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Das Warten hat ein Ende. Get over here! Mortal Kombat 2.
Johnny Cage, du wurdest für den Kampf auserwählt. Der Scheiß hat nichts mit mir zu tun, ich bin Schauspieler.
Das weltweite Phänomen kehrt endlich zurück in die Kinos.
Das ist ein Krieg um das Schicksal eurer Welt.
Und bringt die legendären Charaktere zurück auf die Leinwand. Es ist Zeit, der Held zu werden, zu dem du auserkoren wurdest. Mortal Kombat 2.
Böse! Ab 7.
Mai im Kino.
It's been a minute.
It's good to be here.
Lots of shit going down.
I love the new place.
Thank you. Thank you. I've been excited to show it to you.
It's awesome. It's making me thirsty for a drink, but it's too early.
Well, hey, we got plenty to dive into if you change your mind.
All right. Maybe we'll grab a cigar later and shoot some stuff. That'd be fun. Cool.
We'll blow some shit up after this.
Love it.
But, well, man, we— you texted me, shit, it feels like maybe 6 months ago, but we were talking about— you had texted me an article or a tweet or something about Christians being persecuted in Nigeria.
Yeah.
And you, I believe, invested in a company down there to kind of combat that a little bit. So I was like, hey, come on.
A lot, a lot of, a lot of stuff to go over. I mean, listen, there's— I think there's like two things we all have to battle for, for great Americans, and we believe in Western civilization. One is we gotta stop the commies, and two is you gotta stop the radical Islamists. I think, I think those are forces of evil. All around the world. Yeah, you know, and it doesn't mean whatever moderate left— I don't mind disagree with them, they're not evil. Maybe there's some moderate Muslims I think are good people I work with, but these extremists, man. And, and by the way, even if we solve everything in the Middle East, let's just take it as— let's just pretend everything goes perfectly and we solve so many of the problems. They're obviously not going to solve it all, but let's say you solve a bunch of it. Africa is going to be a battleground for this nonsense for sure for the rest of our lives.
Yeah.
And we— and, and man, it is just nasty. Like, you see what they do to the Christians They're— they'll, they'll like, they'll like take 70 of them into a church and they'll slaughter in the church and they'll rape and they'll pillage and they'll kidnap schoolgirls. And it's just on and on and on. Thousands being murdered, very little pushback. Let's, let's stop these bad guys.
Fucking crazy, man. I pulled some stats up, uh, while you're down here getting pictures. And, uh, yeah, it said 388 million persecuted Christians worldwide, 4,849 murdered for their faith. In— that's in 2026. 72%, uh, 72% of those murders were in Nigeria alone. 163 worshipers abducted from 2 churches in January of 2026. Shit is definitely popping off there. HVC led $11.8 million round investment in Terra Industries. What is Terra Industries?
Yeah, these guys have raised tens of millions more since I backed them because once we back them, it allows a lot of people like to get involved. Listen, it's two young, talented Nigerian men. One of them was a physics Olympiad. One of them had already built another company in his early 20s that was successful. And they're building— they're building a defense prime for Africa. And obviously, you know, after Palantir, I built a couple other big defense companies here. I know this space.
A few. Just a few.
I appreciate you interviewing them. There's some great men. I want them to get credit, not me. I try to help them out. And you know, it's like Africa needs, needs stuff too. And it's gonna partner with a bunch of our stuff. And listen, these are really talented young men. They were already just trying to get going on it. We thought they deserved some resources and some help and, and let, and there's some partnership. Like I think, I think it's good for us to be partners with the best and the brightest there who, who are on the side of the good guys.
So how did this pop on your radar?
You know, we, we see, we see a lot of things going on. I, I have some old friends, You know, one of my interns built a couple of big companies in Nigeria who's from actually a big Christian family there who's a prominent guy, really, really good guy. We have others who kind of track and try to talk to the Physics Olympiad winners around the world and see what they're doing. So there's lots of different ways that you kind of see this from a couple different sources. You see it's real and then you send people over and get engaged, you know?
