#151 Joe Lonsdale - The AI-Driven EMP Weapon Built to Destroy New Jersey Drone Swarms

Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor known for advancing defense technologies and national security innovations. As a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, he helped develop powerful data platforms to address global threats. Through his venture firm, 8VC, he has supported startups in AI, cybersecurity and battlefield intelligence, driving innovation at the intersection of technology and defense. Lonsdale is a leading advocate for emerging military technologies, particularly directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and microwave systems, which he sees as vital for missile defense and counter-drone operations. Committed to fostering public-private partnerships, he works to ensure the U. S. remains at the forefront of defense innovation while maintaining ethical oversight. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://patreon.com/vigilanceelite https://shawnryanshow.com/newsletter https://shawnryanshow.com/collections/shop Joe Lonsdale Links: X - https://x.com/jtlonsdale Website - blog.joelonsdale.com YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Joe_Lonsdale Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joe-lonsdale-american-optimist/id1573141757 Firm - 8vc.com Policy Group - ciceroinstitute.org University of Austin - uaustin.org Sesh - https://seshproducts.com/shawnryan Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Thanks, Sean. Glad to be here.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I am super excited to talk to you. I've been following what you've been doing in a lot of your different companies for a while now and I know you're a busy guy and I just want to say it's an honor to have you here. You're involved in so much with technology and also I love what you're doing with University of Austin. I'd love to hit on that, but I really appreciate you coming and I've been looking forward to diving into this for a long time.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  I'm excited to be here. It's an honor to be on the show.

• 1:39Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, thank you. But everybody starts off with an introduction and we could go on for probably an hour here, but I tried to summarize it up here.

• 1:51Shawn Ryan?

  Joe Lonsdale, you're a real titan of industry and innovation, a man whose journey from Silicon Valley to the halls of policymaking reads like a modern day epic. You're a Stanford educated visionary who co-founded Palantir Technologies, a company that's become synonymous with big data and analytics, helping governments and businesses worldwide to make smarter, more informed decisions. After Palantir, you ventured into the world of finance and founded Adipar, revolutionizing how wealth management works, making it transparent and data-driven. Of the nine US defense unicorns, billion-dollar companies, you founded three and were one of the earliest investors in another three.

• 2:33Shawn Ryan?

  You're deeply invested in education reform. You co-founded Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies. Your influence extends into policy with your involvement in 8VC, a venture capital firm that doesn't just fund startups, it pushes for policies that encourage innovation. You've been an advisor to leading political figures, advocating for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges. You shape the ideas of the future with your op-eds and articles that often delve into intersection of tech, policy, and culture.

• 3:15Shawn Ryan?

  You're a father of five kids, you just had your first son, and you've been married for eight years?

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Yep, that's right.

• 3:23Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations on your son.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Thank you, Sean. He's 92nd percentile, he's a big little baby.

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, nice, healthy boy, huh? Well, Joe, I want to do a, I want to do a life story on you, starting from childhood and get into all of your different companies and involvement with different things that you're in, but, but it just so happens that, you know, I've been super interested in your company, Eperus, and I've had several conversations with your business partner, Grant Forstanding, and, and love him, amazing guy, but we got a situation going on, literally, right now

• 4:08Shawn Ryan?

  in New Jersey, with all these, with all these drones, and nobody seems to know what it is, so I just want to kind of start the interview right there. What? What the hell do you think these drones are?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  This is funny. I said, we're gonna be at the Army Navy game, so I'm bummed that I don't I'm gonna find out tomorrow probably from all these guys, you know, because I'm sure I'm sure they know. I'm sure they know, but I haven't texted them and asked, you know, I mean, if it's not ours, then it's really incompetent, right?

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  If this is not ours, if this is ours, then it's also kind of weird, like, why are we doing this and freaking people out? But if it's not ours, what the heck, man?

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, it was like two years ago, we're freaking out about a spy balloon traversing the United States from Washington all the way down to South Carolina.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  I got a good answer on that, though. I'm sure, I don't know, I'm sure it's public by now, but I think because of the fact that we let it stay up, we were able to hack into it, trace back where the data was going, and like, find out a lot about the Chinese. And so it turned out, in that case, it made sense. And it turned out that Xi Jinping didn't even know his underlings had put this spy balloon up and were doing it, and it was actually bad for China, because we used it to hack in. So I think in that case, there's like a competent answer, which makes you feel good that there's like not told incompetent people, like, they met with Biden, they said what they're gonna do, he agreed to let them do it, and that was fine. So hopefully, there's a competent answer for these drones, but it's a weird, it's a weird thing, man.

• 5:27Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think it's ours?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  I assume it's ours, because if it's not, that's insane.

• 5:33Shawn Ryan?

  Why would they be do, why would they fly it, why wouldn't they fly this over, like, Area 51, or, or some testing grounds?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  You know what I found out about government, man, is that there are some really great people, there are some amazing special forces guys, every once in a while on the DOD, you'll have this, like, genius person in the strategy group, and then the vast majority of them are incompetent. And so, so, so it's just hard for me to say, but I'm, I'm hoping they're ours, because if they're not ours, that's actually a little bit scary, and it's really incompetent that we're not doing something.

• 6:02Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this might be a distraction?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  From, from something going on in the Middle East, or something going on?

• 6:07Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, maybe some, maybe some... Some bad juju's going on somewhere else and they're just throwing these things up to distract everybody.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  If there was another story, then maybe, but I don't, I don't know. That's, that's an interesting question. We're gonna find out really soon. I'm curious. I don't, I don't wanna make a bunch of stupid guesses and I come out to be an idiot. Cause it's, it's hard for me to know. I, I actually don't know the answer.

• 6:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, drone warfare is becoming obviously very prevalent.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Absolutely critical. This is the future of warfare is like lots and lots of manufactured, smart, weaponized, autonomous drones. Whether they're flying, whether they're on the water, whether they're under the water, whether they're on the land. Like that, that is the future of warfare as far as I'm concerned.

• 6:45Shawn Ryan?

  So, you know, people, one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is obviously I'm, I'm just extremely curious of what your thoughts are. But another reason is, I mean, you know, I've been reading reports on CNN. People are posting the, the neighborhood watch groups and the Facebook groups and stuff and people are, they're freaking out. And what I find probably isn't a coincidence, uh, because I believe in a higher power. But you have, you founded Epirus.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:19Shawn Ryan?

  And Epirus is a directed energy, basically a directed EMP weapon. And it is, I mean, it's, it seems to me from the reading I've done on it, it's, it's, it's defense against drones.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  E- E- Epirus is a really important company and I'm, I'm proud to be a co-founder there with it. It's not just, I can't take credit for it by myself. There's a few other people who are critical. Nathan Mintz, Bill Maher, you know, the other guys, Grant stepped in and was played a key role. You know, uh, you, the background on that, by the way, is, you know, I'd gotten out of defense for a few years. Cause after Palantir, it's just not, it's like hard. You have to go talk to senators, you have to go to the DOD. It's like, this is stressful stuff. I built companies elsewhere, like you mentioned. And, but then, you know, we saw in the early 2010s, we saw a lot of our smartest friends in China were being forced to have their engineers work on military projects. And we said, wait a second, this is not good. And then we saw our defense primes. You know, we're not able to attract the best talent at all. So we had in America, these defense primes had all consolidated in the 90s and obviously Palantir had to compete

• 8:16Speaker 03

  against them in software side and crushed them. But their hardware side was also going downhill, was also getting worse. And this is a big problem that China's getting better, it's getting worse here. And then it turned out that Xi Jinping guy is clearly a commie who's going to try to confront us, he's going to be a serious adversary. And that got scary. And then a bunch of my friends, three of the best guys from Palantir with Palmer Lucky started the Andro. And so we backed that early and basically convinced me, you know, at the time, looking at all these things and looking at Andro, we better get back involved in defense. So we said, we're back involved in defense, what are we going to do? We need to get more of our best and brightest from the tech world, which I'm lucky to come from and have access to, to work on these problems. And we mapped out about 20 different areas. And we decided to start Epirus first and decided to build that because

• 8:57Speaker 03

  exactly the future of warfare seemed very clearly to be heading towards drone warfare. And it's just not sustainable to fire missiles at drones, right? You're spending a million dollars, a hundred thousand dollars to shoot down something that costs a lot less than that. So you need a one to many effect. You need to be able to shoot cones of energy. And the thing we, the thing we realized, really with the help of some really smart people like Beau and Nathan, is that it turns out that the, that the chips in Silicon Valley had gone to be so powerful and so fast that you can, they can help you control power on very small time scales and get the power to hit the emitter and then fire way farther than anything anyone else was doing. And so the emitter was called gallium nitride. It's just a super efficient way of shooting. Gallium nitride? Gallium nitride. It's a GaN, they call them. G A N is the element, you know, code.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  The gallium nitride, these are super efficient emitters. And these exist in other places too. It's a, it's a big breakthrough that was really started to be used in the last kind of like 10, 15 years in a bunch of different contexts. But it turns out if you use the AI chips, get the power to hit the gallium nitride, you're taking a bunch of power and you're kind of condensing it into like a 10 thousandths of a second or even less of a thing. And so you have this burst, it's a super fast burst. And the burst is intense enough because it's so condensed that when it hits the drone, when it hits the electronics, it fries them, you know, destroys them. And then there's all sorts of things you do to kind of tune the burst and figure out how to actually do it most efficiently and effectively to fry these things as well. And you know, we're now, I'm not supposed to say quite how far away, but you're shooting things down from miles away, you're shooting. Miles away? And it's not just, it's not just the, it's not just like the little tiny like, you know.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  You know, DGI drones, or whatever they're called. It's like, you know, these are the big things that Iran's making for Russia as well. They can take down quite a far distance away. And what's really cool is you're not just doing it, so you're doing it for bases, you're doing it for forward attacks. But you can like put these things, you put smaller versions in the cones. So for example, you know, Androl's Roadrunner, you've seen that, right? The thing that takes off and lands again.

• 10:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  You can put it in one of those missiles. And you can, and that one's not gonna work that as far, because it's a smaller form factor. But that missile can get up and get pretty close to the bad guy drones, fire a bunch of them, and then come back and land. And so there's things like this that you do now, too.

• 11:01Shawn Ryan?

  So how many, how many drones could like, one of these? What do you call the actual weapon? Is it Leonidas?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Leonidas is the first version of the product that's being forward deployed with CENTCOM. And it's just going out actually in the next month, which is great. You know, the tests have shown you could do about 100 drones at a time in certain contests.

• 11:20Shawn Ryan?

  100 drones at a time?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I mean, if they're together and, you know, flying together. And then the thing moves. So you fire, fire, fire. What's great, so you know why it's called Epirus? So the Epirus was the bow of Theseus. Theseus was the guy who started Athens in legend, right? And in legend, his bow had infinite arrows. And so that's the point here, is you're firing electronic power. So you effectively have infinite arrows. So this thing can fire thousands of times. And each shot costs almost nothing.

• 11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. What's, I'm just, so that gives us hope. So basically, all these drones in New Jersey, if we wanted to, they could, you know, deploy a Leonidas and...

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Take it down that way. And if they want to, they could shoot down right now with any number of different types of missiles.

• 12:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  I'm sure.

• 12:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  But this, this, exactly. I mean, I think there's probably rules from the FAA about, there's always regulators, about what you could do on shore, and where you could do it, and how you could do it. But, I mean, eventually you'll probably have things like Leonidas protecting stadiums, protecting airports. That was another reason we started up, by the way, is, you know, when we were building Palantir, one of the big focuses was stopping terror attacks. And, you know, we're working and partnering to stop terror attacks, you know, with the United States Intelligence Community, which I think we're very helpful in doing. And so I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a sick thing, but like, what's the bad guy gonna do? You kind of have to put yourself in the bad guy's shoes and figure it out. And one of the things the bad guy could do, which would be horrible, and I shouldn't talk about it too much, is you can attack a stadium, right? You can get lots of little drones, you could put little explosives and cameras on them. It'd be really scary.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  And so I think our stadiums are gonna need to be defended by things like this.

• 12:48Shawn Ryan?

  Well, yep, I mean, would...

• 12:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, we just, I had a former CIA targeter in here just a couple of days ago. We just released the interview now, and actually yesterday. And she's talking about, you know, there are at least 1,000 very well-trained terrorists within our borders right now.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it pisses me off, man. It's crazy. There's some really amazing judges I know who are, one of them actually was just involved in this, oh, it doesn't matter, really great decision against the SEC last week. But they would go down to the border and they assign them to like help because they're overloaded, right, with the cases? And some of the Biden administration judges were letting in people on the watch lists. And they're like, what are you doing? You can't let them in. He said, no, we're instructed to let in everyone. And I, it's like, I still say it, I don't even believe it, but this is what I'm told by multiple people. There's been, I think Chip Roy, the congressman, wrote about it as well. Isn't that crazy? They're like, they're letting in these people into our country. What are they doing?

• 13:44Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think they're doing?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I think it's like this weird ideology where they just, I mean, A, they're probably like trying to spend a lot of money while bringing down inflation by bringing in more people. And B, it's some weird, it's just some weird open border ideology. I don't, I don't understand it. But the fact that you'd let people in, even on watch lists, I guess they think it's not actually dangerous. I don't know. It's, it's, it's a, I think these people don't think in terms of, of like, like you and I, in terms of there's bad guys and there's good guys and we gotta keep people safe and we have this like adversarial relationship with some other countries. It's almost like they're just like extremely naive people who live in a different type of world than we do. I don't know. It's weird stuff, man.

• 14:23Shawn Ryan?

  Do, do you think that they want something to happen for a particular reason?

• 14:27Speaker 03

  (sighs)

• 14:29Shawn Ryan?

  To start a war?

• 14:31Speaker 03

  It's possible.

• 14:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, if they come in-

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, yeah, it's possible.

