Uncapped #51 | Joe Lonsdale from 8VC

Joe Lonsdale is the Founder and Managing Partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital. In 2003, he founded Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR), a global software company known for its work supporting US and its allies’ defense and intelligence. Since then, he has founded over a dozen prominent companies, including Addepar, a wealth management platform helping investors manage over $7 trillion, and OpenGov, the leading cloud software provider for local governments which recently sold for $1.8 billion. Joe was an early investor in Anduril, Oculus (acq. FB), Guardant Health (NASDAQ:GH), Oscar (NYSE:OSCR), Illumio, Wish (NASDAQ:WISH), JoyTunes, Blend (NYSE:BLND), Flexport, Joby Aviation (NYSE:JOBY), Orca Bio, Qualia, Synthego, RelateIQ (acq. CRM), Yugabyte, among many others. We discussed what it takes to keep building after success, why AI is accelerating entire industries, and how it could reshape productivity, healthcare, defense, and the economy. Joe also shared his views on investing in hard problems, rebuilding trust in technology, and where America needs to adapt to win in the AI era. --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:32) Why Joe keeps building (3:53) AI being contrarian and right (5:39) What Palantir got right (6:53) Pulling forward innovation (9:32) AI vs social media (12:23) Making AI work for America (18:03) Department of War debate (21:16) Betting on defense (26:51) Robotics, bio, and energy (32:16) Investing in the AI era (35:38) Peptides opportunity (38:35) Texas vs California (40:12) Political correctness --- Links: https://x.com/JTLonsdale https://x.com/jaltma https://8vc.com/ https://uncappedpod.com/ --- [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you like took like the normal path without AI and like things we were building and knew we needed to build and like assume we need to build, we're like taking the 2030s and 2040s, we're like packing them into the next two or three years because so much is happening right now.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  And that means we're taking the 2050s and 2060s and going to put them into the end of the decade and the start of the next decade. It's just like so much cool stuff.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  All right, Joe, I've been really looking forward to doing this with you. You're one of the most interesting people to me and I love a lot of the work that you've done. And so really excited to chat and learn with you.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Jack.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  One of the things I want to start with is I kind of put you in this category of people who are both investors and founders, like the real way, you know, like a lot of people say that, but you really have done it. You've like started many companies, you've, you've started companies that you then, you know, become chairman. Some you've worked for a long time on, obviously there's Palantir, but there's like, there's many others. Then you also have your own VC firm. I'm just sort of curious, like, what's the mindset that you approach company building, company investing with? Like, where do you start when you think about doing your work?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Well, I think like starting a second or a third company is like fundamentally sort of an insane act after you've been successful. Cause you already obviously like have the money you need. So what are you doing? Cause these things are so hard, like you almost have to convince yourself every time that it's not going to be as hard as last time, even though you know it is.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I did it once and then I remembered it was too hard.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like really, really hard.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  I really. But you kept going, you just keep doing it.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Well, I did like two where I was CEO, Palantir and Atapar. And then I did a few where I was chairman and like really in the weeds with OpenGov. I was, I was with Zach last night, who was my CEO at OpenGov, who did very, very well. He sold it for 1.8 billion dollars after like 14 years. And I was, if, if it was, it was like paddling through the dirt, I was saying, it's like so freaking hard, especially compared to these things today.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Like an AI founder who's just like at a hundred million in no time.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  We were next to this kid last night who I'm backing, who's like, Joe, I'm not just doubling, I'm tripling revenue this quarter. And like Zach, I was like, because it was just like, it was so hard.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  A hundred million used to be like eight years of hard work where basically everything went right.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now like, now like one of these kids who worked for me as a billionaire in revenue was there, you're like, screw these kids. I love it. I'm taking, I'm investing in them. They're great kids, but it's like, they're great, you're adults, I should call them. But no, listen, I, I think like building is really, really hard. There are just gaps in the world that I that I see, just how my mind works. And there's like, this is a gap. And there's like people who are hurting because of this gap. There's things that are broken because of this gap. And it's so broken and no one else is fixing it. And I have all these really smart friends, let's go fix it. And so I just can't help that instinct to like, just go fix things. We say, we say it every day, if you see like, the world is broken, let's fix it. That's just, that's just my energy. So if no one else is gonna do it, fine, let's get people together and do it. But it's like the last option. You'd much rather back a really competent person who's, they themselves are already all in, you know?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think not enough investors have this instinct? Like, do you think it's right that most people don't do it? Or do you think there's actually, you know, more investors who can and should, you know, understand this is an interesting setup? Just like get some balls moving and then you can attract people to it? Or do you think it's like?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I think if you haven't yourself gone all in and built a startup and gone through the pain of that over years, then you probably have no idea how to actually build a startup and you just shouldn't be doing it. And I think the first time you do it and probably the second time, you should just be a hundred percent all in and you shouldn't be distracted. So I think I'm like a really bad example for people. Like you actually shouldn't try to do these things.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  But it's funny, cause even among investors who were former founders or have done it before, I think many just don't take that as one of the options of actually, I could just get this thing started, work with somebody, build around it.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  It takes a lot of energy. It's like you have to pour like a piece of your soul into something to really make it. Not that I do this right every time. Like I make new mistakes all the time, of course, but like every once in a while. And frankly, frankly, like the last several times I've been involved, it's not really mine. It's really like, I'm helping assemble the founding team. I'm helping bring together lots of talent and help bring together the mission. I'm giving them enough upside that it's theirs. And then, and then, and then, so it's just, that's a little bit different than doing it yourself, obviously. So it's gonna be a spectrum, you know?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I'd be curious to hear a little bit about how you're feeling in this general moment. You know, we were just talking about how hard it used to be to build companies to a hundred million of revenue. Now these like AI companies are going.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  So fast.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  It's like so fast. You strike me as like, you know, kind of like a, in the sort of Peter Thiel contrarian-esque mindset of things. And one of the things that, you know, I wonder is like, is it uncomfortable in any way? When the whole world sees something and you're like, we might be in that. The quadrant of the two by two that is both like contrarian and right like are you kind of in the mindset of like AI is actually the thing most people have it right and so I just need to go do it better than everybody else or do you sort of take the view of well when everybody's here I should actually be you know spending my time here because there's going to be a new wave by twenty thirty.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  You could still make like a bunch of like sub quadrants and they could be wrong in some things and you could be right about some things but you're all inside the big AI is right thing right. It's not like you just have this like super simple model but yeah yes I mean obviously this stuff is working in lots of ways in AI I think people are probably not focused enough on productivity as like the kind of like grail you should be going after I think they're not focused enough on the modes created just by the very most talented technologists so I think I think and you know going after just the very, very best teams and going after problems that are going to lead to higher productivity. And then there's just there's just all these nuances for how big industries work and we've been I've been obsessed with a lot of these large industries for a long time so I think we have advantages there and we're

