Dec. 20, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
59:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| And Elon and Vivek, I think they're very clear, along with the president, that the goal is not to even hurt the bureaucrats. | ||
| They want to be very generous with the bureaucrats. | ||
| However, you know, if you look at the federal level right now, I think we have about 3.1 million or so full-time employees. | ||
| We have another 4 million or so contractors. | ||
| We have another 1.7 million or so people paid for who work in the States, paid for by the federal government. | ||
| So just a massive number of people, and you probably don't need more than half of them. | ||
| Or, I mean, just go to D.C. and there's these massive buildings and no one's there. | ||
| No one's there. | ||
| We're spending about $15 billion a year maintaining buildings and spending money on these buildings that no one's in. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| The numbers go on. | ||
| There's over 100 billion NGOs. | ||
| I mean, I'm obsessed with this stuff. | ||
| It's like we're paying for trans-activism in Niger. | ||
| It's just paying for climate activism in Brazil. | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So what are the obvious things that if you were advising these guys, you'd be like, go in and chop a land? | ||
| So the obvious things are that there's $3.8 trillion in entitlements, which over $300 billion seems to be fraud. | ||
| And that's a hard data problem, by the way, but we can do it. | ||
| That's a pretty big number. | ||
| Get rid of the fraud. | ||
| That's obviously the right thing to do. | ||
| On top of that, there's over $100 billion to NGOs. | ||
| I'm so excited. | ||
| is finally open season on NGOs. | ||
| These are the most corrupt groups in America. | ||
| They're completely conquered by the radical left. | ||
| These are pro-Hamas people. | ||
| These are anti-market people. | ||
| These are like the worst people that we don't want in charge of our society. | ||
| And we're just like funneling money to them. | ||
| You see how the Obama administration sent money to these people? | ||
| Are you familiar with the mechanism they used to do it with the settlements? | ||
| So Kamala's brother-in-law, Tony West, he was helping run the DOJ under Obama. | ||
| He was helping run her campaign, too, by the way. | ||
| And this guy, they figured out that if you're going to sue from the DOJ, a big company, for doing something wrong, rather than the big company having to settle with the government or whatever else, you say, don't worry, you can pay half as much, just give it to one of these approved NGOs. | ||
| God, that's insane. | ||
| It's like the craziest mafia move ever. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's so crazy. | |
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| Joining me today is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, the managing partner of 8VC, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Adapar, and OpenGov, Joel Lonsdale. | ||
| That is quite a resume. | ||
| Did I miss anything? | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| I did miss some things, but it's okay. | ||
| I've started a lot of companies, but Palantir is by far the most famous one, and Adapar and OpenGov are the next two, and they're doing great. | ||
| Yeah, you are doing okay, and I thought it would be interesting to have you in as we're wrapping up this year, because something has happened with the tech bros this year, and you're kind of right. | ||
| That's a term now, huh? | ||
| Yeah, you are a tech bro. | ||
| You're right in the middle of the tech bro thing. | ||
| It seems to have scaled, to use a word from your vocabulary. | ||
| What is going on with all the tech bros getting all political and outspoken suddenly? | ||
|
unidentified
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Tech bros. | |
| I prefer the term philosopher, It's really fun to see because we had all these smart, ambitious, nerdy guys who, most of them my age and above, I think, went into technology because they were really interested in it and they were passionate about it. | ||
| It wasn't the thing to make the most money when we were kids programming in the early 1990s or whatever. | ||
| It was a really dorky thing that we were doing. | ||
| It was really fun. | ||
| And mostly I wanted to build games, of course, when I was young. | ||
| That was the fun thing to do with it. | ||
| And also wanted to automatically solve my math homework. | ||
| But, you know, it's really cool to see all these people who were ambitious and worked really hard at these things. | ||
| A lot of smart people I knew in the small community are now going to help run the country. | ||
| So, you know, overall I'm really excited about it. | ||
| Tell me a little bit more about that story, because I'm a largely, I would say, retired gamer. | ||
| There is a PS5 right behind you over there, but it doesn't get bust out too often. | ||
| I'm much better at old-school Nintendo. | ||
| So you're programming, you're kind of a gamer, or you want to make games. | ||
| How does the thing evolve into something that ends up making multiple billion-dollar companies? | ||
| I mean, you know, my friends and I were math champions and chess champions. | ||
| We're nerdy young guys. | ||
| And I was growing up in Silicon Valley. | ||
| And a bunch of them taught me to program. | ||
| Gosh, you must have been 10 or 11 years old. | ||
| We were doing it on RTI calculators, doing it on the computer. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 42. 42, so I'm 48. So close enough. | ||
| We'll get the references. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| These old things, you'd program basic, and then you had to learn how to compile it to assembly to make the game run faster. | ||
| And there's just all this really fun stuff we were building and automatically doing our homework and stuff. | ||
| And right around kind of the mid-90s, maybe I guess it was 93, we all got AOL, right? | ||
| You start going on the internet, and you start playing with it. | ||
| And then a few of my friends were learning how to... | ||
| Break into certain things, which maybe is inappropriate. | ||
| We're like 11, 12 years old. | ||
| They were teaching me they were 14 or 15. And so it's just fun. | ||
| It's like this hacking thing, and we don't really know what we're doing, and we're playing with it. | ||
| What was there even to hack into at that point? | ||
| There's all these companies putting stuff online. | ||
| Were you sending bombs across the world? | ||
| No, nothing, nothing. | ||
| Not like board games. | ||
| I wasn't as good as some of my friends. | ||
| I was watching them, and they're trying to take credit for their work alongside. | ||
| I was just a little kid. | ||
| But a lot of them who were doing that, the internet thing got going, and people started trying to build internet companies. | ||
| And they're trying to build teaching companies, trying to build other sorts of things. | ||
| And a lot of them started to be really successful. | ||
| My friend's older brothers, and this is the 90s. | ||
| The 90s is a bubble. | ||
| A lot of people thought they were rich, then they weren't. | ||
| But we were into this. | ||
| We were into building. | ||
| We were into how the internet was going to change the world. | ||
| And people made fun of it for a while afterwards, the new paradigm. | ||
| But it was true in a sense. | ||
| In some ways, we were 10, 20 years early. | ||
| Because a lot of the stuff we were thinking about in the late 90s didn't really happen until the whole SAS wave and everything 15 years later when everyone was online. | ||
| But it was stuff that was true. | ||
| And I went to Stanford Computer Science. | ||
| A lot of the smartest guys were going to PayPal. | ||
| I applied their freshman year. | ||
| They rejected me freshman year, actually. | ||
| I was very bummed. | ||
| I did something else. | ||
| But then sophomore year, they let me in. | ||
| And I got to work with these guys. | ||
| And you know the guys at PayPal, of course, went on to... | ||
| I think they wanted to build everything. | ||
| No, Teal and Elon and David Sachs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm not really... | ||
| I'm like 15 years younger than Peter and 12 years younger than Elon. | ||
| So I'm a junior member of that whole crew. | ||
| But then I ended up building stuff myself. | ||
| So what was the first success point for you where you realized, oh, there's like a career here. | ||
| It's not just like the fun stuff or the dorky stuff or whatever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think seeing some of the big companies built in the late 90s was very clear. | ||
| This is like a revolutionary thing that's going to change everything. | ||
| I don't know if you're thinking about... | ||
| I never imagined a Palantir be trading at like a $160 billion market cap. | ||
| That wasn't the point really of it at all. | ||
| PayPal actually sold for $1.5 billion, but all these really smart people working really hard on it. | ||
| And that was, to me, that was like a high watermark of something to aim for. | ||
| So I wasn't thinking of it as big as it is today, necessarily. | ||
| But it was clearly something that was very important for the world and was going to change everything that was important to work on. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that so many people came out of the PayPal mafia, as they call it, you know, David and Elon and Teal and many others, that there was this, like, group that suddenly came together. | ||
| They changed how we make payments online, but then they all went to do, like, crazy, crazy huge things. | ||
| Well, the world tends to have power laws, right? | ||
| So what a power law is in venture capital, a power law is like, it's like your top company is worth as much as the rest of your company is combined. | ||
| So there were going to be a couple places in Silicon Valley with super talented people that attracted a lot of their super talented people, right? | ||