• 14:35Shawn Ryan?

  And, and do another terrorist attack, then we go right back to war. That spends up the military industrial complex.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  There could be someone, there could be someone who's that sick in the military industrial complex. I mean, I'm, I, I fall in between these factions because on one hand, I think we wasted trillions of dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq and probably shouldn't have been there in the way we were. I mean, I obviously think we had to do something after the 9/11 attack, but we probably shouldn't have gone and stayed there and spent all the money and all the lives, right? But the same, so, so, but it's the same time, we do need to stop the bad guys from, from causing problems. But yeah, I think there are some pretty sick people who are, who are much, much more aggressive about just like always being at war, which is terrible.

• 15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, that's one of the things, that's one of the things I love about what you're doing is, is, you know, with, with the traditional military industrial complex companies, you know, we're, we're shooting down, we're shooting down $500 drones with million dollar missiles.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  It's crazy, man. It's not, it's not sustainable.

• 15:32Shawn Ryan?

  With a company like what you have, Eperus, I mean, it's, it's not that way. It's an energy. It's an energy weapon.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  This is, this is the goal, is we're not cost plus people. I think there's this really sick disease of people that their whole incentive is cost plus. They just want to use more of their stuff and sell more of their stuff. And their incentives is, is, are, are pretty screwed up. I think, I think, I think the better way to do it is, uh, exactly. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta make things, you gotta make things much, much, much cheaper and better. And then change the incentives around, have it be more like a software thing, not like a, you know, not like a thing where you're just selling as many as possible at 6%.

• 16:07Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you gotta, that brings up a whole nother topic. I mean, what about your personal security? I'm genuinely curious. I mean, you've gotta be pissing off, you know, Lockheed.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  For those guys, that's funny. I always, I thought you meant like killing all the terrorists, but yeah, that's interesting. I'm, I'm, I mean, I listen, I think the guy who runs Lockheed, Jim, he, he ran American Tower. He's a great businessman. He's like, he's not from the military industrial complex himself. He's been brought in to figure it out and fix some things. Cause there's some things that are broken there. He seems like an honorable guy to me. I don't think those kind of guys are, are, and you know, and, and then the other thing, let's, let's be honest. I'm like, I'm, I'm a step down from like, Peter Thiel and, and Al, and Al Karp and Fain. They're both 15 years older than me. They're both important mentors to me. They're my co-founders. I think, I think they're the ones who, who are, who have more security than me. I, we have my security guy outside. I'm not that worried though.

• 16:58Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. There's a lot of money at stake here for those companies, Raytheon, Lockheed, you know, Northrop Grumman.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  It's, it's interesting though. I think, I think, I think Sean, there's not actually, in this case, I think it's not the right way to think about it because it's not like there's like some evil genius behind Raytheon or something, right? Raytheon is like a conglomeration of all of this stuff that merged together in the nineties. There were some great families, great people, maybe in the 1940s, 50s, 60s who created some of this stuff. And back then, by the way, it was legit. It was the best stuff in the world. And so you have this conglomeration and then you saw all these bureaucrats and all these committees. And the problem with the military industrial people is they become more like the broken bureaucracy in government. So, and, and these bureaucrats. They're mostly cowards, right? They're mostly like people who just like automatically wanna like do more, fill out more forms. They wanna, they wanna, they wanna like go along with whatever's safe.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  So I think part of the problem with these companies is the fact that they're actually not bold and they're not, they're not thoughtful and they're not, they're not, they're not courageous. And so, so, so I, I, I'm not really afraid of the bureaucrats. I'm kind of just like disgusted by them. Does that, does that make sense?

• 18:04Shawn Ryan?

  It does make sense. It does make sense. All right, let's, let's break from warfare for a second and let's rewind, let's go back to your life story. Let's, where did you grow up?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Grew up in Fremont, California, the East Bay, near Silicon Valley.

• 18:17Shawn Ryan?

  Brothers, sisters?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I'm the oldest of three boys. I have two amazing younger brothers. I was with one of them yesterday in Miami and they, they both live in Austin, although one of them spends a lot of time in Asia.

• 18:28Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. What did you like, I mean, what did you grow up doing? What were your hobbies?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Uh, a lot of sports, a lot of video games.

• 18:36Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of sports?

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Uh, I was a baseball player, I was a swimmer, got the, got the gold medal in breaststroke for the East Baseball League.

• 18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  My family's very competitive. We're very competitive, whether it's sports, whether it's games, we were, each of my brothers and I were state chess champions. My dad was the top chess coach. We thought it was because we were smart. After we left my elementary school, he kept coaching, they kept winning the state every year for 20 years.

• 18:57Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  My dad, my dad was super competitive.

• 18:59Shawn Ryan?

  You still play chess?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  For fun, yeah. You know, when you're playing, at that age, when we were playing seriously competitively, it wasn't about being smart, it was about my dad training us and we had to do it 30 hours a week if we wanted to stay on top. So it was, it was a very serious commitment from the age of like six to 12 or so.

• 19:14Shawn Ryan?

  Who's the best chess player in the family?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  I think I am. Don't ask my brother chess.

• 19:20Shawn Ryan?

  Are you teaching your kids chess?

• 19:23Speaker 03

  We're starting to. It's actually really funny. So my oldest kids are, are daughters, you know, I have five kids, so my daughters are, the older ones are four, six and seven and a half. And, and, and they, they do little tactics with me and stuff, but I came in the other day when I was trying to, trying to teach them and, and they said, daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore, they're getting married. I'm like, I'm working on it.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Nice, nice. What kind of games were you been to? Uh, like every Nintendo game. We played baseball a lot as a pitcher, so uh, just all. We, we, we played a lot of, we played a lot of video games. So the parenting is bad for kids, but I, I thought it was pretty fun. How old are you? Forty-two. Forty-two, okay, so same, same age. So yeah, you grew up with Nintendo. Nintendo, Super Nintendo. Right on. Yeah, all that kinda stuff. Right on. Well, what got you, what got you so interested in tech? Well, you know, I was lucky to grow up in Silicon Valley. I had a, obviously I was nerdy myself, but I had even nerdier friends who were teaching me stuff and, you know? I had, I had a small group of friends who were way ahead in math and stuff and, you know, programming and math have a lot in common.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  So I got these guys teaching me how to program at nine, 10, 11 years old, which is normal nowadays, but back then that was, that was pretty unusual. And, you know, one of the friends, his dad was at Intel and they got these, they called the Pentium chips, remember back in the nineties? And they'd get them and we'd do this rig where you'd like figure out how to over, overclock them and, you know, use like liquid nitrogen or whatever to cool it off. And it's just this silly stuff and it makes the quake two game work a little better. But it's just, just, just like kinda was in that whole scene and a lot of my friends' older brothers and people were building companies. So I was really lucky to be exposed to this stuff. Very interesting. Yeah. Where did you go after high school? So I went to, I went to Stanford Computer Science, which is right in the area. It's in the Bay Area as well.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  And uh, it's actually funny. My mom made me apply last minute to Stanford. I was always gonna go to Caltech or MIT. And actually I went back and read it. It was the most obnoxious application thing ever, cause I was so eager to, for them to think I was so great. That I just, it's just like, when you read it, you're like, you're like, screw this kid. Like we shouldn't let him in anywhere. Cause he's just like, he thinks he's the coolest guy ever. He was terrible. I was, I was seventeen and I was like, pretty, you know, pretty overconfident. Uh, but, but uh, I spent Stanford one because I did it last minute and didn't, it didn't sound quite as arrogant. I think they let me in. So Stanford, you started interning at PayPal, learning from? Yeah, no, so, so, so all, so all the really smart. And like interesting programmers, I met a bunch of them who were a little older than me. I was lucky to be a little bit ahead in programming already because before I got there.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  So I got to know some of the older kids and some of the really bright ones were going to work at PayPal. And were interning at PayPal, et cetera. And so I applied my freshman year. I thought, this is really cool. I want to go work with these people. And I'd known who Peter Thiel was. He founded the Stanford Review, which I was working with and I became a big editor of. And they actually rejected me in my first year I applied there. So I applied again. I got in sophomore year.

• 22:18Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:19Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like? I mean, I don't remember what it was like back then, but Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sacks, Reid Hoffman, I mean, were these big names in the space?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  They were definitely not big names. No one knew who any of these people were. Not at all.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was like, oh, it's such a coincidence that like all these companies came out of PayPal. But now that we know who Elon is and who Peter Thiel is and who these guys are, it's like, of course, they're all together there. You know, there's got to be a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of it. It was a power law. This was a group, there were actually two groups, right? It was Elon had X.com and Peter had Confinity. And they had a bunch of their smartest friends each building stuff. And there were about eight companies in the space, in the payment space. And these things, these guys were at war with each other. They're obsessed, you know? This really talented team is trying to win and they finally realized they should merge rather than, you know, destroy each other. And the companies merged. And I hear Elon kept trying to rename it X. He finally got his way later.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  But it was an amazing group of people. I was just a kid. I get no credit at all for anything that happened there. But I learned a hell of a lot from all these people.

• 23:23Shawn Ryan?

  That's a hell of a group of mentors. Do you keep in touch with all these guys?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  A bunch of them, yeah. Yeah, a bunch of them. You know, David Sacks has that show. They let me on last week. They're all in things.

• 23:33Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Entertaining and, you know, Peter's someone I see a lot and he still backs a lot of things I do. And Elon, you know, lives in Austin, Texas now and is a good friend. I text him and bug him sometimes. I'm trying to be helpful with the stuff going on in government, so.

• 23:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Oh, you are involved with that, right?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  I do my best to help. I have a bunch of friends who are involved full time and I've passed a bunch of people in and I'm obsessed with the policy world. So yeah, I'm trying to be helpful there.

• 23:57Shawn Ryan?

  Good. It's good to have you in there.

• 24:01Shawn Ryan?

  So after PayPal, you went on to build in social media. What were you doing in there?

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't build anything in social media, but I worked for Peter Thiel after PayPal. And he had a global macro hedge fund, but he also was the first investor in Facebook at the time. So I don't get any credit for that either, but I got to know really well the Facebook founders and the office and the culture. And then right after that, he backed me to start Palantir with my roommate from Stanford.

• 24:26Shawn Ryan?

  What, I mean, what caught your interest in national security? Because it sounds like you made a switch there.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  You know, so I've always been pretty interested in it. It was, if you look at, so computer science is like maybe a young man who likes things that young men like. There's like, there's like games and there's cool defense stuff. And when you grew up in computer science in Silicon Valley in the eighties and nineties, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff the NSA was doing and the US government was doing that way ahead of everything else back in the sixties and seventies. So it was almost this mythical thing where there's just like some of the coolest, most talented guys were there. Like there's literally stuff that was done by the NSA in the seventies that like the very top academics at Stanford and MIT, et cetera, only figured out 15 years later like what the heck they were doing and why they were doing it that way.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  So it was just, it was just this like, like this is what the cool guys are doing and they're the smartest people are doing. They're working on these problems. And then, you know, I mean, as a kid, you watch James Bond and you look at this stuff. You want to get the bad guys. You want to stop the bad guys. And so I was always fascinated by that world. And at PayPal, the thing that came up, by the way, was this was central to this, was the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money. You know about this?

• 25:36Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  This is like, yeah, so PayPal was losing like several million dollars a month. Back then that was a lot of money and it was very unprofitable because you'd go, you'd go use your card down the street at 7-Eleven and the cashier there is not getting paid very well. And so they're like secretly like taking the numbers and they sell a hundred numbers online to the Russians for like 500 bucks. And then the Russians would take those numbers, run them through accounts, pretend you did transactions. And you get this thing later that says PayPal $200. And you're like, I didn't do PayPal $200. So you say no to your credit card company. It's called a chargeback. PayPal has to eat it. And so this was happening at massive scale and PayPal and its competitors were going under thanks to this. And so we had to figure out at PayPal, how do you go after it? We actually ended up taking a bunch of our customer service people, building these tools

• 26:20Speaker 03

  for them, building investigative tools, and then helping them figure out how to like stop and catch some of the bad guys and then turn them into Secret Service and FBI. So I ended up getting to know a bunch of these Secret Service FBI guys around 2001, 2002.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Ben, I don't remember that at all. Wow. How long did it take you guys to solve that problem?

• 26:40Speaker 03

  It was kind of a cat and mouse game because every time you'd figure out what the bad guys are doing, they'd change their method. So we tried to use AI, right? You tried to teach the AI. It wasn't really as good 20 years ago. And the AI could detect some, really machine learning, could detect some things, but you really needed the human intelligence layers. You'd have a machine learning layer and you'd have these tools to let people see what was going on. And you'd keep just iterating, staying ahead of them. And the tools were good enough. We cut down the fraud by about 90%. And that made it profitable. And then PayPal was sold to eBay. And so the anti-fraud thing was a big piece of what made PayPal work. And we got to know these Secret Service guys. And these are good guys. A lot of them are good old boys. They're not tech guys. They're just like, you know, trying to figure out what the heck this internet thing is and how to deal with it and how

• 27:23Speaker 03

  to catch the bad guys. And so they'd come to us for advice. And I got to know quite a few of them. And they'd come to me for advice on other stuff. And we'd start chatting with them. And, you know, because cybercrime was a new thing. You're helping them out. And then 9/11 happened. And then we kind of saw the government spend billions of dollars trying to build new tools to help them do better, you know, stop future stuff. And the stuff they were building horrified us. It was stuff that was based on principles from maybe like 20 years ago. And we're like, wait a second, guys, like Silicon Valley exists. We've done all these new things, all the top talent. And it was just so disconnected. And we realized this is actually really scary because our country's spending actually tens of billions of dollars on this stuff that doesn't work, that's 20 years out of date, it's just completely not what a top software culture is. And that's when we realized, well, we gotta figure out how to get involved and how to fix this.