• 5:17Speaker 00

  but yeah I mean listen it's it is non-consensus there I'm just like really bullish on this stuff right now and it's just working. Yeah. It's what are you gonna say it's all working and let's go after go after the very best of it and help it you know.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  I can't remember where I heard this but you know somebody saying like there's there is a form of contrarianism even among good ideas which is that you can like believe harder than everybody else.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  You believe you believe more you can under you can understand more the nuances of what's working so so the thing as an I've got really lucky the last few years because I I get no credit for like Palantir figuring out what it did the last five years the only credit I get is that I actually like originally like built the company I did hire a bunch of those people who are in charge.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  But like but it's them now who've done it recently but like the stuff that we figured out at Palantir and the stuff they figured out at Palantir turned out to be relevant to a ton of other AI companies like so it's like kind of the center of the AI world in terms of what's working in many ways was right around Palantir.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  And so that's just a huge advantage for us and I think we understand a lot of the nuances like how do you apply a workflow ontology this area how do you apply like the FDE motion to this thing and go deeper on this with a SaaS plus FTE.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  It is interesting the FTE thing is just everywhere now.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Well you have to.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Almost memetic but it's true.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  And Palantir figured out that the way you do these things in AI world and it's just and yet you have to use that.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  When you say you know Palantir figured out a lot of like the modes of like how AI is working like what else besides that FDE model what about like the technology itself?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Well, it's like, how do you, how do you like extract like the ontology of the workflows? And how do you, how do you like figure out where to apply L L Ms and where not to apply L L Ms to? And then, and then what do you have to build for it, for it to work? And, and, and, and there's just, there's just a lot of stuff that's like, these people have got it right.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  When you talk about like the productivity stuff being like, sort of like, underexplored and people don't appreciate how important it is. Do you mean like areas of like productivity software? Are you talking about like making individual like professional workers more productive every day? Is it both? Like, what are you thinking about?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's definitely both. It's also just like, how should this industry work in twenty thirty five? Like, what does this industry look like today? And what does it look like if it's doing everything that's possible and that we know is likely to become possible?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  It's like unam- twenty thirty five seems like it's so far away now. I can't even think about like May.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  No, I know that we, it's like we're pulling, if you like took like the normal path without A I. And like things we were building and knew we needed to build and, and like assume we need to build. We're like taking the twenty thirties and twenty forties. We're like packing them into the next two or three years because so much is happening right now. And, and that means we're taking the twenty fifties and twenty sixties and going to put them into the end of the decade and the start of the next decade. It's just like so much cool stuff. And my, my favorite one this week, every week there's something. My favorite one this week is I was with, uh, the guy who runs Joby Aviation. I was actually doing an episode with him and, uh, and it's just like, it turns out there's just going to be all these ways. The jets and airplanes are going to be like ten or twenty times as efficient in the next decade. And like, you know, he's launching in the next year, obviously these current flying cars. But actually there's like massive things that would take him three months before you do it in an afternoon now with his aerodynamicists. It's crazy.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yep. By the way, it's funny because, um, I feel like before A I took off or like right at the beginning, like right after Chat G P T. So much of the conversation felt like it was around like, you know, A G I, A S I. And like, is this, you know, is this like sci fi terminator taking over? And then as everything has like become super commercialized and, you know, these are great businesses and it's proliferating the economy. In a weird way feels less sci fi now and more just like.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  There's just cool things to build. There's just so much, and people underestimate like really smart people. Like he was saying, like his right hand had just like a list of like fifty things he wished he could work on and build. Wasn't the resources, wasn't the ability. Now we're gonna get through it all. There's just, there's so much to build. It's working.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that that mindset, though, I don't think everybody has it, you know, and like you can see this actually, you know, in in in high schoolers or something where some percentage of high schoolers, I think, are like becoming like, you know, putting on an Iron Man suit with AI, but you can also use AI to just sort of like skate by. And so you kind of see these like big schisms.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  It's like it's like soma, the sci fi, it's a heroin, right? It's like, it's really scary. Like you can use, you can use AI to be your heroin. You can use AI to not have to do much at all. You can use AI to lose all your agency. There's like a very negative version of it. And then there's like this extremely positive version of it. And, you know, this is a cultural thing. We got to figure out how do we get people to be more agentic themselves? How do we get people to engage and to choose to get dopamine from iterating and winning and not from sitting there and attaching it to their brains, you know? It's like TikTok is evil. And I hate that X is having to copy it because the the the financial incentive for social media is evil right now.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, you're saying X, you know, you on X, you go into a video, you start, you scroll, you're like,