| And it had nothing to do with ideology, right? | ||
| I mean, Reid Hoffman ended up being a big backer of the left. | ||
| He was part of it, too. | ||
| And other people were part of it. | ||
| So it wasn't about ideology. | ||
| It was about... | ||
| People who thought differently, people who were really competent, people who worked hard. | ||
| And so, of course, and you think about it in retrospect, it was Elon Musk. | ||
| We now know who he is. | ||
| We didn't know who Elon was back then. | ||
| He was some crazy guy. | ||
| But now, you know, he's a legend. | ||
| It was Peter Thiel, who's also now really a legend in a lot of ways, similarly. | ||
| And it was their smartest friends. | ||
| No surprise. | ||
| If you go back in time, knowing who Elon is, he had a place with his smartest friends, Peter had a place with his smartest friends. | ||
| They merged their companies, like two of the best companies in this space, rather than trying to destroy each other famously in all sorts of aggressive ways. | ||
| Ended up merging. | ||
| No surprise, this company becomes a bit of talent for all sorts of things. | ||
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| So why, when you have, you mentioned all those people, they largely are, I would say, libertarian in belief, at least now. | ||
| Why do you think Silicon Valley went so the other way? | ||
| You mentioned Reid as more of a lefty, and he's funded a lot of the things that I've been railing against for a long time, including Gavin Newsom. | ||
| But, like, it would have seemed that the tech world would have gone more to a libertarian bent, and yet it seemed, at least in its public sense, that it went to a progressive bent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So what happened in the tech world is that, first of all, the areas we were building in didn't really intersect very much with government back then. | ||
| Of course, Spitzer tried to come after PayPal and kill it, so there was some of that where the government was annoying, and it definitely intersected a little bit. | ||
| But a lot of the stuff we were doing wasn't that political. | ||
| It was so new that there wasn't really interaction with DC. And then the cultures of most of these companies came from the big universities. | ||
| And so if you look at, like, Google was mostly just, like, Hundreds or thousands of computer science PhDs, you know, from Stanford and MIT and Harvard, etc. | ||
| And so you had this kind of march through the institutions of the extreme left over the previous decades, and that became just like a default culture there. | ||
| And if you didn't want to have to have fights with people constantly or be canceled or be harassed, you would just go along. | ||
| I mean, most people are programmed in the areas of their life they're not passionate about just to go along with the norms. | ||
| The norm was to be on the left in universities. | ||
| And so, of course, that culture became the norm for much of big tech. | ||
| When did you realize that something was a little out of whack with that? | ||
| Because I should note, actually, you were one of our first investors in Locals, and at that time, this is now six years ago, we were fighting for free speech, we were trying to get off the big tech wires, that's all what everyone's doing now. | ||
| But it was very risky at the time and a lot of people, I'm not going to mention, I just mentioned one off camera, but like a lot of major people took meetings with us and just closed the door immediately after. | ||
| But not only were you one of the first ones in, but I just said to you the kindest thing that I can say to investors, which is you always took my calls to give us advice. | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been pretty passionate my whole life about this stuff. | ||
| I grew up, you know, reading Ayn Rand, reading Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, like the, you know, just like really interested in the ideas of liberty and why our society works, right? | ||
| So I think there's been a few of us in this network. | ||
| It includes Peter Thiel, who have had that kind of philosophy at our core and been very interested in how and why Western civilization works and what the threat is from these other things. | ||
| And, you know, if you look at how Western civilization works, there's really, we were speaking about it before you came out, there's like a few threads that really matter. | ||
| You have to understand, to understand the West, the classical world and the classical virtues and, you know, courage, things like that. | ||
| I mean, they're really, really important to have, and we can go into that. | ||
| And then you have to understand, I think, the Judeo-Christian values, and I think a lot of that's a really positive foundation for our world that enabled a lot of things in really good ways. | ||
| I mean, if you just understand the classical virtues, you get some very scary, like, Nietzschean kind of Nazi-type stuff you can get to if you don't have the dignity of every human life, right? | ||
| And then, of course, those combined with the Enlightenment And with the kind of radical ideas that came out of the 17th and 18th centuries, that created this thing in the West that was totally unique in history and gave us an amazing last 300 years. | ||
| And what's really unfortunate is a lot of the people in the tech world just haven't grown up with any kind of Economics, history, philosophy, background. | ||
| And so they've just become, like, on that part of their life, they're NPCs. | ||
| They're just going along with this leftist nonsense. | ||
| I think there have been a few of us. | ||
| So I was the editor of the Stanford Review, for example, which Peter Thiel started 15 years before me, because I was really passionate about these ideas and about fighting back against this nonsense. | ||
| So there are some of us who have had that obsession our whole lives. | ||
| I think other people, only after the whole DEI stuff took over, only after this kind of rot infected our space and started to break things, did they start to wake up to this, right? | ||
| So it's great that they're woken up. | ||
| They weren't really focused on it before. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Do you think it's also, and I don't even mean this in like a really judgy, judgy way, that it was just like, oh, we're kind of rolling in dough. | ||
| Our companies are working. | ||
| It just doesn't matter. | ||
| Like, our life's pretty good. | ||
| We got a plane and whatever. | ||
| I wouldn't say it's quite like that because most of these guys, if you look at what entrepreneurship's like, It's like most of these people have struggled for many, many years to get to where they are. | ||
| There's very few companies that are just like, I hit it rich and I'm rolling in dough and I don't care. | ||
| That's a very rare exception. | ||
| Most of the time, it's like everyone treated me like shit and I had to fly commercial lowest, cheapest ticket on JetBlue twice a week back and forth to DC to try to convince them of something for three years, which is what I was doing with Palantir. | ||
| I'm like, It's just this very long, very painful journey. | ||
| Most people are just not focused on politics. | ||
| You're just focused on giving every last ounce of energy you have to get this thing across the line before it dies and make it work. | ||
| And then once it does and you've got to this platform, then there's all these other existential threats to your business. | ||
| So even though it looks really good, you're still trying to scale it and build it. | ||
| And a lot of these people in my world I think have really strong work ethics, and that's what an entrepreneur is. | ||
| You have to be a little bit crazy. | ||
| You have to want to work really hard. | ||
| And it's just that I think for most of them, because they didn't have that philosophical background, they don't have the interests in government, it's just not something they spent time on. | ||
| They just virtue-signaled, not because they're cowards even, but because I'm doing this really hard thing, and I just want this other thing to stay out of the way, and I want to think about it. | ||
| I think that's what their attitude was. | ||
| What do you think it says about Peter Thiel that he was sort of the most public outlier in this? | ||
| And as you said, a few years ahead of you on this, that he was always the guy that was kind of going against the grain when it came to political correctness and Stanford Review and all of these things. | ||
| And then Sachs was with him. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Peter and David Sachs both had these views, both worked together on the review, published that book. | ||
| That's partly what attracted me to work with him. | ||
| I was sort of his right hand for quite a while, you know, early in my career, in my early 20s. | ||
| And it was because he was someone who was courageous about his values. | ||
| I think it's really important as a role model to show people we do need to be courageous about our values and that we do need to care that these things actually matter. | ||
| Peter lives in a world where ideas really matter, and I think him having done that inspired a lot of others. | ||
| You've mentioned Palantir a couple of times, so you were co-founder of Palantir. | ||
| Now, I mention Palantir on the show every now and again, usually because lately we've been playing a lot of clips of Alex Karp, who's the CEO, who I think is just absolutely knocking it out of the park, and I'm sure you'll have some thoughts on that. | ||
| But first off, can you, in the most simple terms, explain what Palantir does? | ||
| Because every time I have to do it, I feel like I'm slightly butchering it. | ||
| So can you give me, like... | ||
| It's not a simple company to explain. | ||
| So Palantir, I hired probably most of the first two or three hundred people, which I'm really proud because we're running number one for technical talent. | ||
| And what we were doing, there's a few different ways of looking at it. | ||
