“China’s Cognitive Warfare” - Palantir Co-Founder On Iran Threats, AI PSYOPs & CIA Funding | PBD #751

Patrick Bet-David sits down with Joe Lonsdale to discuss founding Palantir after 9/11, working with the CIA and FBI to combat terrorism and protect civil liberties, China’s cognitive warfare and AI-driven influence operations, tensions with Iran and potential U. S. military action, venture capital’s role in defense and AI innovation, and rebuilding American institutions through policy and media. ------ 👞 THE NEW FLB 1'S: https://bit.ly/4mXV9gd Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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

• 0:00Patrick Bet-David?

  When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Nobody is angry at you, you might not be doing much.

• 0:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do so many people not trust you? Why do so many people not trust Palantir?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  We have to eliminate probably about 10, up to 10,000 terrorists.

• 0:15Patrick Bet-David?

  The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex? Then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building? Then what?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  What's scary to me is if it's Safari Republic elects a really, really bad person.

• 0:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Who today is your biggest enemy?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Uh, are like the extreme populists on both political sides.

• 0:33Patrick Bet-David?

  So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mencho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  If these guys were trying to kill Trump, it means that if they're still around after Trump's president, they're probably trying to get him and his, and his kids again.

• 0:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Why was Palantir still?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Protect the West against Islamist terrorists.

• 0:50Patrick Bet-David?

  That's truly the mission.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  That was truly the mission. But is Iran really Iraq?

• 0:54Patrick Bet-David?

  But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  And I know maybe this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman. So you know what the Romans would do? You'd go and you wipe out the leadership class, they're all dead. And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge. We're gonna make a deal or we're gonna kill all of you too.

• 1:16Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, this whole thing with VagTin and PBD Podcast started with a phone, me and Mario. That's it. And it grew today to, you know, 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full-time employees. And that relationship, are you watching us and supporting us? Wouldn't happen without you. But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel? And it would mean the world to us if you could press that subscribe button and notification. Why? It allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you. So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button. It would mean the world to us. Thank you so much.

• 2:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Great to have you on the podcast.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Patrick.

• 2:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, and I know you like these mics.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  These are awesome.

• 2:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, Jake and the crew. Jake, who picked these blue mics, by the way? You did? Okay, so credit goes to him, but cofounder Palantir.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  We started that 23 years ago.

• 2:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, the story you have from cofounding Palantir to then, I think you were an investor in Free Press with Barry Weiss, if I'm not mistaken, you were somewhat involved.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Built two companies.

• 2:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I gave Barry some money when she started, because you know we need to rebuild our institutions in this country.

• 2:47Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And to make it better.

• 2:48Patrick Bet-David?

  And then you moved to Austin, you're building a university, University Austin, you're doing another thing with Cicero, which we'll talk about. I want to get your opinion on Cicero and Cato, because those are two different mindset.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Two different statesmen.

• 3:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, two different statesmen. One had a temper, his way or the highway, the other one was compromised, open to, which is kind of the route you guys went. And then recently, you put, I think some 11.8 million dollars into a drone company in Nigeria.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Well, that's random. I run a big venture capital.

• 3:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  We're doing a lot in AI.

• 3:17Patrick Bet-David?

  A V C.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, A V C. It's called A V C. And listen, most of the best defense stuff, we focus on America, of course. I do think in Africa, working with the very, very best group that we could find there, it's important because there's a lot of bad guys there, too.

• 3:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I agree. So that's interesting. We'll get into that, because I'm curious, the drone business is very important. We're seeing with these wars with Ukraine and Russia, if you would have asked the average person five years ago, if Ukraine and Russia go to war, what will be the most important tool to use? Nobody would have guessed drones.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Millions.

• 3:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Millions, millions of drones and blowing up all these other things. But, okay, got a lot of questions. And the time we got this interview is phenomenal, because we got the Iran stuff going on, we got El Menjo that was just killed, and you know, with what's going on with Mexico, we have.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I wouldn't want to be in Puerto Vallarta right now.

• 4:03Patrick Bet-David?

  No, and we, you know, it's a place where we used to go to a lot, because for vacation spot, Americans go to Cancun, they go to Puerto Vallarta.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  They hit the Costco, man.

• 4:11Patrick Bet-David?

  They hit it out of all the places.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  The airport, too, it's scary.

• 4:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, yeah. But I want to start off with your background. Palantir, when you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's good if they know who you are, but one of my favorite signs on the old Defense Secretary Rome's field, he had a sign on his desk, and it said, if nobody is angry at you, you might not be doing much.

• 4:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you subscribe to that?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 4:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 4:37Patrick Bet-David?

  At what age did you subscribe to that?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Pretty young, actually. I was a pretty obnoxious kid.

• 4:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Were you?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I had all sorts of opinions. I always have, yeah.

• 4:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Tell me about your parents. Who were your parents?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I had my parents. My parents were awesome. My, uh, my mom passed away a long time ago. My dad's not doing well, which is sad, but they were, they were amazing people. My father was very competitive. He was one of eight kids. He brought them all out to California. He was our chess coach when we were little for fun. He does a chemical engineer, but in, uh, we won the state championship when I was a kid and my brothers did too. And we thought we must be really smart. And then he kept winning 20 years in a row. So he's just a very competitive guy, everything, every game, every sport and a really optimistic, positive, competitive guy.

• 5:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Chess? So you guys played chess? How old were you when you won the championship?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I was the K to six champion twice in a row in fifth and sixth grade. And we won the nationals in junior high school. So but it's like, it's because we worked really hard at it because he was a good coach. You got to spend, you had to spend, you know, 30, 40 hours a week to be the best.

• 5:29Patrick Bet-David?

  And this is in Fairmont?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Uh, we grew up in Fremont, California and Silicon Valley. Then these were tournaments in California and around the country.

• 5:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Who were you in high school?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Uh, it was a public high school. I was a nerdy guy who was a valedictorian and I had a bunch of really smart friends who taught me a bunch of stuff about, you know, we went, get way ahead in math and science and stuff.

• 5:46Patrick Bet-David?

  So at what point, uh, uh, did you and Peter Thiel link up? Because I think when I, I heard a story about you were still in college and you were doing something with him. How did that relationship start?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the smartest, uh, kids in Stanford computer science were going to PayPal at the time. It was something where I really admired the talent that was there. You have to realize that company, there was one company started by Peter Thiel and a bunch of his smartest friends. Max Levchin started it and David Sacks, all these guys were there. Reid Hoffman. And there's one company that Elon Musk started with, roll off a bunch of other really smart people. It was called X at the time. And X and Infinity merged to make PayPal. They were, they were fighting each other and they merged. So it's all the smartest friends around both Elon and Peter. No surprise, it was a place you wanted to be. They actually rejected me in my freshman year, but they let me in my sophomore year to go, go help them.

• 6:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Was that like the place everybody wanted to work?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Not everyone, but I, I think it was for, for me, it was where I noticed a lot of the smartest, most interesting people go in there. So, so it was, it was when I was trying to find it.

• 6:35Patrick Bet-David?

  How was the story coming to you guys? Because, you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, At that time, when you look at the numbers, it's not like Elon is today's Elon.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't. They weren't.

• 6:45Patrick Bet-David?

  But how did you know that these, was there, would they talk about it in the small circles?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Well, but I mean, I was a computer scientist. I was already ahead. I'd already done most of the undergrad work before I got there, which is normal nowadays. And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists and they were all trying to go work there. And so and their smartest friends were working there. And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review, which Peter had started. So I met people that way too through it.

• 7:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So Peter's way, how proactive was Peter of trying to get it in front of all the smartest kids coming out?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, this is, this is like, this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses. So Peter was very good at that. That's what we spend a lot of our time on now. I'm flying up to see all the kids at Harvard, MIT this week. I mean, we spent a lot of time on this.

• 7:26Patrick Bet-David?

  So, so walk me through it. So what does that look like? Is it, you know, do you, do you go straight to the top? Do you establish relationships? Are there programs to go meet the kids? How does that?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  It's actually, it's a good question. People don't ask. So Palantir, we had a whole playbook when we started that, you know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent. And so you'd have, you'd have your, your fellows, you'd have your spies, you have your advisors, you have all these like spies.

• 7:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Spies.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  These, these young men and women on your team and they're like talented computer scientists and they help you map out who the other best people are. And they help you throw parties and they help you get to know them. You know, professors there as well. And you're just, you just have people who are young, smart, technical people who are social. And they're there and they're mapping it out and they're helping you meet the right people. So when I come in, there's different groups. We've met. People who want to work with us, we want to learn from them. So it's mutually beneficial thing where you're getting to know all the top talent and you're, and you're helping connect them to your top companies. And it just becomes a, a way to work with them all.

• 8:15Patrick Bet-David?

  But how do you filter them out? Like, how do you know?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  It's like a chicken and egg. You start with, like you say, I'll, I'll have a superstar from my portfolio who's like one of our best engineers who just came from MIT. And they have like five or six of their smartest friends in a younger year and you'll go meet those kids.

• 8:28Patrick Bet-David?

  God.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Who are the smartest guys you know. So it's a network.

• 8:30Patrick Bet-David?

  It's purely word of mouth. So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys. And they would say, you have to meet John. He's the smartest guy I know. So you're asking them.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then you, then you might talk to them and you might work on projects with them. So you get to know a little bit, but, but yeah, you're just purely through the network. And I mean, it's, it's, it's a lot of things. The same way, if you're a football coach or you're a baseball coach, you gotta do this for talent.

• 8:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, what do you look for? So, so in football, you you may look for speed. You know, like right now, I met with one of the uh uh law firms that represents a lot of young talent. Nowadays, they're recruiting kids at ten, eleven, twelve years old. I said, so what do you look for? They said coachability and personality. I said, why personality? Personality equals sponsorship. You got personality, I can get some sponsorship money. You're coachable, we can put you. Of course, you gotta have the physical abilities. What did you guys look for?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  You know, it depends if you're hiring an entrepreneur or hiring an engineer and engineering leaders. It's because they're different.

• 9:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Give me both.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  An entrepreneur needs to have opinions. And my my entrepreneur needs to, needs to be able to say, here's my hypothesis about the world. Here's why I'm right. Usually, they want to have some chip on their shoulders, some something they're trying to prove.

• 9:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Like, they they will have to be someone. You can tell they're ambitious. They believe in things. You you don't necessarily, you need smart, interesting, curious people to build things. But you need to have like a certain level of leadership and opinions about the world, I think, to build things.

• 9:42Patrick Bet-David?

  I- i- is the mindset of recruits, that's all four, right? You were at Palantir, oh, four to oh nine. We were also at PayPal. And they they categorized you as being part of the PayPal mafia second, you know.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I was I'm fifteen years younger than Peter and twelve years younger than Elon. I was a junior kid. I don't get any credit for PayPal.

• 9:59Patrick Bet-David?

  But you were still there.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I was there learning. I was learning from these guys.

• 10:02Patrick Bet-David?

  And were you in meetings? Were you watching them? Were you there? And what was that like? What was Elon like in meetings? What was Peter like in meetings? What what was that like? Give us some of the.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon, to be honest, but I mean, these, these guys were, were just very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast. No tolerance for things that are broken. You fix it right away. Uh, you know, you work through the problems. You get, you get everything done today. You don't talk about what you're gonna do next week. You just, you just move. You know, people would be there late at night fixing problems. You know, passionate about their work.

• 10:31Patrick Bet-David?

  What what was the demo of the age? Wha- wha- what would you say the averages? Would you say twenty five?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  There are a bunch of guys in their twenties mostly.

• 10:39Patrick Bet-David?

  In their twenties.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Their twenties.

• 10:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Where you can, as you can be demanding of getting them to. Now, at the same time, was Elon and Peter also there driving, working with them?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, in different contexts, right? Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the, the thinker. He's not the one. He's not the technical guy himself. Um, I think, I think Elon is more of the operator. He's more there in the room. I mean, I was, I was in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago, right? And I was meeting a friend and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at at XAI. He's just, he's just there working, working. He's kind of the more the workhorse, just push through, solve the details of the technical problems.

• 11:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Was the level of intent, like, who was the most intense guy at Apple? The most intense?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working, but there's other engineers who are just there all the time pushing hard, right? I think, I think when, when you're in operation mode, guys like Max Levich and others were just, as far as I could tell, just always working.

• 11:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Who were some of the guys that you, you worked with that were maybe junior guys like you that came out and became big stars as well?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so I mean, a lot of the guys who were there, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal that quickly became billion dollar companies, right? So, and a lot of these guys were older than me, but it was the guys that, you know, Chad and Steve who built YouTube, it was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn, it was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX. I mean, you know, there's guys who built Ironport. There's just, there's just so many things that came out of there.