• 9:42Speaker 00

  It's bad.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  You're on TikTok again.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  I've blocked, I've blocked TikTok for years, partially because of the CCP and stuff, but partially because also I don't have the willpower not to frickin' scroll these things. So I block it. I block Instagram. I can't deal with it. And like, I'm an investor with Elon and X. I guess I mean SpaceX now, so maybe it doesn't matter. But it's like, so I so I have it, you know, and also I'm addicted to like commenting my stupid views online. I'm arguing with Ballg, you were today, whatever. He's a good guy, but I got angry at him. But but like, but like, but you go on this thing and it gets addicted to you late at night, too. It's horrible. I I don't know. I'm gonna have to turn it off. It's terrible.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like um, tech probably lost a decent amount of trust with the public as a result of social media and people being like, you know, they don't care. Like, the tech industry is just like here to like monetize eyeballs and make money off of us.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  You know what's ironic? It's like, generally, market forces are really good in our society. Like, they cause us to have to work hard to solve problems. They're gonna bring down the cost of so many areas if we can get rid of crony capitalism. In the media itself, like with newspapers and in social media, market forces are terrible.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Because it's like, because it's because an attention economy, your incentive is to like distract people and just like polarize them. So it's just like, that is like the worst area of society for tech. And unfortunately, that's what we're known by.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  It's really bad. It's also, you know, it's, you know, I'm not like some, I'm not an anti journalist. I'm not, you know, against mainstream media or social media particularly, but, you know, it's like even with. Journalists who I really like, it's not their fault always, but you know, they might write a great article and then somebody, you know, some editor.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Clickbait headline always.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Slaps a crazy headline on top of it because they gotta, they gotta grow a business.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  It's, it's a very bad incentive and it's actually just ripping apart our society right now. These, these bubbles that it creates in social media. There's probably half your listeners, if they're, if you have typical listeners who are like, oh, that Joe Lonsdale guy.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  He's like, I don't, I don't like him. He has different views than me and he's offended, he offends me.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  And the other one's like, yeah, you go. And it's like, it's so unhealthy.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is, you know, the middle of the bell curve, who is neutral on Joe Lonsdale is not going to get shown this. Because that's not how the algorithm is going to work. And so.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  They're gonna show everyone who either loves me or hates me.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Probably. You know, it's like in general, I think.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  I went over some haters maybe.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, we'll, we'll try. That'll be our goal here. We'll run a survey afterwards.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  I feel like that is probably the problem with social media though, is it just amplifies extremes. And like a, a middle of the road, neutral, agreeable take is not incentivized.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. Most people are boring anyway.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  No, no, no, but, but here's, here's the thing. I was on a walk with my mentors at, at the dish just before this. Uh, and she comes from the moderate left and I'm, and I don't obviously. Uh, but I actually think like most issues, there's a dialectic where there really is truth on both sides. And I, and what I'm trying to do lately is like actually step back and just like, what are the dumb people on each side? But what are the smart people on each side? And I think, I think social media does not do that. Like I wish there was a way for it to do that.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  So relating this to AI, I feel like, um, the tech industry has some currently missed opportunity to do a better job. With our like, you know, relations to.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  We need people to love AI more because otherwise we're gonna like ban it and it's gonna hurt us.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And they don't love AI.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  All societies.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Like I don't think America loves AI right now. I think.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Not enough people.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thi- I think not nearly enough people. And I'm like, I think, um.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  They're scared, right?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  It's understandable.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Like, I think they're scared. Why, why do they like it? What, what do you, what do you think?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Threat for jobs, you know, obviously. And so if you're in an industry where it looks like, you know, you're seeing all these headlines.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Do you know anyone personally who's worried about their job being lost? Just to be totally honest. Like, like, oh, my life's gonna be tougher. Cause everyone talks about it, but no one knows anyone.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Coming for me.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I think everybody believes it's gonna happen to everybody.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  What are we afraid for? I'm actually really curious.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Well.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Who's the, who's the architect? Cause even if you walk through it, it's hard to get to the person.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  You know, what's interesting is, um, we should be, you know, software engineering, let's take as a good example. Of like, it's probably the best application of AI right now. I just saw a chart that like, you know, job postings for engineers are going up and are like as high as ever.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  There's so much to build right now.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  And so, you know, then you have the question of, are we basically just, are we basically just amplifying the value of that function? And so there's going to be more demand because it's more valuable.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  There will be, listen, Oracle did cut, I think, thirty or forty thousand people because there were things that they had to do with thirty people that they have to do with three people now. And they just don't have as many of those things to do, right? So there are, there definitely are already things where you're seeing some cuts for sure. The question is, can those people now in this economy do better? And I think most of them can.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  But that's, but that's been another agenda question we have to ask about.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  But so then why, why, why do you think we're sort of like failing to make AI look like a positive for, force for the world?

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Because everyone hates tech from social media. I, I, I, I think social media has had a terrible impact on our democracy. It's ripped things apart. It's like very distracting for people. It's just, it's not good for kids. It's like terrible for young girls especially. I have five daughters and a son and it's like, I'm not letting my young girls on social media just for everything I've seen.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Poison.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  I think it's poison for them. And so this is like the last, their last consumer experience with us. And now that this is like the next social media to them, of course they're afraid of it. Like, I think, I think that's the energy.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. You were mentioning to me before that China likes AI more than America.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, some surveys show me it's like seventy-five or eighty percent positive and we're like thirty percent positive now. They may just take better direction from their leaders than we do, so, which is a difference, that's a cultural question. But I also think there's more optimistic about how they could build with it and create wealth with it, which people should be here too. I think, I think this is gonna, so the last time we had productivity go up a lot over thirty years, it was like the working class person, the median was like two point four times wealthier. There was eighteen seventy, nineteen hundred. So more than twice as wealthy, real terms for, for working class. I think it's gonna be more than that the next thirty years. I think it's gonna be like four or five times wealthier next thirty years if we allow this to rise. This is amazing. And people just say. I think people will start to see, hopefully, if we don't make it illegal, like just what it could do the next five years. I think it's gonna be really positive.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It's almost like we need it to proliferate quickly, though, because like to the, to that point, there's, you know, we, we were just talking about these founders who are having these explosive businesses.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  You have a lot of people who are resistant to AI. That sounds like the beginning of wealth inequality to me.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Well, this is why we have to actually make sure that the applications of AI that help the middle class, that help the working class, you know, win faster and make sure they're legal. So right now, for example, like the number one thing I think AI could do for three hundred fifty million people in the US is we can make healthcare like half cost, like really fast. Like healthcare should cost half as much and it should be way better. It should be way more convenient.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  How?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Well, there's a bunch of different levels of this, but we need healthcare services and AI. We need to actually have primary care, be work, work with deterministic AI, where you're allowed to start a business that has one doctor and has a bunch of nurses and a bunch of others, and it has the input through AI and they, and they optimize it. And, and they do things through AI that we know are safe. When we prove out, here's a hundred different workflows. Like, so Utah just allowed one workflow. They allowed, if you have a chronic disease and you've been prescribed medicine by a doctor, your re-prescription can involve AI. It doesn't have to involve a doctor. And, and they're, and they're testing it out. But so, so what I'm pushing right now is a healthcare AI sandbox legislation. You know, we have Cistero Institute, which gets things done in like twenty states. So we're trying to get a few states to create an AI sandbox where we can very safely prove out dozens and then hundreds

