Does it all just feel very weird? | ||
| Because it's not that long ago, as you said. | ||
| Yeah, I remember being at a dinner with Peter. | ||
| He was the first investor in Facebook. | ||
| Mark was there. | ||
| I know the Facebook founders really well, of course, from this background. | ||
| I remember being jealous because the other really important people at the table were treating Mark as more important than me. | ||
| And I said, Palantir is going to be a really big company. | ||
| Why do you think Facebook is necessarily going to be bigger? | ||
| So obviously I was wrong that we were going to be nearly as big as Facebook. | ||
| I went public last week for $22 billion. | ||
| So we didn't do horribly, but it's all... | ||
| It's like, we're not worth five, Mark's worth a trillion dollars. | ||
| But no, it is interesting having known a lot of these characters, very ardent, very hardworking people. | ||
| I don't think any of us knew how big these companies were going to get though. | ||
| I like how you just poo-pooed 22 billion. | ||
| 22, yeah, yeah, yeah, 22 billion last week IPO. | ||
| We'll get to that by the way. | ||
| You know, whatever you do, there's always someone who's like crushed it and done way better than you, right? | ||
| Or at least that's been my experience. | ||
| It's kind of funny. | ||
| I was actually gonna get there a little bit later, but let's just jump to it. | ||
| Did the numbers, like when you say something like that, okay, so Palantir went to IPO, $22 billion. | ||
| The numbers start to seem crazy. | ||
| Do they seem crazy even to you guys that are in it? | ||
| Because I think to the average person, it's like, you can't fathom what $1 billion is. | ||
| I don't think most people can fathom what $10 million is. | ||
| You know, it's, yeah, I guess in some ways I'm lucky that it took so long because as things take time over the years, you kind of adjust to it. | ||
| I think if it were to all of a sudden fall on your lap after a couple of years, it would probably be extremely unhealthy. | ||
| There's things I worked on with Peter, you know, with the fund where we had a hedge fund that kind of blew up one year where I would have gotten this giant bonus as a 25-year-old and I didn't. | ||
| And looking back, it's probably good that I didn't because if you just get a bunch of money all at once, it's hard to adjust to it. | ||
| If you build these things over time, you learn how to manage it. | ||
| The money is not like a bunch of gold coins. | ||
| If you asked me as a kid, I would have thought it was like Scrooge McDuck and there's a tower | ||
| and there's gold coins in it. | ||
| And it's like that's what money is. | ||
| You don't dive into your tower with a big dollar sign on it? | ||
| No, it's actually not. | ||
| Maybe at some point we should figure that out, but it's actually my experience. | ||
| I just had breakfast with Peter Thiel yesterday. | ||
| He made more on Palantir, of course, than PayPal was worth. | ||
| And when it was sold to eBay, of course, when he first did it. | ||
| But these people, the money represents these missions and these causes. | ||
| And the money is ownership in something you've built. | ||
| So it becomes much more about it's the money you say sure. | ||
| It's worth some large amount on paper, but it's much more about the ability to get things done in the world ability influence things to some point. | ||
| It's not money. | ||
| You're going to spend for yourself. | ||
| It's when you're going to use to achieve stuff and to build stuff. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that's the fundamental disconnect when we talk about money and when there's a certain level of resentment when these companies go to IPO or when they see people getting these huge payouts or something, that they don't really understand the work that it took and the way these things change industries and everything else? | ||
| There's a disconnect between what's actually going on with a lot of these companies and what the media portrays it all as. | ||
| Yeah, well of course it's a massive amount of work and of course a lot of people wouldn't take bets on these things, wouldn't invest in them, wouldn't do them if there wasn't an economy where you could earn lots of money. | ||
| But I think the biggest disconnect is that there's really two options with these resources we're creating. | ||
| Is once the resources have been created, either you're going to have a bunch of committees and bureaucrats in charge without money, Or you're going to have these really hard-working people who know how to build things in the world, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and all sorts of other people with different views who've created this money, using it as they see fit. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Most of the money in the world now is run by committees. | ||
| Most of the money is taken by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds. | ||
| 98% of the money in the world is controlled by these big, slow, boring things like insurance companies. | ||
| And those guys don't usually do anything that's that interesting. | ||
| Whereas there's this small number of people who've created wealth. | ||
| And even that last, that's like the last free wealth in the world. | ||
| And if people wanna take that and give it to the committees too, | ||
| it's like, what are you thinking? | ||
| I mean, don't you want people who know how to build taking this and using it for something? | ||
| So you're giving me the perfect segue to I think something that a lot of people wonder about. | ||
| How is it that a place like Silicon Valley that has so much of the spirit that you're talking about, these people who want to change the world, who want to invent and innovate and the rest of it, how is it that the social justice thing, which is so counter to that in many ways, how did it infect almost everything to the point that everybody's leaving San Francisco right now? | ||
| Yeah, it's a huge problem in the culture of Silicon Valley. | ||
| This has been the case for a very long time. | ||
| When you're very successful and wealthy and philanthropic, I think a lot of people will have some level of guilt about their success. | ||
| And the guilt doesn't have to be rational. | ||
| It's just like you're guilty. | ||
| There's people who are poor in the world and you have success. | ||
| And so the cultural norm, I think, becomes to be very, very careful about being proud of your success, about showing off any pride, any of that at all. | ||
| And the default becomes, you know, it becomes taken over by the left at some point. | ||
