Latest / The Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Podcast / Productivity, Innovation, and the New American Golden Age with Joe Lonsdale

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Productivity, Innovation, and the New American Golden Age with Joe Lonsdale · The Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Podcast

• 0:00
  [MUSIC]
• 0:09
  >> Jon Hartley: Welcome everyone, especially those who are new here.
• 0:11
  Really great to see so many new faces.
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  I'm really, really excited, for those who don't know me again,
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  my name is Jon Hartley.
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  I'm host of the Capitalism and Freedom, the 21st Century podcast.
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  It's an official podcast of the Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group.
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  For those who are not familiar with our distinguished guest today, Joe Lonsdale.
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  Joe is one of the world's leading innovators in venture capitalists.
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  And to say the least,
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  it's really unbelievable all the sorts of things that Joe has started.
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  I mean, he's the co founder of Palantir, founder of 8VC, a venture capital firm.
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  He's also the founder of the University of Austin and
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  is trying to really disrupt education.
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  He's also the founder and chair of the Cicero Institute,
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  which is a think tank that's focused on state policy, and it's based in Austin.
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  Joe also has his own podcast, which is called the American Optimist Podcast as
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  well, and definitely recommend that you guys check that out.
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  Welcome, Joe.
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  How are you?
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: Thank you, Jon, for having me.
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  Thanks, Francisco.
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  It's nice to see all of you, I'm great.
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  I'm here in Miami for a day and glad to come by.
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  >> Jon Hartley: Awesome, well, we're so excited that you decided to stop by and
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  talk to us here.
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  I want to start with the 2024 election and the Trump transition.
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  I think it's definitely something that's on a lot of people's minds right now.
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  I mean, what are you most excited about when hearing about all these various
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  nominees and Elon Vivek starting Doge, and how are you helping, and
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  how are you planning to get involved in the next four years?
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: Well, it's definitely a very exciting time.
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  It's a huge weight off my shoulders for our civilization.
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  I was very, very worried where things were heading.
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  And this is a much, even though, even though it ended the way it did,
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  is election was much too close, given the implications for our civilization,
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  it was very scary for me.
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  And you know, I'd say I'm probably most excited about the fact that,
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  that we have an opportunity with like this vibe shift in our
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  civilization to push back on a lot of the illiberalism.
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  To push back on a lot of the authoritarianism,
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  to clean up a lot of this, like massive corruption with hundreds of billions of
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  dollars going to NGOs that are run by activists that are not accountable, and
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  that are pushing the wrong ideas that push our civilization the wrong way.
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  And I think I was saying outside, I was exchanging notes with Mark Rowan earlier,
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  who, you know, someone I met, someone who runs School of Finance, obviously, but
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  someone who's very involved, in advising Trump on these things.
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  And I think he's right, I think if we make the right cuts and
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  when you model it out, I think you'd have enough growth that you actually can
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  get the deficit back to below zero and pay it off.
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  Especially that plus Doge.
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  And the thing I guess I'm most excited about, obviously active things going on,
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  of course, is Doge.
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  I'm friends with Elon and Vivek for a long time.
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  And this is awesome, this is stuff that I've been posting about,
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  and writing about and obsessed about.
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  Just like this broken thing that's just been this cancer,
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  it's been growing out of control and everyone's been ignoring.
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  And I feel like a crazy person.
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  Like, this is this cancer, we have to get rid of it.
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  And everyone's like, well, yeah, about, we're busy with our everyday lives and
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  we don't want to talk about it.
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  And finally all these smart people are like, yeah, we have to get rid of it.
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  And this is like, awesome, let's do it, there's like,
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  we can talk a lot more about that if you want.
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  There's just all this stuff to fix in government.
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  It's just, just incentives are misaligned, things are unaccountable, things are being
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  stolen, things are, are, are being wasted, things being managed terribly.
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  It's just like, yes, let's finally fix this and it helps everyone.
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  >> Jon Hartley: No, it's amazing.
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  Yeah, we'll see, I guess, you know, there's still a lot of uncertainty,
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  I guess, with how, how Doge is going to work, and I think Elon,
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  Vivek are still figuring it out.
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  I mean, do you think that the best way to go at it is,
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  I guess the bureaucracy that really sort of fights against change,
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  and you can't really fire public employees has been the case since the 70s, is that?
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, I mean, that's one really important thing.
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  Solicit, so it's both about cutting wasteful spend,
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  it's about cutting unnecessary and
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  wasteful bureaucracy, and it's about cutting unnecessary regulations.
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  And all, all of those are related and all those are very important.
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  So I think one of the issues that I wish more people would talk about when they
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  talk about that is that there's really two things that happened in the late 70s.
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  First of all, it was actually it Wasn't even Jimmy Carter himself.
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  We don't remember this, but Jimmy Carter was actually famous in Georgia for
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  consolidating a bunch of bureaucracy.
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  I don't think he was a great president, but he was famous for
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  consolidating bureaucrac.
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  And he ran on wanting to cut red tape from the left and saying, listen,
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  I agree with the right.
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  This is bad, his Congress was completely captured by the unions.
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  The Democratic Party was completely captured by the unions in the late 70s,
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  and they're the ones that passed in 7980, these, like,
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  crazy protections that make it impossible to fire anyone.
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  So that's one of the problems that happened to our government, and
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  that was really bad.
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  And then the other thing that happened in the late 70s was the activist courts.
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  And so, the activist courts basically said, so let's stop for a second.
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  So you go back to 1883, you had the Pendleton Act.
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  And so what happened in the US Is that we had a very small government.
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  Civil war happens,
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  we start growing the government massively create all these new departments.
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  Just it just if you graph it out, the government grows a lot from that point on.
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  There's a lot of federal power created maybe for good purposes, but, you know,
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  it's something that I don't love, obviously,
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  having lots of extra federal power.
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  And by the early 1880s, both sides, everyone agreed this is a mess.
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  People are coming in, they're hiring 10,000 friends, our government's running,
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  run by cronies is totally a broken thing.
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  So there's a Pendleton act, which put in some basic protections, which,
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  by the way, are fine.
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  I'm fine with some protections for civil service that aren't crazy.
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  And it put in tests.
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  So from 1883 for about 100 years,
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  there was like a really hard test if you want to run something in government.
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  So, when we went to the moon, when we fought World War I and World War II,
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  when we did some things that frankly, were pretty competent in our government that we
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  should be proud of in our civilization.
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  You know, in the mid to early 20th century, the people running
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  those things had to pass hard tests to be running those government departments.
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  Come to the late 1970s, these courts run by crazy activist people on
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  the left basically said, these tests are racists.
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  And then, they said, bo, but the tests actually predict performance,
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  that's not racist.
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  They said, well, no, just by definition of the fact that different races have
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  different outcomes on these tests, they're racist.
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  You must get rid of them.
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  And so we completely Got rid of the tests.
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  And so, so, so not only can you not fire people who.
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  Which makes them a lot lazier, by the way, in any business, in any organization,
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  if you can't hold them accountable easily,
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  you also can't give tests to make sure you're hiring the smartest people.
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  So, our government, you know, and by the way, was pretty smart, I think in this,
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  in the 60s, 70s.
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  I didn't love big government, but it was at least like not completely dumb.
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  It's just gotten stupider and stupider and stupider for 30 years.
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  And then, you got the WOKE stuff come in the mid 2010s, and
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  you prioritize identity politics, and then it accelerates its stupidness, you know,
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  for the next 10 years.
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  So just, so now it's just like completely retarded, it's a broken bureaucracy.
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  >> Jon Hartley: Well, shifting to generative AI,
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  we'll get back to some of that later.
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: We're allowed to say the word retarded now, by the way.
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  >> Jon Hartley: We'll shift back, so generative AI, you know,
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  obviously a hot topic right now in Silicon Valley.
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  How in your mind should VCs be best positioned?
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: So, I think that, so when you're looking at AI,
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  to see shifting topics a bit here.
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  I was going to talk more about Doge, but that's probably,
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  she got scared of my passion there.
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  We look at AI,
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  there's really, I think, five ways people are investing in AI at a high level.
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  There's the bottom level, which is the chip companies, there's the next one,
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  which is the data centers.
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  Pretty much all my friends, family, offices who made Money the last 20 years
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  in tech have been putting lots of money in data centers.
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  It's become a very popular trade,
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  which is great because you guys are funding stuff for me to build on top of.
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  So I appreciate that, keep funding data centers.
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  I don't know if it's going to work with this much money, but
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  that's great because it's cheap for me.
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  And then the level three is the model companies, which is like OpenAI,
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  of course, famously, which besides this for profit company now too,
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  and XAI and Anthropic and everything.
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  And then level four is software infrastructure.
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  This is how you deploy AI.
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  And that's obviously there's a ton of,
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  I think San Francisco is probably the center of that.
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  There's a ton of very, very powerful software infrastructure companies we're
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  invested for example, in Ollama,
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  which like over a million engineers use to deploy their llama models.
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  There's a lot of good stuff there that makes sense.
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  Palantir does a lot of stuff level four.
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  And then there's level five,
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  which is actually this like applying the AI to services itself.
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  Like actually the one doing the health care billing, doing the logistics billing,
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  doing the new legal company, you know, doing the new back end of the insurance or
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  trust or estate or whatever it is.
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  And so I'm obviously invested in stuff like I'm proud to be invested in stuff
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  that like, if Elon starts a company in level 3X, that's great,
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  I want to be involved.
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  Matt, obviously impalance here and lots of level four things, but
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  most of what I'm building and doing is level five right now.
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  And the way to think about level five is there's probably about $5 trillion
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  right now paid out in wages in the services economy in the US and
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  about 2 of that 5 trillion, about 40% is in areas of
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  the service economy that we've already shown we could double the productivity.
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  This is very important.
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  This is not like maybe when models get better.
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  This is today based on things we're seeing.
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  We've already shown these companies can work at least twice as well.
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  And this is things like, I have a health care billing company that's doing a bunch
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  of stuff that we're big investors in and it's already got,
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  I think last quarter was like 56% margins and
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  like most healthcare billing companies are between 15 and I think 25% margins, right?
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  So it's already more than twice or three times as productive of all of our
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  companies thanks to not just sprinkling a little bit of AI, but
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  thanks to building a lot of stuff and applying AI properly.
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  And so this is a huge fact because if, even if AI gets no better from here,
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  just by scaling these things,
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  you should pull like a trillion dollars of spend out of the economy.