| One way of looking at it was we were taking the best technology talent into Can you give me an example of something like that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the government, when we started at that time, there was almost a million people who were analysts in some form of the defense world or intelligence world. | ||
| There was a lot of people working on data. | ||
| And they have data. | ||
| They're spending over $36 billion at the time, I'm sure it's much more now, gathering data for some sort of different projects. | ||
| And by the way, everyone thinks it's like, oh, the CIA and the FBI. It's not the CIA. It's like 2,000 different groups in the CIA, which many of them don't like each other, and many of them don't share data with each other. | ||
| And then there's all the other groups too, right? | ||
| I have a feeling we'll be finding out a lot more about that in the next year to come. | ||
| Well, that'll be fun, too. | ||
| But there's so many of these groups, so many people, so much data, so many silos, and it's just totally dysfunctional. | ||
| So how do you have, let's say there's maybe a smart guy who's in his 30s, didn't study computer science, but he's worked hard and a senior in the military. | ||
| He's an analyst, and he's trying to stop an attack, and he's trying to work with different groups to stop an attack. | ||
| And there are these $36 billion of data and these 20,000 databases or whatever and different rules for accessing each of them. | ||
| How the hell is he supposed to do that work? | ||
| Is he supposed to go write the code himself to look at this thing over here? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| So what's the interface for that person that's intelligible that lets them do that work, lets them build the graph of the 30 people around Osama Bin Laden with the different payments and structures and information, lets them set that to be monitored so that if some data does come into a database from MI6 from Britain later and we have access to it and it actually ties one of the guys near Osama Bin Laden to something lets them set that to be monitored so that if some data does come into a database from MI6 from Britain later and we have access to it and it actually And this is a hard problem, especially because these guys aren't coders. | ||
| So basically you ended up building like a ability to do data integration, search and discovery, knowledge management, collaboration, and to have a platform that does that and that plugs into everything else. | ||
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| So this will sort of get us to what I want to more so talk about on the second half of the interview. | ||
| So you guys come in and you try to do this with the government. | ||
| But the government is, now everyone really realizes, is deeply broken, is backwards, is insanely bureaucratic. | ||
| And the systems, literally the systems are old and dysfunctional. | ||
| So how do you even do that? | ||
| Like you walk into an office and basically say, guys, we got to blow this thing apart. | ||
| We're taking over. | ||
| We got to throw out a bunch of You just got to start building, and you got to design it in a way that you can deploy at one place, but you know that if you deploy at another place, then you can flip a switch and have them coordinate and collaborate. | ||
| And you know what it is? | ||
| So in the 1990s, we had a lot of defense companies. | ||
| America had a lot of the best defense companies. | ||
| The Cold War ended, and they all had to consolidate. | ||
| They're called the primes, the prime contractors. | ||
| They consolidate. | ||
| So it went down from many, many dozens to maybe like eight to 10 that really mattered in the 90s. | ||
| And then those guys, because there were only eight to 10 of them and they were lobbying and there was lower spend, they just captured everything and they put all these rules in place to make sure they owned everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so nothing else had broken in for quite a while. | ||
| But then we both talked about it. | ||
| And then in the late nineties, all the top software engineers went to Silicon Valley. | ||
| And so these primes, which had been dominant forever, started losing all their best software engineers, losing their best technical cultures. | ||
| They started becoming more and more like government, because that's who they work with every day, and that's who's going in and out of them. | ||
| So you have these kind of dysfunctional, bureaucratic, government-like things that don't know software. | ||
| And then 9-11 happens, and then they have to try to react. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the administration says, let's spend billions of dollars, let's fix this. | ||
| But these guys just started wasting the money on stupid shit. | ||
| So we see this. | ||
| And we had been at PayPal. | ||
| And at PayPal, one of the biggest challenges was that the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all of our money. | ||
| And we actually had to build systems to help our investigators stop that. | ||
| And a lot of our competitors went bankrupt. | ||
| They couldn't do it. | ||
| And so that lesson from PayPal... | ||
| By the way, when you catch the bad guys at PayPal, who do you call? | ||
| There's two groups. | ||
| It's the Secret Service and it's the FBI. And so we got to know a bunch of these groups. | ||
| And then we saw them spending this money after 9-11, and we said, oh my god, this is like, this is, I guess you can say the word retarded now. | ||
| It's retarded. | ||
| It's back. | ||
| We're having an 80s boom. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's back. | |
| We're trying to bring it back. | ||
| So it's like, this is ridiculous. | ||
| They're just lighting money on fire, doing things in really outdated ways that are way behind what we did at PayPal. | ||
| And so let's take the lessons from PayPal, let's extend it much more broadly for how you do it with government data, and let's just start building it and showing them, and start flying back and forth. | ||
| And every time we fly there, they say, well, we can't use it for this, this, and this reason. | ||
| So we'd go back, we'd like, Worked like crazy with the team. | ||
| We'd come back two weeks later and we'd say, well, now we solved those problems. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| And they said, actually, that's really good. | ||
| But then you can't do it because of this, this, and this. | ||
| And so literally we iterated like this for a couple of years. | ||
| And finally they just couldn't have any objection anymore and they started to use it. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because it sort of seems like the way the government's operated, it's basically like in some sense what you guys were trying to do, make them more efficient, would be the exact reverse of what they would want done. | ||
| So the amount of pushback at different levels must have been nuts. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| There are... | ||
| A lot of bad actors in government. | ||
| There are a lot of these players on the side that are going to want to sabotage you and get rid of you. | ||
| There's a lot of very lazy people who don't care. | ||
| But, and this is what's really interesting about government, there are some really great people who do really care in there. | ||
| And maybe it might be one of every 10 people. | ||
| It might be one of every 50 people in some places. | ||
| But you find those few people who really care. | ||
| And other co-workers and their bosses kind of could tell, like, that's our guy who actually knows what the heck she's doing. | ||
| It's our girl who knows what she's doing. | ||
| The guy who knows what he's doing. | ||
| And so you partner with those people. | ||
| And, you know, we created an analyst groundswell where a bunch of the best people were all saying, we need this, we need this. | ||
| And you know what we really figured out? | ||
| This is something CARP really figured out. | ||
| You need to go to the places where the problem is existential. | ||
| Because what you just said is, right, if it's just like a general problem, you're never going to get through it if you're way better. | ||
| But if you go to the team where there's literally people dying, for example, the special forces teams or army brigades that are dying to IEDs because their software is not good enough to map out what's going on and find where the explosives are, and if you're actually saving their lives, which is what we started doing, we started saving a lot of lives on the special operations teams, then everyone says, wow, we need this too. | ||
| And the army brigades actually ask, can you give this to us? | ||
| and they're paying billions of dollars to the other thing, but can you at least let us use it for now and we'll show you the lives we're saving. | ||
| So we started doing that. | ||
| We started letting people see all the lives we're saving in different areas, coordinating. | ||
| So you guys were literally saving lives because they had better data on the ground as to where the enemy was or what movements they could make. | ||
| A hundred percent, because there's a massive SIGINT and UMINT and database gathering thing and you actually literally started saving it. | ||
| And they actually started showing us the lives we were saving, and it was a big deal. | ||
| And then they put the next contract up for bid, and they gave it to the old company. | ||
| You know what we did? | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| You bought the old company? | ||
| No, this is like a giant prime. | ||
| We sued the government, and we won. | ||
| Because the law said they had to consider the outsiders that were already working. | ||
| We actually had something off the shelf that was already working, and they wanted to pay someone $5 billion to try to build it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they wouldn't have been able to build it anyway. | ||
| But anyway, so we won and got in there. | ||
| But it was just like a mess to get in. | ||