| You know, I don't know exactly how the woke people got in charge here in so many places. | ||
| It's partially because they're so loud. | ||
| I think there's 5 or 10% of people here who really believe in that stuff. | ||
| And they've gotten very good. | ||
| I think it came from the universities. | ||
| You look at our big tech companies, the culture at Google is really modeled off of Stanford because it's all the PhDs. | ||
| Same thing with a lot of the other ones. | ||
| And so these tech companies are basically taking a culture from a university that's, you know, that's been broken for a few decades. | ||
| And these people are really good at punishing people who stand up to them and trying to get them. | ||
| And so it's not worth people's time to push back. | ||
| And so if you're just trying to do your job, you're just, you know, you're just, you're just, you're just doing, you're just doing what you can. | ||
| And these people get to be in charge. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| So how do you run companies then and make sure that they don't get infected by these ideas? | ||
| I mean, it's really important who you hire, first of all. | ||
| Like, a lot of our companies, you've got to be really careful who you let into your company. | ||
| You do not want a social justice activist who's going to be stirring things up. | ||
| Like, I love what the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, put out the other day that a lot of us shared. | ||
| And our company is not about all these other things. | ||
| It's about our mission. | ||
| And, you know, there's other places you can go if you want to focus on other missions. | ||
| This is our mission. | ||
| So a lot of my companies, we spend, you know, Decent amount of time. | ||
| Let's be really careful who we let in. | ||
| And I have to teach CEOs, this is your job. | ||
| Don't come to me a year from now and say, this is so horrible. | ||
| These people are so distracting. | ||
| They're pushing us to do all these stupid things. | ||
| That would have been your fault for not figuring out and for hiring them. | ||
| So this is something a lot of people are learning about right now. | ||
| It's funny, I always find it interesting how it deviates from the core mission always. | ||
| Like, if every single commercial you watch these days, it's a company, but it's not about their product. | ||
| It's about what quote-unquote good they're doing. | ||
| The only company that I know, like major company, that's not doing it is T-Mobile. | ||
| And all their commercials are about their product. | ||
| And I'm always like, oh, I know what they're selling. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's a real company. | ||
| And you know, I think there is a role, there is a role for consumer brands to stand for values that people believe in. | ||
| I think in a free market, people could choose to put their money towards brands that go towards things they believe in. | ||
| And if it was purely reflecting the desires of the market, I think that's interesting. | ||
| I think the problem is a lot of these big companies is the marketing departments are conquered by people with these extremely woke views that do not reflect their customers. | ||
| And that becomes a really weird disconnect that I'm hoping the market will solve for that eventually by pushing back on some of these things. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's back up to that poo-poo moment when you poo-pooed the 22 billion. | ||
| So, okay, so Palantir went to IPO, it's about 10 days ago by the time we post this. | ||
| Can you just, I've had Peter on, as you know, but can you just explain what Palantir is? | ||
| I feel like Palantir gets a lot of really bizarre press and people have no concept of what it actually is. | ||
| It's because it is a pretty complicated thing to explain. | ||
| The best way I like to look at it is we're taking things that used to be done by IT services. | ||
| So we started off in the defense world, in the intelligence world, and the US government spends $40 billion a year gathering data, and then they spend a similar amount of money paying IT service professionals | ||
| to try to build systems to let the analysts see the data, let them share it, etc. And it's | ||
| a mess. Their projects go way over budget. They waste billions of dollars, as you'd expect, on | ||
| these things. They're paying people to do things the same way they did in the 1980s, 1990s. And so | ||
| looking at this after 9/11, we said, "Wait a second here. The technology in Silicon Valley has | ||
| gotten way ahead of everything DC is And that's actually, that was a sad thing for us to realize, because when you're a computer scientist, you look at the NSA in the 1970s, and they were way ahead of everyone else by far. | ||
| So it used to be the US government was way ahead. | ||
| It's not anymore, no question. | ||
| And so we said, how can we build a platform that out of the box replaced the need for this tens of billions of spend? | ||
| So our platform is an information environment where you could take in data from tons of places, a process that's very, very expensive and hard to do and takes a very long time, and then secure it and make sure only people who are allowed to can see it, and then allow people to build tools on top of it to collaborate. | ||
| So for example, we help intelligence agencies around the world collaborate. | ||
| We help So for more libertarian minded guys like you and Peter, does that cause a little bit of an ethical dilemma? | ||
| you're allowed to use and only people who are supposed to see things see them. | ||
| So it's just a hard IT problem. | ||
| So for more libertarian minded guys like you and Peter, does that cause like a little bit of a ethical dilemma? | ||
| You're working with the government. | ||
| Well, the whole, there's two different things there. | ||
| First of all, what was happening before we built Palantir was they were building systems | ||
| to see things with basically very little safeguards because anybody who needed to, you imagine | ||
| like Jack Bauer on the show 24 and there's a terrorist, he's just going to go in the | ||
| database and take the freaking data he needs because otherwise someone's going to die, | ||
| right? | ||
| And so people are just like, a lot of people were like screw civil liberties, we're just | ||
| going to take whatever we can. | ||
| And so as civil libertarians, we said no, we're going to build Palantir. | ||
| It's going to give them more powerful access, but it's also going to be able to make audit | ||
| trails. | ||
| We're going to know exactly who did what and we're going to enforce the rules. | ||