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  And I think it gets better enough there's probably a trillion and
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  a half to 2 trillion.
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  And you're gonna pull out the economy in the next 10 years.
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  That's a massive, massive productivity boost, and
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  you're gonna make a lot of money.
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  We're going to make America a lot richer.
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  >> Jon Hartley: So I think a lot of the big generative AI winners so far have been
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  really the large firms, the OpenAI's Anthropics, Nvidia, Google and so forth.
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  The ones that can lay down the fixed costs to actually build the large.
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: Well, they bet they've been the level one, two, three,
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  four firms mostly.
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  And then level five is like just started to scale still.
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  That's right.
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  >> Jon Hartley: Really.
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  And I mean, do you think that it's possible for AI upstarts to, to really
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  sort of latch on and without getting sort of outcompeted by one of the big guys?
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  Like, I feel like I remember there's one startup that, you know, created this
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  video, you know, generative AI model and then, you know, raised $3 million.
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  And then the next day OpenAI builds essentially the same product and
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  releases it.
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  >> Joe Lonsdale: Totally, totally.
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  I think that's very, very hard.
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  So there's answer this in two ways.
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  First of all,
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  let's just think about the last 15 years of tech to put it in context.
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  So after Palantir started Add a Par,
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  which is a leading wealth management technology company.
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  It's a giant SaaS company.
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  We sold OpenGov this year, which we built.
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  And invest in a bunch of MY friends built a lot of SaaS companies.
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  and the SaaS companies that my friends built in,
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  like the early 2010s had a very high success rate.
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  And I could say it's because I'm some kind of genius or something, but
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  what was actually happening with these is, is the cloud was newly possible.
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  There's new things you do in big data.
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  And our competition was stuff mostly from the 1980s, 1990s.
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  So you can kind of be like,
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  like we have access to the best tech cultures in the world.
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  That's my background.
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  So it's kind of like being a bully.
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  It's like we're taking the very best tech guys in the world.
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  We're going and beating up on these things from poor things from 10 or 20 years ago.
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  And by the way, it's good for the economy to do this.
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  It's not like a morally incorrect thing, but you can kind of think of it, yeah,
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  you're being a bully versus these These always doing things.
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  Now if you wanna start a SaaS company, if anyone in here wants to start something
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  and compete against something in one of the major areas of SaaS in cloud,
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  you're mostly probably competing against the stuff my friends and I and
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  others built in the early 2010s.
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  And that's a lot harder because there's not going to be as big of a gap there.
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  And by the way, all this AI stuff, my, our companies are going to use it too.
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  So these 10, 15 year old SaaS companies, they're also using AI.
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  Like good luck trying to start a new AI SaaS company against them.
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  They also have 300 million of revenue and a thousand people and
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  they're already able to customers.
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  So that's really hard.
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  So that's a dumb thing to do.
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  That's really hard.
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  So the question is, what is there to do?
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  So you go back to those five levels of AI, a new chip company,
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  that sounds really hard.
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  It's probably possible for some,
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  a couple EE geniuses to figure something out new but that's really tough.
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  It's very expensive to do these things.
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  The data center is fine, everyone's gonna invest in that.
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  I'd like you to do that for me.
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  Like level three is like,
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  like the only person I would have ever backed with a new one of those was Elon.
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  That's great cuz Elon is Elon.
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  So of course they're gonna back Xai even though it was a ridiculous price when
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  he started.
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  But whatever, it's Elon and then he has the top talent,
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  he's probably gonna figure it out.
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  But yeah, I would not suggest trying to do that.
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  So the question is level four, Level five.
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  Level four is really hard.
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  And the problem of level four is that there will be some things that win,
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  there will be some things that get bought.
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  But it's like the smartest people in the world are all doing it.
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  And you're right, what you just said.
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  Level three is trying to eat level four.
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  All these level three companies, they just want to own level four themselves.
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  And so it's really hard.
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  Like how do you do something that OpenAI or
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  X or anthropic or somebody's not just gonna eat, I'm just gonna do themselves.
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  It is possible, but it's tough.
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  And you better be really the best in the world and
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  you better be really running fast.
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  And it's not even clear to me yet what has to escape velocity and what doesn't.
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  So that's a very Fair question.
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  Level five, I think is by far the best risk reward place to build because you
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  have a lot of other things we're doing there.
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  And going back to the model I just gave you of those SaaS companies that were
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  beating out from 20 years ago.
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  When I'm starting a Level 5 company right now,
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  my competition is these guys from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s.
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  We're literally competing against Logistics Biller in Baton Rouge for
• 13:43
  a thing we just won, which is in there.
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  Sure, they're great people, they've been doing this for 50 years, but
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  they just don't have the same ability to build and apply tech the way we do and
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  to service the customer the way we do.
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  And so if you can build a great operational culture, you can compete and
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  win there.
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  And I do think there's moats and barriers to entry at having great operational
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  cultures that build and apply AI.
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  So I think level five is a great place to build.
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  I think level four for a few geniuses is going to be great.
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  But man, that's hard.
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  I wouldn't want to try to do that.
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  >> Jon Hartley: Definitely not something I could do, that's for sure.
• 14:16
  So outside of AI,
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  what other sorts of startups are you most excited about right now?
• 14:22
  Is crypto dead?
• 14:23
  Anything in fintech?
• 14:24
  Interesting other places that, that you're looking at?
• 14:28
  Obviously, Jenna- >> Joe Lonsdale: The thing I've done
• 14:29
  the most in these areas are built a bunch of SaaS companies.
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  The other thing we've done the most probably and uniquely is defense, right?
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  So there's no, I've been lucky to start six different unicorns.
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  Three of them are in defense right now and, and
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  I'm working on a couple more there.
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  And the reason this is really exciting is,
• 14:46
  is a Palantir was like the worst thing to build in the sense that it just.
• 14:50
  The government was not fair, was not letting a new competition.
• 14:52
  We had to be so persistent.
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  We had to keep trying for years and years and years.
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  Even when we won,
• 14:56
  they would like use the thing that cost 10 times as much sometimes.
• 14:59
  It's a very frustrating company.
• 15:01
  But I think the path that was paved by Palantir, by SpaceX and
• 15:04
  now by companies like Anduril, which was like started eight years ago and
• 15:08
  has grown really quickly to create these new primes.
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  Has created an awareness with the generals, with the admirals, with
• 15:14
  the people in the House and Senate Armed Services Committee that the old primes,
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  cuz all the old primes consolidated after the Cold War ended in the 1990s and
• 15:22
  they became completely dominant, but they became very bureaucratic and slow, and
• 15:27
  they lost a lot of talent.
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  And they're not as dynamic.
• 15:29
  And there's still great things some of the primes do.
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  But over overall, there you go.
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  That no problem.
• 15:34
  Francisco's trying to get me here.
• 15:37
  Overall, there's just a lot of need for new possibilities.
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  And war for warfare has completely changed.
• 15:43
  We can talk more about that if you want.
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  And so. So I'm building a lot there right now.
• 15:46
  >> Jon Hartley: Awesome, all right.
• 15:47
  We're going to talk a little bit about defense tech in in just a minute here,
• 15:52
  but want to first talk about.
• 15:53
  We're in Miami.
• 15:55
  I want to first talk a little bit about San Francisco versus Austin versus Miami.
• 15:59
  Joe Joe, you were one of the first- >> Joe Lonsdale: Dangerous
• 16:01
  conversation there someone who lives in Texas.
• 16:03
  >> Jon Hartley: We'll see if we can maybe convert you here.
• 16:07
  >> Joe Lonsdale: The people here may be better looking actually I'm not
• 16:09
  sure if I'm supposed to say that.
• 16:12
  >> Jon Hartley: That's high praise, very high praise.
• 16:14
  You were one of the first people to leave San Francisco for Austin.
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  And some other people like Peter Thiel and
• 16:21
  others from Founders Fund have resettled here in Miami.
• 16:24
  I mean we're about, I think five years into that experiment.
• 16:27
  I mean do you see that something that's continuing or is a permanent move or
• 16:32
  do you see there being a bit of a reversion back to SF amidst this AI boom?
• 16:37
  >> Joe Lonsdale: So I originally moved 60% of my firm to Austin and
• 16:41
  I think now it's about half of my firm in Austin.
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  So we did have to move a few people to be back participating in the.
• 16:46
  I have to admit there are some things happening in San Francisco that are unique
• 16:51
  to the entire nation and that are based there.
• 16:54
  That said, there are also some things happening in Austin, in Texas and
• 16:58
  other states like that that are unique in the sense that like you know,
• 17:02
  the Tesla manufacturing plant that Omi built with Elon took 18 months.
• 17:06
  The biggest plant in the world.
• 17:07
  We wouldn't have got, they would have got that permitted in like five years or
• 17:09
  10 years in California, who knows.
• 17:11
  And we're going to build 500 ships next year with one of my
• 17:14
  defense companies in Austin.
• 17:15
  El Segundo has some great talent.
• 17:17
  I just don't think we could have scaled nearly as quickly and
• 17:20
  again had the state kind of work and help us move obstacles out of the way for
• 17:24
  dumb rules in order to help us scale.
• 17:26
  And so there's some things that have to happen in Austin and have to happen in
• 17:30
  states that are kind of more aggressive about helping us with these things.
• 17:34
  Miami seems to be attracting a lot of amazing talent.
• 17:37
  I was saying earlier, I used to come here like every year or two.
• 17:39
  I think now I'm here four or five times a year.
• 17:41
  There's amazing people here to see.
• 17:43
  There's a lot of the best investors.
• 17:45
  I think one difference, you know.
• 17:47
  So I think there's lots of things we can talk about where Florida is run
• 17:50
  very, very well.
• 17:50
  I think you guys have like the best legislature because everyone terms out
• 17:53
  after eight years.
• 17:54
  And so you get the Speakers of the House and
• 17:55
  leaders of those senate here that are really aggressive their last two years
• 17:58
  they get put in and they just do amazing work.
• 18:00
  So I love your guys government here.
• 18:02
  One of the differences is there's probably not as many engineers or
• 18:06
  engineering culture.
• 18:07
  So Austin has a top engineering school, has a history of, for 70 years of like
• 18:11
  lots of big companies in tech world being built there for tough engineering.
• 18:15
  And so, so there is more.
• 18:16
  It is easier I think.
• 18:17
  I think having it makes more sense that Elon's there and
• 18:19
  people like that are there because we're building lots of things with engineers.