• 28:07Shawn Ryan?

  And how did you get involved?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  We started Palantir with Stefan and I. I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs one summer to come and sketch, draw it up with us. And they all thought we were totally crazy. So we couldn't convince them to join. A few of them joined a few years later.

• 28:24Shawn Ryan?

  What is Palantir?

• 28:26Speaker 03

  So... I mean, at a very high level, Palantir is an effort to take like the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems, you know, in these institutions that didn't have, didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world. But what is it actually doing? So there's, there was really initially four pillars of Palantir. It was, it was data integration, you know, search, discovery, you know, analysis, knowledge management and collaboration. Each of those is like a really big, hard product. So what happens if you have a government department, you know, the time government was spending, say, thirty-six billion dollars gathering data. So you're, you're, you're you. It's your job. There's like five thousand databases. There's

• 29:09Speaker 03

  all sorts of sigils and humans and other things coming in. There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see, depending on the context. Like, what the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a, that's a weird, crazy problem. And, and you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you. Our job is to, to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions, like, okay, take this guy we found next to Osama bin Laden, show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them? And just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and, and, you know, bring things in more easily. So it's, it's, it's a hard problem to solve.

• 29:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this, uh, it was, from a layman's term, it seems like very, it, it, it helps predict.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  There's some prediction, but you're, what you're really doing, so, so Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data. Cause there's no way that any single human is going to be able to keep, you know, five thousand, twenty thousand databases of stuff of different formats in their mind at a time. So you're going to have to organize it in a way, you can interact with it, ask questions, preserve your investigations, share with others, collaborate. So that's a problem. Now, now it turns out that organizing all this information in all these ways is very powerful to then apply AI on top of it. And so as AI has gotten to be more advanced, there are now a lot more predictive, a lot more kind of like magical AI-like things that it could do thanks to that. So Palantir was, was lucky in a way to have a top technology culture and to be solving these, these kind

• 30:45Speaker 03

  of data organization ontology workflow problems, we call them, that when AI came along, it was really powerful to add AI to it and go even faster.

• 30:53Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you guys were doing this with also with with IED emplacement to?

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Hundred percent like to be able to take all the data and figure that out. We first started working with a bunch of the special forces groups and we really helped them and, you know, figure out some of those hard problems and partner with them. Some really smart guys that were taught us like, here's the data you should be looking at. And we brought together with our partnership and did it. And then the Army Brigade said, well, we need this too, because they needed it badly. And they couldn't pay for it, of course, because they have some giant bureaucratic process. We just gave it to them. We said, just show us the lives you're saving. That's all we want to see because that's really inspiring to our engineers. And they started showing us the lives they were saving. And then it came up for bid. It's called the Defense Ground Control System, DCS. Remember, it was called back then, I remember. And of course, some general gave it to his friend for like $5 billion of some other company. And everyone protested like, we're using Palantir. We don't want to use to wait years for this giant contract.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  So we ended up suing the government and I never sue anyone. But Palantir had to sue because they purposely just gave it to their friends and we won. And it took years, but they eventually used us. You know what was shocking to me is when they finally eventually used Palantir. I'd met a bunch of the guys and they all said, it's the best thing ever. It's amazing. We thought you guys were fake. We thought you guys were liars because the people who are competing against us had just like talked shit about us for years. So but we finally got in and made it work.

• 32:06Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that had to be, that had to be pretty enraging, dude.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  It's pretty frustrating when you're saving lives and you're doing it for free. And you're like, have always forward to play people just like working their asses off to like really help and then they treat you like crappy. I said, but you know, because Palantir went through that and because SpaceX went through something similar with their whole competition, we've paved the way now where a lot of the generals and admirals in Congress is more on the side of new innovation. Now they're more open to it. They're more willing to let it, let it than let it compete, which is important because that's a much better place for it now than we were 15 years ago.

• 32:36Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, that's great to hear. I don't have much trust in anybody in government, but.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  There's some good ones every once in a while who really care and you should partner with those.

• 32:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, being coming one of the top serial entrepreneurs in the 2000s. I mean, what are some, what are some lessons learned, you know, when it comes to building companies?

• 33:00Speaker 03

  You know?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  First of all, I come from this background in Silicon Valley with these tech cultures. Like, first of all, to build the really top companies, you need a really great technology culture. You need a place where the very best engineers, they're fighting to come in. So I think a typical company is like, you're like looking for engineers, like, oh, I have this idea, I gotta find these people, I gotta find who's gonna help. And what you want is you want like the very most talented technologists in the world. It's there, and you want people lining up from the top places to try to come in. And that's a very hard thing to build, but that, to me, that's number one, if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company, like, just absolutely A++ tech culture. Because what you could do with a really great tech culture is just, you can try like 10 things or 100 things in the time that the other guys are like still building their thing.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  And you impress people, you make it work, you iterate. Like, with Palantir, we'd be back and forth every couple of weeks to DC that have all these objections. We'd come back two weeks later, we would have done the equivalent of six months of work for a typical contractor in the two weeks. We showed them, look, it's ready now, we did what you said, and do that over two years, you know, 50 times. Eventually, you get somewhere really fast. So I said, tech culture's number one. I'd say number two is you have to have a vision about like, this is a gap in the world that you're really confident in. Because building companies is really hard, things go against you, things take a long time. No one actually, no one else actually believes in you and believes you're gonna make it. So you gotta be really sure there's this gap that you're going after, and really sure you're right.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  And just, you know, it takes a certain, it takes a certain overconfidence almost to be willing to go after that and do it. You'd be a little bit crazy, maybe.

• 34:35Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't ask this about your childhood, but I'm curious. Did you grow up in a fairly wealthy household?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I'd say more middle class.

• 34:43Shawn Ryan?

  Middle class?

• 34:44Speaker 03

  My dad, you know, one of the most obnoxious stories I remember is when I was like four and a half, and we were flying on a plane economy. And I asked my dad, I said, Dad, why aren't we in the front? And he said, well, you know, this costs a lot more money and we're comfortable here. I said, Dad, but you're really smart. You're smarter than all those people. Why don't you have enough money to be in the front of my super obnoxious kid? Um, my dad was really smart and he just prioritized spending a hell of a lot more time with family. He was one of eight. He brought, I'm also nineteen cousins, so he brought them all out to the Bay Area from Massachusetts. And he, he did a great work, but he never really, he had, he grew up a little middle class. For him being middle class and having, you know, having enough money was fine. He didn't care, which is, which I admire, by the way.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  As a kid, as a kid, I was obnoxious, but like, there's a lot of lessons in that. It was really cool.

• 35:33Shawn Ryan?

  How did you, I mean,

• 35:37Shawn Ryan?

  how did you get going? I mean, you're talking about, you know, lessons learned and basically what you're saying is hire the best tech people there are. How did, how were you able to find the capital to afford to?

• 35:49Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a good question. You know, at Pounce here and also at Adapar and my other companies, we actually usually tried to pay lower salary, higher equity. So you give them more upside in the company. So they had to believe in the company. And it was interesting, whenever we gave someone an offer, we'd give them three choices for the offer. You could say you could take more cash, but they get a little bit less. You know, medium cash, medium, or take less cash and take more, take more upside. And, and like the very best people, the ones who are the really best, they always wanted even less cash and even more upside.

• 36:18Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Which is, it's just cause, cause it's like, it's like they're just confident, we're just gonna fricking win. And it was fun. I used to give them a table, here's what their shares would be worth if we had a certain level of success. And we'd like, we'd give them the different types of options. And the biggest option was if we make this company worth $5 billion, here's what your shares are gonna be worth. And everyone says, Joe, you can't say $5 billion, that's too high, that's ridiculous. So that was, you know, it was kind of fun. It's, it's 160 now, but that took 20 years.

• 36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What kind of percentage of ownership are you, or are shares were you?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, I mean, so for, for an early, really strong engineer, they might get a, you know, depending on where we are, like, you know, you might get a really strong one early on, might get 1%. And then, but gets diluted over time, right? So you get this down, but like later on, people get a half percent, a quarter percent. And, and you know, dilution is when you raise more money, so you're going a little bit less than that. But let's say you started with a quarter percent, you get diluted down to. .1%, but you know, .1% of a few billion is still a really big number. And .1% of, you know, 100 billion is a lot. So, so a lot of these guys did really well.

• 37:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, very. How long did it take you to start? I mean, was there a turning point?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You actually, you know, three years into Palantir, we're building this software, iterating. A few of the top guys were best, the engineering side are basically ready to quit. They're like, Joe, this is just not working out. Like, we haven't got enough contracts. It just seems like it's really unlikely it's gonna be there. And, you know, I found this in life is oftentimes right before the breakthroughs. You get this like really hard time where people are just like giving up. And I convinced a couple of them, let's just push for six more months because we have these other things coming. And, you know, and Alex Karp did a really great job of figuring out how to get both the FBI and CIA to move on something. And all of a sudden, we had these bigger contracts and it was good. We were building, but it came really close to dying early on. This stuff, this stuff takes a long time to build, right? And like I said, you gotta be a little bit crazy because it's just, you just gotta push really hard.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  You're building a bridge and you don't know if the island's there or not that you're building it to, you know?

• 38:12Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, uh, super inspiring. So from, uh, from Palantir, what was next for you?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Uh, I ended up, so I was, I was helping Peter with the hedge funds, my other passion. And I did a lot of the financing and it's mapping that world out. And it was after the financial crisis in 2008. We were thinking like, oh, there's a lot of things that are like not organized in this space and they're messy. And we realized one of the ways to really make things work better in finance would be to have like a platform with like root access to everyone's wealth and organize those problems, organize better from there. And I also just made some money myself. So I had like what's called a little bit of a family office, like a small one. And instead I was talking to people, how do you run your family office? I was talking to what are called REAs, the registered investment advisors. And it was a mess. They all hated their technology. So I was pretty arrogant at the time, having just had some success, you know? And if Palantir was starting to grow really well, I said, I'm gonna build a company that fixes this space.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  And I thought it couldn't be that harder for running data globally for all these intelligence agencies and defense stuff to do this little finance thing. And so we started it off and it turned out it was a really hard problem as well. It took about, again, about three years to get it to work. It's called Adipar. But today, Adipar is doing really, it took us a long time, but Adipar is now by far number one in the country. We just crossed seven trillion dollars reported over Adipar. So it's a leader in that space now.

• 39:31Shawn Ryan?

  You just crossed what?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Seven trillion dollars.

• 39:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Reported over Adipar. So if you think of like a big investment advisor, a big bank with wealth managers or family offices, even some of them here in Nashville, you know, with friends you mentioned, like those guys are probably running their family office and their wealth off of Adipar to do all of their data and reporting and decisions and how does their accountant see it? How does their lawyer see it? How does they bring together all the information and figure out what to do next? And it's really good for finance to be more data driven because if things are not data driven, it becomes an old boys' club. It becomes just like insiders just doing things like insiders do. Whereas once you have all the data, it's able to bring in and help new solutions work and help, you know, help people actually break into it. So I think it's been a good thing.

• 40:11Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. Very interesting. You know, we're talking about all things pretty much AI. Do you know, I mean, what is powering all this stuff? Because AI takes a tremendous amount of energy from what I understand.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so because a lot of those companies initially were just in the cloud and that was a pretty expensive thing and Amazon and others and Google and Oracle set up these big giant, you know, things and it made a ton of money, like the infrastructure powering the cloud thing, powering things like Adipar was become a big business. And now all of a sudden, there's a whole new infrastructure, of course, with Nvidia chips and everything else to build for AI. And this is like a trillion dollar investment and it's one of the biggest investments we've ever made in infrastructure in our civilization to power all this new AI stuff we're doing. And I'm sure you guys on your team are using it for different things. We're choosing it for things. You know, we're gonna need more power. I'm, a lot of us are big fans of nuclear, but right now, we don't have a lot of nuclear in our civilization. I think we do have some, by the way. It's 20% of what we do is about that.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  But a lot of us want to ramp up nuclear. I think this administration is going to do that. But, you know, a lot of people want to ramp up solar in different ways. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of good options for how we do this, but it is a big problem to make sure we do that if we're gonna, we're gonna keep growing this stuff.

• 41:24Shawn Ryan?

  Is solar, is solar actually a realistic option?

• 41:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:27Shawn Ryan?

  For AI?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  You know, so the problem is, it's actually funny. There's this term I like. So a lot of people, the old term, the old term is clean energy, of course, because they call it cleaner, which I don't know if solar panels are that clean. It kind of takes a mess to make them, but you know, it's clean in the sense that when you're using them, they're just very clean. There's another term called intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is stuff that's not always on, which is wind and solar. So if you're going to use intermittent energy, first of all, we've probably oversubsidized that because if you have too much intermittent energy, it just screws you, right? Because it makes energy cheaper where the sun's shining and then everyone's screwed. And there's not, you know, you have to pay people even more who are running all the time when the sun's not shining. Batteries are getting better, but and there are, there are certain like things, for example, with air conditioning,

• 42:09Speaker 03

  you probably, that's works really well because you need more energy anyway when it's sunny outside. So listen, I think solar is a big part of the solution. But, but you know, I think for the base load, I think natural gas and nuclear are the obvious things to scale off for now.