| And whatever the rules are, we're going to enforce them. | ||
| We don't make the rules. | ||
| President Obama makes the rules. | ||
| President Bush made rules. | ||
| We're going to enforce whatever the rule, you know, Congress says we're going to enforce | ||
| those rules. | ||
| And so, so, so first of all, first of all, it was actually Palantir is like the most | ||
| awesome privacy engine in the world because we've really enforced it. | ||
| If you use Palantir, it's very hard for you to get away with anything you're not supposed to do. | ||
| So that was something we were really heartened by. | ||
| The second one is an interesting question. | ||
| I've built a lot of things now in GovTech. | ||
| I think for me it's part of being a realist. | ||
| You asked about being a libertarian. | ||
| You know, Cato is the most famous libertarian in the Roman Republic. | ||
| And what Cato would do is he wouldn't compromise at all. | ||
| So he was really admired for being uncompromising and constantly fighting for what was right. | ||
| But because he wouldn't compromise, he wouldn't work with Pompey, Pompey went over to Caesar. | ||
| They eventually lost the Republic because he was so stubborn. | ||
| He couldn't get things done and therefore he lost the entire thing and the entire thing was gone. | ||
| So as much as I admire Cato and I have a lot of Cato in me as I've grown up, I'm a realist, and so I want to fight for my values as well as possible, but if the government's going to be doing something, like, let's actually help it reflect our values of a free society as much as possible. | ||
| Let's help it not waste billions. | ||
| Let's help it protect civil liberties. | ||
| Let's help it actually get the terrorists, because in the worst of all worlds is that the government is doing all these things, and it's viciously incompetent. | ||
| I think that's probably really bad for everyone. | ||
| Yeah, you're speaking my language. | ||
| So can you explain to me then, as someone that has worked with the U.S. | ||
| government, why are there so many government websites that are so ridiculously old and broken? | ||
| I mean, I pay, I always use the example, and you as a California guy, I pay my California state taxes on a website that literally looks like it's Prodigy from 1999. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| There's no, Dave, there's no accountability and there's no incentives and the people who win these government contracts are working through these really Byzantine procurement rules that favor the incumbents and favor the people that have paid for massive amounts of lobbying that have been doing it the same way since 1987 or whenever they started building. | ||
| It's probably 97 for that website. | ||
| So what we need in government is we need to completely change how procurement works and | ||
| we need to have accountability and have metrics and all the same things you do in a business. | ||
| In my business, if we have a website, there are certain rules for measuring how well it's | ||
| doing and measuring the feedback. | ||
| You probably need NPS scores. | ||
| An NPS score is how much people like it and how much they'd recommend it to friends. | ||
| There's things like this that government should have to do. | ||
| The biggest problem is government has special interests everywhere, especially government | ||
| unions, that refuse to let them be held accountable. | ||
| So until we can hold our governments accountable, it's going to keep being broken. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| I want to shift a little bit, because as you know, we're doing Locals Week here, and when I created Locals, and when I had the idea of Locals, and I brought in some of the team for Locals, we had to raise a little bit of dough, and I started asking around, and a lot of people, your name, just kept popping up. | ||
| People just kept saying, this sounds like Joe Lonsdale, you got to talk to Joe Lonsdale. | ||
| I don't even remember, I'm not even totally sure how we got connected, but I But we jumped on a Zoom or on a Skype, and in the first conversation, within five minutes, you were like, yeah, I wanna throw you guys some money and good luck, and you've helped guide us with this thing. | ||
| When someone approaches you, this doesn't have to be about locals specifically, but generally, when people approach you with ideas like this, what goes through the checklist in your mind of, oh, this is something I wanna fund, or I see something here, or I'm gonna write a massive check for this one, or a little bit for this one? | ||
| What is the whole process like? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Well, so you know, 8VC is my venture fund. | ||
| We run a multi-billion dollar venture capital firm. | ||
| There's 40 people, nine partners. | ||
| And at 8VC, we have different themes we're focused on. | ||
| And the big question there is what's possible now that was not possible five years ago? | ||
| That's the big question. | ||
| And we look for really top technology cultures and tech talent and help nurture and build those. | ||
| Then we look for them working on these problems that are newly possible because again the job of venture capital is to evolve the economy. | ||
| So you have a lot of things in that vein. | ||
| I also do a much smaller amount of personal investing when something is just really important to me ideologically or for the world even if it doesn't fit exactly into my VC bucket. | ||
| I love to support things I think are very important for the world like what you guys are doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense that the sort of small internet or the bottom-up internet is the future, that we're going to move away from these big tech platforms and do things a little bit more like what we're doing with Locals, where people will kind of create their own communities and kind of figure out how to network up, so it's really just flipping the whole thing upside down? | ||
| I would love that to be the case. | ||
| I think in some cases that will be what happens. | ||
| One of the big challenges that's unusual right now is in the old days when you think of a monopoly, you think of something that gets to be somewhat decadent and starts to decline. | ||
| And right now there is, at least for today, an advantage that the big companies have is they keep attracting the very, very, very top talent. | ||
| So as much as I think they're doing things that are morally and ethically wrong, Yeah, and it's like you've got some dough. | ||
| to bring that vision you mentioned, which is very possibly good vision, | ||
| is how do we compete for top talent? | ||