• 16:27Speaker 00

  of kind of primary care workflows. And then that would allow huge cuts in cost for these things. And then there's a bunch of other areas of healthcare, of course, it goes after as well. But this is, you generally can have AI practice more safely for a bunch of things where it's actually better.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there's gonna be so many of these. We just have like, there's like a marketing problem right now. It feels like to me.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And so we, well, if you're, you, you guys are the better marketers than me. I need help on that.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know either. Um, I mean, you know, like.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Let's fight, let's fight to actually bring down costs for people. That's a good marketing thing.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Well, one thing.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  To buy is better.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  One thing I don't think helps for, you know, and you were close to this, obviously, you know, if we can talk about a little bit, you know, at a high level at least about like the Department of War thing that just happened.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm actually interested to hear. So you think it doesn't help because.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I think it doesn't help.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Bad or, or it probably look bad or what?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that. I think it's, um, I think what, what it is, is, um. When you have two companies or, you know, other, you know, where you see them at odds and you see everybody fighting.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  We're fighting.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And there's this dynamic of like when, you know, the pigs roll around in the mud, everybody's messy kind of thing. And it's just like.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Just a negative energy around it.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Everybody's like telling each, everybody is trying to project that like the other side's terrible.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  You know, you know what's funny is that the positive is that it is still being used right now with Palantir and Anthropic. And it's working like really, really well. This is like one of the most accurately fought wars with least civilian deaths and the most bad guys falling so fast, which is amazing. And so it's like, there's always positive for the US if you believe in the US.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  It's like a nasty, um, it's like a nasty primary election before the general election.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  It is like that.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  You know, and it's like, hey, like there's this sense I have where I'm like, on some level, like if we all really care about AI getting there, you don't want a really nasty primary before the general. It doesn't help.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  It doesn't help.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And I, so I think there's a little bit of that. Um, I'd be curious, like, you know, cause you're, you're obviously very close to the Department of War and so like, you know.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  My friend, my friend Emil and, uh, then Depsec Feinberg and all these guys in the middle of this.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's like, you know, with most people in tech, it's like, you know, people, you know, got sort of their tribe to some extent or whatever, and that's fine.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  We were talking, we were talking about this ahead of time. That is my tribe, but I was trying to tell you ahead of time that even though I am on, and I can explain why, you know, I, I think they're right and Palmer's right. Uh, like I actually introduced Dario and Palmer and was trying to get them, I was trying to get them to get on.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And it's like how you're saying, you know, you, you appreciate the moderate left and you want to hear the good side of the other side.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  This is, this is, I think it's really important in this state. If you've heard about the DOW and Anthropic battle, and you only think there's like stupid person, people on one of those sides.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  You have to assume it's smart people who want good outcomes for the world.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Smart people want good outcomes, who have their good point of view.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  So my, my main point of view, supporting the Department of War ultimately, is that you can't have the gray, complicated, nuanced decisions about what's allowed, being made by the company or having the company involved in those. You have to be able to make those nuanced decisions.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  At the Pentagon at the end of the day, and I think that's a fair, totally correct viewpoint. Uh, you know, but stepping back, like, listen, originally Anthropic came from like a much more effective altruists.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  I call it very left, very like different perspective. And originally they had like. I don't like 50 pages of demands for the Pentagon, which were ridiculous. And then to Dario's credit, A, he went and worked with the Pentagon ahead of time more flexibly. He was trying to help America. He does believe America is better than CCP. B, he got all that 50 page of nonsense after lots of iteration with his team and lots of work down to just two requests.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  And he really has boundaries of why they created Anthropic and what their boundaries should be. And that's in his mind and he's managing a bunch of co-founders who have different views, you know? And they got them all the way there. They were working with them. They tried really hard. But at the end of the day, like when they're in the room with the mail, there's 20 people. And you know, the two demands were like no autonomy.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  No surveillance.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  And no surveillance. And like, and they say, okay, well, for autonomy, let's say we're going to be using one of Palmer's autonomous fighter jets. And something we're planning, and Anthropic's involved in planning the whole thing. Is that not allowed? Or let's say we're using some autonomy in how we respond to attack. And they all ask the fence. It's okay. Well, what if we're doing an attack? But then as part of the attack, we're using autonomy to respond to things at times. There's all these nuances. And Dario's response, oh, just call me. We'll work it out. Just call me. And the secretary is like, well, I can't just call you. I'm in charge, not you. I can't have a CEO making decisions. So I respect where Dario is coming from, but I think the part of where I had to make, the decision I had to make. I'm very sad I got into all the mudslinging. I'm very sad about that.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  No, totally. And that's where I'm just like, you know, to me, you know, going back to the AI thing. It's where I, I hope there's some way for the industry to just like want to think of it as, you know, all on a team of, you know, this is going to be something that's good for the world.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's good for the world, but I think we have to have debates and it's fair to have debates. And there's going to be really tough debates about how this is going to be used. And you know, I think Dario is right. There are laws Congress does need to pass that it has not passed yet. Because it hasn't even anticipated some of the nuance of like, how can you even do surveillance and things with these tools? You can never have done before. So there, so I mean, listen, there's a lot of good points on both sides here. And we're going to have to work together and hopefully our republic can figure out some good rules.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  I hope it will. I think it will. On the defense side, you know, obviously you've been involved in a bunch of companies like Palantir, Andro, Sironic.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I started. Palantir, Serrano, and I only invested in Andrel.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Only invested.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Too bad.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And every one of the early rounds. So those guys are crushing it, man. It's so impressive to see. You know, three of them used to work with us, a Palantir, and then Palmer's a good friend. And it's just, yeah, and then Dino at Serrano, you just, you know, he's built more big ships than anyone else. Now, fastest built ships since World War II that are big. It's so fun.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I wasn't doing venture 10 years ago, obviously, but like, seems like there was no interest in this stuff now. And now outside of AI, it's like the hottest.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  It wasn't just that there was no interest. Like, when I wrote the check into Andrel, I had multiple people telling me they would never work with me again and to not even talk to them about their next round because it's so evil to be working in defense and working on weapons. It's like, it was like, you had to basically be willing to just go completely against the cultural zeitgeist and be, and be excommunicated, basically. It's like, because, which is like, but by the way, sometimes that's the most valuable things to do is, is when you do stand up to everyone, you know?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Well, it is crazy. I mean, Trey wrote something, Trey Stevens wrote something recently that's basically about like, you want to be funding people who are, you know, saying the thing that's not popular, not exciting, and it's going to be the creation of the next wave.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  This is one of my favorite things. It's like, what does no one else want to do that is really important to do?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  And by the way, to me, that's like a definition of leadership.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  It also, um, like, it both means you're playing in a space that other people aren't playing, but it also reflects a personality type that has like a very.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  You're willing to just say, you guys are all wrong. Can I give you a crazy one right now?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, please.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  That we're doing this, working.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  That's what I want.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  So China during COVID ended up cutting off a lot of things from us. And they had this whole big strategy of like going after our biotech sector. And one of the really key things you need in biotech is to do primate testing. And this is very controversial in the US because obviously you're hurting monkeys.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  But like, my five-year-old daughter, by the way, gets it. I say, if mommy had a very bad disease and we had, trying to work on a cure, do you want us to test the cure on mommy? Or do you want to test on the monkeys first in case it kills the monkey? Would you want to know that instead of killing mommy? She's like, test the monkeys. I'm like, how many? And she's like, hundreds of monkeys.