• 18:22
  I think if I was want to be around like top investment minds just investing,
• 18:26
  I think this would be a really compelling place and Absolutely.
• 18:29
  >> Jon Hartley: Well, if there's anyone from the University of Miami here or
• 18:32
  from other schools,
• 18:34
  I know that there's a lot of great efforts going on there as well to really invest.
• 18:39
  >> Joe Lonsdale: It's amazing how these network effects work where like even
• 18:41
  though Austin's had great stuff for a keeps getting better.
• 18:44
  It's just so hard to compete with the depth of Silicon Valley's network and
• 18:47
  engineering.
• 18:48
  And then similarly Austin hat does have 67 years on Miami.
• 18:51
  So I think Miami's going to build it up.
• 18:52
  But it takes a generation sometimes to get that depth of engineering.
• 18:55
  But you definitely see a move from Chicago, like you said, like I said,
• 18:59
  from California, from New York, both to Austin and Miami and you got just so
• 19:04
  many great people.
• 19:05
  It's a really fun time to live in Austin,
• 19:07
  as I think it is here too from what I'm seeing is you just get like so
• 19:09
  many cool people constantly coming to town, constantly joining.
• 19:12
  I was working out and my friend has a billion dollar consumer company,
• 19:16
  built an awesome headquarters with an awesome gym right near my house.
• 19:20
  And like just like the guy who created Solana just happened to be there like
• 19:23
  this week.
• 19:24
  He just moved to town. I mean,
• 19:25
  there's just all sorts of amazing people coming through Austin, it's really cool.
• 19:28
  >> Jon Hartley: That's awesome.
• 19:29
  Well, you're also the founder and chair of the Cicero Institute.
• 19:32
  And it's one of the most powerful groups in the country when it comes to creating
• 19:36
  and passing legislation in states.
• 19:38
  >> Joe Lonsdale: That's how I know Florida is so great.
• 19:40
  >> Jon Hartley: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:41
  And you've got teams I think in about 20 states including Florida.
• 19:46
  What are some of the big recent successes there in your mind?
• 19:48
  I know school choice and universe licensing recognition are sort of two big
• 19:52
  ones, but what are the big wins in your mind?
• 19:54
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Well, school choice is big, I'm a big fan of it.
• 19:56
  We tend to work on orthogonal things that no one else is doing.
• 19:59
  So our, our framework is we're fighting special interests,
• 20:02
  we're fighting things that are broken, and
• 20:04
  we're trying to fix stuff that's broken by aligning incentives.
• 20:07
  And so I'll give you a few examples really quick.
• 20:09
  I know I'm obsessed with this policy stuff.
• 20:11
  I know most people maybe want to talk about other things, but
• 20:14
  just a few quick examples.
• 20:15
  Vocational schools is something I think really matters.
• 20:17
  We used to have a lot more better vocational schools by percentage
• 20:20
  of people in the 60s and 70s.
• 20:21
  And instead we started sending them to get studies degrees and
• 20:25
  whatever other degrees at universities that basically
• 20:28
  lead them to become protesters because they can't get jobs.
• 20:31
  And it doesn't make any sense at all to me.
• 20:33
  We should actually train them and skills to get them good jobs.
• 20:36
  And so that's what vocational schools do.
• 20:37
  The problem is people who run vocational schools if they're not held accountable,
• 20:40
  they also start to get ridiculous, they also start to get broken.
• 20:42
  And so if you ask an average politician about this, like, yeah,
• 20:45
  I want to fund vocational schools and it stops there.
• 20:47
  But if the vocational school is run by an idiot, what do you do?
• 20:49
  And so here's what you do.
• 20:50
  If you have 20 vocational schools in a state, or 27 high end ones like Texas
• 20:54
  does, what you do is you say we're going to fund the vocational schools,
• 20:58
  proportion to the average salary is coming out of them.
• 21:01
  And you measure, you give them a number which is their average salary over three
• 21:04
  years and then you give them more money if they're doing well and
• 21:06
  less if they're doing worse.
• 21:07
  And you tie their entire budget to that.
• 21:09
  And what this does is it means the school's incentive is to say, okay,
• 21:12
  what skills do we teach to get people good jobs, what businesses we partner with?
• 21:16
  And guess what, having done this in multiple states,
• 21:18
  you could double the average salary coming out of these places.
• 21:21
  Some of them will do worse and get less, some will do better and get more.
• 21:24
  It just completely changes the whole culture of it.
• 21:26
  And you take that idea, by the way, and applies to lots of things,
• 21:30
  let's do another one is prisons.
• 21:31
  Prisons are very controversial right now.
• 21:34
  If you're on the left, you're worried they're trying to make money with for
• 21:36
  profit prisons.
• 21:37
  And that's the root of the evil.
• 21:39
  It turns out only 10% of prisons are for profit and
• 21:41
  they have just as bad results as a nonprofit prison.
• 21:43
  So it actually turns out they're all actually bad.
• 21:45
  I think if you're on the, if you're on the right,
• 21:47
  you're worried people are not being put in prison enough, which I think is very fair.
• 21:50
  And on the left, maybe there's more concerns.
• 21:52
  I do think some people have been punished for a very long time and
• 21:54
  are very unlikely to commit a crime again.
• 21:56
  There's no reason to keep punishing them.
• 21:57
  I think both sides have some points here that are legitimate.
• 22:00
  But here's the thing no one's talking about is we're not holding the people
• 22:02
  running the prisons accountable to anything.
• 22:04
  These prisons have terrible cultures.
• 22:06
  They have no useful goals.
• 22:09
  It's a total mess.
• 22:09
  Let's say we get together with ten of your smartest friends on the left and
• 22:13
  the right, what can we all agree on?
• 22:14
  We don't want people coming out of prison to go back in.
• 22:17
  We want lower recidivism, and we don't want people to come out and be unemployed.
• 22:21
  We want people to actually come out with skills to get jobs.
• 22:23
  Those are two obvious things.
• 22:25
  So what we should be doing is we should be measuring these things.
• 22:27
  You should be rewarding the people running it, doing it well,
• 22:30
  reward the programs that are working and defunding the things that are not working.
• 22:32
  And as best I could tell, the best politicians ever get to is just like
• 22:36
  coming up with their own one favorite pet idea for the prison and giving it to them.
• 22:39
  Most of them, unfortunately, aren't smart enough to think of the system level.
• 22:42
  Let's create a system that competes and that measures things and iterates.
• 22:45
  So that's the way markets work.
• 22:47
  And so it turns out if you apply this system, by the way, to probation,
• 22:49
  to parole, to prisons, you can massively reduce recidivism,
• 22:52
  massively increase employment, like fix these things.
• 22:54
  And so that's the kind of stuff that we're working on.
• 22:56
  And so we're trying to do this in a bunch of different areas and doing a lot of
• 23:00
  different things with markets and healthcare and fixing education.
• 23:03
  But just trying to put common sense and incentives and accountability.
• 23:06
  And by the way, the moderate left tends to agree with me,
• 23:09
  the right tends to agree with me, the far left hates me.
• 23:12
  And the far left is captured by the government unions.
• 23:15
  And they do not want any accountability, any measurement,
• 23:18
  because that is totally against how the far left works.
• 23:20
  And so. So what we need here is we need people,
• 23:22
  both on the right, but also the moderate left,
• 23:24
  to say, listen, we're going to stand up to these people.
• 23:26
  We're going to demand there is going to be accountability in our society because our
• 23:30
  government's a huge part of our society now.
• 23:31
  We have to hold it accountable to results that we all want.
• 23:34
  And that takes courage.
• 23:35
  It especially takes courage on the moderate left.
• 23:37
  It's mostly not there in our society right now, but I'm hoping with this vibe shift,
• 23:41
  we're going to get more of them to come along.
• 23:43
  >> Jon Hartley: So Chalonsdale disrupted prison warden could maybe be
• 23:48
  on the horizon.
• 23:49
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Okay, you joke.
• 23:50
  It's a big deal, man.
• 23:52
  Making these systems work.
• 23:53
  It impacts hundreds of thousands of lives.
• 23:56
  And it's an ethical, it's like something we Is our duty.
• 23:59
  We should be doing these things like just allowing like we all know these places
• 24:02
  are full of like prison guards who hate the prisoners,
• 24:04
  prisoners who ate the prison guards.
• 24:06
  Everyone's miserable, it's a total mess.
• 24:07
  It's a broken culture.
• 24:09
  And like leadership is about not allowing those broken cultures, about going in and
• 24:12
  fixing them.
• 24:13
  And so everywhere in our society there should be no room for
• 24:15
  broken cultures that aren't getting results.
• 24:18
  >> Jon Hartley: Absolutely.
• 24:19
  Yeah, very important issue and thank you for your leadership in that space.
• 24:26
  I want to shift to defense tech Palantir.
• 24:30
  Obviously the world's become I think a more dangerous place in the past
• 24:33
  few years.
• 24:34
  Russia invading Ukraine, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, China threatening Taiwan.
• 24:39
  I mean the Assad regime has fallen in Syria.
• 24:41
  It's kind of unclear what's next.
• 24:43
  Joe, I mean you're one of the co founders of Palantir.
• 24:46
  It's really the leading firm in the defense tech space.
• 24:49
  And you also have a lot of other very, very serious commitments
• 24:53
  in the defense tech space to, to other, other firms as well.
• 24:57
  I mean can you explain the audience what Palantir does and
• 25:00
  how and how it's a force for good in the, in the world.
• 25:04
  >> Joe Lonsdale: So we started Palantir 21 years ago.
• 25:06
  I think a lot of you were mentioning you loved Alex Karp's clip at
• 25:09
  the Reagan Library this weekend.
• 25:10
  He's very proud to be his co founder.
• 25:12
  He's an amazing guy.
• 25:13
  Someone mentioned his hair keeps getting crazier as he gets richer.
• 25:16
  So quit he's a character.
• 25:19
  He's a PhD too.
• 25:21
  He was he not only is a PhD,
• 25:22
  he was the star student of the top philosopher in the world.
• 25:25
  So he's a.
• 25:26
  He's definitely, he's definitely was the only non technical person who was full
• 25:30
  time on the co founding team.
• 25:31
  >> Jon Hartley: Like a Habermas student at one point.
• 25:33
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:34
  He was.
• 25:34
  Alex is a genius.
• 25:36
  He's taught me a lot about people and institutions in the world.
• 25:38
  It turns out you need kind of these philosopher builder types for
• 25:41
  these things to work.