| 'Cause it's a very unusual circumstance. | ||
| They may be monopolies, but they are just hiring all the top talent, | ||
| which is very impressive to still watch. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like, you've got some dough. | ||
| It's not like you can't compete, but they've got even more. | ||
| They have this money machine. | ||
| Google has like this, I mean, people think pounds are being worth $22 billion or something. | ||
| Google's money machine, I think, shoots off like three or four billion of free cash flow a quarter. | ||
| It's just ridiculous how much money these guys have. | ||
| Do you know what they're actually making money on at this point? | ||
| I've heard a bunch of people talk about this, that it's like, what products do they have that are actually making money? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, one of my companies actually is funds like a few percent of their revenue for Google and Facebook. | ||
| It's the number two to Amazon called Wish. | ||
| And we just advertise and we do like dollar store stuff online. | ||
| It's like having a Walmart online. | ||
| And so there's things like that where we're selling stuff to consumers and consumers are finding it. | ||
| But there's basically everything you sell, these guys make money on, especially Google. | ||
| Anything you might search for, anything you might want to figure out. | ||
| Google has gotten to be very, very good at monetizing. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think generally about the subscription versus ad model these days? | ||
| Is that changing a little bit now, that people have sort of woken up to some of this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I think that you said, I think for the bottom-up world, you're going to start seeing a lot more subscription model in how things work. | ||
| I think that is how media should work. | ||
| My favorite media I'm a subscriber to, whether it's like, I mean, the information Is this technology, you know, it's kind of a little, it's like slightly woke, but it's like better than the other ones in tech. | ||
| In fact, it's hard to find everything you get, but it's like, it's just, you know, I think a lot of stuff you guys, you guys feature is, there's a lot of people on there who are definitely worth following and subscribing to. | ||
| So it's just, yeah, I think things are shifting back to subscription because it's a healthier thing, but, but we're going to see, hopefully get more in that direction. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about sort of your political life. | ||
| So first off, for people that have no idea what Cicero is, can you just explain what they are first, then we'll talk about your involvement a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So, you know, it kind of grew out of a lot of my other activity where you'd learn about different industries and you'd say, wow, this is really broken. | ||
| I wonder why this part of healthcare doesn't work this much better way. | ||
| They would be like five times as efficient. | ||
| And sometimes you'll find, oh, well, they need a system. | ||
| We need to do something as an entrepreneur and we'll build companies. | ||
| But a lot of times you say, you know, it's not because no one's built a company. | ||
| It's because the policy is just wrong. | ||
| It's like the policy here is causing healthcare to be three times as expensive. | ||
| The policy here It's causing housing to be twice as expensive as it should be in this area. | ||
| And so, the more I look at politics and the more I get afraid of socialists, you know, coming and convincing our kids to be socialists, the more I've realized, wow, every area of our society that's broken, it tends to be broken because of big government and because the best ideas are not allowed to compete and win. | ||
| What you want in society, the reason a free society works is if someone has a better idea, that idea wins out over time. | ||
| This is a better way for us to do probation and parole because less people will go back to jail. | ||
| You want a way for that idea to win. | ||
| And I think a lot of people don't understand this. | ||
| They think that you can just publish like this is a better way to run a prison and then other people will just adopt it and then society will move forward. | ||
| And it turns out that's not how society works. | ||
| That's a false model of society. | ||
| The correct model of society is you have to have a competition of ideas. | ||
| You have to have accountability. | ||
| You have to have something that makes the bad ideas lose and the good ideas win. | ||
| And so Cicero is helping put forward laws. | ||
| It's helping figure out where we can take these best ideas and identify them and create systems where the best ideas will win in these areas. | ||
| Is the hardest part of that just the messaging where I think most people, unfortunately, they just see, oh, something's screwed up. | ||
| Like, it just needs more money. | ||
| Like, that's just like the one level thought, you know? | ||
| I think it's a really hard thing to teach people to think in terms of systems. | ||
| Most people are not systems thinkers. | ||
| I think what a systems think, you know, a good leader might say, this is a good program. | ||
| I'm going to give it money. | ||
| Whereas a great leader would say, how do we redesign the system so that the good things are winning and the bad things are going away? | ||
| And so the redesign the system problem is not how people think. | ||
| And the market is a system. | ||
| The market's what the greatest systems there is. | ||
| And the more we can reflect, the better systems, the better. | ||
| But you're right, people don't understand it very well. | ||
| Right, so can you give me a couple of examples of the type of things? | ||
| Let's talk about healthcare. | ||
| What can we do to clear up this healthcare mess? | ||
| Oh gosh. | ||
| Give me your presidential debate platform. | ||
| There's so many things we're pushing. | ||
| There's a group called PBMs. | ||
| Three of the Fortune 20 companies are PBMs, pharmacy benefit manufacturers. | ||
| They're the guys who tell pharmacists what drugs they could sell and make them available to them. | ||
| They're kind of the middlemen on drugs in America. | ||
| And they do all these things where they gag everyone. | ||
| And so one thing we stopped them from doing, which was good. | ||
| we finally passed in the Senate two years ago, I was very involved putting this forward, | ||
| is they used to say, okay pharmacist, if there's two generic drug options, | ||