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Hundreds of monkeys before mommy.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  What's the ratio? It's high.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  It's very high, right? Because it's mommy. And it's, and actually, but there's like wisdom there. Like, I think human life is more important than, even though I feel bad hurting a monkey. Like, but so, so get this.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Well, you don't test the monkey right away. You obviously are.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  No, of course. You do all these other things first. You try to use, you try to use AI to figure it out. But sometimes AI is not going to know as well as testing it. And so, anyway, there's not nearly enough primates now and like no one will touch it. So we started a company to provide Safe for Human Medicine, it's called. And we're providing like massive numbers of primates, working with a bunch of biotech firms. And we're breeding them here and bringing them over. And no one will touch it because they're afraid because it sounds scary to do, right?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  But guess what? Would you rather save, would you rather save your sibling? Or the monkey.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  That's a very taboo idea.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  But it's working. We're making tons of money and it's not evil. It like people might say it's evil. It's not evil. It's actually good. It's pro-human.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's it's funny. I think a lot of ideas, there, there, there's a whole category of idea that sounds really bad when you say a snippet of it.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, this evil man is doing his defense and killing monkeys.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And you hear the whole, yeah, exactly.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  I failed again.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  No, that tab will get, that thumbnail will get us a lot of clicks. That'll be perfect. But there's a lot of ideas like this where they sound bad if you take a certain snippet of them. But if you think the whole thing through, you're like, actually, that is an increase in overall morality.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  It's really good.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  That's the type of idea that sounds like it could flip.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  And it's critical for like bio supply chain. This is like actually something our defense department is even aware of that we need a supply chain for our industry. But like no one, literally, I actually, so, so we're gonna have to do the next round ourselves. I think even though it's crushing it, no one will touch it.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Everyone's a coward.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. It, it, it's crazy.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I'll make all the money myself.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  But then I guess, I mean, with these defense companies, it's like eventually it flips and then there becomes an insane amount of capital.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  And there's too much, and there's too much money to love.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  You can't even take all the money people want to give you.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Sironic has like billions and billions of interest for the next round. They're gonna crush it. So guys, I think that's a great, still a great investment here.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I don't know a ton about defense in general. Is it a space where there will be like a thousand blooming flowers? Or is it a space where there'll be a small number of companies dominating?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  There will be like a dozen neo-primes that will completely crush it.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And it'll be that many though?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's already probably like eight or nine that are just really crushing it. I think Androl is the biggest neo-prime and it's gonna make the most money.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  And I think Sironic's gonna be massive, massive company. I mean, we need to, we're trying to hunt 100 X-ray shipbuilding capacity. I think a lot of ones like Sironic are already trying to work not only in defense, but figuring out how to work commercially. And, you know, Chaos is crushing it. Eperus is doing really well, shooting down drones with microwave.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Why can't the incumbent prime, incumbent primes catch up?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I mean, so, so what happened was in the nineties is that like 80 of these companies merged to become like eight primes, basically.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  And then you had the tech wave and like all their core tech talent left and they don't have computer science talent and they don't understand what computer science talent is. So you, you've seen this, like when you start a really top tech culture, like why can't, you know, why can't Anthropic be built by IBM? You know, it's, it's like, it's like, come on.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  It's crazy, isn't it?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  It's not gonna happen.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Even, even easier things than that. You're like, why can't a? Thirty billion market cap, you know, incumbent, you know, system of record. Why can't it build one of these applications that thirty engineers at a startup are building, even though they're putting two hundred engineers on it?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  But how do they hire those right thirty engineers? How do they give them the upside? How do they have the culture? Like the engine that we track, you know, I'm sure you guys do too at Benchmark. We track at ABC thousands of talented engineers. We have all sorts of ways of doing it. We try to get a map of what they're doing. And I've been doing this for fifteen years. Like, none of them are going into their primes. And the very few that did, they would leave very quickly because they'd be rejected. They wouldn't get, they wouldn't get an upside. They wouldn't get the right culture of building. They wouldn't get treated the right way. They'd basically be like the kid in the basement being yelled at who has to, like, earn his stripes for twenty years. Like, why would they do that? Like, these cultures are broken there.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  And they're not showing any signs of fixing themselves. Like, there's certain things they're good at. There's not, they're not doing the other stuff.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. What else are you interested in? I mean, we could talk about AI too, if you want to. But outside of AI, what are the other areas? Like, bio, robotics, like?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, everything is, like, tied back to AI in a way. Because if you're doing things in robotics, like, our best, we have one robotics investment called Bedrock, and it's a bunch of guys from Waymo with me, Boris, and he's, and he's, like, doing excavation, and it's working, right? So it's AI-driven excavation, which is twenty-five percent of the construction spend in the US. It's going to change the value of quarries and mines and super cool stuff.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  By the way, it seems to me like robotics should be like a bigger category than, like, software.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think eventually. I think most of it doesn't work yet.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  It might take thirty years.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  None of this stuff works. Yeah, I mean, his thing's working. It's my first big investment I made. Most of this stuff doesn't really work yet. That's the problem. I've looked at hundreds of things, like, not personally, but my team and I.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't you just think, like, Elon will figure this out? It's, you know, like, one thing.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  He'll figure out a big piece of it, I think. But, and, and, and I love Elon and I back.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I'm not saying he'll make that there's no other robots available. I'm just saying, like, don't you think this? Why would this not end? Why would robots not end up working?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  I mean, no, I, I think the world models are harder than people think. That's obviously, and I, I've backed, I've tried to back everything Elon does. I think it just takes longer than even he thinks for some of these things, right? And it's just like, we can say the estimates are really hard to get, right?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I don't know what's going to be there by twenty thirty. I'd be surprised if we don't have some really cool robotics companies by twenty forty, right? It's just like, it's clearly coming.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah. What about other things? Like, is there anything in, like? Bio that you're interested in?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of stuff going on in bio, but again, like the rate of discovery is just like.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  AI enabled.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  I think Demis's Nobel Prize was well deserved, right? I think we had like 213,000 proteins we'd like mapped out and understood how they work and understood the mechanism of action over like many, many years of hard work. And I think his AI mapped out like a 200 million of them, just like all of a sudden, you know, just from figuring it out. And so like, we're still in the, in the dark ages of, of, we're just figuring out like, I saw like a small model the other day with all this bio data and they were like, how do you make a protein? Do these two other things to go after this, like, just like, you know, this, this disease? And it just like redesigned the protein and figured it out. And we don't even know why it figured it out, but it, but it did like, so we're still, it's like, it's really cool. Like, so it's like, so I mean, bio isn't, is, I mean, listen, it's not just an AI story, but bio is an AI story.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I mean, like, for example, if we can like, if we can like recreate like a cell, you know, in a computer, that should unlock so much speed, I would think to drug development and things like that.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess other stuff we're doing, just like, just like competent people at execution. Like, so, I mean, Quince, we were the first big investors in.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  That's like, had you, have you bought stuff from there?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my, uh, my wife has her house full of Quince.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. My wife likes obsessed with it, which, uh, she's like, look, Joe, I'm making you money. I'm like, yes, darling.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  She knows she's joking, but it's like, no, it's like, well, I don't know what's public there, but it's like more than doubling again this year and the billions of revenue. And it's just, just it's such a great executioner.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  No AI story there, is there?