• 25:42
  And he had, he had a big influence on me on that.
• 25:44
  You can't just have the best tech.
• 25:46
  You also have to understand the world and be interested and
• 25:48
  curious about how the world works.
• 25:49
  Would which Alex is Palantir took some of the very, really some.
• 25:55
  One of the very top tech cultures in Silicon Valley we created it was
• 25:58
  ranked number one for quite a while and
• 25:59
  applied it to areas of our society that don't have functional tech cultures or.
• 26:03
  And didn't have functional cultures for a very long time and solved some very
• 26:07
  important problems, helped save the government billions of dollars, helped
• 26:11
  eliminate several thousand terrorists, helped block dozens of attacks, and
• 26:15
  then help do that for about 40 of our allied countries.
• 26:18
  And it turns out the hard, technical problems we solved by creating these
• 26:22
  ontologies and bringing the data and the workflows together in certain ways
• 26:26
  to build on top of actually are very useful for AI.
• 26:29
  So not only did we do something I think that was very important for the world and
• 26:33
  built like a, you know, when I was there, like a unicorn, I think
• 26:36
  in some ways we got a little bit lucky because we have the best tech culture.
• 26:39
  We had this thing we built that.
• 26:41
  It turns out it's very useful for AI.
• 26:43
  So we're kind of in the right place at the right time with that and
• 26:46
  then seize the advantage and built on it.
• 26:48
  And so they're now going around and
• 26:49
  teaching hundreds of the top corporations how to do things in AI.
• 26:53
  I think one of the things that you show up and
• 26:55
  these people have all been spending lots of time, money on this last two years.
• 26:58
  And so the IT guys are sometimes terrified of Palantir because you come in and say,
• 27:01
  give us one week, and in one week we're going to do something that's
• 27:04
  much more useful to you and impressive than the last 18 months.
• 27:06
  You just spent time on it.
• 27:07
  And we consistently do that with the pilots.
• 27:08
  And then you win it and then you grow.
• 27:10
  That's why Palantir is growing really fast.
• 27:11
  So it's in a really good position right now.
• 27:13
  But I think that the moral kind of background or the mission for
• 27:17
  Palantir was after 9, 11.
• 27:19
  Let's make sure that does not happen again.
• 27:20
  And you know it's not you can't only credit Palantir with Apple.
• 27:23
  I think we definitely played a critical role in making that happen.
• 27:26
  >> Jon Hartley: That's amazing.
• 27:27
  Yeah. And I know, I just.
• 27:30
  There's always these crazy libertarians, like, hate the TSA and stuff like that.
• 27:34
  >> Joe Lonsdale: I hate the tsa.
• 27:36
  I'm also a crazy libertarian, though Kelt gone.
• 27:39
  >> Jon Hartley: You want to keep the TSA though, maybe.
• 27:41
  >> Joe Lonsdale: No, no.
• 27:42
  It's like security theater.
• 27:43
  What the hell are they doing?
• 27:44
  This is a big waste of everyone's time.
• 27:46
  Give the airport back the control and then hold them accountable.
• 27:48
  I don't know.
• 27:49
  Keep going. What do you want to say?
• 27:50
  >> Jon Hartley: Well, well, here instead of tsa, I'd be less concerned maybe, but
• 27:56
  it's like such a waste of everyone's time and money and they don't.
• 28:01
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Whenever we test them, they always fail.
• 28:03
  >> Jon Hartley: Do they?
• 28:04
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yes. It's like really easy to think things
• 28:06
  past the tsa.
• 28:06
  You should not try this yourself.
• 28:07
  But it is, sorry, you're gonna ask a question.
• 28:11
  >> Jon Hartley: We won't give anyone any ideas here, but moving on.
• 28:16
  University of Austin or you know what, any other just,
• 28:19
  you're such an expert on defense tech.
• 28:22
  Do you want to talk about the other defense.
• 28:23
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, I think, just listen what they do listen.
• 28:26
  So, yeah, we mentioned this earlier.
• 28:27
  Warfare is fundamentally changed.
• 28:29
  If you want to fight a war today or in five years,
• 28:31
  it just does not look anything like what the wars of the past look like.
• 28:35
  You know, it's very sadly In World War I, you have this kind of maligned
• 28:38
  aristocratic class that had been like kind of beaten by the progressives for
• 28:42
  a generation.
• 28:43
  It was finally failing it.
• 28:44
  Really excited that it got to prove itself because the whole purpose of
• 28:47
  the aristocracy in, in the Great Britain and in the past was,
• 28:49
  was to be the warrior class and to defend the civilization.
• 28:52
  And so these like young men got on their horses and
• 28:54
  they took their swords and they.
• 28:56
  And they charged the front and they were all mowed down.
• 28:58
  It was very sad because warfare just totally, completely changed.
• 29:01
  It was a huge mess and there's a lot of things like that today that are,
• 29:04
  they're analogous to that.
• 29:06
  You.
• 29:06
  I mean, I have to be careful what I say because I hang out with all the guys who
• 29:09
  run these things.
• 29:10
  They'll get pissed off at me.
• 29:11
  But there's a lot of stuff we're doing now that is equivalent to that.
• 29:14
  And what warfare should look like today is you did mass swarms of
• 29:19
  autonomous weaponized, weaponized things.
• 29:22
  Whether they're drones, whether we're overwater vehicles,
• 29:25
  which we're building with Saronic.
• 29:27
  We're gonna build 500 ships in Austin next year to build these very sophisticated
• 29:30
  ships that can coordinate with the fleet and attack together and separately.
• 29:33
  And you know, they're weaponized different ways.
• 29:35
  Whether it's underwater stuff like the dive stuff that the underworld is
• 29:38
  building, where you're building 200 from a year out of Rhode island right now,
• 29:41
  hopefully going to accelerate that.
• 29:42
  Whether it's Overland, which is, you know, very best self driving in the country,
• 29:46
  winning all the awards.
• 29:47
  Rather than sending 30 tanks to Ukraine, which 21 are destroyed, you could send for
• 29:51
  the same cost 30,000 of these things that are intelligently swarming and weaponized.
• 29:55
  There's all that stuff.
• 29:56
  And then there's things like Epirus,
• 29:58
  which is a company actually proud to have Helped start.
• 30:01
  We kind of anticipated all the drone stuff seven years ago, right after Anduril
• 30:04
  started, and way back that we backed, we backed, we started Epirus.
• 30:07
  And it's the best.
• 30:08
  It's like a force field.
• 30:09
  It's the best directed EMP in the world.
• 30:11
  So you can shoot microwave radiation in a cone and you could turn off like a hundred
• 30:15
  drones at once, or you could turn off a very powerful large Iranian drone,
• 30:18
  which I don't think these are Iranian drones over New Jersey, but
• 30:21
  we could turn those off too, if someone wanted.
• 30:23
  And, you know, so there's things, there's things like that you could do.
• 30:26
  They're really critical to the future of warfare, basically.
• 30:29
  Like, it's,kind of like Star Trek.
• 30:30
  You do need to be able, if you're fighting swarms of these things on land,
• 30:32
  in the air, in the ocean, you also need to be able to turn them off and fry them,
• 30:35
  you know, in a distance.
• 30:36
  And so there's all sorts of these new things.
• 30:39
  They're just critical to how war is going to be fought.
• 30:41
  And it's critical to get our manufacturing base up.
• 30:44
  So this is I am very pro liberty.
• 30:46
  I'm very against most industrial policy.
• 30:48
  But we do need industrial policy from an economic, from a defense perspective,
• 30:52
  otherwise we're gonna lose to China if we ever have to fight them.
• 30:56
  We have to be able to produce more of this stuff.
• 30:57
  So this is all really critical.
• 30:59
  I'm very against the adventures of wasting trillions of dollars in Afghanistan.
• 31:03
  And I'm very aligned with the kind of moderate right, kind of populist right
• 31:07
  line that we basically don't want to be wasting money overseas.
• 31:11
  At the same time, you know, you don't want Islamists to be able to run wild or
• 31:14
  you don't want a country with nukes taken over by bad guys,
• 31:17
  because that's going to come back and hurt us.
• 31:19
  There does need to be a very strong deterrence in the world and very strong.
• 31:22
  If America stays the strongest, it does keep us safer.
• 31:25
  And that's something we need to do in an efficient way.
• 31:27
  >> Jon Hartley: No doubt.
• 31:28
  And pager warfare as well.
• 31:30
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Pager warfare is more Israel's thing.
• 31:33
  But they did a great job.
• 31:34
  >> Jon Hartley: Yeah, absolutely.
• 31:36
  Well, it's fascinating.
• 31:38
  And also want to talk just a little bit about.
• 31:41
  And thank you for.
• 31:42
  I think it certainly should be said, thank you for lending your great mind and
• 31:48
  bringing great minds to solve these hugely important problems.
• 31:52
  And certainly, I think there's, I guess, a changing view, certainly on.
• 32:00
  Industrial policy and, and rethinking trade when it comes to how to deal with
• 32:04
  these sort of non economic objectives.
• 32:06
  I wanna talk a little bit about just, I guess,
• 32:08
  do you have any thoughts on fintech?
• 32:09
  You know you started out of par, any fintech thoughts you wanna add?
• 32:13
  >> Joe Lonsdale: You know it's, it seems like there's going to be, there's going to
• 32:18
  be a need for, for better ways of using stable coins to transact for free.
• 32:22
  I think you guys probably saw it came out how the SEC, not even the SEC so
• 32:26
  much as like kind of leftist senators like Sherrod Brown, others kill,
• 32:31
  killed Libra and killed a lot of other attempts from large companies to use
• 32:35
  crypto to create kind of new different challenges and with identity and
• 32:39
  payment online, which really is the obvious long term answer.
• 32:43
  I think it's as much as I don't agree with a lot of what goes on in meta,
• 32:46
  I think it's actually really bad for the world that the, that they kind of,
• 32:49
  it kind of used mafia like tactics to threaten Facebook not to launch this.
• 32:52
  It was legal to launch it, but they're like if anyone works with Facebook and
• 32:55
  launching this we're gonna look into everything you're doing.
• 32:57
  It was a very mafia thing they did that came out and so
• 32:59
  I think that was really wrong.
• 33:01
  I think it would be really good for this to happen on the consumer side.
• 33:04
  On the wealth tech side, add a part just crossed $7 trillion this month.
• 33:09
  I'm very proud of the company, $7 trillion that reported through the platform.