• 11:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. And so from there, how did the opportunity to be a co-founder of a Palantir come up?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund and I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized and I, I started bringing in my smartest friends to help and there weren't really other managers there. So I'd help start, start building things. And a bunch of my smartest friends I brought in one summer to help us, they, they weren't interested in finance. They thought it was boring. And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about, you know, PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money. And so we got to know the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys. There was Secret Service and the FBI. And right after this happened, it was nine 11. And so these guys were spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought was, didn't make any sense. And they were really, they kept asking us for advice. They were confused about how to do things. It's, it was, it was, I mean, President Bush created what was called

• 12:45Speaker 01

  the Department of Homeland Security at the time. I shouldn't be too mean about it, but you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department, people can't really fire people in government easily. So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire, and then instead they just pushed them into the new department. So it was a bit of a mess.

• 13:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Pushing them into new departments and you're fired.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  So therefore the whole department didn't really know very well what he was doing. That was my impression. And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff. And it became really obvious to us that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things that were going on up there were just way ahead technically of where the government was at that point. And this was a problem because, because the government was using all, the government was spending $38 billion a year gathering data, looking at the data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also abusing our civil liberties. So it was a mess. So we said, you know what? There's actually a really important problem here to solve. A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and go get them instead. B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any controls. That's crazy.

• 13:40Patrick Bet-David?

  So that's when you said, why don't we go do it? You guys said, let's go do it ourselves.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And I started having my friends I brought that summer to help build a prototype. And which it, which it sounds even crazier than finance, but at least it was interesting. They enjoyed helping me build it. And, and my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later, he moved down here to Miami. He and I controlled the team and Stefan Kell, my co-founder. And when you started building it up.

• 14:00Patrick Bet-David?

  And CIA was apparently one of the first investors in the company.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  They eventually gave us money. I think it was the second, second or third round, but it was, it was only $2 million and we actually bought them back. The reason we needed them is that Peter, basically no one would give us money. First of all, Alex Karp and I went all over San Hill Road. Like, you guys have all this talent because they can measure talent even back then. Why aren't you doing social media? Why aren't you doing something new and exciting? Working with the government's crazy. What's wrong with you guys? It's not possible.

• 14:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So he didn't think it was a good idea to.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  No, no, this is Alex and I talking to the investors. So all the investors were.

• 14:30Patrick Bet-David?

  They were telling you guys.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  They're telling us, you guys are crazy. No one does this. Why are you doing this? It's not possible. It doesn't make any sense.

• 14:36Patrick Bet-David?

  These are some big names, credible.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  These are, these are the big names. These are, we got turned down by everyone. I turned down by Excel, by Sequoia. The guy at Kleiner Perkins at the time, and they're, they're a great firm. I admire them very much. But the guy at the time who's no longer there. He started laughing at us on the phone because Alex didn't have a technical degree. He's like, you guys don't even know what you're doing. And he's a, it's a doctor, but it's not even a relevant doctor. Like, like laughing us out of the room, basically.

• 14:57Patrick Bet-David?

  And what, what is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of the room? What's he telling you?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Oh, we really.

• 15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Because Alex is a, he's a very unique type of guy himself.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  We were, we were not happy with these people. Peter, Peter Thiel told me it was probably really good for me because it gave me like an even bigger chip in my shoulder to make sure we succeeded after being like mocked and turned down by like 30 of these guys. And, and Peter couldn't just only fund it himself. He needed other people to fund these things. So when we got Incutel, which is CIA's venture capital arm at the time, to give us a little bit of money and Peter gave us even more, that was really critical.

• 15:24Patrick Bet-David?

  And then how long later did you guys pay the $2 million back?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I think we bought it for a much higher amount. We had some option. I forget. It must've been five or six years later.

• 15:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. So they still made some money on it.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Oh, they made plenty of money on it. And you know, and, and, and more importantly, we saved the government. Billions of dollars versus what they were doing. I mean, you literally had things going on. The DHS guys, I remember there was some Unisys thing where it was like $3 billion to integrate all the data. And we came, we showed them we could have done the same thing for them out of the box in a month. Like, don't waste billions of dollars. So it turns out competence saves the government lots of money and protects civil liberties. People don't realize it's both of those things.

• 15:58Patrick Bet-David?

  What is the desire to constantly use names that are from, I believe, Lord of the Rings, right? What does that come from?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Peter gets credit for naming.

• 16:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Peter gets credit.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  You know, but I'm a fan of it. I think, listen, and we wrote about this at the time. So at the time when we're creating this, we said, this is a dangerous thing to create. You know, but we believe it's a worthy thing to create. And it took a lot of courage. Like, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on. It could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things. But it was really important to both help, you know, we have to eliminate probably about up to 10,000 terrorists that might not have got eliminated. We worked with all sorts of amazing groups in the government alongside them with the technology and with the ability. And we help protect civil liberties and make sure the government watchers are being watched. Now, of course, if you create this technology, if it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the audit trails, who knows what bad could be done with it? So there's good and bad here.

• 16:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, and we'll get in, I want to get into that as well, but going back to the meetings of going, meeting with investors and them saying, you know what, you know, you guys don't know what you're doing. You don't even have the real degree. Alex said in one of the interviews, I think he may have said it to you. He said, I wish we would have told them to F off and just left.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  We were so polite. They would have probably respected us more if we just like.

• 17:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Were you naturally polite or were you intentionally becoming polite because you needed the money?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I thought you were supposed to do. We needed the money, man. I didn't know what you were supposed to do.

• 17:16Patrick Bet-David?

  So, but it wasn't naturally because you're a disagreeable personality.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, at the same time, I think both of us are not the kind of people. We're probably a little more arrogant now that now we've been successful. We didn't know that. We didn't know for sure we knew what we were doing. We felt we were doing something smart, but it was our first time.

• 17:33Patrick Bet-David?

  He said, I think it was, I wish we were more arrogant in certain areas and less arrogant in certain areas.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  That's well said. You know, it was interesting when you're creating our company. We kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch and in some cases it was probably frankly genius. In other cases, we could have just hired someone who knew what they were doing. And it's like, when you're building a company, I talk about having adults in the room. There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring into a startup because you don't want people running a machine in a standard way. You want to be creative, but there's certain parts that once you get there, you probably do want the adults to show you how it's done. So there's, there's some things we maybe could have learned from others.

• 18:05Patrick Bet-David?

  What was your strength in the partnership as a founder? What was his?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I was really good at recruiting the first few hundred people and kind of pushing forward on the kind of like the product strategy and whatnot. Alex was really intuitive about institutions, about how the world works, about how we come across, about how to get into certain places, about how to make deals happen. About how to communicate with the, in the right way that you're, that you're coming across to create value for the other person in a way they understand, the way you can get it done. Alex is a philosopher and he understands how people in organizations work and how to navigate the world.

• 18:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it, got it. So his, was he more the one selling the vision? You were more recruiting the people?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think recruiting is a lot about selling vision as well. I, when we, when we gave people their offers initially, we, this is really early on at the beginning. We give them three options of like higher salary, middle or lower salary and higher upside, middle or upside. And I'd put on the sheet, sheet of paper, the lawyers hated this, but I put an asterisk that it might not be exactly right. I'd say, okay, if the company is worth $5 billion and this much solution, here's what your shares might be worth. And it'd be like five, or you know, here, here, the company is worth a billion dollars, here's what it might be worth. And people would say, Joe, you can't show people if it's worth $5 billion. That's totally unrealistic. But you had to say, no, here's why it could be worth five.

• 19:19Patrick Bet-David?

  And now it's worth what? 335 or 100 billion dollars?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a lot bigger than that.

• 19:23Patrick Bet-David?

  So you couldn't say it's worth 5 billion?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  People thought I was ridiculous.

• 19:26Patrick Bet-David?

  So let me get this straight. So, so you're sitting in front of me and you're telling me, Pat, you can take 200K salary, 350, I'm just making up numbers. 500K salary, okay, 500K salary, if it's 5 billion, you're going to get $10 million.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but up here, you have 50.

• 19:42Patrick Bet-David?

  20 billion dollars, it's going to be 50 million. That's literally what you guys.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Something like that, lower salaries, of course, but yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 19:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow. And so based on what I would choose, would you judge me and put me in the?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Totally. I tell you, if you. Choose the high salary and low upside, then I have to go be very skeptical of you.

• 19:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Would you still hire me or no?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Sometimes, but usually, you know, it works out. We, because we measure everything.

• 20:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  After the fact, all the very best guys chose the low salary.

• 20:07Patrick Bet-David?

  All the very best guys choose a low salary.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  High upside, because they want, they want, they want to get in the game. They want to be part of the mission. Yeah.

• 20:12Patrick Bet-David?

  And by the way, how much, especially since you're, you said you recruit the first few hundred people at Palantir. So, and you were at PayPal and you watched how they recruited you. How much have you noticed recruiting change from then till today due to AI?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So, oh, no, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not just AI. It's that people recognize talent so much better. So Palantir was getting the best of the best. We get the top people out of the top schools. Facebook and Google kind of caught on to some of this. They started giving big signing bonuses. And so what I, in like two thousand nine or two thousand eight, two thousand nine, they started giving hundred, hundred fifty K signing bonuses, which at the time, that sounded like a lot of money for a twenty year old. It's ridiculous. Now, the top AI companies, it's like multimillion dollar signing bonuses.

• 20:52Patrick Bet-David?

  I saw this one guy got a billionaire offer. He turned it down. This was like nine months ago, ten months ago.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like the very best guy. He's probably taking some knowledge from one place to another. So it's a little sketchy, kind of what they're paying for there. But for just the raw talent, you're still getting millions of dollars for, for coming into companies, just being the most talented, kind of math Olympian.

• 21:09Patrick Bet-David?

  As a young guy coming in.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like, think about it. It's like, it's like, it's like, you know, you hire a young guy for a basketball team who's the best basketball player. Similarly, the gold medal programmer in the world who's going to add this unique ability, what's that worth? So, so it's worth a lot.

• 21:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow. So, so today, it's not uncommon for a young guy to get a five million dollar signing bonus.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  For the very, it's like being a top athlete.

• 21:30Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you protect yourself if the guy walks in six months? Is there a clawback?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you start, you structure it in some way that like it's built in. I mean, if he walks in here, he might be able to keep it, but he hopefully contributed a lot in a year. But he's getting, he's getting equity and he's investing into his upside. So you don't want to leave too soon. If the company's doing well, he's going to stay because he's going to earn that.

• 21:46Patrick Bet-David?

  You got the equity in it.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  He's going to get the equity for the next four years. He's going to want to stay and earn that.

• 21:50Patrick Bet-David?

  So you got the signing bonus, you got the salary, and you got the equity.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And sometimes a sign bonus, you might ask to take his equity if he's bullish, which, which by the way, the best people often do. They want a bigger piece of the game.

• 21:59Patrick Bet-David?

  So I'd give you five million dollars. I'd give you five million dollars worth of share today that could be worth a hundred million.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Maybe he takes a million of it in cash and he gets, he's comfortable and he has four million of it in shares because he's smart and he wants to make the big money, you know?

• 22:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so that's one thing that's changed with recruiting, the cost, how much cost to get people.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  It's the cost and and and.

• 22:14Patrick Bet-David?

  What else? What else has changed?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  I mean, so at Adapar, my second company after Palantir, it's a very successful, it's like ten trillion dollars in this platform for wealth managers. And, you know, a guy used to work for me, Scott Wu, he had won the gold medal in programming three years in a row. So like, it's like king of the nerves, basically, right? Everyone knew who he was in these competitions. And he worked for me and then he went on. Now he's running one of the top AI companies. Um, but the fact that I was able to hire him and people like him just by like showing up at these contests and hanging out. Now there's like hundreds of other firms going after these contests, sponsoring these contests. They all know who these kids are. The game's gotten harder. You have to look, look harder for these top people now.

• 22:51Patrick Bet-David?

  And it's harder to recruit them.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And you, and you better, you better, I have an advantage because of everything I've built, but you better have a reason why they should be coming to work with you. If you're just a random new person, it's really tough.

• 23:01Patrick Bet-David?

  What's the differentiator?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I've built multiple different multi-billion dollar companies and the next, and this is my main thing I'm doing, come work with me on it. That's a pretty good pitch. Versus, you've never heard of me before, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's a lot harder.

• 23:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So the differentiator is moral authority, previous track record, I've won before, we're building something big again, come join us.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Tell you the best thing is this, is this other guy you know is there who's a genius, you want to work with him and learn from him. So it's all about chicken and egg. You've got to start with the best people and the other best people. That's how Palantir really did it. We started with a bunch of the best guys. The other ones want to be with them, want to learn from them. So it's, it's, you gotta have a nucleus you start with.

• 23:37Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what else did you do at the beginning? The first few hundred of Palantir you recruit? I mean, that's a big thing to say. That's the foundation. Yeah. What, what other methods did, did you look at certain schools to recruit from?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had, we had teams of about twenty of the top universities. We have playbooks for flying there. We would raid, we could raid other companies. It sounds really bad when you talk about it. Uh, the most ridiculous version, one of, uh, this guy Nathan, who was helping us build a company early on, he had worked at eBay because eBay bought PayPal. He did it in PayPal. And we went and got a conference room at eBay. And I was like 2021 at the time and we were interviewing people at eBay to come join our company. And I felt a little bit awkward about it, but I'm like, I guess this is what people do sometimes. Turns out you weren't supposed to do that, but anyway, it was.