• 29:29Speaker 00

  I mean, internally, of course, you're using, using it to execute well.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  But really, it's just a good business with good.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  It's just like really good. Listen, the real story there, by the way, is that I was the first big investor in Wish. I led the seed in the A and then it went all the way up and all the way down. And there's lots of reasons why I did basically China subsidize the, the Shein and the Temu competitors, basically.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  And there's like weird postal changes and then like the CEO, like probably didn't hire enough people around him to replace himself. So when he had a kind of a breakdown, like the whole thing kind of, kind of crashed. So that was, that was tough, but we learned a lot of lessons about how this stuff worked. And so actually my partner Drew Whitsett came up with the idea for, uh, for Quince after that. It was like a more really high end luxury type thing with a similar framework. So that, if anything, that was like my redemption story after having like personally made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that damn thing.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  That's all right. Yeah, it seems pretty good on Quince.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  It's like, it's, yeah, it's good. I think it's doing well.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what about energy? It seems like that would be natural. Like you're in Texas, like you know.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  I know, there's all this cool energy stuff.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And like, we kind of need energy for AI. We need it for other reasons too.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  I love it. It's actually really, it's actually really funny, Jack, because it's like, all I go and they'll have me speak to like these like 200 guys and there's like all these really complicated tech stuff to explain that we're doing and how it works and how hard it is. And they'll just like with a slow drawl, just feel like, you know, but, you know, and then they'll, but they'll have like $5 billion of energy assets and they just realize that, you know, your, your stuff's really complicated, but.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  But I got a lot of energy.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  It looks like we're gonna make tens of billions of dollars on this.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like a better business.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  It's like, oh man, that's like, actually, maybe the Texas guys are smarter than me. Um, this is like, this is like, no, when we talk about investing in AI.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Different ways to do it, yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  We, we talk, we talk about six levels, right? So we do energies, the base, they call it zero, then chips, and then data centers, and then the models, and then software infrastructure, and then apps and services, right? And so there's like zero through five, six levels. And we're obviously mostly level four and five. I have a few bets at level three with Elon's XAI with Anthropic and et cetera. Um, yeah, unfortunately, all my friends were involved in OpenAI. It was a nonprofit. I stupidly didn't get into it early on, but I should have done that. Um, and then like, the data center stuff, I don't really do. And then chips, we're doing a little bit because it's pretty interesting now. I think Nvidia, AMD and Intel are like 99% of the value right now. And that 1% is probably going to change to like 15 or 20% from new things is gonna be my guess because there's so many new architectures and so we're doing a little bit there.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  And then, I mean, we've, we've done a few things around energy. I think around like nuclear, there's stuff with uranium that's interesting that we're definitely working on. I think General Matter we're invested in, which I think is doing really important stuff.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, fusion works, that'll be a mega one.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  It's like the monkeys, by the way. It's like, it's like, it's like a controversial supply chain. You can get monkeys, you can get like, you can get uranium feedstock, you know? So I think, I think these are good things to be doing, you know, if you, if you do it with the top people, I think Scott's doing great at General Matter.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  You know, so, I mean, it's just, yeah, so we definitely, we'll try to touch the things that aren't there in energy. I would say like, at HPC, it's not really our job to do like the natural gas turbines and stuff. I think that's a great thing to do.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Looking around like the venture market now, you've obviously been doing this for a long time. And we're in like a kind of chaotic moment.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  It's really fun. It's chaotic, it's a fun moment.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Well, it seems like this is what you, you know, if you can't enjoy it now, like when can you enjoy it?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  If you're not gonna be enjoying it now, you should retire. This is like the best time of whatever we're doing.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Compared to what I imagine twenty twenty two or something was like.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  It was actually pretty painful like four years ago because it was like, it was like not clear to me yet like how you could do AI or how AI was gonna work. Unfortunately, it wasn't as smart as some people about how it was gonna work. And then like, and then like you couldn't really start a new SaaS company. Because I was trying to convince everyone like if you start a SaaS company now, you're competing against SaaS companies now, which is much harder than competing against things when we first started them. So there was a couple of years there where I was like, oh, this is like.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  It was like most of the good stuff was picked over.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  And I had to like, so I started Sironic then because I spent a lot of time on it because I had a lot of extra time back then, you know, because there wasn't as much else to do and that worked out.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  The defense was like the right thing I think to do.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's been now, it's like there's so much and yeah, we're like two thirds of just like AI productivity type stuff.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you think is like the, um, either the sort of like structure of firm or individual that is like best equipped to succeed right now?