• 42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know anybody that's working with cold fusion?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot of stuff, you know, there's, there's a few different companies. There's one called Commonwealth in Massachusetts that a bunch of my friends are invested in. And it's interesting because fusion is one of those things where for a while, when I was younger, I was just really skeptical because it's always supposed to be common and you're like, this is never going to come. It's crazy. But it turns out you can actually map out the ratio of the energy you put in to get out and then you kind of graph that, right? And so if you graph that, it's like, it's called like the, I think it's called the Q ratio or something. If you graph that, it was like, I think it had like 0.2 like 10 years ago. So you only got back a fifth as much energy out and it kept going up and up and up. And now it's over one. So fusion's now over one in terms of energy coming out. I don't know exactly. It's like 1.2, 1.3. It starts to get really economic around 1.5, 1.6 and really economic at two.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  And it looks like if you graph it, it's going to cross, I think it crosses two in the early 2030s. I think some of these new designs make that very likely. This is not something that just happens magically. There's a ton of billions of dollars at work. But you know, one thing I will say about America that's awesome is even people I disagree with politically. A lot of friends, you know, in the tech world, for example, that might be on the other side. But there's people on both sides, including Bill Gates, including all sorts of other guys, who are putting just a ton of money into this fusion research, these fusion companies. I think we're gonna get there, and I think it's really, really good for our civilization if we do. If we have cheap energy, man, that helps everyone, but it helps the working class more than anyone else. Because it just makes everything cheaper, and I think there's a really good chance we get there.

• 43:45Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go into a little bit of that? Because I don't think people understand, you know, why cheap energy would really help the economy in middle-class, lower-class homes.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the cost of everything. Cost of food, the cost of driving your car, the cost of building stuff, the cost of, like, building a manufacturing plant for things you buy, the cost of running the manufacturing plant. Everything comes back to energy. If you make energy cheaper, you make everything cheaper, and it means all of us can afford more stuff. And by the way, it's not just like, like, if you make energy cheaper, it's also then cheaper to clean the environment. It's cheaper to make things more green, right? So there's all this stuff that just, like, in our society, like, there's just tied to that. And if you look at the standard of living the last couple hundred years for the poor middle-class, it's tracked, like, almost one-to-one in a lot of cases, you know, with the cost of energy. It's a really big deal to innovate on that. It's just been this very predictive thing for how well people are doing.

• 44:40Shawn Ryan?

  What's the holdback with nuclear energy? What is the...

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Well, there's two different holdbacks. The holdback on the fission side, which is what we should be scaling up now, is that we have an insane regulatory apparatus. And so we had this, like, this atomic energy group in the US that was very innovative. And we used to do things very quickly in, like, 50s, 60s, and we built a ton of plants. And then, in, like, the mid-'70s, they shifted it, and it became what's called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as far as I could tell, and all of my friends could tell, had a mandate of just stopping anything new. So if you graph, like, new nuclear stuff, it's like this, and then it flatlines. And these people... Like, it's just crazy. So basically, like, my father, for his job, actually, was at something called Raychem,

• 45:25Speaker 03

  and he was selling heat tracing. And he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants. And sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he had to sell it to a nuclear plant, he had to bring, like, 60 binders that they had to work on, and all this stuff of just nonsense information. It made it 10 times as expensive for him to sell to nuclear plants. So what these bureaucrats did is they created so many rules and so many laws that made no sense whatsoever. And by the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just, like, way aggressive beyond that. And so it made it unprofitable to do new nuclear plants. And so what happened is, starting from the mid-'70s, you no longer could innovate on this technology, and you only had what you had. And so it really crushed the industry for, really, almost a couple of generations now.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  And finally, finally, thanks to great work by a lot of people I know, one of my friends who started Airbnb, his wife is a model who's a big nuclear energy promoter. It's really cool. They're just really into this. And a bunch of other friends who are pushing nuclear energy, it's finally coming back as a bipartisan thing, that it's cleaner for the environment, it's good for everyone, including the working class, it's good for American business. We should be innovating again in nuclear energy and building it. So it looks like we're gonna start fixing the regulations and allowing us to do more things there. I think this new administration, Chris Wright's coming in, Secretary of Energy, he's a very big fan of it. So I'm seeing really good things. So that's gonna come back there. That's what's been blocking that. On the fusion side, we should have now the technology, but this big investment might get us there the next decade.

• 46:48Shawn Ryan?

  Ben, do you think that, do you think that big oil and gas lobbyists have something to do with it?

• 46:53Speaker 03

  It's very possible, it's very possible that part of the reason, there's probably, like, if you look at Germany, the Green Party in Germany, which is a left party, was basically founded around an anti-nuclear energy framework. So there is, like, a crazy part of the left that's against nuclear energy, but I bet you on the right, there's some interest from oil and gas that I can't go back in time and see those conversations in the smoke-filled rooms, but I bet you some of those guys, you know, I love Texas, but I bet you some of those guys in Texas, they might have had a thing to say about that. Now, today, are they blocking it? Nah, nah, they're not really anymore. I think we're gonna break through and fix it. And most of the guys I know, Chris Wright comes from, he created some, you know, giant fracking company, Liberty Energy, I think a lot of these guys nowadays are...

• 47:36Speaker 03

  You know, they have a lot of money, they love the country, they just want the best solutions to win is what I've seen. I'm sure there's some of them that don't want it, but I think overall the vibe shift we're in and it's just like, let's do what's best for America. So I think we're gonna break through and fix the regulation, I'm hoping.

• 47:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, a lot of people, me included, are very concerned about our power grid, you know?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:54Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and so I got, I would like to kind of hang out on this subject for a little bit.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 48:00Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people are seeing rolling blackouts.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:02Shawn Ryan?

  You know, um, the power grid structure is extremely outdated, it's old, doesn't seem like it's getting updated anytime soon. Um, you know, how, how, how much is the, is our outdated power grid holding us back?

• 48:17Speaker 03

  It's, it's gonna become a bigger problem, I, I, I agree. It's, it's, especially as you go to more electric vehicles where it's distributed and everyone wants to charge. That's gonna weigh on these grids. They need, they need to be modernized. Uh, the way we've built them right now, Sean, is the regulation again is a problem here. The incentives are all screwed up, you're only allowed to charge certain amounts or spend certain amounts. And it's, it's very much like one of the areas of our society, it's like one of the commie areas of our society, economy. I mean, it's like controlled by top-down by government and told what to do. And it's like, you know, I have two concerns. One is it's not ready to work with what we're gonna need as, you know, in terms of future demand the next five or 10 years. Two, it's not protected very well at all. So if I was an adversary who wanted to go to war against America or wanted to harass America, probably lots of ways to break in, hack in, take down these utilities.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's kind of crazy, like, we spend all this money on defense, we haven't defended any of that stuff at all. I think we usually leave it to the local towns, but I'm sorry, these small towns aren't gonna know how the heck to defend against the top hackers in China or, you know, so, so there's, there's definitely a lot we could be doing to fix that.

• 49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Are you concerned that China manufactures a lot of our energy equipment?

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it's, uh, I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. Uh, I think from a geopolitical perspective, it's extremely dangerous. And if we want to be ready, so in World War II, it wasn't that we had like a bunch of big defense contractors, it's that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war. And if, if we've, we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base. And I think we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think, I think Trump is very good on this, he shifted it back. I think, I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree, we need to fix this. And so, but, but we, I mean, this is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are not totally insane at all. That makes a lot of sense to me.

• 50:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How, I mean, how do we? Where do we start, you know, with updating the grid? Are we talking, I mean, we're talking everything from power lines to power plants to transformers?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  I think, I think, I think, I think an effort to, to do more advanced manufacturing here and to, and to, and to, and to give, give some kind of, you know, general subsidies and have a competition is not totally insane again to rebuild our manufacturing base. And, and then, you know, I think, I think you have to look again at how it's being regulated and what the incentives are for people to update these things. And you need people to have the proper incentive to update them.

• 50:37Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break here.

• 50:42Shawn Ryan?

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• 51:23Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 51:44Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We had a little side conversation about the, the incoming administration and we're both pretty fired up about it. I'm just, who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular?

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Well, I was, I'm most excited about Elon and Vivek and the Doge effort because this is something I've wanted to see for forever. I'm probably like one of the only guys in tech that's been a lot in policy on the, on the right, on the small government side for the last 10, 20 years. And it's like the world just like shifted this way. Like the vibe shift is exactly in line with stuff I've been thinking and talking about for a decade. So I'm, I'm, I'm so excited about this.

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  What, I mean, how fast do you think they're going to start cleaning this stuff up?

• 52:20Speaker 03

  They're already doing it, man. They can't really officially do it yet, but they're already making all the plans. There's people working hard there. There's guys thinking, Joe, we need another engineer for this. We're trying to mount this out. We're, we need more lawyers for this. They're going, they're going right now as hard as they can. And getting ready, so it's gonna be really bold.

• 52:35Shawn Ryan?

  You think they'll have it all mapped out before they even step in?

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I think the way Elon works in general is just like, what can we do right now? And then what can we do next? Let's just focus on what we can do right now. So they have what's called their day one priorities. And they're just focusing sprinting on everything they could do day one. And I think they're gonna have a lot of stuff ready for day one.

• 52:53Shawn Ryan?

  How would, I mean, where do you think they're gonna start? I think, you think they'll go from agency to agency to, you know what I mean? Will they do it in sections or will it be all one big sweep at different stages?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  I mean, they're, they're bringing in like at least like well over a hundred people. The Doge effort and there's gonna put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs who are the policy, you know, there's these policy placements that are all working with Doge and being liaisons with Doge. And, you know, they're, they're, they're gonna, they're gonna come out of the gate with a bunch of general things, a bunch of removing certain people, a bunch of removing certain regulations. Uh, there's all sorts, I, I can't, I can't go into the details exactly what they're gonna be doing, but it's gonna be really aggressive right from the start.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  How much pushback do you think they're gonna get? I mean, and will it, will it affect their, their effort?

• 53:39Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a really good thing that the Supreme Court of the United States right now is controlled by the pro-liberty side that's skeptical of the special interests of government bureaucracy. The government bureaucracy is one of the most powerful special interests in our country. It's, it's such, it's such like a strong force. So you know what happened is that in the late 1970s, in a very, very kind of like government union biased Congress of Jimmy Carter's Congress, they just put in all these crazy rules to try to make it impossible to hold people accountable. And I'm sure you've seen this a lot in government too. And so they will fight it really hard, but a lot of us believe, and I think the Supreme Court believes, that the intent of the Constitution is that the president is supposed to be in charge of the executive branch, is supposed to have unitary authority to, to remove people and to fix things.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  And, you know, there's another thing called the Empowerment Act from the 1970s as well. They tried to force Nixon to say, you know what? You have to spend every last dollar that we procure, you know, and tell you to spend. And I'm, I'm not sure that's constitutional either. That's, that's, that's an unconstitutional like, you know, thing coming from Congress on the presidency. So I think controlling the presidency, controlling the courts. We only partially control Congress because you really need 60 senators to really do something bold, but we partially control that too. We, we should be able to get a lot done here.

• 54:49Shawn Ryan?

  I hope so.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  The whole world's watching, man. I was with someone, even like freaking Keir Starmer's government, which I have some issues with over in the UK, obviously, they're the kind of more really hard left side. Like, even people out there is like, they know they have to cut their bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are like these cancers, man, that have grown out of control, they're unelected, they think they're in charge, they're laughing and saying, no, we're gonna be here forever, we're gonna stop whatever you do. It's just like level of like, broken arrogance. Like, we have to. If Elon, and Trump, and Vivek, and like, a bunch of my other friends, our smartest friends are going in to help right now, if these guys can't do it, it's not possible. So, so we all have to root for them for the sake of our civilization, because if we can even, you know, get part of what they're doing right, that's a much brighter future for everyone.

• 55:31Shawn Ryan?

  Who else are you excited about?

• 55:33Speaker 03

  There's, there's a lot of great people coming in. I think, we were talking about, I think cleaning out the DOJ with Kosh Patel is gonna be, just so much corruption, so much mess there, the stuff you see coming out, it's like, they're spending all their time going after white supremacists as opposed to real criminals. The whole thing is just crazy. And by the way, there are good people in the FBI, there's still people in the FBI trying to find communists, trying to find bad things happening in our country. So, I think we ought to be careful. It's not that the whole agency, like, if you have friends in the FBI, they might be a great person, but there's just so much corruption, so much waste, so much nonsense in these places.

• 56:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I am, uh, I'm ecstatic to cash cut in there. I think he is gonna do a phenomenal job. What do you think about Chris Wray resigning? Why do you think he did that?

• 56:16Speaker 03

  I think these guys are probably afraid at this point, I don't know. Maybe, maybe he just knows, is, you know, there's a vibe shift. He knows he's not supposed to be in charge anymore. You know, you know, the vibe before, it was like, it was bureaucratic, it was cowardly, it was guilt-ridden. Like, that was like, that was like the vibe for like, from like, the whole, you know, like, woke movement. And now, instead, the vibe is, is greatness, it's courage, it's joyous ambition. I mean, the whole country has just shifted away. Like, these guys, they, there's just like, overvalue on credentialism, right? It was like, just like fake credentials, and now we're shifting towards like, human judgment and common sense. Like, it's like, nature's healing here, man. Things are going back to the right way, and I think a lot of people know that their time is over. Do you think we're going to see a lot of, you think we're going to see some mass pardons?

• 57:01Speaker 03

  I'm scared of that. I'm scared of, I don't know. I mean, I get him pardoning his son, although the way he did it was super sketchy because he basically did it for the whole Ukraine period, which, you know, I hope he could still do that investigation to find out what went on.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  I mean, the guy, it's such a corrupt family. It's just terrible. You saw the thing where he paid one of my friends in like, like a booklet with his art that was made with his own shit. I can't even say it. It's just crazy. See this stuff? It's like, he literally was 300,000 behind on rent, so he tried to pay it with his, with the art made from his shit. It's like, and he did. Like, he got away with it. He's pardoned now. So I don't think you can go after him for anything. Yeah. Yeah, I'm worried you're gonna see a bunch of more mass pardons. I really hope not. The joke is he pardoned SBF because SBF gives so much money to the Democrats and, you know, the crazy guy. I really hope not. It's just, the whole thing's crazy, man. Do you have any concerns with the upcoming administration?