Did you, I mean, so with Terra, did you found it? Did you co-found it?
This one, we were the first big institutional investor. So we took a big minority stake in the company early. I think it was about a $40 million valuation. We put, you know, we bought a quarter of the company or give or take. And then it since has raised, you know, $20, $30 million more, closed some really big contracts. And the idea is like, you know, we know a lot about this industry. Let's help them. Let's help them scale it up around Africa, have multiple spots, multiple governments they're working with. Let's have, there's certain things they're gonna be the best at. There's certain things America has companies that are gonna be the best at. Let's make sure we partner and help them. So if they're building, for example, remote-controlled cars that are already working, which they are, if they wanna make those things autonomous, maybe you partner with someone like Overland, right? There's also all sorts of ways you can help 'em with our stuff as well.
Where are they based out of?
They're based out of a city, a suburb of Lagos in Nigeria to start with, but then they also have stuff they're doing around East Africa as well. Now they're doing multiple places where they're manufacturing.
So what else are they doing? And how does this tie into persecution of Christians?
Well, I mean, you have to be able to monitor things going on. You got to build sentry towers, you got to build sentry drones, you got to be able to build defense drones, you got to be able to build, you know, cars and other things that can drive around autonomously and watch and have guns on them. So you basically need to be able to arm these people cheaply and affordably with a way to see when the bad guys are coming and a way to fight back and a way to deter the bad guys. And so, you know, it's not just that, it's infrastructure as well that's being attacked by these crazy people. You got to defend for the country. You got to be able to defend all sorts of different kind of assets over there. But you want, and you want stuff that can help these innocent places defend themselves. Right now they don't have any advanced modern military, you know?
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm aware. So do you know a little, do you have a little more context of what's going on on the ground there? Why are they persecuting Christians? Who's defending them.
Well, this ties into the war that we're fighting right now in the Middle East. Let's be clear, right? This is— this ties very closely into it, is you have these basically crazy forces around the world that are funding Islamic jihadi terror, right? And that does unfortunately— like, how the extreme Islamists view things is that it's their job for them to dominate and for every— everyone who's not Muslim to have to, to have to basically, like, you know, either, you know, submit or convert or pay a tax and, and have Muslim win. And so Nigeria is a country in Africa that's close to 50/50, right? Slightly more Muslims than Christians. So it's a very obvious, very big target for these same jihadis in Iran who are sending out money to do bad things. It's the same types of groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, that's, you know, same ones that run CARE in the US and try to pretend that they're nice guys when they're not. Those are the same types of people who will go after this and say, this is a chance for us to assert our Islamist dominance. And so it's a very big target to make sure the Christians lose and the Muslims win for them in that country.
What are they doing to the Christians?
Over there. They're intimidating them. They're trying to scare them into converting. They're trying to kill them when they're in there. They're trying to take their woman. They're trying to basically horrible things, you know.
I mean, in Syria, I think they were crucifying them.
It's hard for me to—
yeah, or if that was, if that was Nigeria.
All over, there's all over the Middle East they've done this. I mean, listen, Lebanon— let's stepping back for a second— Lebanon was a very safe Christian-dominated country, right? Like, this is like, like, like Lebanon was one of the success stories still for Christians in the Middle East. It was a relatively peaceful place overall. Uh, the constitution built in where it was shared power between kind of moderate, uh, you know, Sunnis and Maronites and others. And what happened with Iran in the '80s when they started just to fund all this kind of nonsense is they funded Hezbollah and they went in and they basically destroyed Lebanon as a safe place for people to live. And they made it a horrible broken country and they tortured people and they killed people there. They actually not only tortured the people there, we had a CIA chief who was there in the '80s under Reagan, uh, and they caught him and they kept him alive for months, skinning him alive, torturing him in every possible way to get his information. And so people say Trump's like convinced to do this recently. Trump saw that happen then. By the way, you see that happen to the CIA chief of America, tortured for months to get all the information, like, do you want to let those guys get away with that?