• 33:20Speaker 00

  You need a lot of young people on your team who are friends with the other young people who are the best programmers and who are in the networks from talent. I just think you do. Like I think.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  It's going so young now. I mean, you even like look at like these like accelerator programs are getting extremely young.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  I mean, these kids who are eighteen but are AI native and have been programming for a long time, I actually hired Scott Wu as an eighteen year old, uh, ten years ago. Like he'd won the gold medal three years around I O I and you know, top in the world the previous year. And like this guy Vlad on my team helped me like hire him and actually Alex Wang came to that same class and all these guys that add up par. And it was seen as like a really weird thing to do back then, but it was really productive. They were really, at that level, they were still really, really good back then. Now it's just like ten years later, it's obvious because like a lot of these people are just so good even when they're younger.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I know. Yeah. I mean, there's some counter example, you know, I had Brett Taylor on the show and he's, you know, an example of somebody like, you know, you, you can be in your forties and fully readjust.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  As a forty three year old, I'm not totally washed up yet, hopefully.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  But it's, it's rare. It's like, and I think for, by the way, for the subset who do that, I think it's like a massive superpower because you have all these networks and talent, capital.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  I think investing right now, even like ten years older than me and if you, and it is like, it's actually is really hard as a venture capitalist to like be in the game.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Ten years older than you, you're saying?

• 34:30Speaker 00

  There's people in their fifties. There are some who are doing it. I think it's just really hard to be in the game. And frankly, it takes a lot of humility.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  You also have to.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  You have to convince all these twenty two, twenty three year olds to hang out with you.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Chase twenty two year olds. Which is hard, I think.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Well, some of them are used to that in Miami, but this is a different version.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  We'll cut that.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  No, it's like, I mean, one of my favorite CEOs, last night, I had an event for a friend and it is like, he's, I think he's 22. And he's, I think he's the one who's tripling revenue this quarter and he's just, he's an AI CS genius and like that's, that's, you need to be working.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  By the way, there's a big advantage that these kids, adults, whatever you, you know, that, that you have if you're that age, because you never saw the old way of doing it.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  I know.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And so you just have this fresh mind where you're not unwinding anything.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And, and to some of their credit, like to his credit, he wants to learn from me where I think the old way is still relevant, which I, which I appreciate as the old man now. You know, but so I think there are some of them who's like, okay, we're going to do all these things, all the new ways. But then you can kind of step in and say, well, here's a couple of lessons. And I do think you still want to mold it, but you do need to rethink from first principles, almost everything right now. And by the way, every few months, you know, because it, because, because it's changing every few months, what's possible, which is, this is a weird time.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  I'm fidgeting around on this podcast because I tweaked my back out.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  So you need to.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  And peptides. Yeah, peptides. Yeah. What do you, what do you think about all those peptides? I mean, like, they're like everywhere right now. Do you think this is like, going to be like a huge, um, we're going to learn that it was all like a huge problem? Or do you think this is like next coming of like the great wave of medicine?

• 35:55Speaker 00

  So, so I first had some peptides because I tore up my knee, hell, skiing is, and then, you know, so I'm like, I got to heal. And, and not only did it like make me heal faster, like fix my back problem. It's like, oh, this is interesting. I should study these things. And one of our other friends, actually, who you know as well, Matt Mizeo, uh, he, uh, had gotten pretty overweight, bad blood markers, not in shape at all, working too hard, making too much money. So he like took some time off, like started taking like a bunch of peptide stacks and exploring it. And like all of a sudden, like seven months later, he's like lost over 60 pounds. His blood markers are perfect. The girls in the office were asking who he was. He's married girls, you know? But, and he's like this, he's like, he's in great shape. He's crushing it.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  And, and, uh, so he's actually our new CEO of a peptides company. We're doing the, he, he's founding with us. And it's called, called NoHo Labs and it's, it's like, it's like growing like crazy. This is one of the, I mean, this and GLP-1s is one of the biggest market in the world. One of my bio infrastructure companies I built is, makes billions of dollars producing GLP-1. So I'm watching peptides from that side.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Uh, and now it turns out a bunch of these other peptides are also, I think, going to be, you know, market worth hundreds of billions of dollars and we're going after it. Yeah. It's, it's growing. It's one of the fastest growing industries I've ever been part of. You can go online. We wanted to make, we're buying our own compounding pharmacy because we want to like have everything done here, everything legit, everything. Super careful. Listen, like RFK himself is rumored to be on these. I'll say I won't give any inside information. He runs HHS. I mean, these things are gonna be

• 37:14Speaker 01

  On a bunch of these peptides, you're saying?