| We had to be extremely persistent. | ||
| We had to just like iterate crazy. | ||
| Every unfair advantage, every ally we could find to break in. | ||
| And eventually we broke into these places. | ||
| We won. | ||
| People loved it. | ||
| Everyone thanks us who we meet, who's worked in these places. | ||
| But it took a long time. | ||
| It took like over a decade of just like persistent work to break in. | ||
| But you know, because Palantir broke in, by the way, because SpaceX similarly broke in, similar types of problems, they had to do the government too, you know? | ||
| Because they broke in too. | ||
| And now I'm pretty sure the government's Well, no, it's good. | ||
| The government saves so much from them, gives them lots of money. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| SpaceX and Palantir have saved the government each. | ||
| Tens of billions of dollars have solved all these problems. | ||
| Palantir stopped tons of attacks that would have happened otherwise. | ||
| But because we did that, we've now created this situation where a ton of other companies have a pathway to compete, which is happening now, and it's very exciting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I sense you don't mind that, actually, right? | ||
| Because that's what will spark innovation. | ||
| I've built a few other billion-dollar companies in space. | ||
| So I'm actually able to build things now that I never could have built 15 years ago because we've now taught the generals and the admirals in Congress that we do need to be open and have competitions and to let the new best solutions in. | ||
| So I want to talk about Alex Carp for a minute, because I have played a couple videos of his lately. | ||
| He's one of my favorite people. | ||
| So first off, he looks like the guy who created Oasis in Ready Player One. | ||
| So that already, it's like he seems like a character out of a movie. | ||
| But what was interesting, we played a clip of his a week or two ago, and I did not realize that, I mean, he largely... | ||
| I think is still a Democrat. | ||
| He voted for Biden, if I'm not mistaken, voted for Kamala, and yet he seems to get all of the issues right and explain them quite well. | ||
| That says something about the intellectual diversity you guys have... | ||
| I think he voted for Biden. | ||
| It's unclear who he voted for in this last election. | ||
| We can't say... | ||
| We did a little digging. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so maybe I'm wrong on that. | ||
| We tried to do a little digging on that. | ||
| He may have given some money, so left. | ||
|
unidentified
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Listen, I... Either way, it doesn't specifically matter. | |
| Alex is one of my very favorite people. | ||
| He's a philosopher king. | ||
| He actually was. | ||
| He was the top philosophy student of the person who was the top philosopher in the world when he got his PhD. | ||
| So he's a genius about very, very high-level abstract ways the world works. | ||
| He deeply cares about Jewish people and Israel. | ||
| His mother is African-American and his father is Jewish. | ||
| And if you come from that background, I think you kind of grow up as part of the people on the left. | ||
| That's just the culture that he came from, very much especially the culture that his parents were enmeshed in, and deeply cares about that. | ||
| At the same time, I think he's been brought around to see that there are a lot of people who are not very nice Yeah. | ||
| Well, you must be particularly happy about that, because you've obviously been involved in the University of Austin, and there are things now waking up, at least seemingly waking up at the educational layer of all this. | ||
| How did the Austin thing Yeah, well, and just to say on Alex, he's a very important mentor to me, and he's one of those people who just deeply, deeply cares about our civilization and what's right and helping people around him. | ||
| And he was the only non-technical person when we started the company. | ||
| Everyone assumes he's a computer scientist, but he actually really is a philosopher who understands and cares about people. | ||
| So was he really brought in as the CEO to be the... | ||
| So he was really brought in as the idea guy, not necessarily the... | ||
| I wouldn't say the idea guy. | ||
| I wouldn't say the idea guy. | ||
| So the actual story, which I've only told a couple times a long time ago, was that my roommate Stefan and I were the full-time founders along with someone named Nathan who's in the background who's helping us, who's an older programmer, who's really smart. | ||
| And Peter was a co-founder, but not working at it. | ||
| He was more backing us and giving us advice and stuff. | ||
| And we were building these things, flying back and forth to DC. And Alex at the time had just finished being the philosophy student. | ||
| And a lot of the philosophers in Europe like to pretend... | ||
| Sorry, a lot of the billionaires in Europe like to pretend they're philosophers. | ||
| Which is kind of funny. | ||
| It's like a high status thing to be. | ||
| And so he was like, he said it's like being a basketball star in the US. You had all these women and everyone interested in him. | ||
| It was very funny. | ||
| And so he's helping raise money for interesting causes running around the world. | ||
| And he gets to know all these powerful people. | ||
| So he was hard to advise us. | ||
| I met him through Peter. | ||
| They got into law school together. | ||
| And he was helping Peter raise money for the fund I was helping Peter with. | ||
| And he started to advise me for Palantir, like, oh, here's how you meet these people. | ||
| And I'm 21 at the time, so he says, Joe, if you want to come across the right way, don't get the introduction that way, get it this way. | ||
| And here's how you, what you say, induce, you're taken seriously by the institution, because if you say it this way, they'll know you're a kid. | ||
| And just stuff like that. | ||
| And at the time, Peter was trying to get an adult to come into Palantir, and there'd been a bunch of military guys, generals. | ||
| He kept introducing Stephan and I to you. | ||
| And Stephan and I were like, no, these generals just don't get it at all. | ||
| They're going to ruin the company, right? | ||
| Because it's such a different culture than our tech culture. | ||
| And we were talking to Alex about this, and I flew out to London at one point, and I said, Alex, Peter's trying to put these other people in. | ||
| He's right that Stefano and I are 21. We're not the right people to go talk to senators and sell this. | ||
| Can you come pretend to be CEO for a few years, and just, like, there'd be no more pressure to have to have an adult, and you can kind of advise us on these things, and then you can figure it out. | ||
| And he said, sure, I'll do it. | ||
| I said, you know, I'm interested. | ||
| And he came, and at first, like... | ||
| He didn't really know what was going on in the tech world at all. | ||
| It's like an anthropological experience to come to this different place. | ||
| But he learned really quickly, and he started helping, he started advising. | ||
| It was first called the Triumvirate with Stephan and Karp and I for a long time, but he just very quickly became this wise leader who was able to figure out how to make things work for the company. | ||
| And it turned out he was just an amazing CEO. He figured out how to do the job, and he's still doing it 20 years later. | ||
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| So pausing on my other question for a moment, do you think now having all of these people involved in government, or at least interested in government, and some of them clearly will be on the inside, Saks is going to be the crypto AI guy, clearly Elon's going to do some staffing and Dojo, all these things. | ||
| Like, do you think this is the exact moment that we need? | ||
| Like, is this the right people and the right moment, and it's just one of those rare, precious things that we have an opportunity to grasp right now? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's really two opposing forces in our country, and I think the good guys won. | ||
| I think there's one side that's pro-censorship, that's like this very elitist, kind of very authoritarian group that works based on cancel culture, works based on a lot of the Maoist principles, and that kind of went along with a lot of very scary things from the far-left nor the gang power. | ||
| And I think there's another side that is much more about society working bottom-up, fighting for the working class, fighting for innovators and builders and to be able to change and fix things as opposed to be able to have permits and restrictions on everything and stopping anything from changing. | ||
| You know, so naturally in the tech world, like you have these two big sides in society. | ||
| And so naturally in the tech world, kind of the top builders are on the good guy side and then bottom up and the liberty side. | ||
| And then a lot of the people who are kind of the bureaucracy at the big companies is on the other side. | ||
| And they're the people enforcing you, the HR ladies and everyone, they're on the other side, right? | ||
| And so, yeah, I think having... | ||
| We in America have this builder class that is the best class of builders anywhere in the world, by far. | ||
| These are the best builders. | ||
| These are the best innovators in the world. | ||
| A lot of them were born here. | ||
| I'm proud to be born here, but a lot of them came here. | ||
| We should not turn away Elon Musk. | ||
| It's good that he came here. | ||
| This is a great thing. | ||
| And so to have that set of people fighting for our country and fighting to fix these crazy broken things that this corrupt class has put in place, it makes me very bullish on America. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You think there's any risk there that so many people coming from the same thing will have this kind of influence? | ||