• 33:13
  It's a very dominant company, I think about 1,200 firms using it.
• 33:17
  And that's gonna keep growing.
• 33:18
  There's a lot of really interesting stuff we're doing with creating new ways that
• 33:23
  any RA could offer in aligned way really smart alternatives to their investors.
• 33:27
  And so I do think wealth tech's going to be smarter, more dynamic.
• 33:31
  There's just a lot of fun stuff we're building there.
• 33:33
  I think the estate stuff's going to be handled way better.
• 33:35
  You shouldn't have to know the smartest lawyer in New York.
• 33:38
  You should be able to you feel to automate whatever the Jewish guy is telling
• 33:40
  you from New York to do for everyone.
• 33:42
  It's for their taxes instead of having to all pay,
• 33:44
  you know I should just have to pay $100,000.
• 33:46
  Everyone should get access to it.
• 33:47
  So there's, there's things, there's things,
• 33:48
  there's things like this that are that are coming, which are just like smarter and
• 33:51
  better with AI that I'm very bullish on.
• 33:52
  But, you know, just, just like everywhere else, there's just a lot to build there,
• 33:55
  a lot to keep fixing.
• 33:56
  >> Jon Hartley: There's a lot of good accounts and finance guys in Miami too for
• 33:59
  that's worht, not just New York.
• 34:01
  A lot of our New Yorkers are- >> Joe Lonsdale: He moved to Miami,
• 34:05
  that's true here.
• 34:06
  >> Jon Hartley: Just saying.
• 34:07
  Just saying.
• 34:08
  Why don't you talk a little bit about University of Austin.
• 34:11
  I mean, you're really the chief benefactor,
• 34:13
  I think, of the University of Austin.
• 34:15
  The first class just began this autumn and
• 34:18
  I think just finished their first semester.
• 34:21
  How is that going so far in your mind?
• 34:23
  >> Joe Lonsdale: That's great.
• 34:24
  We have 90 something students there.
• 34:27
  In the first undergraduate class, a lot of students turn down very top schools,
• 34:31
  have very top scores that came in.
• 34:33
  They wanna go somewhere, I think that in some ways more patriotic.
• 34:37
  But it's a place where you can pursue truth.
• 34:39
  It's a place where you're taught to be, you know, the philosopher builders that we
• 34:43
  want to see in our world that are going to step up and fix things.
• 34:46
  I think there's all these classical virtues which are very important,
• 34:50
  which we don't talk enough about.
• 34:52
  And my favorite classical virtue is courage, and
• 34:54
  you're basically taught the opposite of courage.
• 34:57
  Now if you go to Yale or Harvard or Stanford, it's basically like, shut up,
• 35:01
  go along, don't, don't try to speak out.
• 35:04
  Echo what you're told.
• 35:06
  If you speak out, if you're virtue signaling the thing we've told you to say.
• 35:08
  But if you disagree with us, don't speak out because you're just gonna get punished
• 35:11
  and you're gonna get hurt for it.
• 35:12
  And that is like the worst possible message that we could be teaching our
• 35:17
  youth.
• 35:18
  You should go to college to have debates and to speak up, but then at the same time
• 35:22
  also, by the way, have the intellectual humility that you don't for
• 35:26
  sure know all the exact right answers.
• 35:28
  And that you're gonna listen to the other side,
• 35:29
  you're gonna learn that you're gonna be able to steal man their arguments.
• 35:32
  Basically, almost no one on the left who comes out of Harvard or
• 35:36
  Yale knows how to stealman smart people on the right.
• 35:39
  They literally have been not allowed to listen to that, which is pathetic.
• 35:43
  Like John Stuart Mill, one of the great kind of, you know,
• 35:46
  classical liberals who shaped all of this, that, you know, if you don't know, if you,
• 35:50
  if you don't know the other argument, then you don't actually know your argument.
• 35:54
  And it's just a dysfunctional set of affairs that's bad for our civilization.
• 36:00
  We live in a liberal civilization that is based on these open debates and
• 36:03
  it's based on frankly understanding the conversations of the last thousand years,
• 36:06
  especially the last 300 years with the Enlightenment,
• 36:08
  which are also not being taught at these schools.
• 36:10
  And so there's just a lot of stuff to fix.
• 36:12
  And, you know, University of Austin, I think our goal is for
• 36:15
  about half the kids to be stem.
• 36:16
  I'd say it's about one third STEM right now because we are starting really deeply
• 36:20
  with the kind of history, economics, philosophy, and great idea stuff.
• 36:23
  But, but the, the idea is to have both great thinkers come out of there who
• 36:26
  are leaders in policy and politics and other parts of society, but also to have
• 36:30
  STEM leaders come out of there, but STEM leaders who are more well rounded and
• 36:33
  who are going to fight, you know, speak up and build cultures that are healthy.
• 36:37
  >> Jon Hartley: That's great.
• 36:38
  I mean, how would you describe the University of Austin?
• 36:42
  I guess just like a few sentences.
• 36:44
  And like, how would it be different from, I guess, say like Hillsdale or,
• 36:47
  I know like Thomas Aquinas College makes people actually read.
• 36:51
  Like, listen, I think Hillsdale is an important institution.
• 36:54
  >> Joe Lonsdale: I don't want to throw any shade at it.
• 36:55
  It's different in the sense that Hillsdale is explicitly a conservative institution.
• 37:00
  I don't know what cancel culture goes on there against the left or not.
• 37:02
  But I, but I, but I, I do know University of Austin does have people who,
• 37:06
  there's people on the moderate left, there's people on the right,
• 37:09
  there's all sorts of views.
• 37:11
  I think University of Austin has scores from students coming in that are similar
• 37:15
  to the other top 30 universities.
• 37:17
  So our goal is explicitly to compete with Harvard and Stanford and
• 37:20
  Yale and those, and build like the next great university that's based on more
• 37:25
  of these traditional values.
• 37:27
  And I guess the other thing is different is we have a talent network with over 100
• 37:30
  people in my community who have started and built the unicorns and
• 37:33
  built the top tech companies who are engaging with our students,
• 37:36
  are helping us design the new programs and are figuring it out.
• 37:39
  So I think having, I think having this philosophical foundation combined with
• 37:43
  the innovation world is also pretty unique.
• 37:45
  >> Jon Hartley: Yeah.
• 37:46
  Well, it's very impressive what you're doing.
• 37:49
  I feel like starting school is almost something sort of unthinkable,
• 37:53
  even just a few years ago.
• 37:55
  >> Joe Lonsdale: It's a very crazy entrepreneurial endeavor.
• 37:57
  They had to do thousands of pages of regulation,
• 37:58
  all these things are set up to stop you from building new universities.
• 38:01
  There's always moats in everything I build,
• 38:04
  these are some of the worst moats I've seen, we had to be very stubborn.
• 38:07
  Fortunately, people like Barry Weiss, Neil Ferguson,
• 38:10
  two of my main co-founders in Pano, who's been our president, they worked very,
• 38:14
  very hard and pushed this through.
• 38:16
  And it's amazing getting to work with those people.
• 38:18
  >> Jon Hartley: Absolutely, and finding, I guess, regional accreditation monopolies.
• 38:24
  >> Joe Lonsdale: It's definitely a big moat.
• 38:26
  Well, that's something hopefully this administration will also fix for everyone,
• 38:29
  which would be great, we'll see.
• 38:31
  >> Jon Hartley: Absolutely, and
• 38:31
  you've really assembled a very impressive board there.
• 38:35
  I wanna just pivot a little bit to Wokeness and DEI?
• 38:40
  I mean, you've been pretty outspoken against Wokeness and I mean, do you see,
• 38:45
  obviously, I feel like the election seems to be America's kind of spoken.
• 38:51
  It's the first time a Republican president's won the popular vote in maybe
• 38:56
  20 years or so.
• 38:57
  I mean, do you see the election as being sort of a resounding
• 39:01
  rejection of Wokeness and DEI?
• 39:04
  >> Joe Lonsdale: I mean, of course, everyone agrees it went too far, and
• 39:07
  it is great, and we won by only, again, a very small amount.
• 39:11
  I mean, we won, which is great and it's a rejection.
• 39:13
  And I think a lot of moderates said this is enough.
• 39:15
  A lot of people I know who are moderates,
• 39:17
  who support the other side actually came to me and said,
• 39:19
  actually I'm kind of glad we lost because we do need to get rid of this nonsense.
• 39:23
  And so I do think a lot of people in America have had enough of this.
• 39:27
  Now, that doesn't mean that it's going to go away.
• 39:29
  I think this stuff.
• 39:30
  Listen, these neo Marxist philosophies have marched through the institutions.
• 39:35
  They've taken over most of our universities.
• 39:38
  There's entire departments that are top universities, whether you can't even hire
• 39:41
  a moderate person, a moderate Democrat, you have to only hire a Marxist.
• 39:44
  I mean, these places are completely broken in sociology, anthropology, history.
• 39:48
  You can't have a history person who believes, not believes in
• 39:51
  the British Empire, which would be great, but even believes in power of markets.
• 39:55
  I mean, it's just crazy how broken these things are.
• 39:57
  And so.
• 39:58
  So yes, America's said it's gone too far, but does that mean it's going away?
• 40:02
  No, we actually have to go and like fight the fights now.
• 40:04
  So here's what drives me crazy.
• 40:06
  There's something I'm thinking about with Cicero.
• 40:08
  Every red state in the country still has state funded institutions where they're
• 40:13
  paying tax dollars, where there's literally departments that everyone in
• 40:17
  that department is a neo Marxist of some form who hates markets, hates Israel,
• 40:21
  hates America.
• 40:22
  Like these are red states where the voters don't believe in this, and
• 40:24
  they tell, it's academic freedom.
• 40:26
  It's actually a freedom to take my money in this freaking state,
• 40:29
  take your money and defund these Marxists.
• 40:31
  And that is how powerful they are in our society, that we're still doing that.
• 40:34
  And by the way, on K to 12, if you're a teacher in pretty much every red
• 40:39
  state you have to go get a master's degree from woke you in order to be
• 40:43
  brainwashed to hate markets, to hate America, hate Israel,
• 40:47
  in order to get paid more than come back and indoctrinate the kids.
• 40:51
  And school choice is great.
• 40:53
  Don't get me wrong, I love school choice.
• 40:54
  It's important you guys started here in Florida.
• 40:56
  First things to Governor Bush and others, and it's just, it's amazing.