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, listen, I, I think you can't agree 100% with anyone. I actually posted on X recently, like, you know, I disagree with the, with the Longshoreman decision that came out recently. The what? So, so Trump said that we're not gonna automate the ports and we're not gonna, and that it's a waste of money to automate the ports. I know about equipment and it's not worth buying this equipment and we should just let the unions keep going. And, you know, and what I posted is I think Trump's clearly wrong on this, but you know, it's okay to disagree with someone and still respect them and follow them in other areas. So I don't think we have to agree. I'm never gonna agree with someone 100%. I'm never gonna be afraid to say it. I think that's how America's supposed to work. And if people don't think America works that way, too bad. I'm just gonna keep speaking out. So, you know, and so I 100% loved the Trump's president. I agree with a bunch

• 58:33Speaker 03

  of stuff he's doing, but like, giving in to these like crazy corrupt union mafia people, not what I would have done. I get it in the sense that A, there's a vibe shift where he wants the union vote for the right, and B, like, he doesn't want a giant strike to deal with as he comes into office. So I respect that and that's his decision. I wouldn't have done it in a way that kind of like attacked automation. I think that's silly. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never thought of that. Interesting.

• 58:56Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's move back into, I know we already talked a lot about Epirus, but I'm just fascinated with the subject. So where, how did that even pop up on your radar? What was going through your head when it started?

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Were they oppressive when it got started?

• 59:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  So the thing, the thing was, the thing we were talking about earlier is basically we realized that China was gonna be an adversary, that this like crazy guy is actually communist who's coming in, that he's forcing his best and brightest to work on new ways to get us. And we said, okay, what does a war look like in the 21st century? Like, what is the warfare gonna happen, gonna have happen? And you're gonna have like these massive numbers of drones is by far the best way to fight, and you're gonna need ways to stop them. And so, so, so, so was it one of the most important weapons? Well, if you could have force fields, if you have the Star Trek shields, that's pretty friggin' cool. And let's, let's, and it turns out, in venture capital, there's two things, right? In venture capital, there's, there's, where's the best talent in the world? And what's possible now that wasn't possible before? We have access to the best talent, we're lucky to have that. So what's newly possible?

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Well, turns out these chips are now fast enough to control power on small time scales to make our electronic warfare weapons work way better. So we said, okay, this is a really key area, because we know there's new possibility here, let's prove it out. And it was really fun, because with about 30, 40 million dollars on our side, we were able to go to the desert and have a competition against guys who've raised and spent, and give them billions and billions by the government, tens of billions by the government for their stuff. And, and when the hardened drones flew, for the same size, same power, we shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away.

• 1:00:24Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Nine and a half times farther away than the guys who got billions of dollars of contracts. And it's because there's these new possibilities that they didn't know how to do.

• 1:00:30Shawn Ryan?

  How was it, how was it developed? Where'd you guys develop this?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  El Segundo, Nathan Mince, Bomar, a bunch of guys, Andy Lowery, a bunch of really key guys on their team who, you know, and the DNA was a combination, like, we had the DNA from the Silicon Valley world, and we had the DNA from the electronic warfare world. So there's some people who have worked at some of these other places, because there's just certain expertise that's been built up in America that no one else has, that you need to build on what already exists, and build on the kind of knowledge of how gallium nitride can be worked with, as well as what's newly possible. Is Leonidas an offensive weapon as well as a defensive weapon? There's lots of ways, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's core, it's really, it's a defensive thing in a sense that like you can have something protecting a city or a base or a squadron, but, I mean, if you're going to be attacking the bad guys and you're going forward, you wanna have these things, right? You wanna have ways of stopping the drone and our attacks

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  from getting you during an offensive, so, or you base, by the way, you wanna just turn off the area you're attacking. Imagine if there's an area you're going after and all the electronics go dead. That's probably pretty useful right before an attack. So what would you, what would you point the, the weapon at? If you wanted to take out a, could you take out a city? What, what do you mean by that? Turn off the power? And if you turn off the power in a cone that goes, again, we're not supposed to say how far, but, but quite a far, far distance, and so you could definitely turn off an area of a town or a city and you could move it to turn off more. Holy shit.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  It's pretty crazy, right? It is. We used to think, we used to think about this in terms of when I was a kid, you'd thought about like, like the EMP from a nuke going off in the high atmosphere. So I'd be like, it's a, but, you know, that's actually much more aggressive and scary version of these things, but, but this thing, that can only be used once. This thing could keep being used without hurting anyone at all. Could this, could this take out a nuke in flight? It could, so, so it's frying electronics. So if you think about it for satellite defense, for example, which is not what we're doing right now, but this is, this is just me talking out of my butt, so excuse me if it's, if I get something wrong, but, but my bias would be that if something's targeting a satellite, it needs to be adjusting its flight in order to hit it. And so you probably, what you'd wanna do with satellites, you'd wanna blast this, and you blast it a certain number of miles away, and then you could adjust slightly,

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  and the thing's not gonna know how to hit you. Same thing, a cargo plane's a better example, probably, right? So I think if you had a big slow cargo plane and a bad guy's trying to take it out, which is key for contested logistics, you can put one of these on it, you know, you always see the movie where the missile's trying to follow the guy. You blast the missile, now it's a dumb missile, and then you turn. Right. So there's things like that we're probably gonna be doing for defending planes. Wow. So this, so these... These might be deployed on planes. I think, I think, I think some version of these will definitely be deployed on planes at some point if we're gonna be having battles now. The question is what type of planes and drones we, we have or use in 10 years, but, but yeah, you definitely want, I mean, you definitely want cargo planes, no matter what, I think. So if you don't use them. What other, what other type of, uh, what other type of stuff are these things gonna be deployed on? Naval ships, auto?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Ships are, I mean, our company Seronic, which is building the, you know, hopefully thousands and thousands of these, uh, smart, autonomous, kinda like, so smart autonomous weaponized vessels, you're gonna want, that could be one of the things you put on an autonomous vessel, obviously, during a battle, is to be able to go around and turn things off with this. So I think, I think you're gonna have stuff like that, too. Are there different sizes now? Hundred percent. So the ones that are, the ones that are, Leonidas is a certain size, which, which is, you know, takes out a cer- certain distances much farther. If you wanted, for example, if, for example, this was put in an Androl Roadrunner, if we did that kinda partnership, like that would, like, there's only a small cone inside the Roadrunner. So there's only a certain amount of, of stuff you could put in there that might only shoot things effectively like 20 or 30 meters, for example.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Uh, but that might be okay, because the Roadrunner can fly up, fly next to the swarm, and shoot a bunch of times, then go back and land again. I love that video that Palmer made with, with the guys on that, it's such a cool, such a cool weapon. So combining with stuff like that would be great. Man, could you, can you go into the Roadrunner a little bit? So, so I'm, I'm, I'm lucky to be an early investor in Androl. Uh, Brian Schimpf, Trey Stevens, Mac Grim, a bunch of our superstars from Palantir, co-founded this with my friend Palmer. Palmer before had started Oculus, was the VR company, and actually backed him at the beginning of that. He was like, he was a crazy kid, like 20, 21 years old. We met him and he had these prototypes and we're like, guys, this is too crazy, let's give him a little bit of money, though, it's so impressive. And then we actually co-led the next round, because we're starting to work, and then Facebook bought it.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  And he very famously got kicked out of Facebook for being a Republican, that's a longer conversation. What? You didn't know about this? I didn't know that. Yeah, no, he like put up a billboard against Hillary and was like outspoken. I mean, listen, you're all of a sudden a billionaire in your mid twenties and you have opinions and it's right in the middle of woke Silicon Valley. So they, Facebook's like famously like on the other side of it. So they just attacked him like crazy and, and you know, all these people were really nasty to him. A lot of people have come out from Facebook and apologized to him now because he's now like this really important leader in our country doing great things and they realized they were wrong to treat him that way. So it's like a, it's like a whole saga in his life of being like beaten down and out and discarded. Not badly, he's a billionaire, you know. Just because we're talking about Palmer, I was at his wedding, you're not gonna like this maybe, but I was at his wedding and I was sitting next to like,

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  you know, Peter Thiel and Senator Cruz and all these people. And it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy. His twenties, getting married. And all of a sudden, all the music goes off and Top Gun music comes on and then like a helicopter flies over us. It lands behind, behind, and Palmer's flying it, he comes out in Thiel's and he never dresses up nicely for the wedding. The helicopter goes away and then the normal music comes back on. His wife comes in normally with her dad. But that's the kind of guy, he's just hilarious. Damn, that's awesome. He's a basic America's iron man. He's like, he's a hilarious inventor guy, amazing guy. So he'd invented all this hardware for, for the first real VR in America that worked. And then, and then he partners with my Palantir guys and they start Androl. And they're, and so Androl has all these crazy cool products and they're running circles around the primes.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  They're basically like the next new prime, right? They just raised like billions of dollars at like, you know, fifteen, twenty billion dollar valuation range. And so one of their new products, which is amazing, it reminds me of Elon's rockets. It's a missile that can open up, launch, and if it's not used, it comes back and lands and waits and gets used again, which is not something that I think the generals knew to ask for. But if you think about warfare, it's all about like dollars per effectiveness. Like if you have a bunch of things attacking you, fire fifty of these things, use ten or twenty if you need and have the other ones come back and use them again. It's way better, right? So and by the way, this thing is like a tiny fraction of the cost of similar competitive missiles. Are you kidding? It's like, it's like, it's like, he's literally competing against stuff that costs

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  like, you know, depending on what it is, one to three million. I think we're selling them for two hundred and fifty K now and still have much better margins than our other guys. And so it's just like, which is why you want to let people not do cost plus because you want to have them reengineer from scratch, you know, what makes the most sense.

• 1:07:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Because if you charge someone cost plus, your job is to make as expensive as possible because you get to keep a piece of that cost. Right? But if you don't charge cost plus, then you have this whole better framework.

• 1:07:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you get, you had kind of mentioned that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, like these companies, the big guys, you guys are, you know, underneath them. I mean, do you see that flipping?

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's still some really, really amazing expertise in our military industrial base. It's like America's military industrial base that's important and that exists inside some of these primes. So I won't, I don't want to say there's like, they're not going away. And we don't want them to go away. That's actually, as much as the military industrial complex, like you talked about, is an issue, you have some stuff we need to know how to do to keep America safe and to be the best in the world. And so these companies are going to be important, but in terms of anything really new and innovative, anything with really hard software, they just don't have the cultures they used to have. And they don't have the top people they used to have for most things. So, so, so it's really important that we have, you know, Silicon Valley just got so far ahead and it's really important we take some of that culture and apply it. And, you know, when I first wrote the check in Androl, it was 2016, I think, I had a

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  bunch of people who we work with in like the bio world say, we're not going to work with you anymore if you're doing defense. This is so wrong. You're just such this evil. Why would you do this stuff? Like, it's just wrong to do. And a lot of fun just wouldn't even mean it. You know, so it was like a thing you weren't supposed to do. And, and what's really cool with the vibe shift, that's totally changed. You have a lot of the best people going in. It's popular now, which maybe it's too popular now, but that's, that's another problem.

• 1:08:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you had mentioned, you had mentioned Facebook kicking them out because of, yeah, because of a billboard. What do you think about Zuckerberg trying to get in with the conservative crowd? It's pretty interesting to watch the, you know, I mean, well, four years ago, you kicked the president off your platform. Now you want to buddy up?

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what's, what's going on here?

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a lot of that going on. Listen, Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg is an interesting case. He is fundamentally himself not super political and he himself.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And I'll get a lot of flack for this, but he himself like has always had an appreciation for some of the liberty side and some of the conservative side, which is shocking given how his company does things. But like I've sat next to him not that long ago, you know, at a wedding or whatever. And he's like, you know, he's, he's, he's interested in his, his kids learning about some of these ideas, like there's a, like the Tuttle Twins or whatever, you know, these like these conservative libertarian shows and stuff. I think, I think he's open to different sides. I think the culture inside of Facebook that comes from the universities is so poisonous and so leftist that I think they get away with things sometimes that they don't even tell him about. So I'm not saying, I'm not saying he's like a perfect good guy on this. I think he should be way bolder and hold his company accountable to stop censoring conservatives and stop doing the wrong things. So I think he's maybe a little bit soft. Maybe I would say a little bit cowardly sometimes about these things

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  despite being amazing in other areas. But he himself is not really a driver of that. And, you know, what happens is a lot of these guys, maybe I'd say he started off moderate, moderate left, but with an appreciation for both sides. And he'll start like a foundation. It's called the Chance Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI. And what will happen with these moderate leftists is they don't, they're not good at keeping out like the crazy far left. And so his philanthropy org becomes run by these activists. And, and he's busy with his business. And, and like their, his wife and I, I guess, don't want fights or whatever. So you get these crazy activists and they just start doing terrible stuff. And they're very good at like sounding maybe to him like, oh, it's a reasonable thing. It's not actually affecting things. But when you saw it actually changed the 2020 election, the way they put the hundreds of millions of dollars to work. My, my guess is he didn't even understand or might not

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  even still understand how much, how much it would screw things up. Which, which, which is not an excuse for him, but it's, I think that's just the reality of how these orgs evolve, you know, with these, with these crazy activists inside of them.

• 1:10:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I see what you're saying. So you're, you're basically saying he wasn't necessarily the catalyst, but he.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  He wasn't the George Soros. He was, he was, he's not, he's not George Soros. He wasn't like doing the crazy bad stuff himself. I think in general Silicon Valley, people who are moderate on the moderate left have been way too tolerant of letting these crazy activists take over their companies, take over their philanthropies and break things. And, and if we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls. We need these guys to have a little more boldness, a little more courage. And they need to come out publicly and like excise these parts of their orgs and say, you know what? I was way too tolerant of that. There's forty-seven people I just fired because they were all found to be doing this crazy stuff, censoring conservatives, turning things down, screwing with them, shadow banning, and we're not gonna let them do that anymore. Like, that's what he needs to do, and he can still be on the moderate left if he wants, but you can't freaking tolerate these crazy activists, man. You know, that's what I, that's what I would tell them.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  I haven't cut off with them in a bit.