| We're not really the same people, though. | ||
| I think Elon's a very different person than David, who's a very different person than me, and we all have our views. | ||
| There's certain things that, as builders, we've learned how they work to apply them, but I think we all have different backgrounds. | ||
| I think you've got to be careful I think you've got to be careful that everyone's being represented in terms of the classes in America. | ||
| I think JD's very good at this, by the way. | ||
| Some people say it's populism, but he came from a background where he's able to represent some working class people and people who are struggling. | ||
| And I think a lot of the issues that they're struggling are tied to mistakes we've made in terms of how our country works and how our government works. | ||
| And so I think it is very important that we're highlighting these issues of the people in our society who are not doing as well and struggling and making sure we help all of them. | ||
| But in terms of how you help them, how you build, how you create, the only solution for our country, if you look at the debt and the deficit and all these messes, is we need to grow. | ||
| We need a lot of growth. | ||
| Growth pays. | ||
| It makes everyone work. | ||
| If you grow correctly, we can help everyone, especially at least swell off. | ||
| If you look at everywhere in the world, where do poor people suffer the most? | ||
| It's if you stop growing. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And if you don't bring these builders in and fix a lot of this stuff, we are not going to be able to grow. | ||
| Do you remember a couple months ago when Elon said that there'll be a certain pain point with some of this and people were going crazy on it? | ||
| And I thought, oh, it was a rarely refreshing moment of someone being like, oh, we're going to have to cut back on some things and that might affect some people. | ||
| Do you think that the American people will only have like a tolerance for a certain amount of whatever that pain point is? | ||
| You know, it's going to be really- As things change? | ||
| It's going to be really important, Dave, that we communicate really well what we're doing and why we're doing it. | ||
| And there's a lot of government money right now that's being spent very wastefully. | ||
| It causes a lot of inflation. | ||
| Inflation is caused by government spending, government overspending. | ||
| We have like We have an insane amount of government overspending, and a lot of that needs to be cut back to allow our society to thrive and allow us not to go through a debt crisis and allow us not to hurt everyone more. | ||
| In the process of cutting back some of that waste, some of that waste is sustaining certain things that are helping certain people. | ||
| But it's a very dysfunctional way of doing it. | ||
| It's like there are cells in your body. | ||
| If you have cancer and you're going to get rid of the cancer, there's going to be certain cells around that cancer that are going to suffer a little bit. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying in this case, maybe it's a bad analogy, because we're not killing people to fix this, but we are going to kill some programs and we are going to kill some other things in order to make this whole system healthy. | ||
| Yeah, I had Rand Paul on last week and basically I asked him that question and he said, well, I'm not that concerned about the person who has the job unjustly at the government because I'm more concerned about the person who's having their wages garnished to keep that person in the job. | ||
| I thought that was the right answer. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| You know, and Elon and Vivek, I think they're very clear, along with the president, that the goal is not to even hurt the bureaucrats. | ||
| They want to be very generous with the bureaucrats. | ||
| However, you know, if you look at the federal level right now, I think we have about 3.1 million or so full-time employees. | ||
| We have another 4 million or so contractors. | ||
| We have another 1.7 million or so people paid for who work in the States, paid for by the federal government. | ||
| So just a massive number of people, and you probably don't need more than half of them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Or, I mean, just go to D.C. and there's these massive buildings and no one's there. | ||
| No one's there. | ||
| We're spending about $15 billion a year maintaining buildings and spending money on these buildings that no one's in. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| The numbers go on. | ||
| There's over 100 billion NGOs. | ||
| I'm obsessed with this stuff. | ||
| It's like we're paying for trans-activism in Niger. | ||
| It's just paying for climate activism in Brazil. | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So what are the obvious things that if you were advising these guys, you'd be like, go in and chop a land? | ||
| So the obvious things are that there's $3.8 trillion in entitlements, of which over $300 billion seems to be fraud. | ||
| And that's a hard data problem, by the way, but we can do it. | ||
| That's a pretty big number. | ||
| Get rid of the fraud. | ||
| That's obviously the right thing to do. | ||
| On top of that, there's over $100 billion to NGOs. | ||
| I'm so excited. | ||
| is finally open season on NGOs. | ||
| These are the most corrupt groups in America. | ||
| They're completely conquered by the radical left. | ||
| These are pro-Hamas people. | ||
| These are anti-market people. | ||
| These are like the worst people that we don't want in charge of our society. | ||
| And we're just like funneling money to them. | ||
| You see how the Obama administration sent money to these people? | ||
| Are you familiar with the mechanism they used to do it with the settlements? | ||
| So Kamala's brother-in-law, Tony West, he was helping run the DOJ under Obama. | ||
| He was helping run her campaign, too, by the way. | ||
| And this guy, they figured out that if you're going to sue from the DOJ, a big company, for doing something wrong, rather than the big company having to settle with the government or whatever else, you say, don't worry, you can pay half as much, just give it to one of these approved NGOs. | ||
| God, that's insane. | ||
| It's like the craziest mafia move ever. | ||
| I mean, it's genius from a corrupt angle, right? | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't ever do that because it's immoral, but if ethics is not your problem, it's genius. | ||
| It's genius, yeah. | ||
| You're filtering money to your far-left friends. | ||
| And these groups are like the left of the left, and they're the ones who are like funding activists to fund people to burn buildings in BLM. They're the ones... | ||
| Like, they're doing... | ||
| Oh, it's great that they're bringing more homeless to our cities in order to raise funding for progressive causes. | ||
| It's the whole thing. | ||
| I mean, literally, they have these NGOs sitting at the border telling people how to get to different cities. | ||
| Billions of dollars teaching people how to falsely claim asylum. | ||
| This is billions of dollars funded from the government to teach people how to falsely claim asylum. | ||
| I mean, this stuff is crazy. | ||
| So NGOs are going to take out. | ||
| Fraud we're going to take out. | ||
| The bureaucracy itself is not that expensive. | ||
| It's only about $400 billion, but you still probably want to cut 25 to 40% of it just because a lot of them are the ones doing the nonsense. | ||
| And then the real cost we're not talking about here, it's not just the money, it's the regulatory state. | ||
| There's a million commands at the federal level, and this stuff is slowing growth massively. | ||
| So there's probably hundreds of thousands of regulations to cut. | ||
| We're going to use Loper versus Bright, which is a Chevron deference thing. | ||
| And then, you know, a couple other rulings were to go in and try to turn off a bunch of this stuff they shouldn't be doing. | ||
| You saw there's a great thing. | ||
| It just came out of the Fifth Circuit. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it. | ||
| It would be last week when this was shown. | ||
| That basically says the SEC was not allowed to work with NASDAQ to force everyone to have to report on the gender diversity of their board. | ||
| Did you see this? | ||
| I didn't specifically, but thank God. | ||
| It's a great judge. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Judge Andy Oldham on the Fifth Circuit. | ||
| Amazing work. | ||
| Basically, like, the SEC clearly should not have been forcing every company. | ||
| It's a very funny thing, because, you know, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen were on the Facebook board, and so the lawyers had to meet with them, and they had to say, Peter, you count as a diversity candidate because you're gay. | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| He literally, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I had dinner with him that night, and he really was very conflicted about it, because they basically were like, use your gayness now, because that's how we can keep This is how we keep you on the board. | ||
| And Mark was saying, what about this Persian person? | ||
| They say, no, Afghani counts as diverse, but Persian doesn't. | ||
| And Mark just said online, he's like, if I say that I'm bisexual, is that okay? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But they're like, make you approve of it, Mark. | ||
| So he's like... | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| Well, that's why I made a joke about it a long time ago that Elon retweeted. | ||
| It's like, you're going to keep saying, okay, so we're going to let all these gay people through the border. | ||
| It's like, there's going to be a lot of guys giving first-time handjobs at the border. | ||
| How are you going to prove it? | ||
| It's so insane. | ||
| And if this had been a law that Congress had passed, I would have also made fun of it. | ||
| But at least, okay, fine, it's constitutional. | ||