• 37:15Speaker 00

  He's rumored to be on a bunch of them himself. A lot of smart old people are a lot of, a lot of, a lot of my billionaire friends are all on these things. It's like, it's a legit thing.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Was there some unlock that just like made us discover, made people discover like a bunch of these things? And now we're just like, you know, there's, there's this just like proliferation of new ideas happening at once? Or what, what happened here?

• 37:32Speaker 00

  You know, I think the law have been around for a little while and people just started like sharing more stories. And I think maybe the fact that people are willing to do the GLP ones and they work so well because that is a peptide and that's like the cultural phenomenon kind of opened people's mind up to the others. And now the HHS, the unlock is that they are taking some of them off the schedule to like, make it like more legal to sell them and stuff. And so I, so I think, I think it's more of like a policy has been holding it back as well. And we, listen, like, you know, we have an NIH in this country, which is National Super Health. And like, if you're on different political side, you can yell, yell at me for what this administration is doing. I'm, I'd agree with all of it. There's like different things. But like, the one thing the NIH should be doing is there's something like peptides, which no one's allowed to patent because they're already, the IP already exists. They should be studying them more. If there's tens of thousands, a hundred thousands of Americans using something, why the hell do we not have the NIH studying? For me, that's why government exists is to do the tragedy of the common type things. So I, and I think they're, and the secretary agrees with me. So I think they're filing and start actually doing a lot more studies too and approving, which is great because we can start approving these and make them safe. And listen, it seems obvious to me. They're super helpful.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yep. You lived here for a long time. Obviously, you still spend a lot of time.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  By here, you mean Woodside. That's right.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Here, just like the broad here.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Still have a house somewhere near here, but you know.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  You know, now as you spend most time in Texas, I'm curious.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  We're based, we're based with our six kids in Austin.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Six kids in Austin. My brother Max lives in Austin. I feel like there's probably some changes to your mindset, I had imagined by being out of California. I'm just like curious if it like, does it like help you think more clearly? Do you feel more in touch with like the world outside of tech? Does it change anything? Is it just a place to live? Does it, is there anything about it other than it's just a place to live?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Oh, it's definitely, definitely a different culture. You definitely.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  You definitely see, I mean, I'm talking, it's partially because of my policy work as well. I talk to a lot of people from a lot of red states and, and purple states, like in different parts of the country, and you see the skepticism of tech, you see the things they're afraid of, and, and you kind of, you kind of see more clearly to them, it's just such an alien thing, and how certain things come across like much more nately than I would see it coming from here, and kind of knowing the insiders, realizing what's going on is not as scary as they think. And so it's definitely given me more perspective on, I guess like you said, we really probably should be doing a better job marketing some of these things for our country and, and coming across in the right way and respectfully to people. Listen, it's also a more sane place, I think there's like a really healthy middle class in Texas, I think I have people who work for me there who can live 10 minutes away, even though you only pay them $100,000 a year, whereas if you, if here in Woodside, if you

• 39:58Speaker 00

  pay someone $100,000 a year, they're living an hour away.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  And I think, so I think it's just a healthier, better place for society the way it works.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we also, I think, have more, more, more aggressive and challenging like political swings happening here in general, and, you know, you've obviously been, you know, sort of focused on politics for a long time, like back since Stanford Review.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  At least to try to bring common sense, man, that's my point of view.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually had someone intern with us who was editor at Stanford Review recently.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  All kept before Benchmark, but.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And I'm like, you know, it's like really good, anyways, but so like, I'm, I'm like familiar with like the school of thought, and I think it's great, and, you know, I'm just curious, like, as you've watched us go over the last few years through the sort of like, you know, swings of politics and political correctness and all of it, where are we now? Like, do you think that, like, do you think people can more or less say what they want to say now? Do you think there are still, like, the Overton windows, not where it should be?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Like, there's like, there's still a lot of things that I think, like, polite society, like, won't talk about, or won't want to understand, you know, there's, there's a lot of the reasons for why things are broken, there's a lot of stuff in California that's very corrupt, I think people here. Are just starting to appreciate, like they don't realize the billion dollars for San Francisco NGOs is not to help the homeless, is to help a very powerful political class of people who control things. You don't realize that, you know, that the government worker unions here just really run the state and really just light insane amounts of money on fire. The budget got up 75% here in six years, 75% in six years. And it's like, things are getting not better.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  And like for what? What have we gotten?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Well, you get much better paid civil servants and you get a few million of them with much better pensions. And which is great, except for the fact you can't afford that and you're breaking so many other things. And so it's, and you know, and in Texas, you'll have things like, in Texas, we had something where the cities were, cities are always a little bit blue and they weren't permitting things because the people are in MB. So we said, listen, if a city won't get back to a permit in 45 days, you go around it to the state and the state will approve it really quickly. And we passed this law and Austin building exploded the last three years. The prices are down 20% in Austin, not because people are leaving, but because there's just so much more stuff we brought online. And here, and by the way, of course, Saronix building there, all these companies are building there. The things that we're building there really fast, you still have like five or 10 years later, be in permit hell if you're trying to do in California. So we, and we have to fix CEQA in California.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  And I think the fact that people still don't know what CEQA is very much, I'm not sure things have shifted that much. Like this California Environmental Quality Act, it's like, there's just crazy things in there where you're like, you know, talking to like 14 Indian tribes and you're like in years and years and years of lawsuits to pay off environmental lawyers. I mean, the whole thing's just broken still. So, so I, and by the way, there are candidates here, even on the left, like I say, the San Jose mayor on the left, I don't agree with him on everything, but he like, he like gets it. He gets that these interests are broken. So I think you're just having some people come around. Will the people here support the moderates on the left who get it? Because I don't know.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's sometimes I have hope that we're on like a better path, but it's not like it's, it's not getting there as quick.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  We need the leaders.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Things take a while.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  We need the leaders to actually win and we need people to wake up and actually fight for it. And too many people here are too scared to fight for what makes sense, even in a moderate way, which, which is, that's why it's still broken. So, but we need more, more courage, man, more courage.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  All right. Well, this was super fun, Joe. Thanks for doing this with me. I really appreciate it.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Thanks so much, Jack.