I wouldn't want to let those guys get away with that.
When did this happen?
This is the '80s under Reagan.
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
But this is like, so this is why it's such a big deal right now what's happening is because for the first time, like that was one of the things that fell when Iran first started projecting its power after taking over, right, in the late '70s when the crazies came in and slaughtered people and tortured people and took over and started kind of spreading their nastiness. They spread it to Africa, of course, and they have lots of things there. But Lebanon was like the first really kind of like pretty healthy Christian, like, part modern country to fall to this nonsense. And we may be within a month or two of actually cleaning out Hezbollah and taking it back, which is awesome.
Interesting. Interesting. So let me give you an introduction here real quick before we get into all the geopolitical shit that's going on in the world. So Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies. After Palantir founded Adipar, invested or co-founded multiple U.S. unicorns, billion-dollar companies— Epirus, Palantir, Anduril, Illumio. Syntego, Saronic, Ugabyte, Asana. Co-founding Cicero, organizing dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies. Co-founder and managing partner of 8VC, venture capital firm that pushes for policies that encourage innovation. Advisor to leading political figures, advocates for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand, solve our biggest Challenges. Welcome back.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
You know, we got a, uh, Patreon. They're the reason I get to sit with you here today, and so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Tim: It is being reported that the current data center infrastructure investment, roughly $650 billion, will last only 3 years, after which GPUs can be severely degraded and will need to be replaced. Traditional infrastructure investments like roads, railroads, and high voltage, which can last for 30 to 50 years with less of an investment. Is this level of maintenance for data centers feasible?
I don't think they're totally useless after 3 years. I think the situation, though, is that there's so much better stuff based on the new technology that you're going to want some new stuff for certain workflows. And listen, this is the most dynamic sector now of the US economy. There's trillions of dollars going into it. There are so many smart people from around the world figuring out what new chip designs, what new data center designs, how do you use AI to do every part of it better? How do you do the energy better? I'm getting pitches left and right and people, you know, top guys around Elon, top guys around Jensen, all these top guys spending so much money on this. I'm not worried they're not going to figure it out. I think, I think it's a, it's a great space that we are spending trillions of dollars. It's going to drive America to the future. Super interested to talk about AI, but these guys are figuring out the infrastructure. It's going the right way.
Well, how are they going to power all this stuff?
I mean, listen, like, I have friends who are like getting the next natural gas turbines that were supposed to go to Turkey and they're rerouting them and spending a bunch of money to put them in Texas. Right. And doing it that way. We have all sorts of LNG massively coming online. We have all sorts of new solar. We have, you know, billions of dollars of batteries coming online to make solar work better. I think it's all of the above. I was with Joe Kraft yesterday when we had a political figure over who owns a bunch of coal. I mean, listen, there's every— the solution is all of the above, right? The solution is every possible energy you can get. It's going to keep energy prices, you know, healthy for a while, but it's also going to create and is creating massive investments into energy to make it work. Which you look at China, by the way, China has now about, I think, 3 times the power we have. Starting with 1999, we're about equal. We were way ahead of them, obviously, in the '80s. I think that's, that's one advantage they have is they've put more of their resources into infrastructure.
We're going to need to put more resources into infrastructure. I think a lot of the, the how well our working class does is going to be tied in part to how much we can build more cheap energy for everyone and bring prices down for everyone. So this is going to be a big fight.
Well, I mean, do you know where we're at with the nuclear stuff?
There's so many great companies going as fast as they can now.
There's a shit ton of good companies.
NRC.
Taylor's got Valor.
Valor. Valor.
Jay, you just started that company, LIS, Laser Enriched Uranium.