| and one, even if one is 20 times cheaper than the other, if the doctor prescribes the more expensive one, | ||
| you're not allowed to tell him or the patient, you can't tell her or the patient about the cheaper ones. | ||
| Totally crazy, right? | ||
| So you're just like, and I think there's still, so we got rid of that, that's illegal now. | ||
| What was the logic behind that? | ||
| That's just purely because they're in the pocket of James Farmer? | ||
| It's their cartel power. | ||
| They like being able to make tons more money using their cartel. | ||
| They say, we're not going to give you these other drugs, only we have access to, because we're this cartel, and it's really hard regulatory to compete with us. | ||
| Unless you don't tell these things. | ||
| But here's another thing they do. | ||
| They don't let people tell the prices they're paying. | ||
| So a pharmacist would love to be able to say, hey other PBM upstart, here's what I'm paying on these. | ||
| Can you give me a better deal? | ||
| And that's illegal. | ||
| Prices are a trade secret according to these cartels in America. | ||
| And there's lots of parts of healthcare like this where all the prices are trade secrets and they won't tell you ahead of time because that stops competition from coming in on them. | ||
| And so, you know, insurance companies would love to be able to go to other providers and say, you know, these people are charging us this much over here. | ||
| Can we, can we pay, can we pay a lot less? | ||
| But there's all these, there's all these like think gag orders where you can't do that. | ||
| It's against the rules. | ||
| And so, you know, in my view, in order for a free market to work better, you want competition and therefore you want to ban these gag orders. | ||
| And so gag orders are something that only cartels would want. | ||
| It's amazing, Dave. | ||
| You go to Congress, I talk to senators, and they say, you know, I've had all these people visit me from the pharma lobby, and they've explained to me that if this thing was transparent, everyone would collude and prices would go up. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, guys, these are paying billions of dollars to convince you. | ||
| To convince you of this, right? | ||
| And that if it was transparent, it would make the markets not function as well. | ||
| And this is senators on both sides, man. | ||
| I love working on issues. | ||
| I obviously believe in freedom and believe in free markets. | ||
| But there are people bought off in this country on both sides by these lobbies who are not putting in the pro-market solutions. | ||
| And so we're working hard on it. | ||
| I'm optimistic. | ||
| We're going to win. | ||
| But in every one of these areas, there's just stuff like this that just drives me crazy. | ||
| It's kind of hilarious, you go into a congressman's office, they tell you that if they take the secrecy away and then everyone can actually negotiate, prices will go up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They definitely missed something in economics. | |
| I've literally had conversations like this with people on both parties. | ||
| And there are people on both parties who are on the good guy side too, you know? | ||
| But it's just, it drives me crazy. | ||
| Do you find the partisan gridlock, do you find it, is it 50-50? | ||
| Is one side worse than the other? | ||
| Is one side a little more, I mean, I think generally speaking, people on the right are a little more open to free market stuff, but is it pretty close? | ||
| People on the right are more open to free market stuff, but I mean, the Freedom Caucus, for example, while I admire a lot of them, a lot of them are Kato's, the thing I said earlier, where they're so extreme that they won't even compromise a little bit. | ||
| It's interesting, in the Bush White House, I have a lot of admiration for Dick Cheney and a lot of issues. | ||
| But Dick Cheney was so stubborn as a Cato on this issue that he didn't want to require transparency because he said the market should be able to figure it out. | ||
| We shouldn't have to require transparency. | ||
| But in all his other health care analysts, including myself, say, you know, it's pretty obvious you do need transparency here because that's the only way it's going to work. | ||
| And there's so many little mini monopolies and whatnot that it makes it more like a market and more like a free society with more competition. | ||
| And he was afraid to impose transparency because he thought that was Telling the market what to do. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| You have people on the far right who are pretty intransigent sometimes about some of these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else should we be thinking of as like the big issues related to health care? | ||
| Like, okay, prescription drug prices, like, like what are the other types of things? | ||
| The other really big one, the biggest, so what you look for in these spaces, you look for where all the contribution margin is, what contribution margin is in business. | ||
| It's, you know, it is, of course, it's, it's, it's how much money businesses are actually making before, you know, on the services they're providing. | ||
| And the biggest area of contribution margin is health providers. | ||
| Health providers are hospitals, basically, or things like hospitals. | ||
| And it's really egregious how this works. | ||
| And it's tough because no one wants to be against their local hospital. | ||
| It sounds like the thing you should give money to and support. | ||
| But a lot of hospitals, like Medicare and Medicaid, literally will pay two to three times as much for the exact same service to a hospital versus a clinic because the hospitals have so much power and they've set things up that way where they're getting, and they say, oh, we have to get paid more because we have more expenses. | ||
| And I'm thinking, wait a second, in a market, You don't wanna have to pay three times as much for the same exact outcome or even a worse outcome. | ||
| And it's really interesting. | ||
| If you map it out, there's all these health systems that have bought up lots of things in an area to give themselves more pricing power. | ||
| Because if they buy the one nearby, then you can't have competition. | ||
| You can't actually have an insurance company that says, well, we're only gonna work with this reasonable one, not this other one. | ||
| And it's really bad. | ||
| And here's the thing that's really crazy. | ||
| A lot of these health systems are non-profits. | ||
| And so if you say, oh, it's a non-profit, you know, that means it must be a good, good guy for the world. | ||