| They're doing something stupid. | ||
| It wasn't even a law. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was just the bureaucrats I don't like the bureaucrats just making this shit up. | |
| So when you see something like what they tried to force Elon to give away his package, or what do you even call it? | ||
| His incentive package? | ||
| That Delaware judge is just a terrible activist, and that's going to screw Delaware. | ||
| It's really bad for America. | ||
| It already is screwing Delaware. | ||
| This is really bad for America, because this is a place that is one of our most valuable things, is that we're able to have a trusted rule of law that everyone wants to use. | ||
| I'm literally talking all the time to people all around the world, like, yeah, we're going to do this on Delaware law. | ||
| And now they're asking me, well, can we trust the judges, basically? | ||
| Can you just quickly explain the story for people that haven't fully got it, what they basically did? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Elon basically agreed to work at Tesla for nothing. | ||
| I think he gets like a dollar a year or whatever. | ||
| He's a shareholder, but he's not going to get paid anything more. | ||
| And usually when you're CEO, you're getting paid like a bunch per year. | ||
| You get to own more of the company each year. | ||
| He's like, no, don't give me anything at all. | ||
| I only want to get things based on milestones that are crazy hard. | ||
| So I might get nothing, but if I achieve these milestones, then I'll get a certain percent of the company after that. | ||
| And they were insane. | ||
| An insane milestone. | ||
| So it ended up being that they owed him over $50 billion for creating this insane $700 billion of value. | ||
| But if you look at the value at the time of the option, of the chance that he were to get that, it was worth like $1 to $2 billion, not $55. | ||
| So it was totally fair, totally reasonable thing to give a CEO. And everyone voted for it, and they approved it, and the vast majority approved it. | ||
| The judge then said, oh, well, the board are kind of insiders, and they're your friends, and so it shouldn't have been allowed, even though it was not approved, because they didn't know your friends are pushing it. | ||
| And nobody on the board was... | ||
| I'm upset, right? | ||
| No one's complaining. | ||
| Some random guy with 10 shares is basically suing. | ||
| It's a total activist. | ||
| So that was ridiculous. | ||
| But they finally said, this is ridiculous, but we're going to vote for it again after the fact that our shareholders agree. | ||
| And the vast majority of shareholders agreed when everyone was like, whoa, okay, they did it. | ||
| And then she came back and said, still not approving it, which is very clear. | ||
| And this is a person in Delaware, Biden's home state, a Democrat activist tied to Biden. | ||
| This is purely Democrats saying, we want to punish Elon. | ||
| We don't want him to get this money that he's owed for his work. | ||
| It's totally insane. | ||
| Are you hopeful that people will kind of do a little reset on their thinking about how money works and how they should maybe keep a little more of their money and not be always chasing after other people's money for their pet projects? | ||
| Do you think we're going through a little bit of a mind shift on that night? | ||
| I think there's a slight reset in our country that things got way too crazy and this woke... | ||
| Nonsense was kind of like this hysteria that needs to be pushed back on. | ||
| It's kind of like in the Salem witch trials, everyone was hanging witches, and maybe we shouldn't be hanging witches anymore. | ||
| There's a little bit of that kind of a reset, which is very healthy. | ||
| But I think, Dave, we can't rest on our laurels. | ||
| And here's what I'm really worried about. | ||
| Most of the universities in our country, most of the NGOs in our country, most of the government institutions in our country are still conquered by people with this woke mind virus. | ||
| They marched through these institutions, and they took them over. | ||
| And these people do not believe in America. | ||
| They do not believe in markets. | ||
| They do not believe in the freedom the Constitution gives the freedoms we have. | ||
| These people are against all those things. | ||
| So there's still, for example, in red states think they're doing well, in almost every red state today, If you're a teacher at a K-12 school and you want to get paid more, you have to go get a master's degree at woke you. | ||
| So the vast, vast majority of education departments everywhere are taken over. | ||
| So you literally have in the red state tax dollars from people in the red state paying for a university that has 100% woke people in their education department, which your teacher is forced to go to in the red state to get her master's degree in something education that really just tells her how much to hate America and how not to leave the market. | ||
| So then go back and indoctrinate the students. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is happening everywhere today. | ||
| So do I think that we're- I'm pretty sure Florida has done some things about this. | ||
| Florida fixed one or two of your universities. | ||
| You still have 12 more with woke education departments. | ||
| So you know what? | ||
| I love DeSantis and we're going in the right direction, but it's not even nearly enough. | ||
| There are woke education departments everywhere here. | ||
| We can go through like the 12 state schools. | ||
| You all tell me those education departments aren't woke? | ||
| No, no, but I know we've done more than- You've done more than anyone else, and I love Florida, and I love the people here, and we have to be like 10x as bold. | ||
| It is not enough. | ||
| And the fact that Florida is the best, but the fact that no one else is even doing it, it's crazy. | ||
| We are going to lose this culture war over the next 20 years. | ||
| It's like a cancer where you've beaten back some of the cancer, but it's still in a bunch of these cells, and then we're just going to ignore it, and it's just going to grow back and kill us. | ||
| We've got to expunge it. | ||
| So is that really what the fear is, is that we got sort of this temporary win, we're going to do some good things here, but you still, it's okay, you defund these NGOs, you get some of this stuff out, but it's still so deep in the system. | ||
| The way I've kind of been telling my audience, it's sort of like Hollywood's not done yet because there are still things in the can from a year ago that are going to come out in two years. | ||
| So you might think woke is over, but suddenly we're going to get hit with like a next wave of stuff that's just ready to be made. | ||
| These people have conquered your community, conquered your community. | ||
| They've conquered your universities. | ||
| They've conquered a lot of your government departments. | ||
| We need regulatory sunsets everywhere. | ||
| We need the dollars to be tied accountably when they're spent. | ||
| If you have a vocational school or community college, only fund it based on how the students do. | ||
| If you just fund it in general without accountability, then these woke cancers grow inside of it, which they are now. | ||
| We need a much more aggressive side of moderates and Republicans to just root out this stuff. | ||
| Otherwise, it's going to come back and we're going to be fighting it again and talking about it again. | ||
| I love coming and talking to you, but I don't want to talk about the same I want to crush it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| I will be glad. | ||
| If we do it, I will disappear. | ||
| That will be fine. | ||
| Well, you can have other stuff to talk about. | ||
| We need to crush this stuff. | ||
| And we're not being nearly aggressive enough. | ||
| I think Doge is going to be aggressive enough. | ||
| It's going to shock people. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I think Elon is aggressive. | ||
| I think most of these people are not being aggressive enough, especially in other states right now. | ||
| Well, do you think that basically if Elon and Vivek basically go in and they're like, all right, we can cut two trillion and we're going to fire all these people and all this stuff happens, and suddenly people are like, oh, it can be done, that that might spark the next round of suddenly people—because I don't think people think anything can be done, but once they see, oh, it's a month later and we haven't, you know, ships aren't, you know, planes aren't falling out of the sky and things aren't blowing up and we did get rid of a lot of this nonsense, that then it gives room, basically, for other people to do that. | ||
| The whole world, I was over in Europe recently as well, in London and other places, the whole world in terms of smart business people, people who are politically aware, even a lot of moderate political people, they are rooting for these guys to prove it. | ||
| Because it's not just the US that's trapped under this bureaucratic class. | ||
| This is a problem in the entire West that these bureaucracies have grown out of control and they're just dominating us and they want to rule even though they're not elected. | ||
| Can we push back against an elected bureaucracy? | ||
| I think it's possible, but yes. | ||
| I think it needs to be shown that it can be done. | ||
| I'd love to have a few more states be bolded. | ||
| There have been some great things that Sanis has done. | ||
| There's been some great things that we've done with Governor Kemp and Governor Abbott and others. | ||
| So we do have some strong governors, but we need to step it up like 10x with our legislators and really push these things. | ||
| Let's talk about University of Austin for a second, because about two months ago, I was doing some estate planning with my financial people, and they were asking us about what kind of college fund we want for the kids. | ||
| And I literally was like, well, I'm not doing a college fund. | ||