Commonwealth Fusion's building their first fusion plants. They're spending billions of dollars on it. And it's very, very, you know, credible now how that fusion part's getting better. The late 2030s is going to be huge. The solar is getting more efficient. There's massive new plants there with batteries. Zach Dell's putting in billions of dollars of batteries in Texas grid to make it work better and make alternatives there work better. I think, you know, coal itself is getting more efficient even though they're not supposed to talk about it. Like, I think every Everyone's doing it.
I can't believe we're fucking talking about coal.
I mean, well, I just was with Joe last night, this guy who's doing a bunch of it. But like, there's every— I think every— I think every level is good. Now, listen, fusion and fission, really fission has been held back by stupid regulation and kind of got pushed 30, 40 years behind where it would be. I think we're going to catch up. We're going to do a massive amount of it. I think all of this stuff is good.
You think policy is coming around for nuclear?
It really is. It really is. Like, even like the Texas legislature is putting in like bonuses if someone gets a small, you know, plant done there. The NRC is now staffed by people who are no longer completely— I think we've for the first time in 40 years started approving— maybe 50 years, by the way, I think we started approving new designs again. It's— we're actually turning it back on. It's like— it's like we went through this crazy deindustrialization period in the US from 1971 to like 2023 or whatever. And something about like Trump revolution, but also something about AI and how AI could be used to unlock productivity growth, it's like we're back. Like, like America is now growing again. We're now fixing things again. It's— this is an optimistic time. Our enemies should all be really scared. Like, we are clearly going to be dominant. This is now the American century again if we keep it up.
Hope you're right. Hope you're right, man. Lots of shit going on in the world right now.
Oh yeah.
Iran, China's making moves on Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine still going on. We've heard Maduro out, Cuba's in a fucking crisis. I love it.
I love it. It's like, it's like leadership, man. Come on, you guys are on the run.
Where are we? Where do you want to start?
I mean, the Americas. Let's just say this is— I mean, I mean, I love what we did in Venezuela. This is awesome.
This is—
the guy's clearly a criminal. And here's, John, here's what people don't get. This is really important. When you have a place like Venezuela that gets taken over by these cartels and these socialists and communists and just, just bad influences is lots of problems for the US. First of all, they're like allied with our adversaries. They're working with Hezbollah and others to create weapons with them. They're allying with China for energy. They're helping Russia. But then second of all, they're spreading— it's like a virus. They're spreading their ideology all around the rest of Latin America, all around the rest of the world. And so, so like when you— I was with the conservative president of Colombia, El Duque, who was the guy before this guy. And there were protesters coming into his country, and they were coming from Chile where they had just succeeded and just like worked, you know, to temporarily turn Chile left. Thank goodness we turned it back, but they turned it very left, and they were funded by Venezuela. They were funded— they had Cuban people involved, and they had Russian technology. It's like these fuckers in Russia still think it's the Soviet Union or something, and they're still causing messes around the world.
And, and you know why? Because if, if they succeed and they make these things go hard left, like, it's like having bad guys in charge. Who the bad guy is going to partner with and like plunder with? They're going to work with the other bad guys.
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So, so it really— and I know some people, oh, it's too simple, you're in preschool. No, it really is. There's like the good guys and the bad guys, and you want the bad guys to lose. You don't want the far-left authoritarian rapists, like crazy people, to take over. And so Trump actually using a little bit of our authority, a little bit of our strength, a little bit of our, frankly, total dominance, and going in and saying, no, we're not going to allow a crazy bad guy spreading evil, to be in— spreading crime, to be in charge of this place, 3-hour flight from, from the South Coast. Thank goodness. Thank goodness there's a man in charge.
I mean, why— I mean, Mexico is— we've been talking about Mexico for nonstop.
It's complicated. Yeah.
Why haven't we done anything there?
Yeah, well, I think we have done a little bit there. I would have done a lot more there. You know, my wife actually researched, uh, a lot of the rules for, for, for Texas, what we could do. And we helped sponsor something that got the governor to declare an invasion back when Biden was president. He's a good guy, but he didn't end up acting more than declaring the invasion. If I was me and I was governor, I probably would have bombed a few fentanyl plants, you know, because—
I mean, dude, that's our border. Yeah.