• 24:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Did it work?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was such a badly run company that they didn't even have any idea that it was going on, which is, you do that at my company, I'll mess you up, man. It's not cool. I'll be like one of your mobster friends.

• 24:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, well, listen, you almost have to have that mindset.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  You have to like fight people. But eBay was like a sclerotic group of like MBAs who didn't really have strong opinions about.

• 24:38Patrick Bet-David?

  At what point did you know Palantir was special? Like it really had legs?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  You know, it was, for me, it was like when I had some of these people joining Bob McGrew and it came in from, you know, he'd been Stanford PhD and had been at PayPal and was a superstar. That's part of the reason Peter gave us money for one round is when he joined and he ended up running a bunch of stuff at OpenAI after being at Palantir for 10 years. But when he came, these other guys came, when we started to get into the FBI and, you know, it was just like three or four years in, it was, it started to really work and all this top talent started coming. It was very special.

• 25:10Patrick Bet-David?

  And, and what happened? So when you're saying FBI, what does that mean? Like they're approaching you guys, you're solving their problems, they're seeing.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  You know, it's so hard to sell the government. And I used to, so the CIA, I used to think it was like the CIA. It's actually like 200 competing orgs that don't like each other. And the FBI is like that a little bit too. There's lots of parts of it. And so we are working and doing pilots with both sides, but we couldn't get a breakthrough. And at one point, we finally, it's kind of funny. They were jealous of each other. They wanted to be first, but they didn't want to be first.

• 25:34Patrick Bet-David?

  FBI and CIA.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Government is very funny. I've done other things with selling government. They both want to be able to tell everyone how innovative they are, but they don't want to take any risk in being the first one to do something because they can get fired and they're very risk averse people tend to be bureaucrats. And so we were doing all these things they needed, but they were afraid to do the big contract. And I think both of them thought the other contract was going ahead and then they both signed at once. And then we got in and we started out real value. And listen, this company took a long time to iterate and figure out how to, how to, how to help. But, but it was once you started breaking in and iterating with them, it was clear we were, we were going to get there.

• 26:02Patrick Bet-David?

  And, and what role was Teal playing?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Teal was like the chairman of the board, co-founder, strategist. He stopped us from making some really key mistakes in years two, three, four. There would have been some bad partnerships we were going to sign. He, he made sure it was funded. He made sure the vision was the right direction.

• 26:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you comfortable sharing one of them?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, there was a company that was gonna get us our first few million dollars of revenue if we partnered with them in DC. But they would have kind of locked us into something where they owned a big piece of the whole thing long term, the way they structured it. And that would have capped the value. We might probably would have been a better chance of being worth a hundred million and no chance of being worth.

• 26:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop. That big of a difference.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I mean, because they would have owned a piece of the market, the way they wanted to structure it and have some rights. And for me, I'm just trying to make this thing work. So you're like, oh, this is gonna give us millions of revenue. We'll be able to get over here. But it would have really like taken away a lot of the upside and he's very smart about how to structure these things, how to protect yourself. And he's always been the thinker behind the scenes who you check everything with and who you make sure you're going in the right direction.

• 26:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Why was Palantir started?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  It was started to protect the West against Islamist terrorists. And to make sure we save the government money and protect civil liberties.

• 27:08Patrick Bet-David?

  That was the mission.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  That was the mission.

• 27:10Patrick Bet-David?

  That's truly the mission.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  That was truly the mission.

• 27:12Patrick Bet-David?

  And you're saying that to me in the interview when you're recruiting me?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know if we used.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use a lot of words like that when we were first starting out.

• 27:22Patrick Bet-David?

  What are you telling me? Are you literally telling me we're gonna save the free world?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we say, listen, the technology cultures that exist in the West Coast, which if I'm interviewing you, you know, you're one of the great technologists. And you know, your friends are amongst the very top, the things we know how to do here, they do not know how to do that in this part of the world in DC. They just don't. They're way behind and they're broken and they're wasting tens of billions of dollars and we're getting attacked. And they're abusing our data and they're incompetent and we're gonna have to do this for them to come in. And it's important that at least some of the best people in the world go and help the government be less stupid. I mean, that is, that is, that is my view on the matter, you know?

• 27:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. But that mission was full on bottom, you, Alex, Peter, you guys are on the same page with the mission.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, save the Shire, we used to put it because this comes from the Lord of the Rings, but you're save the Shire is this Western civilization is protecting the innocent. It's going off and doing the mission.

• 28:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Let me ask you, the process, is it?

• 28:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Pre the idea of Palantir. You're sitting there, guys, this is a problem. We have to save, you know, the free world. We have to save the, you know, Western ideology. Here's the enemy, you know, what they're trying to do. How can we solve that problem? And then do you think about what company can we develop that can solve this problem? Does it go mission first, solution second?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Well, the, the tools that were built at PayPal to, to stop the fraud.

• 28:41Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the Russia one you were talking about.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  The Russian and Chinese mafia. You had to be able to stop those guys. So we built those tools.

• 28:47Patrick Bet-David?

  How nasty was it?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  They made all of our competitors go bankrupt. Everyone else was going bankrupt, basically. That this was existential for PayPal to solve.

• 28:55Patrick Bet-David?

  What kind of money did they get?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it was like seven or eight million a month. But that was back when that was a lot of money, though. You have to remember.

• 29:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Early stages of PayPal.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  This is like, I mean, it's like seven or eight million a month at a time when it's scaling.

• 29:05Patrick Bet-David?

  A lot of money.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  It's enough to make it unprofitable.

• 29:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I don't know the exact numbers, but it was enough to make it unprofitable versus profitable. It was really key. And it was annoying because you had to not accept certain things if you couldn't stop these guys, right? So it'd break a lot of stuff. They'd run money through a system, they'd take it out. You might go to 7-Eleven, buy something, they're gonna get your credit card, sell to a group of Russians. The Russians are gonna open accounts, transfer a bunch of money. You're gonna then skip PayPal $300, you say, no, you'll charge it back. And then, and then, and then we have to pay the other companies to pay it. And so there's all this fraud you had to deal with. And then it turned out that like the types of problems we realized we were doing for investigating that, you could extend those to a lot more types of problems and build investigative software that didn't exist. And be able to like look into all the data, bring the data together. Basically how the human mind extended into the $38 billion of data.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  And make sure you only access what you're allowed to access. And how make sure you have audit trails to do it right in order to get the bad guys.

• 29:58Patrick Bet-David?

  And so that created so much pain and annoyance that led to the mission. And it inspired from there to start a company called Palantir that prevents what Russia and China did to you guys.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, 9/11 happened after that and we saw, and we got to know these guys and we saw them reacting to it badly. We said, wait a second, we gotta help.

• 30:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Things at the same time.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, those two things.

• 30:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Why do so many people not trust you? Why do so many people not trust Palantir? Every, but like, you know how, when you think about every decade, there's a company that people look at as evil. You got Monsanto, you got Enron, you got all these guys, you know, 20 years ago, they hated these companies. They hated AIG. But man, when you think about Palantir, a lot of people will say, what is your motive? What is the vision? What are you guys trying to do?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not running it anymore, first of all. So I was I was the other first decade. But I'll I'll tell you, you know, first of all, when you're really successful, people attack you. That's always going to happen. And second of all, this is a this is unusual area. You have a company that is that is helping helping the government, you know, eliminate bad guys, is helping the government do things he wants to do more effectively, more efficiently. And some of the things government's doing right now, people are not happy with. And so I think it's an interesting question, like, should a tech company stop helping the government when it disagrees with it? And I think Alex Karp's spoken really well on this. And I know, listen, Alex Karp comes from, you know, he had an African American mother. He's had a kind of Jewish professorial father. He comes from the left, obviously. Peter Hill, obviously, is more on the right. And, you know, so we come from different political sides here.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  But they both agree that it's better for the world to make American government in America more efficient and work better and and not throw sand in the gears, not break things. And so the question is, like, should Silicon Valley get to decide policy? Or should the government get to decide policy? And our view is, we want to watch the watchers, but the government should get to decide policy. Our republic has a mechanism for deciding, and we should follow that mechanism versus being in charge ourselves.

• 31:48Patrick Bet-David?

  The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex? Then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building? Then what?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's it's see, that that that's not what's scary. What's scary to me is if Safari Republic elects a really, really bad person, and they try to get around things and use technology and power in ways they shouldn't.

• 32:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Pals.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  It's very possible that. It's very possible. That's that is scary to me. That's why we all have to fight to be part of the political process for our views there. And and to make sure we have checks on power, which is core to the US Constitution. What Alex is doing, he he isn't get the data himself. Alex is running a company that builds technology for our clients, right? I should say our clients, I'm an advisor still, I'm a proud founder, I'm not running Palantir these days. But but but Palantir is helping them use their data. We're not we're not data ourselves. You see what I'm saying? Like, you're helping them see things and do things they couldn't do otherwise with their information. Or it's not like Palantir itself has all the information.

• 32:37Patrick Bet-David?

  How many of the how many of the events that happens in the world where we're watching, like? You know, is Palantir involved in, for instance, and I know you're not involved today, like Maduro was Palantir involved in capturing him, El Mencho, the Mexico, you know, the cartel guy we just killed in Mexico. Were you involved in gathering that intel? Because if you're thinking all these intel, and by the way, a lot of agencies use you, right? It's not just CIA that uses you. So you know what everybody is doing.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  No, but we don't actually, because the people who know are the people who have the clearance to see what's going on there. So there may be things that happen that Alex, even if he's running the company, may not have the top secret clearance for that particular operation to be involved in that.

• 33:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Is there anybody in the company that has the clearance to know what everything's going on?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  I actually don't know the answer to that question. That's an interesting question.

• 33:28Patrick Bet-David?

  This is very powerful.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  I doubt, I doubt they do because a lot of Palantir's work is with allies all over the world. And different allies have different clearances and different things they do. So it'd be very unlikely for someone to see everything. Now, the real question though is, do you want this operation to be done efficiently and effectively as possible? Or do you want it to be done slightly stupider? I mean, that's really the question we're asking here. Should this be done in a slightly stupider way or a slightly better way? Because that's all Palantir is doing is it's on site with them, helping them do it in a better way, given the information they're allowed to use.

• 33:55Patrick Bet-David?

  So in a situation with a Maduro or El Mencho, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It's very, it's very likely to me that the technology and was involved and its capabilities were involved. And then they helped them do it in a better way than they would have done it before, especially with the US operation. I don't know about the Mexican operation or not. I'm not, I'm not just speed on what they're doing there.

• 34:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Meaning the Venezuela operation?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Venezuela one, I'd be surprised if it wasn't involved in some way. But again, Palantir is a tool being used by others in our government who are in charge, who are making the strategy.

• 34:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Maybe explain that. So how is that tool used? What does that tool help you do? If I explain different technology, I can say, here's what HubSpot helps you. Here's what Salesforce helps you. Here's what this technology helps you. How does Palantir help in that process?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  So what Palantir, I mean, it's a lot of things at this point, but Palantir is bringing together data from a lot of different sources in the government. Like I said, when I started Palantir, government spent 30 something billion a year gathering data. I bet you it's a lot more than that now. So there's, there's literally hundreds of thousands of databases. There's literally signal intelligence. Intelligence and there's all sorts of rules about who could see what what they could do so they're they're not for example people are not allowed to spy on us is is and use that data that'd be illegal Palantir would flag that and say this is against the rules you can't be doing this right so the whole thing is a rules engine that has very strict rules and then so there's someone who's using it they're getting all the stuff they're legally allowed to be doing based on the policy of our republic and they're and they're bringing it all together and they're and they're putting it together because it's very complicated if you have lots of data bases is this the same person over here is this person over here is this Mohammed the same as this Mohammed you know is this is this guy

• 35:21Speaker 01

  you know this guy was this last common Hispanic last name there's Sarah the same as this Becerra and and they're mapping it all out and they're taking and they're taking all the information they can and they're using that with AI along with along with their judgment to ask questions and rate and make plans and and figure things out and connect the dots and and then get things done better.

• 35:38Patrick Bet-David?

  At the beginning stages who didn't want to see Palantir succeed?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  The primes, all the primes. So so in America, the primes are the big defense companies. In America, we had for a long time, the most competitive, best defense companies in the 20th century, there were maybe 80 or 90 of these. They just were dominant, best in the world. After the Cold War ended, we had to lower the budget, probably a good thing. I'd rather more money goes towards other things than war. Cold War, so the primes all demerged. They emerged in these eight or nine.