| You can't do anything. | ||
| And so the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, is not allowed to look at non-profits right now. | ||
| So you have all these things that have gone non-profit, have bought up massive amounts of an area, and then can jack up the prices a lot. | ||
| And people running the non-profit are making huge amounts of money, even though it's officially a non-profit. | ||
| And it's a big problem. | ||
| So one of the big things is antitrust. | ||
| And letting the FTC do antitrust against nonprofits as well. | ||
| And really what it's about is it's about creating competition. | ||
| It's about putting markets back into place here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you decide when the government can get involved there? | ||
| The libertarian side of you? | ||
| Well, I guess that's what you're saying about being a realist. | ||
| You have to be a realist. | ||
| I mean, another big libertarian thing here is make it easier to start competitors, right? | ||
| Make it easier to start health clinics to compete. | ||
| The problem is if you have monopoly power is just so dominant in that area and you're allowed to tell the health insurance like if you work with this guy, we won't work with you and everything's secret and you can't say what we're charging you. | ||
| They basically become these things that kill competition and that's fundamentally un-American. | ||
| America works better if you can have competition in these areas and there's lots of ways, there's lots of like, you know, Good academic work on measuring what a monopoly is or not. | ||
| And it's comical to me that we're going after the tech monopolies to start right now, when we have a much bigger problem in this country of the healthcare monopolies on all sorts of local levels. | ||
| And if the FTC should use the academic literature that's been written by both sides the last 70 years, the conservative view of antitrust, in my view, is correct. | ||
| The Borkian view, basically, that Bork created as one of the great legal scholars, which is you look at the impact on consumer and the prices. | ||
| And you can very clearly see places where we're spending two, three, four times as much for certain services. | ||
| It's very clearly a monopoly. | ||
| If there's any view where the FTC is supposed to do something, to me, that should be it. | ||
| And again, if you want to say that you don't need government at all, sure. | ||
| If you got rid of all health care regulations and made it really easy to compete, maybe this problem would solve itself. | ||
| But we're not going to get rid of all those things. | ||
| And so therefore, let's find some way to get competition and make it healthy. | ||
| Right, so what would the right system look like? | ||
| Like, would it be just a lot of individual companies that are sort of corralled by the government to have to play fairly? | ||
| Like, what does it actually look like? | ||
| Well, you want to be as open as possible, right? | ||
| I mean, you want to be as open as possible. | ||
| You want new types of competition to be able to come in. | ||
| You want people to be able to choose their own health plans. | ||
| One of the things government messed up, as you know, is in the 1940s, in World War II, we made it so you couldn't pay people more, but you could give them benefits. | ||
| And we made a health care tax-free benefit. | ||
| So it created this system in our country where we started expecting to get things from... Of course, people wanted to pay people more, so they just gave them better and better health plans. | ||
| And so everyone got used to having a health plan from their company, tax-free, and not choosing it themselves. | ||
| And so it got rid of a lot of choice there. | ||
| And people don't even know. | ||
| Some random HR person who's probably super woke is the one choosing your health care plan for you. | ||
| For a lot of Americans, that's not how things should work. | ||
| And so what it should be is it should be that people choose their own health plan. | ||
| So, you know, Ovic-Roy has something Senator Braun, I think, put out yesterday, which is a really great new health plan. | ||
| And what it is, is basically it's going to cover everyone. | ||
| It's not going to cover rich people. | ||
| It's means tested. | ||
| So anyone 55 or under, you're not gonna get Medicare if you're rich going forward. | ||
| And it's the cover of when using the market, which is that everyone gets to choose | ||
| their own private insurance company. | ||
| And any new startups, the people have to choose the health insurance themselves. | ||
| And then in the meantime, we're gonna have antitrust, we're gonna have transparency, | ||
| and we're gonna push back on these really sketchy tactics that people use on IP, on drugs, | ||
| where they've had the IP for decades and they're still keeping it expensive. | ||
| So there's a combination of using markets, using private insurance, and means testing. | ||
| And this is a compromise, again, in covering everyone, but basically everything's private, but the bottom gets covered by the government. | ||
| And that combination would save money and work. | ||
| Yeah, I think we need a compromise like this to keep our health system free. | ||
| Yeah, have you been tracking what Jared Kushner is doing with Oscar? | ||
| Is that related to any of the types of things you're doing? | ||
| That's Jared's brother, Josh. | ||
| Oh, sorry, Josh. | ||
| Josh Kushner, yeah. | ||
| Jared is very busy and peace in the Middle East. | ||
| Jared's got other things going on, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Josh, Josh. | ||
| I am a fan of the Kushner brothers, and I've brought a lot of my friends in the Valley. | ||
| I say, oh, Jared must be horrible, and I show him some stuff he's doing or connect him to him, and they end up liking him in person. | ||
| He's actually a pretty smart guy, in my opinion. | ||
| Josh has done a great job with Oscar. | ||
| There's a lot of ways Oscar uses data, uses telemedicine no one had done before. | ||
| He was fascinating. | ||
| We had a bunch of clinics on the platform, of course. | ||
| This is a health insurance company. | ||
| It's growing quickly. | ||
| And I've put a hundred million dollars into it, so it's one of my 20 or 30 big investments. | ||
| And there was this pediatrician group and they said, how come we're not on your platform? | ||
| And we told them, well listen, you guys spend three times as much on tests as any of the other pediatricians in this area. | ||
| And they said, oh wow, we didn't know that. | ||
| No one ever told us that before. | ||
| And we said, wow, what a strange space. | ||