• 1:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're obviously a mayor, a major player in tech as well, so, I mean, how have you, how have you kept that rot out of your companies?

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got it. You got, you gotta be really disciplined how you hire. You gotta be really fast to fire. And by the way, we have, I work with a ton of people who are on the left, on the right, like, that's, this is not about left versus right. This is about the activists. This is about the crazy kind of woke, like, cancel culture, liberal people. And as soon as you see that, you can't tolerate it.

• 1:12:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you build culture under your companies?

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  You have to. You have to. You have to have CEOs who, I mean, you set the tone by how hard the tops are working. You set the tone by the values and principles we talk about. One of the values of AVC is patriotism, you know? You, you have to, you have to explicitly have these values and say, this is what we stand for. This is who we are. We're, you know, we're, we're, you know, we're principled optimists, we're patriots, we're, you know, we're, we're, we're gonna fight for the truth. And, you know, you wanna live in a world, I think, I think the vibe shift that we've been talking about is like, is like, a lot of people are comfortable living with lives safely, and I think it's important that a lot of people come over to live with the truth, even if it's dangerous.

• 1:12:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. Back to the future of warfare. I mean, what, what are some things that other countries are getting involved in that concern you?

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I think the fact that we let China and Russia become such close allies is ridiculous. I think that was a huge strategic mistake, and I think they're not necessarily natural allies. I think that was something where we drove into each other, so, that, that concerns me. I think the biggest concern right now is Turkey, and on top of that.

• 1:13:10Shawn Ryan?

  Turkey?

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so Russia and China, obviously, biggest concern, Iran, obviously, but Turkey is like the biggest kind of wild card going out right now. So, Turkey... You know, Adetok created Turkey as the first really successful secular Muslim country in the modern world. And it was a really big deal. And there's, there's a lot of problems historically with Islamists, today with Islamists. So he built all these institutions in Turkey to stop the Islamists from taking over because he knew that would always be a threat. And one of the most important institutions was the army to, to, to make sure that Islamists did not run it. And that his job was to fight and stop Islamists if they were going to take over society. And Erdogan knew this. Erdogan, we thought, a lot of us thought, when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate when he came in 20 years, because that's how he ran. But he secretly, like, very strongly on the Islamist side.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  And so, in order to make the Islamists win again in Turkey, he had to take out these organizations in society that had been built to stop Islamists. And so, when he did the coup eight years ago, a lot of us believed, a lot of intelligence agencies believed, it was purposely tripped off as a coup in order to get all these people to come up and see who's going to be anti-Islamist and then wipe them out. And so what happened in society is he ended up, like, killing and torturing tens of thousands of people eight years ago when this happened. Anyone who was going to be against Islamists, anyone who was kind of built in to stop that. And so those people were all eliminated. The people in the army who were against Islamists were all eliminated. And so for the first time, all of Adetok's protections are gone. So now you have this, like, very Islamist leader, who's very pro-Islamist, and he just, he just, like, with his forces conquered Syria because of what's going on in the Middle

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  East for Islamists. He also now is wiping out, by reportedly, huge numbers of Kurds. Like, you can go look online, there's, I think a lot more Kurds have died in the last month than, than people in Gaza have died this entire last year. And you're not hearing protests about it, because, I guess, because there's no Jews involved, but it's like, it's crazy. They're just killing off the Kurds. And by the way, a lot of the Kurds were close allies with a lot of my friends in the special forces who had to deal with stuff over there. They were our friends.

• 1:15:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  And, and, and they don't have a country, which I think they should. A lot of their territories inside Turkey, a lot of it's inside of Iraq, a lot of it's inside Syria, and they're the Islamist enemy. The Islamists don't want these guys to have their own country. And so, so he's wiping a bunch of them out. And I'm very scared what Turkey does next. Turkey has nuclear weapons that, you know, because it's in NATO. Uh, it's, it's a, it's a wild card. Like, are they going to go after and help the Islamists, like, take out the Jordanian king? I don't know. But there's, like, lots of really scary things. So I think, I think Iran's on the run. We need to, we need to, you know, finish off the whole story with Iran, but now there's this other Islamist threat there that's a wild card that's, we're going to be dealing with and figuring out. It's pretty scary to me.

• 1:15:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I didn't even, that wasn't even on my radar. What about technology? Are you worried about, is China developing anything that you're aware of that we should be concerned about? Or is Russia have any technology that they overplayed their hand, maybe?

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  You know, China has a bunch of advanced new technology in all sorts of areas, whether it's hypersonics, whether it's massive numbers of submarines, whether it's all sorts of, you know, all sorts of new projects they're working on that I'm sure I don't even know about. Um, you know, all sorts of things. They're trying to copy SpaceX. Thank God we have SpaceX and they don't. But they're, they're trying to copy it. I don't know if you see the videos that blows up when they try it, but they're, but they're, they're gonna get there eventually, probably, you know? Because I mean, Elon's really smart, but it's, I mean, we have a really great program, but eventually they catch up and they, then they do things in space, which scares me. I mean, I mean, what am I scared by? I'm scared by the space stuff, to tell you the truth. I really hope, it's very funny. Everyone's like, don't weaponize space, don't weaponize space. And I agree, I don't want there to be wars in space. It would screw up a lot of stuff for the world. At the same time, if someone else weaponizes space and we don't, we're kind of screwed.

• 1:16:34Shawn Ryan?

  What, what's go, I have no insight into what's going on in space.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  So I don't have any clearances around this, and so I might piss people off talking about it, but I'm not cleared, so I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you a few things. But like, the number one thing I'd say, there's a natural network effect in space where it's very cheap. Like, for the cost of one aircraft carrier, you can put out probably 150,000 things up there that you can accurately drop on people within one meter. And so, and they're much, much cheaper than missiles. And so, so, so you basically, and if someone does that and no one else does it, then like, the person who has that first, you never launch a rocket again, because it's very easy to see if a lot rockets being launched, and you can just take it out. So there's a network effect that really scares me. If there was gonna be a war, whoever conquers and whoever has stuff up there first is really good, could probably stop the other guy from getting stuff up there. And I, I don't want stuff exploding in space, but like, it's just, it's just such a powerful thing to own for any future battle.

• 1:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  We need to be thinking about it. I think some people are thinking about it. I'm not sure our budget reflects that we're thinking about it. And by the way, this is why a lot of us were usually in favor of Space Force behind the scenes and really glad that President Trump started that. It's obvious you need Space Force. Because it's just, it's like, we're talking about how warfare changes, like, the space thing is, is a scary angle.

• 1:17:40Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Is there anything else you're aware of, going on?

• 1:17:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's fascinating in itself.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  That's a big one. I mean, the other thing in general is that, that I guess I'm most afraid of, is that China has about 200 times our shipbuilding capacity, if you want to say, and I think you've probably talked about this before. In World War II, you get these, like, I have this cool painting at a house in Montana, or ski house, of these American ships hunting down a German warship and taking it out. But we needed multiple ships to do it, because the German battleships were actually better than ours, I think. And now, America battleships, destroy, not battleships anymore, but American destroyers, everything else, they're way more advanced than Chinese. But, you know, if someone has 200 times your capacity, that's really scary, because eventually I have a bunch of them hunted down, right? And so, so the question is, what the heck do we do? We need to get our capacity up. So my friends and I started this company, Sironic. We're gonna hopefully build 500 ships in Austin next year, work with a bunch of the admirals,

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  a bunch of the best people in the Navy. We're teaching them how to use AI to have, like, swarms of these weaponized vessels, and how they can work together with the fleet, and how we could eventually have thousands of these in any kind of, you know, mission or battle scenario. Because that's really what you want, because for the cost of one big ship, by the way, all of our shipyards are delayed. They're all behind. It's pathetic. It's that all run by administrators and terrible relations. So this Navy is just, like, way behind and broken. So we need to have an alternate path to help create, you know, thousands of these ships to deter the bad guys.

• 1:19:00Shawn Ryan?

  That space thing blows my mind. I mean, if that, if that, if that happens, we're not up there already, you know, and with that one meter thing, I mean, when you, when you had mentioned, you know, you could stop anything else from coming up there, I mean, that's, that right there is, that's global domination.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we really don't want there to be war in space, because it may be the case that you start just blowing up certain things, they figure out how to get missiles or whatever, and to blow up certain things, and then, then you have lots of junk up there, and then it's just a giant mess. And, you know, I think Starlink's really good for the world. I don't, hopefully no one destroys that shit.

• 1:19:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's fascinating. Let's go into Sironic.

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  That's what we were just talking about, exactly. The reason this is so important, man, is that there's no interfaces right now for controlling one to many that actually work, right? So, do you ever play Starcraft or Warcraft?

• 1:19:56Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  And so, there needs to be like, modern AI-enabled versions of this. One of my friends is a really impressive video game guy who built Riot Games with League of Legends and stuff. There's tons of really great American talent around there. And so, part of what we need to be doing is iterating on and practicing on like, what interfaces work for these things. Because right now, if you have like, a drone, there's like, five guys who are flying one drone in the Middle East, which is fine for that project, it's not gonna work for a battle with thousands of these ships. If you have a Hellscape, it needs to be some AI. I still want people in charge, but then AI needs to be augmenting them, right? Helping them. Just same way your troops were in your Warcraft game.

• 1:20:33Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you are involved in so many things. How about Anduril? Did I pronounce that correctly?

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Anduril's the one that Palmer Lucky, who got kicked out of Facebook and my three-pounder colleagues started. And it's doing the Roadrunner we talked about. It's doing a bunch of other great stuff. It's a really important company.

• 1:20:56Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about Neuralink?

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  I think it's cool. I think, you know, you know what actually is really neat? There's a bunch of the talent for Neuralink's moved to Austin, where we are. You know, a lot of this tech talent, people have shifted out of California. And so, a lot of the head people are there, and, you know, they're making amazing progress. There's probably all sorts of things you can do with Neuralink eventually, with like, you know, people who are paralyzed, fix that with back pain. And it's a little bit scary if you really get a high bandwidth into your brain, maybe see what's going on. I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know everything about that, you know?

• 1:21:28Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, does that worry you at all?

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  Well, I would say I trust Elon and the people working on it, but in general, having companies have access directly into the brains of huge numbers of people, if it spreads to be a thing that lots of people are touching, that is a little bit of a scary kind of concept if you can kind of, you know. Overall, it's like really positive, right? Overall, for the near term, 100% like, and there's guys, I can't even imagine, I'm claustrophobic. I don't know about you, I don't like being stuck in a small space. Imagine if you're paralyzed and you just, all you do is blink your eyes. And there's guys who are literally getting this thing and suddenly they're able to effectively like, you know, communicate, play games, like do all these things that otherwise, otherwise they were trapped in their head. I mean, this is like, it's like a god's gift for, for a huge number of people. So it's like, so it's like, is it a good thing?

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  100% it's a good thing, but sure, if we're going to speculate 30 years from now where society can go, if we're all plugged into our brains, there's, there's, we gotta make sure the crazy things don't happen, obviously.

• 1:22:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I've, I've read, uh, something a couple of weeks ago saying that, uh, it's helping blind people potentially see.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  100%, there's all sorts of these amazing things you could do with this. So I think for people who have issues or injured, and it may even be like Elon said at some point, for a really bad back pain or something, you could just adjust it and stuff. So there's lots of really, really, I think, I think we're going towards a golden age, it's really positive. I think whenever there's these positive things, there's always some negative possibilities. And it doesn't mean we should stop doing the positive things, but we should just keep those in mind and do our best to make sure we avoid them.

• 1:22:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let's move into, uh, let's move into fighting for Western civilization. And your efforts to combat basically wokeness.

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Shawn Ryan?

  When did you start doing that?

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  You know, even at the Stanford Review, there's a version of that that was going on there. It wasn't called wokeness back then. It was, it was like, it was political correctness, run out, run amok, run out of control. And, you know, and it wasn't as extreme back then. There were, there were bad things, there were dumb things, but it was always like. It was always like there's just generally, you can kind of assume there's gonna be common sense in charge. And things weren't that broken. And I noticed things really started to get crazy. Maybe 2014, 2015. It's like, it's like, it's like something in society snapped and all of a sudden you said all these like irrational activists. And it wasn't about truth or what was right anymore. And it was just like, everyone had to virtue signal and go along. And if you're, if you're not virtue signaling and going along, you're a bad person for saying anything else.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  And I remember it started getting crazier and crazier. There were these like Black Lives Matter groups, which were clearly like, they'd be on TV saying, "We're Marxist trained, we're Marxists." And then my friends who are not Marxists would be like, giving them money. And like, "Guys, these are Marxists." Like, "They believe in like creating division." That's like part of what you study as a Marxist, is how to divide society and how to break things. They, they, they hate you as someone who's building things and creating things. They want to take it and give it to everyone else. And they're like, "Yeah, Joe, but this is like the thing to do right now, we want to be helpful." And I was just like, I've always argued, it drove me crazy, like, "Why are you giving these people money? This is insane." And it's, it's, uh, and I had like-

• 1:24:31Shawn Ryan?

  That was literally their answer? This is, this is the thing to do right now?

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  This is the thing to do right now to promote racial justice. And we're just trying to like, be like good citizens, to show that we care about black people. And it was, it was, I just, and by the way, like-

• 1:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck is that?