• 36:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Six of them.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Maybe even eight or something, but they're much smaller, much, much, much fewer number, much bigger companies. And they became so dominant, but they became more like the government themselves because they interact with this so much, they became big bureaucracies. And these big bureaucracies, a lot of the best tech guys, they all fled. They all fled to the to tech world, to the best places in Silicon Valley, to other places. And these places got really good at what we call innovation theater. They're going to convince in Congress they're innovating, but they're not really innovating anymore and they stopped innovating. And there's only two companies that broke through these primes. It was Palantir and SpaceX. Both Palantir and SpaceX. It was really hard. It was really unfair. They beat the crap out of us. We do things that would save huge numbers of lives. I'll tell you, there's there so we worked with the special forces at first because special forces are like the most elite, like soldiers doing really important missions.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And their lives are on the line a lot. So they wanted the best tools. And when Palantir went somewhere at first, it was very often special forces guys using it for key missions to save their lives. Now, at the time, there were we were in Iraq and there were army brigades in Iraq and they saw us saving lives in special forces. They said, can we use it too? And the government wouldn't pay for it. So he said, of course, you can use it for free because we're patriots. That's the whole point. So go use it for free. Just give us the data back legally, make sure it's going on.

• 37:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Who's reaching out to you?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  This is like all sorts of people in the military, working with our guys in the military, embedded, working with these guys.

• 37:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Not PMCs, these are actual guys.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Like lieutenant colonels in the military.

• 37:23Patrick Bet-David?

  So lieutenant colonels are reaching out, and the government doesn't want to fund it, can you help it?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Getting a general's permission, pushing it in.

• 37:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  These are guys on the ground, because listen, their buddies' lives are on the line, right?

• 37:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  These are, we have a lot of great soldiers in this industry.

• 37:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Without the approval of the US government?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  No, no, they, people that approved that we can use it for, we're still gonna, because they, we don't, we're not gonna pay for it. Pay for it, because we don't want to get in trouble stopping you using something that's gonna work better.

• 37:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And so in this case, we stopped tons of deaths from IEDs, because we were able to track where the IEDs most likely were. We were able to track all sorts of things going on, they reported back all these deaths that, that we stopped. And then there was like a five, whatever, three or five billion dollar bid for the defense ground control system again. And we'd already been used better than anything they were doing before, way ahead, everything they wanted. And they just like, no bid, gave it to a prime. And we actually sued them at this point, because it's not, not allowed, you have to consider others. We actually won the lawsuit, they, the generals in charge of getting into the prime were ordering people behind the scenes to destroy the records of live loss. But some guys said, some guys had saved the lives that we'd saved, so the general couldn't, couldn't hide it. It's like, it's like totally corrupt, it's totally corrupt, so we had to break through. And, and then a lot of others saw this, and this has really shifted the culture of the military now.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And SpaceX broke through, and Palantir broke through, and now Yandere, of course, they're starting to say, wait a second, we gotta be open to the outside stuff. We can't just only do the primes, but that was a big fight for us for years.

• 38:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Who's, which of the primes are bigger than you guys right now?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Everyone's still, everyone's still bigger on revenue, because Palantir's still a smaller company. Palantir's about half government, a little bit less than half government revenue. So it's, it's like, you know, it's in the single digit billions for, for revenue. And there's primes making tens of billions of revenue that are much bigger than us, been around forever. But we're, we're growing much faster, that's why we're valued highly.

• 38:52Patrick Bet-David?

  But market cap wise, you're higher than the prime?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Market cap wise, we're higher, but revenue wise, we're still much lower.

• 38:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you, do you, I mean, you're not a part of it since oh nine, you're an advisor. Is there any situations where Palantir has to deal with the prime?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, all the time, no, primes still run a lot of stuff. And by the way, there are still parts of things that primes do, they're the best in the world, and you have to work with them. The problem was, is early on, if Palantir tried to do anything, the prime would say like, oh, we'll take 99% of the value, we'll give you 1% of the value, we'll take credit for your work. It was like, it's like they just beat you, because, because they're in charge.

• 39:23Patrick Bet-David?

  When you're saying 99, it's a hundred million dollar project?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  They literally pay you a million, they'll give you a million bucks for something, and then we'd actually do most of the work, and it would drive us crazy.

• 39:29Patrick Bet-David?

  So in, in oh nine, which is 17 years ago, what's top line revenue that year?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't remember, but it was.

• 39:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it in the millions or billions?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Probably in the 10, 10 millions, but we didn't cross a billion for 15 years. Took a long time.

• 39:41Patrick Bet-David?

  So in oh nine, company's been around for five years and the revenue's in the millions.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Tens of tens of millions.

• 39:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Tens of millions.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  It might have just been crossing a hundred. I don't I don't know the exact numbers, but probably tens of millions.

• 39:51Patrick Bet-David?

  So if that's who didn't want you to exist at that time, who today is your biggest enemy?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  You know? And I I really can't speak for the company. This is just me now.

• 40:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Founder looking on from the outside. Uh, I I I would think the biggest threat to Palantir are like the extreme populists on both political sides who don't want our country uh using better technology to to succeed, basically. And you know, there's a lot of there's twelve hundred laws right now in fifty states trying to ban different types of AI for things that I think are just ridiculous. I think most of it, by the way, some of it's good. You gotta protect children. You gotta like protect content creators. There's there's legitimate things to push back on. But a lot of this stuff is nonsense. And if those nonsense passes, it's not just an enemy to Palantir, it's an enemy to like thousands of our best innovative companies right now. So so I think that's actually the biggest threat at this point because Palantir is so dominant and adding value to so many thousands of companies.

• 40:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Can we like specify who would be far? Are you saying are you saying things like a non-interventionalist politician?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 40:51Patrick Bet-David?

  What are you saying?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I'm talking about laws that are I'm talking about laws that are like like Bernie Sanders trying to stop all new data centers or something crazy like that, or or people who are saying we want to throw developers in jail if things don't go right with AI or something, which there's laws like that. They're proposing in Maryland, Virginia. Or there's people saying, you know, it's it's a lot of people who are technically illiterate writing state law to block things, to create new regulators to stop you from deploying. Like, stuff like that would be a disaster.

• 41:15Patrick Bet-David?

  And I see the presidents working to deregulate and kind of still keep it open source and allow you to compete without making it too regulated.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, David David Sachs is working hard on this for because he's the head of AI for the president and and you know, my my view is that we should have certain regulatory frameworks to protect kids and protect content creators and have reasonable law. But we but we shouldn't be having each state have its own regulatory code. That'd be crazy.

• 41:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you see this recent movie that came out called Mercy? Have you seen Mercy? You haven't seen Mercy? Oh, my God, you gotta watch Mercy. So it's a movie uh with Chris Pratt. I've been telling everybody, go watch this movie. Uh, specifically you, like in every employee at Palantir needs to go watch this. So Mercy is a story of this actor, Chris Pratt, who wakes up, he's locked into this chair, okay, handcuff shackles.

• 42:04Patrick Bet-David?

  And the judge is that face on the top. If you see the face on the top, that's the judge. It's an AI judge. You have 90 minutes to prove to her why you didn't kill your wife. In this case, in a movie, he killed his wife. He's like, what are you talking about? And she has access to every video to pull up. Can you go to this state? What happened that morning? When I walked into the house.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  That's scary stuff, man.

• 42:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, do you see a day in the next 20 years where we could be living in a world where judges could be AI, politicians could be AI? It could be based on models?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  That's not the world I want to live in.

• 42:37Patrick Bet-David?

  How do we prevent that from happening?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the constitution is pretty clear about the rules. And so I think we should make sure we stick to the constitution and we, you know, if we're gonna amend it, we should be really damn careful not to give AI random power like that. That'd be my view. But the whole point of how America was designed is checks on power. The reason America is a truly great country that's lasted as long as it has, it's our 250th anniversary this year, is because our founders were philosophers from the Enlightenment. And they thought a lot about this. And they realized you have to check government power. You have to set it up with lots of different checks on itself. And the whole point is for the government itself not to be allowed to ever be evil. And by the way, that was how we built Palantir, is have audit trails and to watch the watchers and to have checks. You have to have checks on power. Otherwise, government is dangerous.

• 43:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but if we're going into the robot era of developing robots, and if all of a sudden you have 400,000 robots that you program from your headquarters, and your competitors got 200,000 robots, and third place has got 17,000 robots, and all of a sudden somebody becomes evil, then what happens?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Well, this is why it's important for the military to have the most powerful robots and not some kind of corporation. That obviously is very important. And by the way, China is trying to build those faster than us. And that's why right now, we're trying to make sure we stay ahead of China. And it's, listen, our military, how it's controlled by our government, that's a very important thing our public has to get right. But obviously, our military has to stay ahead of anyone else. That'd be very bad not to have a monopoly on power.

• 44:04Patrick Bet-David?

  You said it eloquently of who you think Palantir's enemy is. Who do you think is the enemy of the state? Top three enemies?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I think our top three enemies are probably our adversaries, right? I think our country right now is very polarized, is very polarized. And I think social media unfortunately does that. But our adversaries take advantage of that. I think China, using TikTok, finds ways to polarize us more. I think Iran, very clearly, the guys running Iran, I'm a very big fan of the Persian people, but the guys running Iran are a bad guy theocracy. And you saw when we hit Iran with Israel last time and the internet went down, you saw 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. And you saw a bunch of bots that are guys who pretend to be Christians who hate Jews in Alabama also got turned off for a while, right? So they're trying to find ways to divide us, man. They're trying to find ways to pull us apart.

• 44:52Patrick Bet-David?

  What a powerful thing right there. The 15% of Christians who hate Jews in Alabama.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Well, 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. Sorry, that was another point. Iran was mining 15% of all Bitcoin in the world. We found that out because it went away as soon as we hit them. But then there's literally hundreds of thousands of bots that were like just angry Americans. They're angry Americans. They're pretending to be Christian guys who hate Jews. They're pretending to be crazy people in America who are at different extremes or arguing. So there's a lot of stuff that's planted, that's planted to make us fight.

• 45:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Let me ask you, if Elon was able to, who actually knows? This is an interesting thought. I'm curious what your answer will be. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose Nike. Instead, we chose Tuscany. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled painters. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary. Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.

• 46:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Doesn't Elon, if he wanted to really run a report with the data that he has, is he able to see who is behind the fake bots that are causing retweets to happen for a certain message? That's gonna undermine a certain way of thinking and pin people against each other? Somebody should know.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Elon did something very courageous with his team a couple of months ago. And I don't know where it is now, but they put all the country of origin-

• 46:41Patrick Bet-David?

  I remember that.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  -up on all these things. And you saw all these like, very divisive stuff. Like you had this, you had this like, AIPAC is evil report AIPAC thing. And it was like, a European account tied to Iranian account tied to a Pakistani account. Like, wait a second, you guys have been saying you're from the south. Like, what are you, you're obviously, you're obviously a foreign lobby who's, who's doing this now, right? And you got a lot of versions of this where all of a sudden, all of these accounts that were, that were stirring up trouble on both sides, were actually foreigners.

• 47:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I think it'd be interesting to see, to see numbers. I haven't, I haven't looked at that.

• 47:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I mean, i- i- if, if, if you're a data company, Palantir or X also data company, any of these guys, I would assume they know exactly who's behind it.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  You know, the problem is, it's very easy to create accounts and be a real person or not be a real person. So I don't know if they know everything. I think there's a lot of bot farms.

• 47:28Patrick Bet-David?

  You can't see the, the, where it's coming from, where-

• 47:30Speaker 01

  But if you're really good at this and you're a state actor, you can use different IP addresses, you can use different spoofs, you can do things to make it a little bit harder for them to tell. And so you, you might be able to create a lot of fake accounts.

• 47:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Who, who is using bot farms? Who are-

• 47:43Speaker 01

  The Chinese.

• 47:44Patrick Bet-David?

  -top customers of bot farms?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Chinese are using probably the most bot farms. To create, sow division and to, and to, and to push things and to make the crazy politicians more popular. The Chinese love making socialists more popular in the US. They know it weakens us. They have a word for like, crazy white person, which is like this kind of woke, white crazy person on the left. And they love to, they know it's a problem there. They want to ban it there, but they want to push it in America. And they think it weakens us culturally. That's one of their models. They have, they're, you know, Chinese do cognitive warfare. You know this, right? So there's like land, sea, air, cyber and cognitive. And they have a whole branch of their military that's just doing cognitive warfare, using all this stuff. Whether it's especially TikTok, but all these other ones as well. And they're very good at it.

• 48:21Patrick Bet-David?

  What other tools outside of TikTok?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  I mean, all the social media stuff, all the protests, like they are big funders of, they'll figure out something like a Black Lives Matter thing, or they'll figure out something going on with some environmental thing. And both Russia's done this too, historically, they funded a lot of the green movements in Europe. They knew it was good for them to do that. And they'll figure out, and you know, China nowadays, they take all the data they can. So there's companies like, you know, I'm told Airwallex does this, I don't know myself. I'm told Airwallex has all the data that goes through China. And the Chinese government has access to any data in China at all. And then we'll use it to model, they have models of you, they have models of me, they have models of everyone. And they try to figure out how to use those models to influence us and influence people about us for their ends and for divisiveness. I mean, they're very good at it.