| These people have no idea how much money they're spending. | ||
| It's such a broken area that none of the insurance companies had even told them that, that they were doing things unnecessarily. | ||
| And so, yeah, so Austria's done a lot to kind of push off insurance to use data and to be a better force, so I'm very bullish on it. | ||
| Yeah, I know one of your other sort of main places of interest is criminal justice reform. | ||
| I feel like this is one where almost everyone agrees something should be done. | ||
| And there can be something that's sort of bipartisan. | ||
| And in many ways, Trump seems to be trying to do things that I thought lefties were fighting for for a long time. | ||
| How can we fix this clearly broken system? | ||
| Trump and Jared have done a good job on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of people on the right who are suspicious of some of this, and I don't blame them. | |
| Uh, a lot of a lot of criminal justice reform is being pitched like getting rid of bail or, you know, you make us you arrest these guys, they get out, you have to arrest them again, they get out, you have to arrest them again. | ||
| There's a lot of ridiculous criminal justice reform. | ||
| I'm not for any of that. | ||
| The part that I'm for is, is again, how can you fix the systems that are failing people? | ||
| So, you know, a few systems that are failing people, one of them is probation and parole. | ||
| There's literally amazing probation and parole officers who really spend time deploying the tactics to lower recidivism to help these people, and they see their job as they're serving these people, and they want to keep them out of prison, and they want to help them succeed in life, and they want to be easy on them. | ||
| Easy on them when they can't, hard on them when it's helpful for them. | ||
| And there's other probation and parole officers who are absolutely horrible and they're really | ||
| nasty to these people. And they get a job and it's too far away and they don't have time to | ||
| see the parole officers. They throw them back in prison. | ||
| Whatever it is, they're just like making things so tough on them. And so the question is, how | ||
| can you have incentives for probation and parole? And I'm not usually a fan of | ||
| California. We were talking about this earlier. | ||
| I know you're still staying here in the state. | ||
| But one thing they did really well 11 years ago is a bipartisan bill where they changed the incentives for county probation offices to actually get to keep some of the money if they didn't send as many people back to prison as long as the crime rate didn't go up. | ||
| And it worked extremely well. | ||
| Saved the state a billion dollars over the last 11 years. | ||
| And we're actually, Montana did something similar. | ||
| So we're taking those successes and we're teaching people, okay, let's do this for California parole now, too. | ||
| Let's actually have incentives for the parole officers to actually care about doing their jobs. | ||
| Because what happened as soon as you passed that law is all these offices started studying and sharing notes. | ||
| What works to lower recidivism? | ||
| How do we do? | ||
| How do we do this better? | ||
| How do we care about this? | ||
| Suddenly everyone's getting measured. | ||
| You know, Bob, you've sent everyone back to prison in the last seven years. | ||
| That's really hurting our numbers. | ||
| Yeah, what about education? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Maybe we should try actually work with them and try to help them. | ||
| And here's some tactics and techniques we found work. | ||
| And so it's amazing how the accountability in these areas, what that could do. | ||
| Yeah, what about education? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| It seems to me choice, choice, choice, choice, choice. | ||
| And yet that seems to be a scary thing to people. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm generally obviously a fan of choice. | ||
| That's the thing we're talking about in every area is competition and choice. | ||
| But there's different levels of education. | ||
| All of them are really important. | ||
| We've got to get these kids when they're young and make sure they're not programmed by Marxists as little kids. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| But in terms of the incentives we can work on, incentives are easier to do at the latter part of education because you can measure the results. | ||
| One of my favorite programs to really go after right now, there's something called Pell Grants. | ||
| And the Pell Grants were created for good reasons. | ||
| They're really well-meaning. | ||
| They're trying to help people from bad socioeconomic backgrounds or lower socioeconomic backgrounds succeed in life and send them to college. | ||
| And the problem is, is there's no accountability at all. | ||
| So we spend $30 billion a year, Dave, on Pell Grants in this country, and the results are just completely different. | ||
| So there's some schools that do a great job, and for the exact same type of kids, they'll have twice the salary coming out of those schools as others. | ||
| And you know, when you think about university, it's not just about getting a high salary. | ||
| I think we can all agree on that. | ||
| University is about being a great citizen, to live in a free republic. | ||
| It is about moral action. | ||
| Those are both legit things for universities to care about. | ||
| But the third thing definitely is learning how to get skills, | ||
| get a job, learning how to actually succeed in life. | ||
| And if we're going to spend $30 billion a year, maybe part of the Pell Grant program | ||
| should care that they're getting skills or not when they're going to these schools. | ||
| And because the results are literally two to one, the question is, OK, these really, really crappy schools, | ||
| but they probably all become protesters, or God knows what they're going to do afterwards | ||
| because they're not going to have any jobs. | ||
| And the average salary is $21,000 or whatever from them. | ||
| Maybe we shouldn't be giving as many Pell Grants to go to those schools. | ||
| And these great ones where people are making more than twice as much as that, | ||
| maybe they should be getting more Pell Grants. | ||
| So the question is, how do you put incentives into these programs to take into account the data? | ||
| And right now we don't do that at all in our government. | ||
| Probably should. | ||
| Yeah, do you think we could just let a whole bunch of these public schools just fail | ||
| and just that that would just clear out the brush? | ||