| I think maybe they could go to the University of Austin, but I'd rather figure out another mechanism to put money aside for them to do whatever it is they want to do in the future. | ||
| But you've had a lot to do with the University of Austin, so. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a co-founder of the University of Austin. | ||
| Our president's Pano Canalis has been running it. | ||
| My two other friends, we built it with, you know, Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson. | ||
| Both amazing people. | ||
| I think two of the most amazing people I know. | ||
| And, you know, we need more philosopher builders, frankly. | ||
| We need more people to turn out, I think, like Elon, or like some version of him where they both create things, but then they also are thoughtful about our society and want to fight for our society. | ||
| And by the way, I say to turn out like Elon, I don't mean they have to agree with me on everything, but I want people who think for themselves. | ||
| I want people who understand the great conversations, great debates of the last thousand years and have that grounding kind of in philosophy and history and are really able to be part of that conversation and push our civilization forward. | ||
| And, you know, it's really important That adults, when they go to colleges right now, you basically learn to shut up, to virtue signal, stop causing problems, why are you speaking out? | ||
| Like, they would bring me at Stanford to the dean and say, like, oh, you're speaking out again, and it's really, like, offending people, and I really just need you to stop doing that. | ||
| As if you're a Catholic school or something. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| What is this place? | ||
| There's things going on in my dorm that I think are ridiculous. | ||
| I'm going to call them out. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You're just discouraged that you're a bad person for doing that. | ||
| That's the opposite. | ||
| We should be training courage. | ||
| We should be teaching people how to debate, and everyone should have to debate and defend their ideas. | ||
| I think our civilization right now is pushing our smartest people to be these little NPCs who go along. | ||
| And I think if you can have even a very small number of examples of really great people who are coming out of the place, even a few hundred each year you can get up to, that's going to completely affect the culture because these guys are obviously going to be the people you want running things and that's going to force other schools to have to be more like us. | ||
| What's been the biggest challenge trying to put this together? | ||
| Because if you would have asked anyone that sort of wasn't woke four years ago, like, oh, we should build colleges or places of higher education, like basically everyone would have said yes, but nobody was doing it. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| No one wants to do the work, man. | ||
| It's thousands of pages of regulation. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| There's lots of cartels trying to block you from doing it. | ||
| You're not allowed to be officially accredited until after you've graduated your first class. | ||
| So every troll online is like, oh, ha-ha, is that the unaccredited university? | ||
| Yeah, you're not allowed to be accredited until you graduate your first class. | ||
| You guys just did graduate your first class, right? | ||
| No, we just admitted our first class. | ||
| You just admitted your first class. | ||
| So we're called university, we're allowed to operate as a university, but you don't get official accreditation until you graduate the first class. | ||
| Do you think that even... | ||
| I don't think it should matter. | ||
| It does matter to some people because they want to go to law school or they want to go get a PhD. | ||
| So we have to make sure we get the accreditation so they can count the degree because then the other schools all want to keep you out if you haven't gone to accredited university or something. | ||
| Unless you were able to really unfurl the entire system. | ||
| Which at some point you could do, but our goal is to compete against Harvard, Yale, Stanford on equal terms and actually be better than them. | ||
| There's all these fun things we're going to be able to launch. | ||
| Imagine a journalism school where the journalists aren't taught to hate America by default. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By the way, they're all crazy activists, right? | |
| If you're in journalism school and you love America, I think you're washed out these days. | ||
| Imagine education school that believes in accountability and measuring outcomes as opposed to just going along with the teachers' union, right? | ||
| Literally, there's none of them right now. | ||
| Tell me one education school that loves markets and that loves measuring outcomes and that can measure school choice appropriately. | ||
| There's literally nothing in America. | ||
| Imagine a business school that, instead of doing corporate drones, is teaching you with the top people from the innovation world. | ||
| There's just so much stuff we can build here that's really fun. | ||
| How much of the educational stuff should we blame on Harvard specifically? | ||
| Because I've been around a lot of powerful people and important conversations, and years ago, everyone was constantly like, what the hell is going on at Harvard? | ||
| And I always thought it was odd. | ||
| I was like, I don't really care what's going on at Harvard. | ||
| And in some sense, like, I don't care. | ||
| I didn't go to Harvard. | ||
| Like, I know it's an important place. | ||
| But somehow Harvard became like the epicenter of all of the lunacy. | ||
| Well, this is the power law thing. | ||
| It's like with PayPal, where the top people came from one place. | ||
| Harvard has been the winner of the power law the last 50 years overall. | ||
| I think the majority of top leaders, more from Harvard than anywhere else, then shortly below that is places like Stanford and Penn and Yale and others like that. | ||
| But I think all of them pretty equally have been conquered. | ||
| I think some are even worse conquered. | ||
| I think Columbia, for example, is much worse than these places and has been very little backbone in these people because they're very afraid. | ||
| But no, I think Harvard as the leader... | ||
| Does take a lot of the brunt and should get a lot of the blame for allowing radicals to conquer and to break its campus. | ||
| How different do you think the world's going to be in, say, five or ten years? | ||
| Well, the biggest things that are changing over the next five or ten years is probably back in more of these other areas where, you know, I think productivity's actually going to start to go up a lot over the next ten years. | ||
| You're actually finally seeing AI and tech get applied in ways that are adding productivity. | ||
| And so I'd be very shocked if in five or ten years you don't see that pick up in the statistics. | ||
| So, I mean, I think Elon and Vivek are going to be successful. | ||
| I think we're going to cut back. | ||
| I don't know if we're going to cut back two trillion here, but we're going to cut back a lot. | ||
| We're going to fix a lot and make it more efficient and get rid of law regulation. | ||
| I love Mark Rowan and Apollo's models on this. | ||
| I think we're going to grow a lot. | ||
| And then I think this productivity thing is going to kick in and it's going to grow even more than it would have. | ||
| And we're going to be in an amazing, amazing place. | ||
| And whenever a country is doing too well, it creates its own problems. | ||
| So what will the problems be? | ||
| I think if we fight this stuff successfully, hopefully the problems will be something very different than the problems that we were facing 10 years ago. | ||
| I don't think we're ever going to be in a place without problems, but I do think we're going to be an area where, thanks to AI, it's very clear how you address and how you personalize solutions for everyone that I think would be a lot better place. | ||
| Well, are you afraid that the problems will be something like, oh, Skynet turned on and now we're just kind of slaves to this stuff? | ||
| I mean, I think that's a genuine, real issue to think about, right? | ||
| It's very important that we design AI in a way where we do pursue truth and we do make things very transparent. | ||
| I mean, it's fascinating, right? | ||
| Because you do want AI to help guide a lot more of the things that we do to make them more efficient, whether it's in healthcare we're talking about or whether it's in how we give a permit or other government work. | ||
| But you definitely want competing AI systems, and you definitely want lots of them. | ||
| You want, I think, open source. | ||
| This is one area where I think Zuck is doing the right thing. | ||
| I don't know if it's for the right reasons, but he's doing the right thing for sure, where you do want very powerful open source AI as one of the possible solutions. | ||
| And, you know, that way you don't get this authoritarian thing at the top that's just controlling everyone as easily. | ||
| How worried would you be that we're basically just going to, like, tech ourselves out of humanity? | ||
| Like, there will be just nothing for us to do. | ||
| Or it's not exactly what it kind of turns on, but they're just, you know, we won't need workers anymore. | ||
| Like, people literally will just not know what to do with themselves. | ||
| Or is that, do you think that's, like, what the next evolution of humanity is sort of supposed to be? | ||
| I think there's dignity in work, and I think it's good for us to have uses. | ||
| I guess I... | ||
| I have more confidence in humanity, I guess, than that. | ||
| I think it's going to take a long, long time, if ever, for AI to get to the point where it could do everything that we could do. | ||
| But what if it was doing 30%? | ||
| I mean, that's enough, probably, to get a huge amount of people. | ||