• 49:03Patrick Bet-David?

  I mean, we saw they did that with TikTok, right? And to the point where we saw what happened with Gen Z and LGBTQ and the tie between it, the percentage is going on. It got to a point that Bill Maher had to talk about it.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  They, Chinese very clearly saw a few issues were very helpful to attack us with. One of those issues is Jewish people. Chinese have decided that it's very helpful to create divisiveness around Jews in America. And that because they see attacking Jews or something is very, very useful to do to rip us apart. And it is, it is, it's actually caused a lot of problems.

• 49:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Unpack that, go a little bit deeper.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  So I think the Asian people maybe are a little more racist in some ways than we are. They think of things more in those terms, they just are, that's my experience. And so if you stop and think about this, there's a lot of Jews that are very successful. And there's successful Jews in America they see as an edge for America. And they see that it's, but they also see there's a lot of resentment. So that's a really easy way to create divisiveness against something that's helping us. And so that's like, they go right at it. And they're very smart about how to do it. You go all over TikTok, you go all over everything they do. And it's like, boom, let's just stir that up. Let's stir up the Black Lives Matter stuff, let's stir up this other thing over here. They're very good at it.

• 50:07Patrick Bet-David?

  But have you ever seen, how old are you by the way? I think you're forty two.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Forty three now, yeah.

• 50:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Forty three, yeah. I'm forty seven, I just turned forty seven a few months ago. Have you ever seen the Jewish story and the division being this high temperature wise in your lifetime?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  In our lifetimes, this is the highest it's been. And it's not just China. Partly what's happening here is this is the first war that Israel's been involved in in our lifetime with social media. And if you go on social media, just the ratio of people who are passionate against Israel versus for Israel is 100 to 1, probably, just based on the number of Muslims in the world. There's a lot of good Muslims in the world. There's going to be a lot of extreme ones who are really passionate about this issue. Doesn't mean they're not good people that can disagree with me. And so that itself is going to create a lot of passion against Israel and Jews, right? We should, and so there's already, that already exists. And then you can exploit that to push it.

• 50:51Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you address that?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  How do you address it? I mean, man, this is, this is a, it's a very, very tough issue.

• 50:57Patrick Bet-David?

  You, I mean, you got, you're, you're the brains. How do you address that? How do you fix something like that? Because it doesn't seem like it's, the temperature's getting any lower.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, I would like there to be peace in the Middle East. And I think for me, the only way to have peace in the Middle East is, is, is to free the Iranian people and no longer have sponsors of terror around the Middle East. And I think that leads to a very positive outcome. And hopefully, Israel and Saudi and UAE can all sponsor and create peace in, in the, you know, in Gaza together with, once the theocrats are gone. And hopefully, that's a much more positive outcome. As long as the Iranian theocrats are there, which is going to be a recurrent, recurrent issue for us. So I really, I really hope we take them out. That's, I'll be honest about that.

• 51:34Patrick Bet-David?

  You really hope we take them out?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think they're evil, evil people who've spread murder and terror and more terror to their own people than anyone else.

• 51:41Patrick Bet-David?

  I lived there 11 years. It's, it's a horrible place.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world and one of the most wonderful places in the world if we could get rid of the bad guys.

• 51:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, if you do. I mean, there's a song by a singer named Moeen. And he says, "My heart wants me to return to Esfahan." Esfahan is one of the richest cities in Iran with history. When my mom and dad were still married to each other for those 10 or 11 years, the only vacation we ever went on was Esfahan. And I have pictures till today as a kid going there with my sister and my mom and my dad. Great memories. But yeah, that's Asfane right there. And Moin says, "I'd like to one day return. My heart wants me to one day return to this city Asfane."

• 52:25Speaker 01

  One of my favorite books is Syropedia, which was written about Cyrus, the great, the great, the great leader. And it's used actually to train European aristocracy princes for like 2,000 years. And there's all the wisdom of Cyrus. And you just, you kind of get this like really sense of like the greatness of the Persian people from that. And it's very optimistic. It's about virtue. It's about, you know, Machiavelli ended up becoming like the thing people used after him, which is the opposite. Machiavelli is like this very cynical take, which is, is a dialectic. It's also true, but I really like the Persian side. And you grew up, my mom's side is Jewish and just like the, what the Persians did for the Jews and the natural alliances, been there for thousands of years. We, that's, that's, we're still, that's what we still feel. So I really hope this is something that can become a positive.

• 53:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you think no matter what happens, it's always the Jews' fault? No matter what happens, it's always the-

• 53:12Speaker 01

  I think you, I think you're gonna blame the people who are outsiders, who are different, who are successful. They're, I mean, I could say it, I'm Jewish, I think it's slightly annoying sometimes. And you're like, it's like this little neurotic, like smart person who like makes more money than you. You kind of want to punch him in the face, you know?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know. You tell me.

• 53:33Patrick Bet-David?

  I can see that. I can, did you hear what Thomas Sowell said? Thomas Sowell said-

• 53:37Speaker 01

  I love Thomas Sowell.

• 53:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he said something so funny one time. He says, "You know what my advice to Jews are? For the world to start liking you a little bit? Start losing. Start losing."

• 53:48Speaker 01

  His mentor was Milton Friedman, who was a little Jewish guy.

• 53:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, Milton Friedman. I have a painting in my house with Milton Friedman in it.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  I love him. I used, you know, I got to spend lunch, I got lunch with him like 20 times because I was the editor of a paper when he was there at Stanford.

• 53:59Patrick Bet-David?

  How was that?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  He was amazing. He always had, he was always interested in the new ideas and just, he really shaped a lot of my thinking. Economics, amazing man.

• 54:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Milton Friedman? You spent 20 times with Milton-

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, his wife was off in there too. They were in their early 90s when I was at Stanford. And he was at Hoover, yeah.

• 54:13Patrick Bet-David?

  You know how hard I've tried to do an interview with Thomas Sowell? Their family won't let it-

• 54:16Speaker 01

  I know, it's too, it's too hard. He's, he's such a great man.

• 54:19Patrick Bet-David?

  I mean, listen, him, the two of them, the debates. When you would watch them do the debates, what's the one book he wrote? Is it called Reader? I think it's called Reader. I don't know what the... Can you type in Thomas Sowell Reader? I just had my son finish this book two years ago. He was 12 years old.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  He had a conflict of visions that I love.

• 54:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Click on that one, Rob. Which one? Yeah, Reader. Oh, my God. It is like a must-read. My son read this at 11, 12 years old. And he breaks down ideas in the simplest way.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  You know, this guy would be so much more famous if he wasn't black. Because he's black, the left doesn't want anyone to know that he's conservative.

• 54:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, here's what's funny, though. Conservatives today are not talking about him enough. I think conservatives need to remind what Thomas Sowell... But go back to that with Iran. So Iran, right now, at any point, you and I are talking right now, at any point, anything can happen. It was supposed to be this weekend.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  I think there's a negotiation on Thursday is my understanding. But I don't know. I shouldn't be saying it.

• 55:14Patrick Bet-David?

  I thought they said they're not going to do anything. I thought Whitkoff and Kushner walked out, said, "No, we're not renegotiating." Rob, do you have that one clip I sent you from the Foreign Minister? Where he's being... Did you see this one a few hours ago?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 55:26Patrick Bet-David?

  The Foreign Minister is being interviewed, and he's asked about, "Hey, I noticed you said that there are 40,000 Americans that are in or in surrounding areas of Iran, and if US attacks, that's open game for you." I sent it in the PBD Podcast group. If you don't have it, Rob, I'll just send it to you. Do you see it? It's right there, bottom clip, right there, yeah. And she says, "Are you saying you would do something to your Americans?" And you should see his answer. Go ahead, Rob.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  2,000 American personnel in the Middle East right now. In Iran's letter to the UN Security Council, you seem to threaten them because you said, "America will bear full responsibility." You said, "You don't want war, but if that's what happens, all bases, facilities, and assets of the hostile force in the region will be legitimate targets." Are you saying Iran will hit US bases in the Gulf? Or will you also bomb the Gulf countries that are your neighbors?

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not going to say what we are going to do exactly. Obviously, we defend ourselves. If the US attacks us, then we have every right to defend ourselves. If the US attacks us, that is an act of aggression. What we do in response is the act of self-defense. So, and it is justifiable and legitimate. So, our missiles cannot hit the American soil. So, obviously, we have to do something else. We have to hit, you know, the Americans' base.

• 56:59Patrick Bet-David?

  You're saying it.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  In the region. That is a fact.

• 57:04Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think is gonna happen?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Listen, I think these guys sent someone to assassinate Donald Trump. We know this, with the Obama regime that caught him. They were told if they missed, that he'd probably lose the election. So, wait and try to get him again after he lost the election. This was the official instructions we found. These were the, these guys were trying to kill Trump. It means if they're still around after Trump's president, they'll probably try to get him and his, and his kids again. So, if I was the president, there's no chance they'd be around after I was president. That's all I'm telling you. I mean, and by the way, I think it's very good for the world to eliminate this evil, for your people and for all of our peoples.

• 57:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, a lot of people are worried it could turn into another Iraq, and we spent a few trillion dollars.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  But is Iran really Iraq?

• 57:41Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't think so, but a lot of people think it could turn into something like that, you know? You hear the two arguments. I think they're gonna do a surgical mission, the way they did Venezuela, and it's gonna be clean, and here's what's gonna happen. And then the other side is like, how do we know that for a fact?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  So, if I was in charge, I'd be very Roman about it. So, and I don't know, maybe this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman. So, you know what the Romans would do? You'd go and you wipe out the leadership class, you're all dead. And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge. We're gonna make a deal, or we're gonna kill all of you too. It's up to you. Because you'll have the IRGC, which is in charge again, probably, right? Because those are the guys with the guns. And say, okay, now here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make a deal. Here's what's gonna happen. Here's how your public's gonna work and to be free people. And if you don't do that, then we'll kill you all in six months too. And they'll give you another chance. But I don't think we should be occupying ourselves as a bull show. I think Iraq was terribly run. I think trying to go and have people over there is ridiculous. But should these guys, who have acted like they've had, who spread terrorism around the region, who have tried to kill Trump, who have, who have killed so many people, should they be allowed to get away with that? No way. I wouldn't let them be able to get away with it. I'll tell you that.

• 58:35Patrick Bet-David?

  How, how much you think the attacks can? Be a collaboration with Israel or you think it's gonna be.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Well, Israel has really good intelligence there.

• 58:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Very good.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Region. And so obviously, if you're doing something, you need to work with your allies to do as good as possible. The same thing is like, you know, we were talking earlier about are you going to use Palantir to do an operation? You're going to use whatever you can to do it as best as possible. And I think in this case, that involves our Israeli, probably involves other allies too, hopefully.

• 58:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Is Israel a customer Palantir?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yes, actually, we we started working with Israel. It was one of my most proud moments because they're kind of like the NSA where where they don't really want to work with outsiders and they don't really buy from anyone else. And it took us several years to break in, but we did break in to work with them.

• 59:09Patrick Bet-David?

  While you were there or it was something that happened?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  It was it was something that I was working on even as an advisor, like shortly after I.

• 59:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Is it recent, like five, 10 years?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  No, no, it's been a while.

• 59:17Patrick Bet-David?

  It's been a while. So, okay. So they've been a customer for a while.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  There's over 40 countries, as far as I know, who are allies who work with Palantir. Israel is not one of the first several, but it is is it's worth the key. The key countries originally were the five I's, right, which is the core five allies, which is Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia.

• 59:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I I saw somewhere where you the the is there a structure where if there is a who can't you work with? Is it based on sanctions or?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, the company was a mission driven, is a mission driven company. We never wanted to work with with our enemies. We're not going to work with the Maldives, not going to work with Russia, not going to work with North Korea, not going to work with China.

• 59:51Patrick Bet-David?

  But not because of regulation, it's a choice.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  I mean, at this point, it's definitely regulation against it too. I think early on, if we had tried to go work with those guys, maybe we somehow could have because the government wouldn't have noticed. But that would not have been ever something we wanted to do because we are a mission driven company to fight for the good guys in the West.

• 1:00:06Patrick Bet-David?

  But meaning, even if you try to go.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  These days, if you try to, because of what it does in the Department of War, of course, it wouldn't be allowed to. And by the way, I'm not even allowed to go to China anymore right now.

• 1:00:16Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not allowed to go to China?

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I mean, China, there's I've had friends who are running other defense companies, so their planes going for one case to Taiwan. And they made it force the plane to do an emergency landing in China and searched all his stuff and they let him go because he was American, say something they want to. But they actually did emergency landing, searched all his stuff because he was a key defense executive and then let him go on Taiwan. So I'm not supposed to go there at all, nor are a lot of other people who who've worked in these areas. I've started a few big defense companies now. You're not supposed to do it.

• 1:00:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, that I mean, that makes sense for somebody like you to go there. There would it would be.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  I wouldn't want to go there. It's I mean, by the way, I used to love to go to Shanghai. It's a great, fascinating, fascinating part of the world, but not not right now.