| I mean, if you do this for Title IV, too, that would count. | ||
| So, Title IV is the loans we give out, right? | ||
| $100 billion of loans we give out a year. | ||
| And it's pretty obvious that Pell Grants plus Title IV are propping up, like, this bottom 30% of these schools that are just absolutely horrid. | ||
| And these schools probably care a lot more about whatever, like, crazy ethnic studies things they're doing, whatever racism they're teaching our kids, than they actually care about anything helpful for America. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| You know, Japan did this recently. | ||
| they closed a bunch of their like, of their like kind of weaker, | ||
| kind of wackier liberal arts departments in their bottom schools. | ||
| And it was a big outcry, but I thought that was pretty awesome. | ||
| The Japanese just like kind of did it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I think we could do that too. | ||
| Now, that of course would be more something the right would do and the left would scream bloody murder. | ||
| So rather than do that, let's just start with some incentives | ||
| where we kind of maybe trim the bottom with incentives that are nonpartisan. | ||
| That'd be my hope is there's a nonpartisan solution here that we can push forward first. | ||
| So even if you could do some of that stuff and you change what you're doing with grants | ||
| and some of the handouts and some of that kind of stuff, do you think that the academic layer of it | ||
| has just been so corroded and calcified and corrupted that it almost won't matter whether, | ||
| whether they pull some of the string purses and that kind of thing? | ||
| You know, I think people respond to money. | ||
| There's going to be some academics there that are going to be wacky and useless anyway, but there's going to be some of these boards that react and say, oh wow, rather than talking our entire board meeting about how woke we are and how to be more woke, maybe we should look at this data that says we're not teaching any useful skills and maybe we should see what these five schools nearby that are doing great are teaching. | ||
| Maybe we should like add some of those in for these poor kids that are coming here to try to build a life rather than just brainwashing And you're right, not every one of them is gonna say that. | ||
| A lot of them are just gonna be completely dysfunctional. | ||
| And that's why markets are such an important thing. | ||
| Markets get rid of bad ideas, right? | ||
| So if these things are not working, then the school is gonna shrink | ||
| because there's gonna be some accountability, you know? | ||
| And so I think some can adapt and I think some probably should go away. | ||
| Yeah, so as a pretty forward-thinking guy in a forward-thinking industry, | ||
| linking this back to the political thing, I think a lot of people feel like | ||
| we're sort of at the end of something. | ||
| My feeling right now with our political gridlock is we're just at the end of this thing. | ||
| The fact that whether you like either one of them or not, that a 77-year-old is running against a 74-year-old. | ||
| One of them's been in politics for 47 years. | ||
| One of them's been in private industry forever. | ||
| Good, bad, indifferent, it doesn't matter, that we're just sort of at the end of this cycle. | ||
| What do you think we need from our politicians after this? | ||
| Well, first off, do you think there is an after this? | ||
| Do you think we get out of this thing or does it reconstitute itself in some other evil form four years from now? | ||
| You know, it seems very likely that we, that, that we potentially get, if you, I mean, if you get some kind of Biden, Biden victory, you get some kind of like this, the whole thing goes on a little bit longer. | ||
| And, and, you know, what we need is we need competent outsiders breaking into government and shaking it up. | ||
| We need people who understand systems. | ||
| What that really means is you need some non-woke computer scientists, frankly. | ||
| You need some engineers who know how to run things. | ||
| As much as I'm disgusted by the CCP and by things China does, one huge advantage China | ||
| has in certain areas is that the majority of the people in charge there have engineering | ||
| backgrounds. | ||
| The majority of people in charge of our country right now are lawyers. | ||
| I'm not sure that's the right answer for the future. | ||
| We need people who are optimistic, who can paint a vision of how this country can be | ||
| I mean, this is what drives me crazy, Dave, is it's obvious how we have enough ability to generate wealth and prosperity for everyone. | ||
| We have a golden age, basically, and we have diseases being cured. | ||
| Your friend Jennifer won the Nobel Prize this morning for CRISPR, right? | ||
| There's just amazing stuff going on in this country and amazing potential, and we need people who can take the optimism, take the values of a free society, and show positive some ways of solving our problems. | ||
| And I think we can get that, but it's gonna be a different set of leaders than we have right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lonsdale, that's a pretty solid closing statement. | |
| Although, wait a minute, I feel like I have to ask you one more. | ||
| Now, you know with Locals, we haven't even gone into Series A yet, but when I get to this thing to IPO, what kind of party do I throw at the 22 billion? | ||
| Like, what do you do? | ||
| What do you do that night? | ||
| I had about, you know, it's funny, I had about 30 friends over who built it with me, but of the 50 people I invited, 20 of them had already moved out of California, so that's why, you know, I got to leave next week, but it was, it's a good success. | ||
| You know, it's not, Palantir was never as much, and this is honestly the case, never as much about the money. | ||
| We helped them target and eliminate over 8,000 bad guys, including the most famous ones, you know, in the last decade, and we've helped serve our country, and we've helped save a huge amount of money, so I'm really proud of the company. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, Joe Lanzell, I enjoyed talking to you and I'm enjoying working with you. | ||
| And I'm going to see if I can add a couple more zeros to your situation. | ||
| Let me see what I can do over here. | ||
| I'm bullish on you. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about tech instead of nonstop yelling, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're right over here. |
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