If you put a fentanyl plant next to my border, I'd blow it up. These guys are scared of Trump right now. He's definitely taking some strong actions. You know, I think we saw Was it Puerto Vallarta where they attacked the Costco and the airport after their leader got killed? I think there's some joint operations right now to put a lot of pressure on the cartels. I think the cartels are laying much lower. A lot of the border crossings were cartels. If you look at the amounts under Biden, it was insane. I think we cut it off in this administration pretty dramatically. So the cartel funding has gone way down because they're not getting paid to get people across the border right now. And I think they're very scared of the fentanyl stuff. And so, so, so right now we're I think we're very busy, but we are doing a lot there. I think there's a lot more we could do there to go after the cartels. And that's— I bet we'll see that. Yeah, I think—
I know there's a lot more we could be doing. One thing that I've just been diving in— because we didn't hear anything about Venezuela forever, and then all of a sudden it popped and fucking yanking him out.
I love it.
And, you know, but I've just been curious, like, why are we going there instead of Mexico? I mean, you're talking about a 3-hour flight from Venezuela to the US. Mexico's right at our border. Have you heard about the— and the answer that I keep getting is voting fraud, the voting fraud.
I've heard a lot of rumors, I've heard a lot of rumors about that, and I believe that there was something they were involved with. I think the voting fraud could have been a part of it. But listen, these guys—
do you understand what I mean? I haven't met anybody that can articulate how the voting fraud is happening through the Smartmatic machines that, that are affiliated with Venezuela.
I understand in theory how they could have— how they could have done something illegal with them and been involved. And I think having a state actor helping makes it a lot easier to, to create a lot of false records and to, and to do a lot of sketchy work. Whether that was true or not, I just— I have to be honest, I don't know enough to know. I could definitely see it being true. I guess the thing I'd say, Sean, is that there's enough other reasons why Venezuela is something where we could act right away, where we could stop them from doing more deals with the Chinese. The Chinese delegation was there when we did it. Like, there was big deals going down. With our adversaries right off our coast. And we had caught them sponsoring lots of horrible things around the Americas and working with a lot of other kind of bad forces. So I think, I think the Venezuela-Cuba access then helps us put pressure on Mexico to take more aggressive action there and makes it easier for us to be successful because it turns off a lot of the funding for a lot of the worst elements.
So what's, what's going on in Cuba? You familiar with that?
Yeah, we had all those funny, crazy far-left idiots there the last few, last a couple of weeks ago, if you saw that at all. It's like these people must just hate America and hate the West so much. So like, it's just crazy who go there and go there and try to pump it up. Such a failed country. It's been about a year of like real extreme problems and real extreme suffering there. It's not clear to me like what the exact trigger is going to be. But these, these people are, are the regime is in a huge amount of trouble.
I mean, their infrastructure is falling apart right now.
It has been for decades, but it's gotten really, really bad. I mean, I mean, they're just so desperately poor and everyone's like, oh, the far left's like, oh, it's because you block them off. They trade with the rest of the world, by the way. They're just— they just don't have property rights and they don't have the incentive for anyone to invest. And, you know, I think a lot of smart people, of course, have fled because why would you want to live in a place where people are making $20 a day and everyone's forced to prostitute themselves? And if you do work really hard, you just get the attention of the government guys who steal it from you, right? This, by the way, this is like human history for 10,000 years is anyone who works really hard and build something, if he can't defend it, it just gets taken away by the thugs in charge.
This sounds like California.