• 1:00:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Not right now. Uh, oh, nine, you left. Why'd you leave?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Well, I was still stated as an advisor, but I finished vesting and I was starting Atapar. And Atapar is a very large company in the wealth management area. So I was actually going to start a third division. I'd started the government side. I helped them get going on the early commercial side. And that's, you know, the company is now about, I think, 60% commercial, basically working with Fortune 500 and other companies around the world. I was thinking of starting a third division, decided to build it separately as Atapar.

• 1:01:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Atapar?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Patrick Bet-David?

  And so Atapar, it takes the portfolio, it gives you a score, it assesses.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Well, Atapar is a software that you kind of work and live in if you're a wealth advisor. If you're running a big area.

• 1:01:28Patrick Bet-David?

  So advisors are using it.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's hundreds of thousands of advisors on it, serving huge number of clients. There's $10 trillion on it. So if you're like a running a big bank with the top wealth management arm, or if you're like a big area like iconic on the West Coast.

• 1:01:40Patrick Bet-David?

  LPL would be, would they, who else would be a customer?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Like Coriant or Omni or all the big RIAs, there's all these big family offices out here, the biggest family offices.

• 1:01:50Patrick Bet-David?

  These as well were RIAs?

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Mostly RIAs, but there's, but there's tens of thousands of RIAs in our country. It's a big, it's a, it's a very big industry.

• 1:01:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. And so as the advisor, I'm seeing this as a database tracking my clients. Is it also looking at their portfolio or is it giving any advice?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's helping you run your whole business, everything. It's doing everything, it's doing all your reporting, all your tax stuff, all your, everyone logs into it to do anything. It's like, it's like the place you live when you're doing your job.

• 1:02:12Patrick Bet-David?

  I had Anthony Pompliano on the other day. I don't know if you know who he is. He's Pompliano, great with his show, big Bitcoin guy. Very smart, telling his brother, the whole family, all the boys. And, you know, he's saying advisors will be replaced very soon. Do you agree with that?

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  I think at a very high end, actually, the relationship really matters to people. So I think there's ways you can do things without people in some of these areas for some people. But I think like the contours of the industry and of our humanity is that we want to talk to people. We want to work through things, you want to sell what you trust.

• 1:02:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I do. Like I like talking to my Goldman guy, I like talking to the Morgan guy, I like talking to the Chase guys and JP Morgan guys.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we can help those guys serve you cheaper than they do now. We help them serve more people more easily. But I think the relationship is going to be there. This is where everyone gets things wrong on AI, by the way, because AI does allow things to work in different ways. But it's like, I saw a great essay online where it was talking about a French garden is where you just like destroy everything and just build a new garden however you want it. Whereas the English garden takes the land as it already is, right, and molds to it. I think Will Manides wrote about this, and I think that's more what tends to happen in industry is you take the world as it already is and you shift things and improve things and make things, but you work with it as it is. It's not just going to come in and blow everything out. That's not usually what happens.

• 1:03:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, that's a fear that that could take place.

• 1:03:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think there is a place for regulation to prevent from a bad player getting in? Do you think regulation is needed for?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  For AI? For what area?

• 1:03:39Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm just wondering if there's a place on what limits of a product I produce.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think I think we want to have, so we already do have a lot of regulation in our world right now, right? So for example, in healthcare, there's like hundreds of thousands of rules. And if anything, the hundreds of thousands of rules, some of them make sense. Some of them are actually only there to protect the existing people to keep prices high. So for example, in healthcare, I think there's, we need new rules that let you try new things, that you have sandboxes, because we could bring the cost of healthcare way down. Like, and this is existential. We have a hundred trillion dollars of debt in this space. And I'm really excited, for example, here in Florida and a couple other states right now, we're doing studies with the legislature to try to prepare laws for next year that will allow us very safely to try some use cases that we think are safe, that doctors want to try. And things like that, if anything, we need new policy to allow us to try it, because that would be great to bring the cost down.

• 1:04:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I think the part with, the one part that you could reduce a lot of costs is trademarks. How they're able to extend trademarks. So I'm able to protect myself with a patent. I get a patent for 20 years. And then the patent is about to expire. The whatever I'm selling could be worth 20 cents, $2, $5, $10 to sell. I'm still selling it for $5,000. And then I go get a lobbyist. I extend the patent for another 18 years. Then it goes 38 years. Especially with hospitals as well. I think Trump was trying to do something. You know, a few years ago with hospital, how much the cost was and.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Well, Dr. Oz is doing a really good, good job right now. Trying to bring down costs for Medicaid. There's a lot of smart things we gotta do.

• 1:05:09Patrick Bet-David?

  It'll be interesting what happens. So oh nine, when you leave Palantir and you're an advisor. Uh, are you at this, are you married at that time or you're single?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  No, no, I got, I got married in, uh, I got married in twenty sixteen.

• 1:05:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty sixteen, okay. So you're a rich, young bachelor at this time. Is that fair to say?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  It's fair to say.

• 1:05:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so how did you protect yourself? Because.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Well, actually, I made a pretty dumb mistake. If you read about it, I had a girlfriend who ended up suing, suing me after I broke up with her and didn't marry her in twenty, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. So you're right. You got, you gotta protect yourself.

• 1:05:39Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you do it though? Because you know.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think looking back on it, I was working really, really hard and I, you know, it was a very nice relationship that didn't work out. And then I had a kind of a rebound relationship with, with. I don't want, I don't want, I don't want to talk too much about, about this person in particular, but it was something where it's probably not someone I should have been dating and, you know, I'd met in New York and she was, she was at Stanford. She was twenty one. I was twenty eight. And, and it's like, it turns out you just gotta be really careful. Like who you let into your life and how seriously you take relationships, because if you're not careful, then it can cause a lot of trouble. And that's, that's a good lesson for.

• 1:06:10Patrick Bet-David?

  How'd you protect yourself?

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I think how you protect yourself is you should listen more to your family. I think it's not my family. Didn't think, didn't thought there were some issues with them and I, and I should like, oh no, she's really pretty and I'm busy and who cares? And it's like, actually it really matters to protect yourself enough. It's common sense who led into your life. I was very lucky. That by the time actually I'd broken up, it'd been a couple of years of my time that I tried to sue. I already had a new amazing girlfriend who was really wonderful. She ended up becoming my wife and. It's someone that my family really admired her and her family and respected her a lot. And that's, I think that's just really important to have, to focus on getting a partner you really, really respect who's the right match for you, you know?

• 1:06:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You've got now six kids.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  We have six, we have six beautiful young children. I'm a very lucky guy. Five, five little girls, which is, which is all.

• 1:06:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. Well, you got the money for it. It's gonna be expensive.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  They're they're they're amazing.

• 1:06:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, you know why I ask that question? Because Trevor Bauer, I don't know if you follow baseball. Uh, uh, he's a good friend. And he was playing baseball and he was doing great things. Cy Young, all this stuff. And then a girl accuses him.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Just for the accusation, it's in your life.

• 1:07:11Patrick Bet-David?

  He lost a few hundred million dollars over it.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Probably cost me a little bit too for about a year. A lot of people didn't, I became controversial, it became harder for about a year. I mean, obviously, I'm I'm lucky I was successful enough, I could bounce back and get through it. But it's it's totally unfair to a guy like that to have to deal with that. And this is, yeah, I think there was a period where you were basically guilty as soon as you were accused. I think a lot of people now have seen enough people where that's been happened unfairly. That hopefully our our culture is changing a little bit, but it's it's still very unfair how it handles these things.

• 1:07:38Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you, when you're rich and single, identify if a girl is with you for you or for you because of money? How do you do that?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  I wanna, and and I wanna push back, by the way, on one thing. I think it's unfair how things work now. I think it was probably even more unfair how things worked in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. I I think we have to acknowledge that because I I'm obviously I'm not a woke guy. But I think the world was at a place where a lot of men, it was a man's world and a lot of men were really nasty, abused women, horrible things, and just got away with it. And I and I think that is wrong, right? So I think, so I think we have to realize that the pendulum was here and now it's like swung too far the other way. But you know what? I'd rather, I'd rather face a little bit of a tough time as a as a rich guy than have all these women being abused. So this is still wrong. It should it should be in the middle. But but I think it's actually like, it's good that we're actually protecting these people now, you know?

• 1:08:29Patrick Bet-David?

  This weekend, my wife and I were celebrating her birthday. So we go to Ball Harbor. And, you know, Ball Harbor, I couldn't walk anywhere without somebody saying hello to me who's Jewish. It's like filled with Jews everywhere in that area. And so, uh, uh, we decide one night, we're on Game of Thrones, just to kind of tell you where we're at. We're at the two episodes after the Red Wedding, whatever they call it. Yeah, that's kind of what we are, right? We haven't seen anything else. And then my wife, she says, babe, thank God, I'm a woman born.

• 1:09:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Today because how different it was back in the days. So it was difficult, it was vicious, it was a whole.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  It was, it was a crazy world. Can I tell you a funny story about that? So I mentioned Milton Friedman I used to hang out with. His colleague who was older than him was Dr. Baikman. He was ninety six when I was at Stanford and he had been a reporter in the White House in the late nineteen thirties. So, so he was like a window for me into like this like completely different time, right? Cause that's like, you know, cause he was sixty years.

• 1:09:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Ninety six, twenty years.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Sixty five years ago from when, from, from when, from when I met him in the White House. And I thought the funniest, he's always stories. So even in the FDR White House, it'd be spring break and they'd all go on the train. And it'd be journalists, it'd be senators from both parties. And it'd be the guys in the White House and the first two stops of the train. All the girlfriends and escorts would get on and they'd all go together. And, and these people would be attacking each other like crazy with their journalists for the, for the business of government. But they'd both be with their girlfriends or everyone else getting in trouble and never would say anything about that. Isn't, isn't that crazy? It was a totally different world. It was a, it was a man's world. It was just a different world. And I'm not saying that's good. It's just fascinating how much the world has shifted, you know, that you never imagined that.

• 1:10:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. Do you believe it? I believe it. I believe that ex. I mean.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely, definitely.

• 1:10:10Patrick Bet-David?

  You, you read about it, you see about it, you know. Uh, it, it's a, it's a very different world, but going back to it, advice, think about it, guys asking. I read Stephen Schwarzman's book and he's talking about how, uh, uh, what it takes. He says he was going through a divorce. He was worried about what to do. He had been married for twenty five years.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Patrick Bet-David?

  He says, I get recommended to go see this one guy who's a very successful therapist, a marriage counselor. And I said, I have four concerns. Uh, how do I at my age get back into the dating world? Number two, what happens with my kids? Number three, what happens with my money? Number four, what happens with my friends? Do they choose her or me? And the guy gave him very good advice.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  That's tough.

• 1:10:49Patrick Bet-David?

  He said, your kids are gonna be okay. You're gonna be fine. There's plenty of girls that are gonna wanna be with you. Number three, do you have a prenup with your wife? He says, no, he says, you're gonna lose some money. And then number four, he says about friends, he says, you're gonna lose half your friends. Cause they're gonna side with her. But I'm talking like for a guy like you who made money, is wealthy, is single, looking for a wife. How do you tell them apart?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  You know? You you meet people through friends, you meet people through people you admire. And I think there's a lot of wonderful families and a lot of, you know, wonderful young women out there. And I think it's the most important to be with someone who you really respect and where you have a shared, strong base of values. And my my wife, my wife converted to Judaism and we have just a really strong base of tradition in our family that we're building together. And we talk a lot about values and what we care about. And she's someone who, you know, I think, I think if you have a really great wife, she makes you want to be a better person to to live up to to her to her vision of things.

• 1:11:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Good for you guys. Good for you. Respect. So going through somebody you know and trust that, again, going back to the same way you recruited people.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I got, I got really lucky. I'm not sure I could find my, someone like my wife again. Sometimes you just gotta go lucky.

• 1:11:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you gonna hit double digits? That's the question. Are you guys gonna reach double digits or six is it?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  I think six kids might be it, but we'll see. We'll see what I can do.

• 1:12:00Patrick Bet-David?

  I was telling you about a guy I met yesterday who has 11 kids with his wife. He's 46, no twins, no adopting, all theirs. And they hit 11 kids. I think his name was Moshe, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Orthodox things do.

• 1:12:11Patrick Bet-David?

  So you left O nine and you went and did other things. The company you started, we're talking about that. And then afterwards, you know, you guys, when did you start eight VC? When did you start making?

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  I started, so, so, so, so because Palantir had all this really top talent, when people come out, similar to PayPal, they're starting great companies. I was mentoring, helping them. So a lot of my mentors, like Joe, you're basically already running a fund, but you need more money and more people helping you. So I put that together. The first one was called Formation Eight. We did two big funds and then we started at VC with most of that team that spun out. And we're on a VC fund six now. So we've done eight really large funds, a bunch of entities around it. And it's been the last couple of years, I mean, it's gone really, really well. Obviously, it raised a ton of funds, but the last couple of years, things have just accelerated faster than you've ever seen before. Because AI is just making productivity go up. It's making, making a lot of businesses grow way faster than we've ever seen. I think it's four, about four times faster on average for the median top 100 versus the median, you know, cloud companies that I was in before. So it's just amazing what's going on.