• 40:59
  And we're gonna try to do it in Texas next year.
• 41:01
  But school choice is not enough because no matter what,
• 41:03
  in 10 years there's still going to be a bunch of kids in these schools.
• 41:05
  And these red states need to stop telling these teachers to go get indoctrinated in
• 41:10
  order to get paid more at a workplace.
• 41:12
  This is crazy.
• 41:13
  It is crazy, and it's like, it's a lack of courage.
• 41:15
  They say, well, Joe, people think it's controversial.
• 41:18
  It's just really hard to fix these things.
• 41:20
  I have lots of other things I'm doing.
• 41:21
  I'm like, no, if you were a governor or, or legislator and you are not fixing this,
• 41:25
  you are not doing your job.
• 41:26
  So we have a lot of work to do.
• 41:28
  >> Jon Hartley: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 41:29
  And I'm curious, like in terms of corporate America,
• 41:35
  which I feel like came to just recently, but I think corporate
• 41:40
  America certainly has become a hotbed of wokeness and DEI as well.
• 41:47
  I mean, do you see a shift there?
• 41:49
  I mean there's been some reports of some companies.
• 41:52
  >> Joe Lonsdale: No, of course.
• 41:54
  Everyone's now just shifting slightly, and they're on the new side, and
• 41:57
  they're quietly firing a lot of the teams that were obviously totally insane people,
• 42:01
  but they couldn't admit they were insane people until about five minutes ago.
• 42:04
  And there's a big shift, and it'll come back, and they'll do the next
• 42:07
  crazy thing because there's no courage in any of these companies, and it's fine.
• 42:10
  It's a good thing for our society that the people who are the NPCs and the people
• 42:14
  that don't have any courage are now going along with getting rid of this nonsense.
• 42:19
  But, but yeah, it's just the lack of backbone in all of these people and
• 42:23
  all of these, in all these CEOs just, it's disgusting, and it's nice.
• 42:28
  They're coming around.
• 42:29
  >> Jon Hartley: And I'm curious, what do you think about the tech world?
• 42:31
  I mean, I think one of the big surprises ahead of this
• 42:34
  election was just how many people from the tech world.
• 42:38
  I think people like Chamath and others, people who were pretty serious card
• 42:44
  carrying, toe the line Dems even a few years ago, and I mean even 10 years ago,
• 42:49
  I mean Elon Musk was I think a card-carrying Democrat and others.
• 42:54
  I mean, do you think that shift is, is a permanent one?
• 42:59
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, I think, I think this is a big shift for, for quite a while
• 43:01
  because I think you have a part of the Democratic Party that's completely insane.
• 43:05
  I don't know if it's 20 of it or 40% of it or what.
• 43:07
  It's probably 25, 30 of it.
• 43:09
  That is completely insane.
• 43:10
  And I think the moderate left, like I said, lacks the courage to fight that and
• 43:13
  push back on it.
• 43:14
  And as long as that insane broken thing is there and is powerful and
• 43:17
  is running any institutions in our society, you're gonna have a lot of smart
• 43:20
  entrepreneurs who are gonna be pushing back, you're gonna be fighting it.
• 43:23
  And listen, the tech world, the other thing that happened,
• 43:26
  I think if we're gonna try to diagnose this,
• 43:27
  first of all these people went insane and you gotta stop them from breaking things.
• 43:30
  But secondly, the tech world has intersected
• 43:33
  with government brokenness in a much bigger way in the last decade.
• 43:37
  So a lot of the stuff we were building in tech was in completely non government
• 43:40
  areas that, where the regulation didn't really affect us that much 20 years ago.
• 43:44
  But if you're building in healthcare, if you're building in defense,
• 43:48
  if you're building in areas that intersect with manufacturing or education or etc.,
• 43:53
  all of a sudden you're exposed to these like totally crazy corrupt regulations and
• 43:58
  moats and things set up, and you're like, wait a second, this is broken.
• 44:02
  This is hurting our civilization, guys, let's fix this.
• 44:05
  And you go. And a lot of them like would go and say,
• 44:07
  okay, this is obviously wrong, let's fix it.
• 44:08
  And then, they'd be really surprised when it just didn't get fixed, and
• 44:11
  it was just stayed corrupt and stayed broken.
• 44:12
  And you look at all these areas of our society where the costs have gone
• 44:15
  up, right?
• 44:16
  You can do this chart where there's this stuff in blue lines and the red lines, and
• 44:19
  you see the parts there, where inflation has gone up.
• 44:21
  And these are the parts the government is just clearly breaking and
• 44:24
  clearly allowing itself to be captured to break.
• 44:26
  I mean, health care is probably the worst, but there's a lot of other ones.
• 44:29
  And this is finally something that a lot of the tech world now is exposed to, is,
• 44:33
  wait a second, well, let's fix this.
• 44:35
  And then they realize it's actually their side is the Democrats that are the ones
• 44:38
  who are not letting them fix it.
• 44:40
  And that's been a huge red pill for a lot of my friends.
• 44:44
  >> Jon Hartley: And absolutely.
• 44:45
  Last question, Doge, if you had one recommendation for them that they would,
• 44:51
  you know, implement with 100% certainty, what would that recommendation be?
• 44:58
  >> Joe Lonsdale: So many things I already mentioned, so I'm not gonna mention,
• 45:01
  the cutting NGOs and fraud and everything else.
• 45:04
  The one thing I would say is that when you look at how Elon Musk has his rules,
• 45:07
  like first you go in, and you like get rid of the dumb requirements,
• 45:10
  and you cut stuff that's not needed.
• 45:12
  And only then, once can you optimize.
• 45:14
  And so I think the optimized thing that's gonna come next to calling it day one is
• 45:17
  all this really cool firing and cutting and just like stuff get out of the way.
• 45:21
  I'm so excited.
• 45:22
  But day two, if I had one thing for the optimize,
• 45:25
  is we need to have a, a transparent process driven by tech for
• 45:30
  every regulation to have to fight for its life every X years.
• 45:35
  And it needs to be something that, because it's driven by tech and transparent,
• 45:39
  everyone can see it.
• 45:40
  Because basically 17 states have regulatory review processes and
• 45:43
  they don't happen because the lawyers are busy and no one sees.
• 45:45
  But if you make it transparent, you force regulation to fight for its life and
• 45:49
  you make it really hard to stay around.
• 45:51
  I better be doing really good things that would stop this cancerous growth of just
• 45:54
  infinite regulations over time that are suffocating the growth of our
• 45:57
  civilization.
• 45:58
  So if we do that right, that could change everything.
• 46:01
  >> Jon Hartley: Well, Joe, Joe Lonsdale, thank you so much for joining us.
• 46:04
  This has been really amazing.
• 46:05
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Thanks, Jon.
• 46:06
  [APPLAUSE] >> Jon Hartley: All right,
• 46:09
  if you like to line up over here,
• 46:14
  you can ask some questions as long as we have some time.
• 46:21
  >> Daniel: Fantastic talk.
• 46:23
  I'd like to hear how you would.
• 46:26
  I have two problems to solve.
• 46:27
  How would you tell Taiwan to defend itself?
• 46:30
  And how would you take out the gangs of Chicago?
• 46:34
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Daniel, thank you.
• 46:35
  [LAUGH] I always forget we're being recorded,
• 46:39
  hoping to say anything inappropriate.
• 46:43
  You know, listen, I think with Taiwan,
• 46:45
  I think the Hellscape thing is basically right in some form.
• 46:49
  Taiwan is a very hard island to attack.
• 46:51
  I think there were plans for
• 46:53
  how it was going to be invaded because I think Japan had taken it in World War II.
• 46:57
  And then we had to map out what we're going to do with China.
• 47:00
  And it was just like horrible thing that was gonna cost, 5,000,000 lives and
• 47:05
  just tons of ships, tons of boats.
• 47:07
  And that was even back then.
• 47:09
  And I think it is quite well defended now, more than people realize.
• 47:11
  So I think it's more likely that they use other methods to keep it, co-opt it.
• 47:15
  But if they were going to attack it, slash defend it,
• 47:17
  you probably want tens of thousands of autonomous weaponized vehicles above and
• 47:21
  below and around the water.
• 47:23
  And you want to be ready to destroy any key ports of entry if they do get a hold
• 47:27
  of them, to stop them from capturing and bringing them in.
• 47:30
  So as much as that's kind of scary, you got to buy bomb your own,
• 47:32
  have bombs in your own areas, in your own ports if necessary, and then.
• 47:36
  And then have the Hellscape.
• 47:37
  And I think that makes it just not worth taking it, makes it so they have to find
• 47:41
  other ways to co opt it, which they might do in terms of gains in Chicago.
• 47:46
  These things are always hard to do.
• 47:48
  I strongly support the US Constitution and
• 47:50
  our rights, which makes these things very complicated.
• 47:53
  But listen, basically you need a really strong DA.
• 47:58
  Any really strong judges that actually wanna be really hard on crime.
• 48:01
  And then, you need probably some new form of like the Illinois Rangers.
• 48:06
  I don't know what they call them in Illinois.
• 48:07
  They call them the Texas Rangers that basically are trained probably by special
• 48:12
  forces to do honey pots and to do honeypot operations.
• 48:15
  And just whatever kind of crime is going on, like make it a competition and
• 48:19
  figure out how to.
• 48:20
  How to entrap them and legally, of course, and get them.
• 48:25
  But it has to be.
• 48:26
  It has to be an effort with great leadership and great talent, and
• 48:29
  it has to be something a state wants to do.
• 48:30
  And right now they don't have that leadership at all.
• 48:32
  >> Daniel: There's no tech.
• 48:35
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Well, sure.
• 48:36
  If we're doing.
• 48:36
  If we're doing all this like once, once.
• 48:39
  I mean, once you get warrants, you could, you could track all these people.
• 48:42
  You could listen to everything going on.
• 48:43
  If we're allowed to turn Palantir on the people who were there, once we know that
• 48:48
  they're guilty, and then use that to find others and everything, sure.
• 48:52
  There's all sorts of things we could do with that.
• 48:53
  We do that with Mexico as well.
• 48:55
  By the way. If we want to really get rid of
• 48:56
  the cartels that are bothering everyone is probably use whatever we used on
• 48:59
  terrorists in the Middle East.
• 49:00
  We should probably point to the cartels in Mexico.
• 49:02
  Same thing.
• 49:03
  We have to be very careful doing that in our own homeland.