But that's— I mean, that's why we were so miserably poor as a species for thousands and thousands of years. There were no property rights. Like, the Enlightenment in the West is this really important thing we forget to teach kids about. Like, the Enlightenment that, like, led to understanding of these things, led to understanding of why natural rights was so important. And then the battles to get those natural rights and to put You know, you know, John Locke, like life, liberty, and property in place. Like, that is, that is core to everything. That's why we have all the nice things we have. And, and that, and that Cuba doesn't have that, right? So it's, it's a miserable place. And if we can get it back in the right direction, that'd be so good for, for them and for the world. And, you know, I think Secretary Rubio, really passionate about this, and I think he's pretty clear he has a plan. And I think after Venezuela, this is clearly, it's going to be something that we work on. I don't know how we do it, but I think it's a great thing to do in the next year.
Interesting, interesting.
Iran.
Yeah, I'm against this.
You're against— you're against doing anything in Iran.
I am.
I want to— I want to— I want to talk to you about this. So let's— let's do the counterfactual. So, so you agree the U.S. Navy was created to fight the— to back against jihadis in the 1780s? Like, they've been a problem for 200 years, right? First of all. Okay, first of all, so I mean, the reason we created the U.S. Navy was because Basically, like, you had, uh, you had Islamic forces around the Mediterranean that had been kidnapping, uh, originally, you know, tens of millions of Europeans. Basically, there were millions of European women who were, who were sex slaves to these people over, over several hundred years. This had been a thing they'd always done since the foundation of Islam. It's in the Quran. You're allowed to do it to non-Muslim women. And when our ambassador goes and says, listen, we're, we're a new independent country, we're not fighting with you, we have nothing to do with this, we're just having trading ships there, Why are you taking our sailors? Like, we have nothing to do with you. By the way, there's no Israel, there's none of that fucking shit. And you know what they say?
They say, it's our right as a superior group. We're the Muslims and we're going to take them. It's all right because you're, you're not, you're not, you're not Muslim. And so we have a right to take you and to take what we want. And that, that, and that is what our holy book tells us. Like, this is, this is, and this is this conversation. So you look at any American founder, the first 30, 40 years of this country, They're like, these guys are fucking crazy. It's a terrible— it's a terrible thing. And we actually literally created the Navy and we went and we fought back and we fucking bombed their cities. We attacked their cities. We went after the— we went after the Barbary pirates. We went after the core empires there that were doing this to us and beat the shit out of them. And it was the right thing to do because they were stealing thousands of our soldiers or thousands of our sailors. You can't let them get away with that, right? So first of all, it was right to do that. I'd assume you'd say based on what I said, like 200 years ago, obviously, right?
And so, so listen today what it is. So you get this, you get, you get a relatively modern country like conquered and raped by this crazy theocracy. Same exact type of guys as 200 years ago. These are, these are, these are guys that are, that are taking what they want, raping, killing. I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure you've seen Joe.
You don't have to tell me about how you agree they're evil.
Okay, so you agree they're evil.
So more of my fucking friends than probably anybody else.
Okay, so, so, so give that They fucking hung dudes off bridges. They're doing it and they're spreading their— they're spreading their money to Venezuela. We caught them building things there. We caught them building things all around Africa. Obviously, they destroyed the Christian country of Lebanon. They're doing all sorts of other bad stuff. Now we know, thanks to this war, by the way, we now know they were lying. They did have missiles they were building. They could go 4,000 kilometers. So they're going to have basically crazy jihadis. We know they're building nukes at this point. They had 11 bombs they were going to have. That was their starting point in their negotiations. We have materials for 11 bombs. So Jared Whitkopf— so Jared Whitkopf is sitting there, the Secretary of State is sitting there. Being told we have 11 bombs you can't get rid of, uh, that, that's our— that's where we are. And now we now know that they could hold all of Europe hostage, and they were obviously working to make that go to the US. They obviously could go to the Eurasia. So we now know they could hold— did you really want these?