• 1:13:06Patrick Bet-David?

  You think VC has been a net positive for capitalism or?

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:13:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, tell me why.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  So, so, so, so what, so here's what VC is like the evolutionary engine of our economy, right? So whenever, whenever, whenever you have new technology come along, whenever you have new possibilities come along, the question is, how are you gonna take those new possibilities and do a better job in your business? How are you gonna do a better job in this area of logistics, in this area of healthcare, in this area of finance, media, whatever it is? And so what VC really is, is taking a bunch of smart. Uh, you know, smart builders who have new ideas and it's figuring out how do you empower these smart people to run really hard at creating value in these areas from the new possibilities. And so there's really two things in VC. One is the top talent and two is like what's newly possible that creates value.

• 1:13:53Patrick Bet-David?

  So how do you, how do you do it? How do you find it?

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  So, so, so first of all, you have to be interested in industries. You have to be interested in how things work. How does logistics work? How are these carriers working with the warehouses, working with other people? How are they getting booked? What is the brokerage? What are all the pieces of the industry? How is this, how is healthcare delivery working in America? Where are all the pieces? And, and you have to, and as you start to work on companies, helping them, you get to know the leaders. And so over the last 15 years, like we'll, we'll bring, you know, a hundred of the top logistics leaders, like, you know, to my, to our, to our vineyard in Napa Valley. We'll hang out with them and we'll see what's going on. We'll, we'll hang out with the people who build all the, run all the hospital systems who are using our things there. Well, you know, I'm in the Pentagon tomorrow morning. That's where I'm going up to DC to spend a lot of time with the guys building and running things in the fence. And so you have to be very interested and enjoy these industries, get to know them. And every time you have a success, every time your company helps that industry work better, now you've built a bunch of trust. Now you know who the good

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  guys are. Now the next one, two, three, four, five are gonna be easier. So you have these big VC firms that have had a bunch of these wins and the networks get stronger and stronger. You can learn how to take talent, learn how to build these things. And it's, it's a huge engine of innovation. As a fact, America is the best in the world at this. And it's, I think it's one of the coolest sectors that exists, you know, in the world.

• 1:14:57Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what's the business model? The business model is teaming up with somebody else and raising a billion dollar fund. And you go find the companies and then you take the 20% of the upside, uh, uh, and then you split some of the money or put your own money in it. Give me the business model.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  So, so here's the, I think here's the right way to think about it, especially for, especially for our generation, a lot of people our age is like, you go off and you build a great company and you work really hard and I get palantir to work and get out of part of work. So now I'm one of the maybe a hundred guys in our, in our country who's built a couple of big successful companies. And now I, I know all these other builders and I'm, and I know how to build things. I've learned. So now these young guys come to me and they want advice. And so I started advising them and I realized, wait a second, I know all this talent. I have all these ideas. And then I raise the fund. And then I raise the fund because now I have the credibility because I've built things. I know how to mentor. I know how to coach these guys because I've done it myself. And I bring people around me who help build these companies as well. So I have 70 people on the team who are the top designers, top tech people, you know, ways to manage it.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Then you raise the money, yeah, and you charge, you charge, it's an illiquid vehicle, which means people lock up their money for effectively 12 years usually is how it works. 12 years? Well, it's 10, it's 10 with like three extensions. And so these funds usually last 12 to 15 years just because they do, because it takes a while for things to go public. And so you could lock, people give you the money and you get some fee on the money to pay the team. And then, and you invest, and you invest it. And most of the money goes into the ground, the first kind of like, you first, first you write like this, you call it a series A or series B, you lead rounds, you take a big piece of the company. And then you'll follow on with more money in the future rounds alongside other friends. So a big part of your job is to help them recruit talent. A big part of your job is to help them have other people put money in after you, right? And so because I know all the other people, you know, when I'm down here in Miami, there's a bunch of big fund managers, we work together.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  And, and, and you're helping them learn how to rate, build a team, you're helping them learn how to work with the industry, helping them learn how to raise the money. And, and then, and then when you have, you know, sometimes you sell the company to someone else, sometimes you take it public. And so, so it's, so it's a business model of kind of helping people create these things, helping them succeed. How, how do you find winners? How do you find winners? How much of it is founder, the entrepreneur? And you know what? There's no single right answer. Some people are like, it's about the markets. Some people are like, it's about the entrepreneur. So some people, it's about the technology, culture and tech talent. Some people are just like, oh, it's just art and I just know, you know, there's lots of ways of doing it. For, for, for me, it's a, it's a, it's a combination. Like you have, we spend a lot of time on technology culture. I want

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  a company that's recruiting the very, very best, just like with the sports team, the very best athletes in the world, the best technologists in the world. I want a place where the best guys want to go there because they've heard someone else is there who's amazing. And then I want an area that we believe is a market that has new possibilities, that there is a gap that should be disrupted. And usually what I really care about is there's a mission. I really want there to be a mission that matters. Like I'm going to put up most of my money into things where there's great team, gap, and I, and it's because what the mission does, the mission brings in the really best people. The mission makes the best people want to work harder on it. And it makes it something that can be a lot bigger. So Palantir was a, was a really big mission. Atapart is a big mission in finance. A lot of my new defense companies, we're trying to help the US, you know, scale our shipbuilding with Sironic. We're trying to, to help fix areas of healthcare, we're trying to save kids with rare diseases. So I think these missions really attract great talent.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  So mission, the big, the mission.

• 1:18:04Patrick Bet-David?

  And what what process of filtering? I remember when I raised my first round, you know, and I sold my insurance company. They came in, they did an extensive background check. You know, they did all this stuff on me. How do you? How do you find out?

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  In Florida, we gotta do longer background checks.

• 1:18:20Patrick Bet-David?

  You do, right? Yeah, you do in Florida. That's right. That's a good point. And it looks like panel of yours moving to Florida anyway. Of course, you're not involved. Yeah, they're moving down here. But what what do you do? Are you doing background checks? Are you?

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  That's one of the that's one of the steps in the process. It's not the most important one, but it's just good to.

• 1:18:34Patrick Bet-David?

  What's the most important one?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  The most important one is to know who the founders are and to and to and to have them be people you can verify somehow in your network are just are.

• 1:18:45Patrick Bet-David?

  From the network.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  From you have to.

• 1:18:46Patrick Bet-David?

  A little bit of credibility, a little bit of background.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  I have to. This is my my advantage is that I'm tied to hundreds of these like top tech networks now from things I've built, things I've invested in. And we have we have to use and we have to use that network. So it's not that it's not that there's not someone in the middle of nowhere who could be great, but if you're in the middle of nowhere and you are really great.

• 1:19:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Your job is to is to find and get to know other people and press them.

• 1:19:07Patrick Bet-David?

  What red flags do you have?

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  There's so many red flags for us. It's just because we have a very particular thing where we're we're not investing in small businesses. We're investing in things that can get to be really, really big and change industries. And so one red flag is being too obsessed with patents. Usually people think patents matter a lot. For most of these things, it's more about the team and the execution. It's not I have 20 patents, doesn't really matter. So if you talk too much about that, it shows you're not thinking about the thing that's valuable, which is the execution. It's a red flag if the person is not full time. People are always trying to do things part time. That's never ends up being the giant companies. You need people who are 100% all in full time. It's a it's a it's a red it's a red flag if they don't plan on doing this for a long time. It needs to be their obsession in their life. You know, it's a red flag if they talk a lot about work life balance because work life balance is great for some things, but this is like winning a gold in the Olympics. Do you think the Olympic gold medalists had a good balance?

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  We're all in. We're all in. So it's like those are types. There's I think it's a big red flag is another one is interesting. If the if the top first five or 10 people don't own a good piece of the company. So if you're keeping it all for one founder and he's paying and giving very, very, very little bit of upside, the first five or 10 people, that's that's a wrong culture and it's probably not the very best people because the very best people in our industry, they want to own a piece of something they're doing.

• 1:20:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Right. So give me the, give me the opposite of red flags.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  You know, it's, uh, it's like, it's there's people we know.

• 1:20:18Patrick Bet-David?

  So mission is one.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Mission, superstar talent is really key. Uh, you know, early pull from, from the industry, top guys from the industry who wanna be advisors, who, who are eager to help. Uh, you know, it's, it's, but, but it's usually all to come, comes down to the people who want our network things.

• 1:20:34Patrick Bet-David?

  What's the biggest success story you've had? Best, best story so far?

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a lot of stuff. We backed Androl early on. It's a top defense, new defense company. Uh, we backed a company called Quince at the beginning and it's now, you know, 10 billion valuation, probably gonna double next year. Uh, cognition we backed early on and it'll, you know, it's, you know, it's worth 15 billion. It's a bunch of these top guys. Um, just, you know, Sironix, like just raising a big round is building hundreds of ships for the US Navy. It's doing really well. We helped start that actually.

• 1:21:03Patrick Bet-David?

  This is really, that's your niche. Your niche is national defense, security, that's.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  A, A, AI healthcare logistics too. We've done some big sale, things we sold in logistics that have worked out. I, I love just fixing things that are broken, man, and making them work better.

• 1:21:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you, do you feel the criticism of, uh, uh, uh, OpenAI is getting right now? ChatGPT is getting right now is fair.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Which, which part of that?

• 1:21:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, you know, uh, uh, revenue, you know, the conversation about, you know, they may start adding ads in there, even though he said that.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  I thought that was funny. I thought that was a funny attack Anthropic did on making fun of them for that. Listen.

• 1:21:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I saw that. Anthropic is very creative on some of the.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Listen, I, I, so I'm old friends with Elon and I'm longest his company. So now after he merged it, I own a bunch of SpaceX that I did before too. Um, I'm also a small investor in, in Anthropic, which is just an extraordinary technology and, and there's people who are attacking them for, for, for various things. But I just, Anthropic has pulled way ahead in the coding area and, and it's just.

• 1:22:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty-five now? I don't know what the.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  It's three eighty, three eighty post, but that's, I think that's even cheap for where they're going, cause they're just growing so fast and like all of our companies are, are, are using this. And it's, it's, it's really fun. Like a lot of my smartest friends who are already extremely wealthy and can do anything they want are staying up coding right now. Cause it's so fun what you could do with these tools. It's a, this crazy time right now.

• 1:22:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you more long with Anthropic than OpenAI?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm most long SpaceX, next AI, I'm second most long Anthropic. OpenAI, I do think it could possibly have some struggles here, but I don't know. There's obviously, it's amazing what they accomplished and they really kind of brought a lot of this to the world. So they deserve a lot of credit for that. I think Elon, along with Sam, both deserve credit for building that team early on.

• 1:22:40Patrick Bet-David?

  No question. It was a not-for-profit, and then it turned into profit. And then that's where the feud took place between the two of them.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  It's unfortunate. I think these like, these feuds are not productive for our, for our society. But I understand where Elon's coming from and I hope, I hope they make it, you know, I hope they make it work for everyone.

• 1:22:57Patrick Bet-David?

  I get his argument. I totally get Elon's argument. Who else are you along with? Who, what else is it that, you know, I had a call with my banker. I said, listen, send me the top 10 nuclear companies out there that are finding ways to tap into the nuclear energy. And then I said, okay, we looked at some of them, made a decision, we had a call with their. And then I said, let's look into these three companies, which we did. And it's done fairly well, but for you, you're in this world. What else are you saying?

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Our friends at Founders fund have a company with a really talented guy building nuclear fuel as well. And making, making sure you have that in America. It's really important to do, and we're looking into that space. It's, you know, it's interesting because Elon says all you need is solar energy, which is, which is true at the extreme. But I think, I think we did kind of screw up the regulation on the nuclear space and that to be, I love the fact that Department of War is trying to do more of that now too. So I think that's a good thing to be doing. You know, the areas that I'm most bullish on. So in America right now, we have $5 trillion of wages in our services economy. That's like every type of service. And in about 40% of that, and in over $2 trillion area, we've already seen you could double or triple the productivity, at least double if not triple the productivity. So this is, this is in companies that we're exposed to. And it's like the backend of a law firm helping it. It's like the backend of logistics payments.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  It's like health, healthcare billing. Healthcare billing sounds small and boring. It's 280 billion a year spent on healthcare billing, right?

• 1:24:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Healthcare billing.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  280 billion, 120 of that's paid to companies, 160 of that's internal health systems. It's a massive part of the economy. We already are tripling the efficiency of that. So, so what that means is a lot of this stuff's very disinflationary. It's creating a ton of value and these things are just scaling. Like my best healthcare billing company with a bunch of ex-pal. Here guys, it's gonna double from like, you know, double to over a hundred million revenue this year, but that's still tiny compared to where it's going, right? And as that grows, it's making the whole economy more efficient. So this is why venture capital is this engine that's like taking these possibilities and fixing stuff to make it cheap for all of us. So it's a really positive thing.