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  I mean, if you want to steel man something, like, there have been things in our country from like 80 years ago, 60 years ago, that were particularly egregious, that, that should piss everyone off, right? Like, if you, like, you look at like, I mean, all these, just all these, like, like, you know, in World War, just as, just like example, in World War II, like, they didn't, this, like, Secretary Knox didn't want any black people fighting in the Navy. And was kind of a dick about it. And there were even some of these heroes, like, I don't know if you know, like Dory Miller in like 1941 in Pearl Harbor ships, gets attacked, he goes, he goes and he saves a bunch of these people carrying him out. Then he's like, he's like not even, he's never not even trained. He runs up to the anti-aircraft gun and he shoots down four of the Japanese arrows. And just like a total badass. And they still treated them like shit because he was an African-American at a time when people were being treated like shit.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  So I think, I think there's like, this generation is like traumatized correctly from like how horrible they were. And I think that's still in the psyche. So I, so that's like the steel man, "Okay, there is something there we should be like remembering and, and pissed off about." But then, but then like the answer is not to do things that divide us further and and to spread Marxism. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it was a very weird, it was very cowardly, because everyone kind of knew, yeah, this is kind of wrong, doesn't really make full of sense, but I don't want to think about it, I just want to go along because I don't want to have trouble in my life. And so it just swept through our country and...

• 1:26:04Shawn Ryan?

  When I think of Black Lives Matter, I think of burning towns down.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, it's just like this anger, it's just this like, just anger expressed aggressively and righteously, and, and, and it was people fanning the flames of that anger and that divisiveness. And, you know, it's really sad, because I feel like in the 1990s, we'd got to like a really good place in our society, where, where like, you know, it was, it'd become like, much less racist, everyone of all backgrounds was much more optimistic on how we're going to work and live together. And I feel like there were frankly, these race grifters, who like, just like reignited a lot of stuff and, and caused a lot of trouble. Like, that, that's, that's the perspective from my perspective, is that, and, and, and, you know, and the woke stuff's not just about race, by the way, though, the woke stuff's

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  about, is about just general illiberal energy, and a general kind of like, it's not about truth, it's about conquering things for the far left and demonizing anyone who stands in their way. And it's just a very, it's a very, very scary time in our society, the last decade. And, you know, a lot of our universities have basically been, been conquered by these forces, by these neo-Marxists, it's all, like, if you stand up and you speak out against anything that's part of their omnicause, they do their best to crush you. And, and, and if you're, if you're, and if you're a professor in a history department, a sociology department, an anthropology department, like, you do not allow any professor to join who doesn't agree with your kind of woke view of omnicause, and your neo-Marxist view.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  And so, for, for quite a long time now, we've not been graduating professors who even understand, you know, the history from the other perspective. And, you know, John Stuart Mill, one of the great, kind of like, like, like liberal theorists, liberal in a kind of, in a pro-liberty sense, in a classical liberal sense, you know, one of my favorite things he, he would say is that, you know, if you don't, if you don't understand the argument, the other argument, you don't understand yours very well either. And this is the case now in most of our society, in the, in these institutions, is they don't actually deeply understand their side, because they've demonized it and they've kicked it out, and it's, it's very dangerous.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  How are you combating this stuff? There's a lot of different ways. One way is as a leader to role model speaking out and role model courage. The classical virtues are really powerful against this stuff. And the more, the more one person shows courage, a few more people show courage and it snowballs. And once people are showing courage, they can't get us anymore. They need us to be afraid. Another thing, we gotta create new media, right?

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  You know, investor Barry Weiss is Free Press. I think it's really important what she's doing there. I'm an investor of my friend, something called Arena Magazine. We're trying to build more of these media sources. What is the magazine? Arena, A-R-E-N-A. Arena Magazine? Yeah, which was a new, we're creating, we're creating new, we're creating new, you know. So basically what happened is like, there used to be all these things in technology world like Wired and Scientific American and TechCrunch. And they're all conquered by the crazy woke people who hate markets, hate America. And so I don't want my entrepreneurs going to talk to this TechCrunch thing when it just constantly is attacking us and lying about us. Like, let's talk to something else, right? So let's build new media. So there's things like Arena we're pushing, we're growing that quickly. And then I think, you know, University of Austin is based on this as well. So, you know, my friends Barry Weiss and Neil Ferguson, Neil's probably the greatest living historian.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Taught at Oxford and Harvard, really, really bright guy. And Barry Weiss runs the Free Press. You know, we thought, listen, there needs to be at least one top university in the country that's not conquered by these goddamn Marxists. Man, that's, I mean, when did University of Austin start? Our first class actually just started. It took us three years to launch it, which is pretty fast because there's lots of barriers. Thousands of pages of regulation. The new universities don't want competitions. They're trying to block you out. The creditors try to block you out. But you know, in this case, we found one that's pretty good. And we have, we have got 92 students in the first class. A lot of these kids turned down the very top schools to be there. No kidding. The idea is pursuit of truth. The idea is, you know, it's a patriotic institution, but we have people who think on both sides.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  This is not, this is not like a conservative institution. And I wouldn't want to be. That'd be a failure because you need to understand both sides, right? But it's an institution that really is going to engage with the last thousand years of great ideas and the great debates that kind of built Western civilization. If you look at Western civilization for me, there's three great traditions you have to understand. You have to understand the classical virtues and, you know, the classical role in Rome and Greece and all the wisdom that comes from that. That's like, that's a core base of who we are. Amazing stuff. And you have to understand I think you have to understand like what the wisdom came from that like gave us that gave us modern Europe and really the dignity of the individual, right? So I think if you only have if you only have this aristocratic like Uberman Shnichian kind of classical view, then I think your human life becomes very cheap.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  And that's very dangerous because I think Christianity has like has a lot of wisdom in the fact that there's like a radical dignity to every human life. And so you have that base. And then on top of those two traditions, you have the scientific enlightenment and the philosophical enlightenment, which, you know, really started in 17th, 18th centuries. They kind of gave us this understanding of the modern world with with Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations and how trade works with scientific revolution, uh, with, you know, the kind of led to the Industrial Revolution, led to what we have today. So we have these like really important three traditions. And if you want to be a top leader in society and you want to be an educated leader in society, I think I think our schools should be should be teaching those traditions to these people. We should be engaging in them, debating about them and applying them to today. And if we're not doing that with our leaders, by the way, that that is what our leaders

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  had who created our country, our founders of this country, they understood deeply and were well read in all of those traditions. And they had a lot of wisdom that they used to craft our constitution. We're really lucky to have that. There's this amazing thing based on all that wisdom. And if we don't apply that today to our modern problems, instead we kind of go off in these kind of woke or nonsense directions, like we're going to break our civilization. So let's have leaders who are courageous and who who know these things, you know? Man, man, so 92 students is the first class. We're gonna try to do more than 100 next class, you know? It's very funny, you're not allowed to be officially accredited fully until you've graduated the class. Interesting. So all the trolls like, oh, the unaccredited university. It's like, yeah, that's the rule, but we're doing our best, man. How how big do you think it will get?

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  You know, Stanford and Harvard have like 1600, 1900 kids. I'd love to scale that over 20 years. It takes a while to get there. You don't want to you don't want to go too fast because you want to have like really top experiences for the students. You really want to and there's going to be things that aren't perfect. There's going to be parts that are amazing that they love and there's going to be parts that we got to keep building, keep improving. I want to launch a master's degree in a couple of years on, uh, I want to compete with Stanford and Harvard Business School and how it'd be like an innovation master's degree where if you want to be part of the innovation world and you want to like work with like the people who've built the top companies, come here and we'll teach you how to be part of our innovation world and then you can kind of bring you as a leader there. And we want people. Obviously, there's a tech and STEM side, but again, you want to train leaders how to think about our civilization and how to be fighters for America, who are, you know,

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  we call them floss for builders. We need more floss for builders, people like Elon, who are going to fight for our civilization as well as build.

• 1:32:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. How many applicants do you guys have?

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  We got several hundred applicants. It's interesting, the Common App is where most applications come through from most universities now. We're not allowed on the Common App until we're accredited. So our number of applications, even though it was several hundred, the first class, I think would have been a lot higher, but kids couldn't check it off on that. But we're still getting a lot of great people trying to come.

• 1:33:14Shawn Ryan?

  How are you vetting the professors?

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  So Neil Ferguson himself is a really great professor, and then we have a set of amazing people. We have a bunch of really, really top deans who are, their job is to help recruit the new professors and getting some pretty famous names applying right now and coming in. So hopefully we'll announce some really great, great new people. But we have a really great set of about 25 really top professors that I'm, it's really fun for me actually to get to go learn from these guys, too. So it's a good set of people.

• 1:33:39Shawn Ryan?

  Are you spending a lot of time there?

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm the chairman of the board and tried to design this new master's degree, trying to make sure we create opportunities for the students, giving scholarships for really top students to come. Right now, all the students are on scholarship. We got extra, I even give extra scholarships for like really, really top students to turn down, you know, very best places and come. And I'm just trying to make sure it's a great experience for them.

• 1:34:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. Any scholarship?

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  Any scholarships?

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so basically, everyone there gets their tuition covered right now, which is, which is great. So we're sending, and we're giving scholarships beyond that, too, for great people.

• 1:34:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it seems like you guys are getting a lot of interest in there. I saw it was on 60 Minutes. Is anybody, or any, I mean, what is the media saying? It sounds like there's a lot of trolls.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  60 Minutes was surprisingly positive. I really appreciate that. They came and they looked at it and they, and they gave it a fair treatment, which was, which was great. Listen, when we launched, everyone attacked and mocked us. These other universities, they don't want competition. They don't want something else there. But we're getting a lot of positive news from a lot of people. I think we have several thousand donors now. I think we have dozens of donors who've given over a million dollars each. So a lot of good supporters have come out of the woodwork and a bunch more are really helping us. It's a movement whose time has come. Like, we need, in America, is what you do. If things are broken, if things aren't doing what they can, you know, you get together, you build something new, and it teaches everyone else. And so right now, you have Dozens of other universities that are referring to us on their boards that are saying, "Why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? Why don't we take these ideas?" Which is great. That's the whole point is let's bring everything back in the same direction.

• 1:35:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love it. I love it. Let's move into the Cicero Institute.

• 1:35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Shawn Ryan?

  What is it?

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Cicero Institute is our policy group. So basically what we do is we work in states, not in DC for the most part. It turns out there's 50 states in our country and our founders, founders intended stuff to happen at the states. This is called the United States. This is an alliance of states. So that's supposed to be where most of government actually happens the most in our country. Like obviously we have federal, state and local, but states are supposed to be, and our federal has gotten too big, so it does too much right now. But states still have a lot of power and they're really important. And we've seen obviously people moving between states a lot because some states are doing the right things, some states are doing the wrong things. And so there's a lot of different ideas for how to make things work better. You can test and prove out at a state level. And what we tend to do is we like to fix broken systems. We like to fix things that governments usually

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  by mistake broken or special interests is broken. So for example, I'll give you one I like is vocational education. Vocational education was a lot more prominent in the US in the 60s and 70s. And a lot of people said, "No, let's send them to college instead. It's racist not to have everyone go to college. It's bad not to have all poor people go to college." And it turns out a lot of people went to college. They get these studies, degrees, you know, they don't come out with any real skills or any real jobs. I don't think everyone should be going to college necessarily. I think they should be doing what they should to get a great job. And so a lot of people agree with me. So we fund these vocational education schools. They're starting to come back up. The problem is, what if it's a badly run vocational education school? What do you do? How do you decide to fix it? So for example, in Texas, there's 27 high-end technical vocational schools, teaching it to be like a high-end manufacturing job, like really good jobs coming out of these if you do it

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  right. But they weren't working that. They weren't working nearly as well as they could. And so what we did in Texas is we said, Texas said, "We're going to fund these schools." Based on the average salary coming out. So we're gonna tell each of these schools, you better figure out how to get your students succeeding. And if you do, you're gonna get more money. If you don't, you're gonna get less money. And you know what happened? Is the school started saying, okay, what skills do we have to teach? What businesses do we partner with? How do we figure this out? Wow. Salary's doubled coming out of these schools. No kidding. And so, so that's the example of where you could take a law. So we draft the law. We kinda go to the legislature, find the sponsors, go to the governors, administration, convince them it's right. Uh, help write op-eds along with the people in the legislature. And, and we have to hire lawyers to draft the appropriate law for that state.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  You get all the stakeholders involved. You say, here's, but here's who's not gonna like it. These special interests aren't gonna like, but here's why they're wrong. You kinda prepare them ahead of time. We have this 20-step process. And, and you, and you, and you partner with all these people in the state. And you get the law passed. And, and then, and then it fixes the problem. How fast is this spreading? Uh, so it takes usually, uh, usually it's two or three years to get a law done. And we've been doing it for eight years. And we got dozens of laws passed in 17 states last year. We have teams in 20 states now. And you, what you'll do is you'll hire someone who used to like, you know, be the lieutenant governor or speaker of the house or whatever. And they're lobbyists, but it's the coolest type of lobbyist relationship. Because lobbyists are usually sick of having to help businesses, try to ask for things for themselves. And these guys charge us way less than anyone else, because they get to work on something they agree with. And so you see, you'll hire these guys, like, yeah, this is really cool. I get to work on this with you.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  And they, and they'll work, and, because every state's different. Every state has different, you know, ways behind the scenes to getting things done. And so you just, you just have to, you have to do it and push it through. But rather than play the lobbying game for the bad guys, it's playing it for the good guys, which is a lot of fun. Are you guys in Tennessee? We do. We already do have teams in Tennessee. Governor Bill Lee has been a great guy to work with. And He has been. He has been. He has been. He's, he's a strong, he's a strong governor. A lot of pro-freedom things here. Um, there's a, there's, I think a bunch of stuff we're working on for next time. I apologize. I should've checked the notes for exactly what we're doing here. It's all good. All good. I just love that you guys are operating in here. You got a strong, you got a, you got a, you got a strong set of leaders here. You got a, you got a, I think that all three houses, that the two, that's Congress,

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  both sides of Congress and the governor are, are red. And so there's, there's a lot of bold things I think we can get done here.