• 49:05
  I'm very pro civil liberties, and so
• 49:06
  we just have to figure out what's allowed with that.
• 49:09
  And at some point, if it becomes a big enough problem and
• 49:11
  Illinois decides to do it in the right way, that's great.
• 49:13
  But until then, until we have that leadership,
• 49:16
  I think the best solution is to move to Miami or Austin.
• 49:20
  >> Jon Hartley: All right, next question.
• 49:23
  >> Speaker 4: Hey, Joe, how are you?
• 49:24
  I have a quick question.
• 49:25
  We recently.
• 49:26
  Let's see if I can pick this up.
• 49:28
  I'll just hold it like this.
• 49:29
  We recently had an event with the Economic club about the next generation.
• 49:34
  And so there's like a transformative shift.
• 49:36
  Trillions and trillions of dollars coming to our generation soon.
• 49:39
  You're seeing baby boomers wanting to get out of their typical mom and
• 49:43
  pop shops selling them out.
• 49:44
  How do you see this unfolding and
• 49:46
  how would you say we can best prepare ourselves for something like this?
• 49:49
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, this is a huge trend in our society.
• 49:52
  I agree. There's trillions of dollars of
• 49:54
  small businesses, where people are going to retire and pass it on.
• 49:58
  I think probably the right way to do it, and
• 50:00
  I've talked a lot about this with a few other friends as well.
• 50:04
  Is we need an distributed method of getting advisors and
• 50:07
  training operators and of partnering with operators to buy these and back them.
• 50:11
  Tech's gonna play a big role in that.
• 50:13
  It's gonna play a big role in transforming these businesses and
• 50:15
  making them more efficient.
• 50:16
  But you still need operators on the ground willing to run them.
• 50:19
  I don't think private equity in a traditional sense is always the right way.
• 50:23
  It doesn't always make sense to go into small towns and
• 50:25
  just roll up everything into part of something, of 30 things.
• 50:27
  But I actually do think you need like distributed training and talents and
• 50:30
  finding smaller entrepreneurs, and a movement for
• 50:32
  more people to be kind of small and entrepreneurs.
• 50:34
  And there's a lot to build there.
• 50:38
  >> Jon Hartley: All right.
• 50:40
  >> Speaker 5: Hello.
• 50:40
  Thank you very much for this awesome conversation.
• 50:42
  Have a quick comment before the question.
• 50:44
  I'm from Spain and I want to go back to TSA, where a socialist country in many
• 50:47
  aspects, much more socialist than the United States.
• 50:50
  And we figured out a way to privatize the TSA.
• 50:52
  And believe me, Madrid works much better than MIA.
• 50:55
  So I think there's much progress to be done there.
• 50:57
  The question, though, has to do with AI and politics.
• 51:00
  Right now. Most AI I've seen in politics has to do
• 51:03
  with elections.
• 51:04
  In your expertise, have you seen any AI being used for lobbying and,
• 51:08
  or strategy and predictive predicting how meters will act?
• 51:12
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Sure. And thank you for that TSA comment,
• 51:13
  actually, not only because I was right against Jon.
• 51:16
  But secondly, because this is what's great about the United States is we have 50
• 51:19
  states where you try experiments and
• 51:20
  this is why the federal government shouldn't do things.
• 51:23
  It's also what's great about the fact that we don't have a global government.
• 51:26
  So we should, as United States constantly be learning.
• 51:28
  Even if something's more socialist, they could be doing something smarter.
• 51:30
  So I think, I think competitive governance is very important thing that we keep
• 51:33
  learning from.
• 51:34
  So I love you guys in Florida because you guys do a lot of great things here.
• 51:37
  We all, we all copy, you know, in terms of AI and elections,
• 51:40
  I learned a hell of a lot about politics in elections.
• 51:43
  I don't even really want to know in this last one because I got more involved in,
• 51:47
  like, I'll tell you, there's things like APIs that are available within 24 hours
• 51:51
  where you can see if someone's voted or not.
• 51:53
  You can't see who they voted for, but you see if they voted or not,
• 51:56
  which then changes how you follow up with them to, like, remind them to vote again.
• 51:59
  There's rules in different states for if you request an absentee ballot at one
• 52:02
  election, they just keep sending it to you forever because that was good for
• 52:05
  whoever the party was in charge there.
• 52:07
  There's all sorts of crazy new rules, crazy new things.
• 52:11
  And it is a giant, big data problem, and a lot of people are trying to use
• 52:16
  data in AI to map it out to, to predict, to see where to put their resources.
• 52:22
  Listen, I think Elon did a very good job of this and
• 52:25
  was very critical to this when he put money and
• 52:27
  time into this last election with a lot of his smartest people.
• 52:31
  It's something the left was winning at by far before, and
• 52:33
  now I think it's a little more neutralized in terms of the exact tricks.
• 52:36
  I can't say too much more, but yes, there's lots of stuff there that's key.
• 52:40
  >> Jon Hartley: All right, next question.
• 52:43
  >> Speaker 6: I stood in line first so I could ask the last question.
• 52:46
  What do we got time for like, two more?
• 52:48
  >> Jon Hartley: We've got a couple people behind you.
• 52:51
  >> Speaker 6: As long as you still cut me in.
• 52:53
  Not a hard stop at 7.
• 52:55
  >> Speaker 7: Hi, Joe.
• 52:56
  I have a question about autonomous agents.
• 52:58
  A lot of people are saying 2025 is going to be like the year of the autonomous
• 53:03
  agents.
• 53:03
  Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, they're all building autonomous agents.
• 53:07
  I just thought what your opinion on it was,
• 53:10
  if it's gonna be the year of the autonomous agent.
• 53:13
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Yeah, well, listen, I'm obsessed, like I said,
• 53:15
  with the AI services at level 5, I was talking about,
• 53:18
  of directly applying AI to solve these things.
• 53:21
  And a lot of these problems are things we do with agents at different types.
• 53:25
  I'm not sure a lot of the agents are quite good enough to do everything on their own.
• 53:29
  But that is how you do these things is you create different agents and
• 53:32
  you stitch them together and you practice and you iterate and you use them.
• 53:35
  And so, yes, I definitely think there's gonna be a lot more sophisticated types of
• 53:38
  agents designed to do different tasks and to complement people and
• 53:41
  replace people in different ways.
• 53:43
  And so, that's a great area to work in.
• 53:46
  All right, next question.
• 53:49
  >> Speaker 8: Hi. I have actually a couple of questions.
• 53:52
  The first one.
• 53:53
  >> Jon Hartley: One. One would be great.
• 53:54
  Sorry.
• 53:55
  >> Speaker 8: Okay, well, I want to try to formulate it in one, then.
• 53:59
  >> Jon Hartley: Okay.
• 53:59
  >> Speaker 8: So when you have kids like me, I have a 4 year old.
• 54:07
  I'm trying to do something about giving them the tools to know what is good and
• 54:14
  what is bad before they get a computer to code at the age of 5 or 6.
• 54:20
  Your Cicero Institute is working on policies.
• 54:24
  Is there something going on in any of the nine states where you
• 54:29
  are working to, to, to help our kids to have a better future?
• 54:35
  And, and also, I mean it's related also to the level three that you were mentioning.
• 54:42
  We all have access to large language models, but
• 54:46
  don't you think that there is an opportunity in the niche and
• 54:51
  in the small language models and not just for someone like Elon.
• 54:57
  >> Joe Lonsdale: So on the education front, there's a lot of cool new
• 55:00
  companies like Angel Studios has made a ton of content this pro liberty.
• 55:04
  It's Christian liberty bias.
• 55:06
  I think it's very interesting company Tuttle Twins was partnering with them,
• 55:10
  which I was a tiny supporter of,
• 55:11
  which is this really fun kind of libertarian cartoon.
• 55:14
  I don't know if you've seen as they've done a great job.
• 55:16
  I actually enjoy watching the episodes and my kids enjoy watching the episodes.
• 55:19
  I have like a four, six and seven half year old who watch it with me.
• 55:23
  So, I think there's a lot of great content being created.
• 55:26
  I think there's some people trying to build various things about walled gardens
• 55:30
  for kids and there's like a lot of stuff there that makes a lot of sense.
• 55:33
  It is a really hard problem.
• 55:36
  I personally don't trust letting young children on a lot of these types of
• 55:40
  social media.
• 55:41
  Or a lot of these types of like certain types of more modern games that use AI to
• 55:45
  kind of harness dopamine mechanisms in ways that they didn't when we were kids.
• 55:50
  I think these are a form of drug, I think and I'm very pro liberty, but
• 55:55
  I think these are a form of drug where it's like.
• 55:58
  It's like, it's like it is doing something to your brain and how, in terms of how it
• 56:01
  interacts with you and addicts you and harnesses you and finds out how to figure
• 56:04
  out how to get your attention when they're really sophisticated.
• 56:06
  And I think that's fine for an adult to opt into.
• 56:09
  I probably too much time addicted to X or something like that, but
• 56:12
  I don't think we should, at least for me,
• 56:14
  I don't want to use that on my kids because I'm not sure I trust them.
• 56:17
  In terms of, in terms of the language models, I think you could train large
• 56:20
  language models to act like small ones in different ways.
• 56:23
  So, I'm not sure if you need small ones, but
• 56:25
  there's lots of ways that you can train them and create context and specify.
• 56:27
  But I'll have to learn more from you about that later.
• 56:30
  Thanks.
• 56:30
  >> Speaker 8: The education.
• 56:31
  I was actually referring to AI guidelines.
• 56:34
  We're actually drafting now the AI guidelines for
• 56:37
  Miami Dade County with Miami Dade County Digital Commission.
• 56:40
  >> Joe Lonsdale: My suggestion is don't draft those.
• 56:42
  That's, that's really bad.
• 56:43
  Like you don't want to create any rules at all.
• 56:45
  And if you, if you're creating rules for your school, that's fine, but
• 56:48
  don't create rules for what people do with their kids.
• 56:50
  You should, we should, you should not create top down rules.
• 56:52
  I think that's really bad, and we should make Desantis stop it if you do that.
• 56:56
  >> Speaker 8: It's happening.
• 56:57
  So. >> Joe Lonsdale: Okay, well,
• 56:58
  Desantis is going to stop it and I'm going to stop you, but thank you very much.
• 57:02
  Don't do that.
• 57:03
  Don't do that.
• 57:03
  That's, that's, that's authoritarian and it's not your job and
• 57:06
  it's not your business and this is a free state and they shouldn't do that.