| Yeah, but there's five million unfilled vocational jobs right now, and AI's going to train people. | ||
| So the thing is, AI could be used to make you more productive, to help you do things. | ||
| And I think at a very high level, when we work, we're repairing the world in some way. | ||
| I mean, it sounds a little bit too fluffy, but it's like this Jewish idea of two code and one, which I think is actually very beautiful, which is that six days a week, you're supposed to repair the world in some way with your work, and then seventh day, you pretend your job is done, you pretend you're in heaven, and that's the Sabbath. | ||
| And so there's six days a week, The work is that you're repairing things in some way. | ||
| You're helping people in some way. | ||
| So the question you're really asking is, is there going to be a point where there's no way to help each other, where there's no way to repair the world, where there's no way to do anything good? | ||
| And I think the universe has a lot more steps than we realize and a lot more depth than we realize. | ||
| And there's going to be ways for people to do good things and help each other in the world. | ||
| And I think AI is going to help us do that more. | ||
| Have you ever been more hopeful than you are right now? | ||
| I mean, I can kind of see it in you. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are feeling that right now, that we got pretty damn close to what could have been the end. | ||
| I was really, my wife was telling me, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. | ||
| The more crass way of saying it, which I'm sure I'm supposed to say on this show, is I was talking to Jay Cal and he said that Sox was like in his seventh week of an orgasm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can say it on this show. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| The seven-week orgasm. | ||
| I'm sure AI is working on that too, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But no, it's a huge weight that's lifted. | ||
| It was terrifying. | ||
| I mean, I think Elon commissioned the thing with the fork in the road you could show, because this really was a fork in our civilization. | ||
| I was proud to put the first money in his pack and it helped... | ||
| I love supporting what he did. | ||
| I thought it was just so important. | ||
| And a lot of other friends stepped up and did it as well because we really did believe this was key for our civilization. | ||
| So listen, are things going to be perfect? | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| But it's definitely the direction that is sustainable and that can fix things and can help us thrive. | ||
| What else is on your mind that maybe we didn't get to here? | ||
| I feel like there's got to be some other things bouncing around in there. | ||
| You know, it's a scary world out there. | ||
| I think I work a lot in defense, and I'm really glad that Israel is able to destroy a lot of Syria's army. | ||
| But these Islamists are scary people. | ||
| It's not clear what they're going to do next. | ||
| We've got to make sure we defend the King of Jordan, because if these Islamists go after him, I think that's going to break things in that part of the world. | ||
| Turkey really scares me. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Turkey is like there was this kind of sort of fake coup that Erdogan did like eight years ago. | ||
| Turkey was set up basically as the only non-Islamic Islamic country and the army was supposed to protect against crazy Islamists and he knew that and so he triggered something to kill and arrest tens of thousands of people and kind of got rid of the anti-Islamic stuff that had been put in for a hundred years and now he's running this and he has nuclear weapons and he's in NATO and I think there's some really scary next steps that we really got to make sure this administration cracks down on them. | ||
| I think we should be giving the Kurds I mean, it's tough because I am very much on the side of America not going on adventures, but at the same time, I'm also on the side of stability and of people not being slaughtered and of making sure these things don't spread in a way where there's nukes in the hands of crazy people that can hurt us. | ||
| Do you think a lot of that can be solved by technology? | ||
| I mean, just that wars are going to look very, very different, say, 10 years from now than even what they look like right now. | ||
| This is a big thing. | ||
| So I think we wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. | ||
| I think we had stupid adventures. | ||
| I mean, I was very for, obviously, our technology helped fight and kill thousands of terrorists. | ||
| I was very for eliminating the bad guys. | ||
| I was very against putting trillions of dollars into these areas to try to rebuild a broken civilization, which is not our job to do. | ||
| We should have been building our civilization. | ||
| So I'm very pro-America. | ||
| But part of being pro-America is fighting these wars without sacrificing American lives and of keeping people very scared of us that we don't have to fight and they do what they're supposed to do. | ||
| So yes, we have a bunch of companies right now that are kind of replacing the way the primes work. | ||
| And so, for example, in the water, you want to have... | ||
| Thousands or tens of thousands of smart and able, autonomous, weaponized vessels of different sorts that coordinate together, right? | ||
| That's what you want. | ||
| And then you want, on the land, you know, we sent 31 tanks to Ukraine, and 20 of them were destroyed. | ||
| For the same cost, or even less cost, you could have sent, like, 10,000 tiny little vehicles that are smart, that have weapons on the fight, that are coordinated. | ||
| There's all these new ways you use. | ||
| You use mass production with advanced manufacturing. | ||
| to use AI and you don't put American lives at risk and you for much cheaper, you deter the bad guys. | ||
| And the other one is really cool. | ||
| Just mentioned. | ||
| So we have all the enemy also has like, you see China where they fly those hundreds of thousands of drones. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So we have something called EPRS, which is now deployed, which is a, it's like a force field, but it's a burst of microwave radiation in a cone and we could turn off hundreds of the drones per shot miles away. | ||
| So there's so that seems like sort of the next version of the iron dome or something in some sense. | ||
| It's, It's a little bit like Star Trek-ish, but you need these sorts of things to fight back. | ||
| Rather than waste million-dollar, hundred-thousand-dollar missiles to shoot down one of these drones when there's so many of them, what you need is you need electronic warfare. | ||
| So there's all sorts of new things there we're doing that are really cool. | ||
| Taking the best of Silicon Valley, combining it with the best. | ||
| And by the way, who doesn't want a really great shield? | ||
| This is a great thing for civilization, that it's easier to build shields now. | ||
| So there's things like this we need to be doing. | ||
| Alright, one last one for you. | ||
| So for everyone watching this that has some idea, but they don't know what to do, they don't know where to turn, they don't know who to call, they don't know where to start, all of this stuff. | ||
| What do you think is like, what's the biggest or the most precious kernel you could give them on how to build something properly? | ||
| If they've just got the idea. | ||
| They're watching this and they've got the idea. | ||
| So what you need to do if you have an idea and you're passionate about it is there's two things. | ||
| First of all, Peter Tittle always used to tell me this. | ||
| Imagine there's five people with the same idea, four of them are afraid and don't tell anyone, and one of them talks to a bunch of people and keeps telling all of them and getting feedback and getting feedback and making their idea better. | ||
| Who's gonna win? | ||
| Not the people who are afraid to tell you this. | ||
| So first of all, Your idea is not worth that much. | ||
| Your intelligence, your brain, your execution is worth a lot. | ||
| Make your idea better by sharing and innovating. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| And then two, it's impossible to create a really valuable company without a really great technology culture. | ||
| So if you're not a technologist, that's a high bar, but you're going to have to find someone who is and understands it. | ||
| If you are, you're going to have to learn and study. | ||
| Try to expose yourself. | ||
| I was very lucky to work hard at Stanford to get to PayPal. | ||
| They rejected me the first time. | ||
| They let me in the second time. | ||
| Seeing how a great technology culture works, learning from all those things, it's very hard just to read about it. | ||
| You really want to be part of a great technology culture, help build it up, and that experience then will help you build your own, is my opinion. | ||
| You don't have to say, the best joy that I've gotten out of my entire career is that I get to talk to people who know more about certain things than me, And then I've been able to integrate some of that into my life. | ||
| And what you just explained right there is exactly what I did with Locals. | ||
| I had an idea, but I knew other people had a similar idea, but I had a talk show. | ||
| I started talking about it. | ||
| My brother-in-law was a tech guy. | ||
| You know him. | ||
| We connected. | ||
| And then we started just building things and talking to people. | ||
| And then next thing you know, it all worked. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys crushed it. | |
| So you have a small sense of what you're talking about. | ||
| It's been an absolute pleasure, my friend. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| If you're looking for an unfiltered lens into the world of tomorrow, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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