• 1:39:07Shawn Ryan?

  Amazing.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  What other states are you guys in? Do you know? We do a lot in Florida. We do a lot in Texas, of course, where I am now. You know, Missouri, you know, a lot of stuff in Georgia. There's all sorts of places. We're all over the country. Arizona was a big place for us. It's harder now with the current governor. But even sometimes with moderate Democrats, we get along. I'll tell you what happens. Most of the time when our laws pass, we get people from both parties voting for them. And the moderate Democrats love a lot of our stuff, too, because it's like we're helping fix things with incentives, right? And accountability. The far left hates us. Because the far left's tied to those government unions I was talking about. They don't want anything to be held accountable. They don't want spend to be tied to metrics, because then they can't capture the spend for their corrupt groups. And so the far left tends to be, like, really against us.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  And so therefore, when you have a left administration, usually you can't get through the far left. But we're still getting a lot done in purple and in red states. What about homelessness? That's a big one for us. So we've passed a bunch of laws in a bunch of areas there. So I come from San Francisco, remember, originally, nearby area. And San Francisco is just totally screwed because of homelessness. And what happens is you get these special interests, the NGOs. And these guys lobby for money. And then even 20 years ago, people were like, wait, we're giving you all this money. How about we, like, tie the money to results or to outcomes or to goals together? And they're like, no, no, no, you can't do that. And they screamed and yelled. And they're so powerful, because once they have all this money, they become the biggest donors. And so all the politicians don't want to piss them off, so they don't hold them accountable.

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  And when you look at it, these NGOs, they started giving free houses to a lot of their friends, the people in their groups, because there's houses are given out, of course. You started, like, actually having incentive to bring more homeless there with, like, super generous stuff. You started giving, like, free drugs to all these people, because that's what the homeless people want, it makes them come. It's just a total mess. I'll tell you the worst. I think the worst part of it is a vulnerability index for homes. Have you heard of this before? No. If you talk to the people on the very far left, they're not really big on incentives. And some of them are well-meaning, of course, and so they say, "Well, we want to give homes to people who need homes." So it sounds like a nice thing, but of course, there's an infinite line in America for homes. So everyone wants a free home. It's okay. We have to prioritize people who are more vulnerable. So how do you prioritize them?

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  This is something that came from both HUD and a bunch of these blue cities. So they said, "You get more points towards a free home if you're on drugs." If you're on drugs? If you're on drugs. You get more points if you're not in a recovery program, because you really need it better, more, if you're not in a recovery program. You get more points if you commit a crime. You get more points if it's a violent crime. More points if your kids are truant. So basically, there's all these points you get for bad things. And they say, "Well, these people deserve a home, because they're going through all these bad things." I'm like, "No, no, no. If you give them points for bad things, you're creating incentive." So you look at our cities and say, "Why are they so effed up?" Is you literally have insane amounts of money being given out based on points for bad things. And so, we like followed a homeless guy around and a bunch of homeless people around Austin, tried to be helpful. And we map it out, and like, one of them goes in.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  The first time he goes in, he says, "You know, I'm trying to look for job training. What do I do to get out of my situation?" And this like, young, blue-haired, progressive woman says, "No, no, sir. You deserve a home." "And I'm not sure we're gonna have enough from right away, because Republicans aren't funding us enough. But you deserve a home. Sign this. Here's how you get your tent." He's like, "Oh, I was gonna stay with my cousin." And she said, "Don't tell me that. It's better if you have a tent. You're gonna get home sooner." So he gives him the tent to go set it up in the city. And he comes back two months later, and he doesn't get quite qualified for a home. And he says, "But you know, I heard that if I was on drugs, I'd be more likely to have a home by now." And she said, "Yeah, that's technically true, but we don't like to think about that, right?"

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  You believe that? This is ungrating. This pisses, yeah, exactly. Why do you think I get so involved in policy? It pisses me off. It's crazy. It's breaking our country. And so, we passed a bunch of laws in Georgia and Florida, and a couple other places, uh, you know, where we're actually like, just completely fixing the incentives, completely getting rid of this nonsense. Red states still need to hold these NGOs accountable. There's these really sketchy NGOs. And you know, probably shouldn't be illegal to run one of them in the red state, but the very least, if you get any money from government, you should have to be way more transparent on your outcomes, way more transparent on everything you're doing. Because a lot of these things are just actually lobbying groups for the extremes.

• 1:43:09Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think any blue states will start to adopt this?

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  I think so. I think it's, and this is one of those things, is you have to first do it somewhere and prove it works. And then it becomes like, and then it becomes clear that the moderates are gonna do it in the blue state to fix it as well. So I think that is the fight. I have a lot of friends who are moderate Democrats in SF, and they're fighting hard against the far left. That's the battle. It's the moderates against the far left. And I think the moderates are gonna win, and they're gonna start putting in these accountability, putting in these incentives, defunding the stuff that's corrupt. That's what we have to do to fix our cities. So I'm bullish it's gonna happen. It's a really tough battle, because there's just so much money for these extremists in our country right now. Like in California, there's over 2 million people working for the government. They all have to give a piece of their paycheck to the government unions, who then are part of funding this whole complex.

• 1:43:54Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of corruption in our country, and there's a lot of money going towards the wrong things. But you know what? I think, like I said, there's a vibe shift. It's a vibe shift away from the bureaucracy, away from the cowards, away from the people who are acting based on guilt. And you know, it's going towards greatness, going towards courage, going towards kind of like a positive ambition. So I think we're going the right way.

• 1:44:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing to hear. I also see you're involved in trying to fix the prison and parole systems.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's really similar in some ways to the vocational thing we talked about. Obviously, they're different systems, but think about it. If you're running a probation system, if you're running a prison system, whether or not you're on the right or the left, like there's certain things we want to have happen. Like, we don't want people to have to go back to prison, but we want people to succeed and not commit a crime, right? And we don't want, if someone's gonna come out of prison, you want them to have a job, right? You want them to be employed. So what do you do? You want to create incentives in the system for the people running it to hit certain goals, to have more people come out and be employed. And it turns out, there's lots of programs that work to make people more likely to be employed, and there's lots of programs that don't. And in fact, right now, most of our prisons, they're terrible cultures. The guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards. It's running badly. There's exceptions to this, but most of them are running really badly, and there's bad leadership.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  And I mean, you can't automatically create good leadership, but you can't replace bad leadership. You can incentivize good leadership. None of our states do this pretty much right now. So it's just stuff like that that we're trying to work with the governors and work with the legislators. And like, let's just make these systems work better for society, you know?

• 1:45:23Shawn Ryan?

  Am I missing anything with this? What else are you working on?

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  That's a lot.

• 1:45:27Shawn Ryan?

  I know.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  That's funny.

• 1:45:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do you? You're involved in so many things. You've got five kids, you're married. I mean, how do you manage all of the tech companies, everything, the University of Austin? Everything that you're involved in, how do you?

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Well, you have to have really great people around you who are in charge of each of the organizations. Somehow Elon stays as CEO. I don't know. He's, I think he's an alien. He's great. He's a genius. But like, for me, I can't be in charge of all of these things at once, nor would I be as good at it if I was trying to do all of them. It doesn't make any sense. So like, so you get someone who's better than you at it. And, and you, and I work as usually a chairman with them or as a co-founder with them. And, and we partner together. And, and the more you can surround yourself with attracting more and more great people who come and want to work with you or inspired by stuff you're doing and want to be part of it, the more advantage you have. So it does kind of like be snowball the advantage. Like you just keep trying to find and get really great people. And we don't always get things right. Lots of our things screw up. There's lots of mistakes. You've got to iterate, you know? It's not like we're, we're not infallible.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  We're making mistakes all the time, but you've just got to do your best to push in the right direction.

• 1:46:31Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to talk about any of those mistakes or anything big that you've learned from?

• 1:46:36Speaker 03

  Oh goodness, there's it everywhere.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  I mean, there's just a general thing for me. You asked like how I do it all at once. I think when I was younger, I thought I could be in charge of a lot of things at once. And if you're in charge of too much at once, then a lot of it starts to break at once. And then you're really screwed. Right? So like, my new rule right now is I'm only responsible for the failure of one thing at a time.

• 1:46:55Shawn Ryan?

  I'm going to take that advice.

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  It's, it's important because especially once you start to have your success. It's happened to all my friends who've been really successful is that all of a sudden you try to do a lot at once. Just like, I could do that thing. I could do these five things. And it turns out, no, actually now you're totally screwed. So you really want to have other people who are each responsible for whatever's going on. You want to have teams that are great that are, that are responsible. By the way, they have to own a piece of it too. This is why nonprofits are really hard for me. Because I do, I get a lot more for-profits because they're for-profit. The people there, they own a big piece of it. They're going to sleep thinking about it. They're waking up thinking about it. And that equity works really, really well. It's like you give people real upside and things and then they own them.

• 1:47:30Shawn Ryan?

  How do you recruit them? I'm just, I'm curious because I'm trying to build my company out and I have no business sense, so.

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  Well, we have a pretty big talent network. We spend a lot of time on this. We have teams at about, not teams, we have like fellows and, you know, people we nurture and take relationships with at about 20 different universities. We have people on our team who spend a lot of time figuring out where is the top talent right now, making sure we're helpful to them, make sure we get to know them, be in the right circles. And, you know, but it's, I'm still figuring it out. It's one of the reasons I wanna, I'm happy to be on here. Maybe, maybe some smart person will hear, will hear about it and wanna come work with us, you know?

• 1:48:01Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Right on. What do you, do you have anything particular, one of your ventures that you're the most excited about?

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  You know, I think some of the, I mean, obviously the defense stuff's really exciting. I think some of the bio stuff for me is really important because it's, it's cool because it's saving lives. It's like, it's like, defense does save lives too, but there's almost nothing that doesn't, that feels more pure than when you build like a, like a therapeutic company that's actually treating and saving lives where you invest in one of these things. So there's just a bunch of that stuff that's really working well right now. Like, for example, I'll just give you an example, um, you too. One example is this company, Orca Bio, uh, it's amazing founders we backed relatively early on, and they're able to sort cells one by one, uh, using subconductor technology. It came out of a Stanford lab. And, and it turns out this is really useful for cell therapies. And so cell therapies, there's been, there's been like a trillion dollars invested in cell therapies. They're amazing.

• 1:48:51Speaker 03

  It's what they are, is it used to be, uh, that all the, all the pharma guys were chemists and they would do things with molecules and all the drugs were molecules. And then with Genentech and others in the 1980s, you had what's called biologics. And so instead of using a molecule to treat you, you'd use like a peptide or an antibody, something that came from your, from the body, right, to treat you. And that was a really powerful way to cure a lot more things. And now, instead of just using that, you're using like a whole cell to treat someone. So, like, if this is a peptide, like, the whole building is a, is a cell, right? It's a much more complicated thing that we've, and just in the last 10 years, learned how to program them and use them. So all this is going on. But the simplest form of cell therapy, it's been around forever, is, for example, it's called a bone marrow transplant. So if someone has late-stage blood cancer, they're gonna die pretty much for sure in six months. What you do is you can give them a bone marrow transplant, uh, reboot the immune system,

• 1:49:35Speaker 03

  good chance it cures the cancer now. Unfortunately, it's like playing Russian roulette. You'll die 15, 20% of the time with a bone marrow transplant, right? Cause it, cause it could be rejected, could, could just kill you. So you'll only do it if someone's about to die anyway of cancer, and then maybe it saves them. Now, it turns out with this new cell therapy sorting thing that these guys are doing, they're able to make it so the rejection rate's almost nothing. So as opposed to fifteen to twenty percent, there's very, very few reductions, even those were not fatal. And so here's what's really cool about this. Not only is that going to save thousands of more lives per year of people who have these blood cancers, it turns out that when you reboot someone's immune system, it seems to cure autoimmune diseases. So autoimmune diseases are like Crohn's or multiple sclerosis, you may have heard of. We lost my aunt unfortunately to multiple sclerosis. We're starting a phase one now with the FDA where we think we may potentially have

• 1:50:20Speaker 03

  a cure for multiple sclerosis. So there's stuff like this happening right now with bio that's really exciting.

• 1:50:25Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's incredible.

• 1:50:27Speaker 03

  It's fun stuff, right? There's like the breakthroughs coming out of our top universities with the latest technology. It's just really inspiring. I feel like we're going towards a really positive direction for our society if we can, if we can keep things functional, you know?

• 1:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, man. Congratulations. You're doing just phenomenal things, not only for the country, but for the world and...

• 1:50:49Speaker 03

  Well, I'm honored to be part of the stuff that all these other amazing people are doing too, that I get to invest in and get to back and try to help because our, you know, we live in an awesome civilization. There's so many smart people doing so many great things here and we should be more positive about that, you know?

• 1:51:02Shawn Ryan?

  I am, uh, I'm just honored to have you here and I'm so thankful that we met. You're an amazing human being. Who are three people you'd like to see on the show?

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  Um, at some point you gotta get Elon on, of course. He's the, he's the, he's the, he's the king of the moment. You know, uh, probably my, my, my, my two most important mentors, I'm Clara, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, I'd say. Those are the guys I learned the most from in my youth and they're, they're both extraordinary individuals. Alex is my co-founder, a palantir, as was Peter. And, uh, and Peter obviously was co-founder of PayPal and was kind of one of the intellectual leaders that I think, I think, even though Peter was not involved in this election, he, a lot of the things he created kind of led to this stuff happening. And he's someone I really admire.

• 1:51:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe you can put a word in for us.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  I'll let him know.

• 1:51:50Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, Joe, it was seriously, it was an honor to have you here and, um, I hope to see you again. I really do.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  Thank you, Sean.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  Bud, thank you.