• 57:08
  And anyone, they try to do it, DeSantis should step in and stop them.
• 57:11
  >> Jon Hartley: Okay, next question.
• 57:14
  Joe Lonsdale, titled Twins Watcher.
• 57:17
  That I didn't expect.
• 57:18
  >> Joe Lonsdale: It's great tonight.
• 57:20
  >> Jon Hartley: Great.
• 57:20
  Next question.
• 57:21
  >> Speaker 9: Thank you for your time, Joe.
• 57:23
  Shifting to the banking sector in a world that's very relationship driven and
• 57:27
  client facing and you know, building the relationships is,
• 57:30
  tends to be the backbone of business development.
• 57:34
  Do you see or knowing where AI is at and where it could be, do you see AI either
• 57:38
  augmenting those client facing roles or possibly replacing them down the road?
• 57:44
  >> Joe Lonsdale: I don't think it's going to replace them for a long time.
• 57:46
  I think people like meeting other people and trusting other people and
• 57:49
  seeing other people, it's definitely augmenting them in new ways.
• 57:51
  It's definitely completely changing, outbound sales,
• 57:54
  is definitely maybe doing some first screening calls and things like that.
• 57:58
  There's definitely a huge role for like augmenting with AI.
• 58:02
  But I think what's happening is right now the AI is playing that role for
• 58:07
  like first emails and for first chats and stuff.
• 58:11
  But I think as that gets more and more popular, it's going to get too annoying
• 58:13
  for people because they're going to get like infinite inbounds and
• 58:16
  then you're just not going to want to interact with something if it's not like
• 58:18
  a person you know in your network or trust or have somehow met somewhere.
• 58:21
  So, I think it's like we're in an interregnum right now where this stuff all
• 58:25
  works better because it's so new and because it echoes a person.
• 58:28
  But as soon as we all set up ourselves again to protect ourselves from this like
• 58:32
  increasing deluge of AI, we're all going to face, I think you're going to
• 58:36
  need to find ways for people in relationships to come back in.
• 58:39
  And so, so I, I, I'm, I guess I'm very long people in relationships still
• 58:42
  mattering for most things.
• 58:43
  If it's a very simple transaction, maybe the AIs figure out themselves.
• 58:46
  But for bigger decisions, I, I think,
• 58:48
  I think this AI stuff that's getting like growing really fast in certain areas there
• 58:52
  is not going to work long term because it's just too spammy and too weird and
• 58:55
  people, people want other people is my view.
• 58:58
  Maybe I'm old fashioned, but that's my view.
• 59:00
  >> Speaker 9: Completely agree.
• 59:01
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Great, thanks.
• 59:02
  >> Jon Hartley: Next question.
• 59:03
  We're going to do one question each.
• 59:04
  You're going to be the last person.
• 59:06
  We're going to get you out of here on time.
• 59:07
  And ideally, quick with the ends with the question mark would be great.
• 59:12
  Thank you.
• 59:13
  >> Speaker 7: So, thanks for Ollama.
• 59:15
  If I took the entire corpus of your digital data, these recordings,
• 59:19
  every recording public and private, all your messages, emails, and
• 59:24
  I threw $10 million at compute and I made a model of you and then I benchmarked
• 59:29
  both of you, do you think you could still outperform your model?
• 59:34
  And bonus question, what would you ask yourself?
• 59:38
  >> Joe Lonsdale: I think there were certain tasks at which the model would
• 59:41
  outperform me.
• 59:42
  It'd probably be a lot more eloquent in knowing,
• 59:44
  having all the context of things I was thinking about and saying them well.
• 59:47
  So, there's if I want to just sound impressive at quoting things or
• 59:50
  saying things I've said before.
• 59:51
  It would outperform me if I wanted to write a new piece.
• 59:55
  I just wrote a piece on this AI services wave I've been talking to you guys about.
• 59:59
  It's on my mind.
• 1:00:00
  You can go on our site.
• 1:00:01
  We published it a month or so ago.
• 1:00:03
  And like, I don't think the AI could have written that piece, but
• 1:00:06
  now that I've written it, maybe it does.
• 1:00:08
  Maybe in some ways it's more eloquent about it.
• 1:00:10
  And that's where we are right now.
• 1:00:11
  Because it has the ability to do all these things and
• 1:00:13
  have all these things in its mind at once.
• 1:00:15
  But, but, but for new creativity.
• 1:00:17
  We're not there yet.
• 1:00:19
  >> Jon Hartley: All right, next question.
• 1:00:20
  Would you mind using the microphone?
• 1:00:22
  Thank you.
• 1:00:23
  We just need you to speak into it just because we're recording it, and
• 1:00:27
  it feeds into the video too.
• 1:00:28
  >> Speaker 10: Sure.
• 1:00:29
  So my question is, you have interesting political views and based on that,
• 1:00:34
  do you think that the government should go towards the direction of AGI building
• 1:00:40
  artificial general intelligence, or should it be solely a private sector thing?
• 1:00:46
  And if government has that, so how do you envision this?
• 1:00:51
  >> Joe Lonsdale: So right now, in the US, as I explained earlier,
• 1:00:53
  the government is run mostly by idiots.
• 1:00:55
  And so that'd be very hard.
• 1:00:58
  There are some smart people in the government, but like SpaceX for example,
• 1:01:03
  there's, there's like no chance they could have ever built even anything even close.
• 1:01:08
  Palantir.
• 1:01:09
  No chance anything even close the way it works right now.
• 1:01:11
  And so, I think asking if government should do it itself,
• 1:01:14
  I think you don't understand where government, what it is today.
• 1:01:16
  Maybe you have a model of government that comes from the 1950s, but
• 1:01:19
  that's not where we are.
• 1:01:20
  We'd have to, we'd be living in a completely different civilization if
• 1:01:23
  the government actually had the capability.
• 1:01:25
  And then at that point I'd be able to answer differently.
• 1:01:28
  Maybe if somehow there's some extraordinary cultural merit,
• 1:01:31
  somehow was in our government that made it deserve to do these things,
• 1:01:35
  I'd be very open to learning about that civilization.
• 1:01:38
  But we live in a civilization where it's like, it's not like a little bit away or
• 1:01:42
  a lot away, it's just like infinitely away from doing that.
• 1:01:44
  And so I think that's a joke, unfortunately, and
• 1:01:46
  with respect, it's just not how government works in America.
• 1:01:49
  And it probably should not try to do these things because it will end up just
• 1:01:53
  spending lots and lots of money on cronyism and waste and silly stuff.
• 1:01:59
  >> Jon Hartley: All right, second last question here.
• 1:02:03
  >> Speaker 11: Thank you for being here.
• 1:02:04
  I'm the dean of the business school at Florida Atlantic University.
• 1:02:07
  We have 9,300 students in the business school alone.
• 1:02:10
  >> Joe Lonsdale: Cool.
• 1:02:11
  >> Speaker 11: I've hired some really great people.
• 1:02:12
  You hired one that I was trying to get you hired at Austin.
• 1:02:15
  What advice would you give me in the practical world?
• 1:02:17
  I can't start over.
• 1:02:19
  How do I handle those 9,300 students and the 150 or
• 1:02:23
  so full time faculty that I've got?
• 1:02:25
  What do I do to improve that the best possible way?
• 1:02:28
  >> Joe Lonsdale: That's cool.
• 1:02:29
  Well, you know, thank you for managing something that important.
• 1:02:33
  I would say you should probably have more exercises where you force people to
• 1:02:37
  engage with debates and controversial ideas and different perspectives and
• 1:02:42
  to learn how to steal me on the other side and learn how to be part of conversations
• 1:02:47
  and thought pieces around this stuff that they're not exposed to enough
• 1:02:51
  about how the world actually works and about how people like Elon and
• 1:02:56
  others view the world and what the great debates are of our time.
• 1:03:00
  And I think a lot of these schools, I think one of the highest ends for
• 1:03:03
  professors is not to be controversial and not to engage in these things.
• 1:03:06
  And I think that's exactly the opposite.
• 1:03:08
  I think they should actually be forced to expose these things.
• 1:03:11
  And I think having these debates about uncomfortable topics is actually makes
• 1:03:16
  people grow and be a lot stronger.
• 1:03:18
  So, it's something I think about.
• 1:03:20
  >> Jon Hartley: All right, our last question.
• 1:03:22
  >> Speaker 12: I'll go with a question first.
• 1:03:23
  Let's say if I want to take my manual heavy business to the next level,
• 1:03:28
  leveraging AI, what are the steps do I take?
• 1:03:31
  Like, do I go get computer science at MIT or
• 1:03:33
  like, is there like a breakdown of the steps you should take?
• 1:03:38
  And I mean the staffing industry, I run a very small boutique domestic
• 1:03:43
  staffing firm and as you like, very similar to what you said,
• 1:03:48
  there's not many smart people in the staffing world and
• 1:03:52
  people are still from the 70s, like using handwritten letters.
• 1:03:58
  So that's pretty much where.
• 1:03:59
  >> Joe Lonsdale: The human touch has a lot of, has a lot of good things about it.
• 1:04:03
  So, there's definitely, like I was saying earlier though, there's wisdom
• 1:04:06
  where people are going to really want those letters and notes and human touch.
• 1:04:09
  So, I don't think those are going away fully.
• 1:04:11
  If you're not technical yourself,
• 1:04:12
  it's probably not obviously good to start over and try to go become technical.
• 1:04:15
  I think you want to find other people who are technical and
• 1:04:18
  listen in any industrial wave like this, there's going to be some people who
• 1:04:21
  are trying to build new companies entirely, and then there's going to
• 1:04:24
  be other companies trying to arm you and trying to give you things.
• 1:04:26
  And there's a lot of companies out there right now trying to give you software,
• 1:04:29
  trying to arm you, trying to allow you.
• 1:04:31
  So I think experimenting with the most advanced new AI platforms out there,
• 1:04:35
  I think finding a smart technical person, helping them help you experiment,
• 1:04:39
  having them do tests, is very worthwhile.
• 1:04:41
  And you may actually find there's ways to make it more efficient.
• 1:04:43
  So I don't think you have to build something newly yourself.
• 1:04:46
  I think you can use what's there, and
• 1:04:47
  you can still probably do some cool things with it.
• 1:04:49
  Thanks.
• 1:04:50
  >> Jon Hartley: Joe, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:04:52
  Let's give Joe another round of applause here.