• 1:24:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Why 11.8 million in a Nigerian drone company?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Okay, no, you know, there's, listen, this, the guy running it, first of all, Physics Olympian, is co-founder of building another business. These are super talented, they're super talented young men there.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  As you probably saw, there's a lot of people being slaughtered in Africa, especially a lot of Christians in Nigeria, being killed for the wrong reasons. Security all over Africa is a huge deal. One of the main reasons you can't build infrastructure and invest in Africa right now is there's a little problem with security everywhere there. And, you know, I happen to know a lot about the defense space. I've started multiple companies here. We felt like these guys were really talented and they could scale a lot of production of doing rail controlled cars, sentry towers, drones, and we thought that some of our US technology as well could partner with them and help them and help them secure Africa. Even if, even if we got rid of the Iranian guys, even if we like make the Middle East somehow of peace, which I hope we do.

• 1:25:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Which, and by the way, they're good at making drones.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  They sell their Russia. Shahi drones are very good. We have to get really good. We're really good at shooting them down now. I'm working on it. But, but, but basically, even if that's all peaceful, Africa's probably gonna be a mess for quite a while. I think helping the good guys there is a good thing to do.

• 1:25:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Why, why is it so difficult for drone companies to excel on America? The regulation here is just intense.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Well, so to build the engines behind these things, you need certain rare earth elements and you need certain refining, which is very messy, and we just don't have the capacity in the US for that. So in Ukraine, unfortunately, right now, a lot of the supply chain is coming through China for both sides, which is unfortunate.

• 1:26:20Patrick Bet-David?

  A lot of the supply chain is coming from both sides?

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Through China. There's a lot of the rare earth refining and elements and engines and things they're building. They're using, so even like, you know, Eric Schmidt famously is building, I think, hundreds of thousands of drones to help the Ukrainians. I think it's a very cool thing he's doing there and he built it in Mexico. But I think a lot of even that potentially would be coming. Some things are from China. So there's just, there's just a lot. And so we're trying to ramp up. And it is the regulation, it's partial regulation. It's actually interesting. If you ask like Peter Thiel, my friends there, it's like the regulatory stuff, kill these industries. If you talk to Elon, who the other night was talking about this, he's like, no, we just need more founders who are willing to build these things in America. And I think he's probably right that as we try to build these things here, you could probably convince them to change regulations to make it possible because we do want it to be possible now. So, so I think we're trying to do it now. We're trying to fix it.

• 1:27:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, and you you think Greenland is one of the reasons that it plays such a big role in this?

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  You know, I think Greenland is a place where if there's ever gonna be an attack on America from the other side of the planet, it has to Russia or China or whatever, a lot of things have to fly over. Greenland, so I think for the Golden Dome, it's important. I think there's also a lot of resources there. I think there's like a certain spirit of expansion. It's very healthy. I think I think you want to be growing and not shrinking. I think you want to be, I think, I think, I think human humanity is like in some ways is just very simple. It's like very complex, but it's very simple. And the question is, are you shrinking and getting weaker and under decline, or are you growing and stronger? And in America, in its current state, where it's expanding manufacturing, it's like confident, it's it's expanding the economy, taking Greenland and building things for Greenland. Like if Greenland was more part of us, we could build

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  infrastructure there. We could have ports that would then enable investment that couldn't happen otherwise. It'd be really good for Greenland. So I think it actually would be really good for the world for us to do more of Greenland. I know where it stands.

• 1:27:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, what what do you have with tariffs? With Supreme Court ruling against it, six, three, you know?

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  If you looked at the Kavanaugh ruling, he kind of goes into depth on how you could have done it legally. So it's kind of like a playbook for how you could still do it if you want, which I think.

• 1:28:11Patrick Bet-David?

  He's giving him a playbook on how to.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  It's very interesting reading. It was a very funny six, three ruling, because and by the way, I'm not a legal scholar, but from best I could tell, it was like three different rulings. It was like three here, three here, three here. And but the six agreed, like the three left and the three moderate right, or whatever you want to call them, agreed that it's not legal. But then I think at least the moderate right part of the ruling is like, here, well, here's how it could be legal. So there probably are ways you could still go back and do it, is my impression.

• 1:28:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. But right now, the lawsuits, you know, I.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  It's a it's a mess.

• 1:28:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Being in the rooms and EU is like, look, we don't have to pay the terrorists. We don't have to agree to do this. Look what your Supreme Court said to you. So it's almost like they're undermining him to say you don't have the kind of authority you thought you had. You can't do. So how does that, how do you think?

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  You know, it's unfortunate, but this is our system of government is we have three separate coeval branches and it's really annoying when the branches sometimes check you, but we, I think it's good that we have checks on power. It doesn't mean I agree with with that Trump shouldn't be able to.

• 1:29:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you part of the Curtis Yarvin camp? We had him on and I don't know if you know Curtis Yarvin?

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  I know who he is. He doesn't, he doesn't like it when guys like me try to fix things. He's very cynical. So whenever we're like, yeah, I have my policy group, we're like fixing things or making things work better. He's like, oh, you guys are all naive. Everything's broken. That's, you know, he's too negative is my view.

• 1:29:19Patrick Bet-David?

  He is negative, but he, the way he was arguing it on, you know, he's for, he's for a monarchy rather than having a democracy. And he thinks it's more effective. It could get things more done, you know, he.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  I just, just, just wait until the monarch decides your wife's attractive, man. I don't know if I, I don't know if I want to live under that system. Like checks on power are very wise.

• 1:29:39Patrick Bet-David?

  We're gonna go back to the, the train days. He's gonna, he's gonna say, I own the train and I own your wife. Give her to me, right? For, listen, all this money you're making, you know, you, you, you, you're one of these guys that's made billions as well yourself. What is something you, you buy? Like, are you a comic cards guy? You know, do you collect cars?

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny.

• 1:29:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Comic books, are you unique cars? What, what do you?

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  In Game of Thrones, early on in Game of Thrones, I, I set up a thing in my yard in California back then. And we had the Game of Thrones throne and, and we, and we like have like the theater outside. It's fun. You know, what do I collect? I mean, I have a couple of planes, but they're for business really. I have, you know, I have a ski house where I host people. We have a vineyard where we host people. Most of my money on the excess money actually goes to the university. It goes to my policy work. It costs about, it's only costs about a quarter million dollars to like get a mission driven piece of legislation passed. It helps a lot of people. So for example, vocational schools I care a lot about. And I think it's really sloppy right now because if you want to, if you want to like spend more money on vocational schools, that's fine. But if the guy running the vocational school is not very good, it's not gonna be good results. So we, like in Texas, for example, there's 27 vocational schools in Texas.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Has it so that you fund the schools in proportion to the success of the kids. So the students coming out, you see their salaries and that determines the funding. And, and what that did is it doubled the salaries coming out. You took hundreds of thousands of people who would have had tough lives. You may not have much, much better lives. And so getting that law passed in another state takes a few hundred thousand dollars. For me, that's like, really, that's like, that's a really cool form of philanthropy where I could take something, make our country more functional. So I, so I have teams in 23 states. So I spend a lot of money trying to just like fix stuff that's broken. So that's for me, that's a really fun way to do it.

• 1:31:14Patrick Bet-David?

  So that's your game. That's your fun.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  I love, I love, I love, I love thinking about like, how do we go in? And like make healthcare cheaper and better here. How do we make the prison system? Like right now, like prison guards and prisoners, it's a mess. The cultures are broken. How do you create accountability for the prison guards? How do you create better results for rehabilitation when they come out? How do you, these things like this to me is interesting.

• 1:31:33Patrick Bet-David?

  That thinking, right, of solving problems makes sense. So you probably have a lot of friends in New York and California. Okay, you saw the exodus. California lost a trillion during COVID when folks left. He got some people back and now he lost another trillion with the wealth tax.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  I moved in COVID and a bunch of other my friends moved to Austin right now. Yeah.

• 1:31:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Right. So how, i- i- is this the worst of it or is California is gonna, i- it's just getting started?

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what. So I've had a problem with how California's been running forever since I have opinions on these things. And no one really wanted to listen for a long time. I'm actually pretty optimistic because right now I have like seventy or eighty acquaintances and friends in California who've made a lot of money. And they're like, Joe, you were right. This is broken. I want to fight for it. And they're doing all sorts of things to fight for it. They're, they're, they're looking at building endowments to oppose the far left unions, to help the moderates, help pro-growth strategies. They're looking at things to bring in more talent. They're looking at things to expose more of the fraud. They're, they're fighting for good candidates, you know? The mayor of San Jose, someone who's a very moderate, very, very strong mayor. He's probably moderate left, which is good because it's California, but he's someone we respect from both sides.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  A lot of us are backing, backing him. You know, there's a lot of good talent in California saying, wait a second. We gotta actually fight, fight for this place. So I'm a Texan and I'm doing a lot more in Texas. But I'm proud to see my friends in California waking up and I really hope they could fight back. And so it's, there's, there's a few hundred million dollars a year, Patrick, that comes from the far left unions, just from people work for the state automatically. They force them to fund them. So it's like a few hundred million dollars a year of like corruption and they're just like fights. But if you can get these other guys to step up, we can do more than a few hundred million dollars a year. So I hope we do.

• 1:33:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, this gerrymandering where which changed the representatives to now they're gonna have control of what, forty-eight out of fifty-two? It's gonna be on the left. So I don't know how they're gonna be moving that. That's gonna be a lot of work. Could take a couple of decades.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot of work to fight back, but I think it's a, I think it's a noble thing to do. If you're gonna live in California, you should fight for the good.

• 1:33:28Patrick Bet-David?

  If you're gonna do it, you have to get them up.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  And I live in Texas and I fight for, I fight for the good guys there too.

• 1:33:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, it's very obvious. Last thing, Barry Weiss, Free Press, why that investment?

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  You know, I got to know Barry and we both agreed, there's a lot of American institutions that have been conquered by crazy ideological people that are that are really decaying our civilizations. So our media is broken, our universities are broken, there's parts of our government that are broken. And the only way we really can fix this is we build anew. And so she and I actually co-founded the new university together. At the time when I met her, she was also co-founding a new media org. And I think I was one of the very first investors there. And I'm really proud of what she's done. I think she's she has millions and millions of people listening to her now. She had a newsroom that was probably about a third left, a third independent, and a third right, which is like the most balanced newsroom in the country.

• 1:34:16Patrick Bet-David?

  The day?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a free press. I don't know what she has now at CBS, but that was a job. I assume she's trying to build the same thing as CBS. And yeah, I think that's really, really impressive to have a newsroom this balanced because no one else is doing it. And it's I think it's worth trying. So.

• 1:34:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you think she's getting so much pushback? Why do you think she has hate? Left, right, center?

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Because she's the only one who has both sides in her newsroom. So people say, wait a second, I thought you were on my side, but you're saying this left thing. And then people left say, I thought you were on my side on this, but you're saying this right thing.

• 1:34:40Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a tough place.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  You're attacking me on both sides. She's attacking both sides. But you know what? If she's getting attacked by both sides, that's probably a pretty good sign that she's doing something better than most others.

• 1:34:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, no, no question. And by the way, you got a podcast. You got a you got a.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  The American Optimist.

• 1:34:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, I love that. Tell me about it.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  You know, I know a lot of interesting friends who are building the future and you know, and I know a lot of friends running the government. So it's just fun. I'll sit down with them for a few hours a month and put it out and people people like it.

• 1:35:03Patrick Bet-David?

  And you're the best booker because you can get hold of anybody.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  All my friends are willing to do it.

• 1:35:09Patrick Bet-David?

  So so who have you had so far on the show? No, you're at T O. Who else have you have yet on?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, it's all sorts of people. It goes from Ashton Critcher to, you know, Senator Tom Cotton, a bunch of senators, a bunch of governors, you know, a bunch of a bunch of people who built the biggest companies in Silicon Valley to drink cancer, running AI, you know, all sorts of Steve's running for governor now.

• 1:35:32Patrick Bet-David?

  I saw that.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, all sorts of characters there, you know, a lot of my friends.

• 1:35:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Andreessen.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Andreessen, Boris, Bill Buemo, you have that on the screen. And now he's he's building a company. It's the first AI for excavation. We're doing autonomous excavators. He's raised tons of money there. People got angry at me for having a read on because he's on the left. And meanwhile, Russ, of course, is running the O M B for this administration. So I tried to have both sides.

• 1:35:52Patrick Bet-David?

  You had Alex Byron yet or no?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I haven't had him on yet. I had Alex Karp on. I had Maria on from Venezuela before.

• 1:35:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Venezuela, which was kind of fun.

• 1:36:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, we had her on as well on a Zoom. And now it'll be interesting to see what they do. But we're going to put the link below to the podcast. This was very interesting talking to you. Keep kicking ass. Great story. Appreciate you for making the time to come down.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  You're doing great work, Patrick. This is great.

• 1:36:14Patrick Bet-David?

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