So you do nothing for 10, 20 years, you have like tons of nukes, you have missiles that can go to every Western city, and you have crazy jihadis who don't care if they die in battle as long as they could destroy their death to America pledge because they're so obsessed with it. It's not This Death to America existed long before any of this, any of this stuff in the modern age in Israel. So that's the counterfactual. 20 years from now, our kids, our children are in a world where it's the nuclear armed guys with crazy missiles, with whatever else AI and China stuff they have that they've now used. By the way, we're way ahead of them right now in a way, fucking ahead of them in AI. We are not necessarily going to be way ahead of them in 20 years. I don't know where we're going to be, but right now there's a giant gap. Like we are way ahead of them. So it's like, it's like we can move now when we're way ahead. And they can hurt us this much, or we could wait till God knows what happens when they're nuclear jihadis, they're gonna threaten anywhere in the West.
I mean, the thing is, I, I 100% agree it's like risky and dangerous and, and tough to act. It's very scary. I think it's much scarier just to let it go for 10, 20 years with these fuckers. That's my point of view.
Yeah, I mean, I just— I haven't— I've not been presented with any proof that they have those type of weapons. And I haven't, I haven't even seen proof that, uh, the whatever the missile is that they, they launched is from them.
You think, you think there's a false flag launch from Iran?
I have no fucking idea. I did not say that. No, I just said there, there hasn't been any proof. And, and it's getting hard. It's just getting hard to believe the administration. I mean, there's been a lot of bait and switches that have happened within a lot of different areas. I mean, uh, the, the For example, the interview I, I threw out yesterday was about glyphosate and all the cancer it's causing. And you know that, I mean, you're familiar with the Maha movement. It was, you know, Make America Healthy Again, and yeah, we're gonna get rid of all this shit. And then they just fucking declared a national security concern for if we don't give the, the pesticide companies immunity. Glyphosate. And they called it— yet they called it a, what, a national security, uh, concern. Well, for example, Iowa has the, the, the most cancer cases out of every state in the fucking USA. You know who uses the most glyphosate?
Yeah, obviously the corn there in Iowa.
618,000 people died of cancer last year in the U.S. Why are we giving them immunity? Anyways, that's just one example.
No, listen, I think, I think that, that's a particular one where I think there should be more open debate from the administration on it and discussion of it. I think I, I, listen, I know Brooke Rollins for a long time in the policy world. I think she's a really smart lady. She did some really impressive things fighting the left in Texas when she ran TPPF. She's now the Agriculture Secretary. That's her call. Uh, you know, I think it'd be great to— you should get her on the show. I can invite her. I know I can text her if you want. Let's see what she says. No, I'm serious.
I'm serious.
Why not? Like, I don't know. I feel like, I feel like, I feel like she'd have respect for a lot of things you do and a lot of things you've done in your service. So I think that's a fair debate. I'm not an expert on that one, but I think we should be debating it openly. And I'd love to hear the smartest people on both sides. And, and I think if they're, if they're just ignoring it when so many people believe as you do, that's not appropriate. So let's, let's engage on it. Yeah, that'd be what I'd say.
That was, that was, uh, I didn't mean to dive into that.
No, that's fair. That's fair. But you're saying you don't trust— you're saying you don't trust someone? I don't trust—
from when, when I saw the release of the Epstein files and how that got butchered and how it continues to get butchered, that shit really pissed me off, man. And then, you know, and, and, and I, I never met the guy.
I agree he was a slimeball who seemed to know everyone because he was really good at networking and meeting people and tricking them to meet him. I don't think everyone involved was like messing with kids.
Like, I don't either. Yeah, right.
So a lot of people just like—
but I think it's pretty obvious that some people involved were—
I think some people were very— at the very least, a lot of people were messing with 21 and 22-year-old girls, and I think some of them might have been underage. And I don't know because I was— I never met a good guy, and he was a bad guy. But these other people, I, I just, I just don't know. But I'm actually, I'm curious, like, what, what should they do on it to rebuild trust there? Actually, that's a, that's a tough— that's a, that's one I don't really follow at all.
What should they do to rebuild trust?
Yeah, yeah. How do we—
transparent. That's— I think that's all anybody wants is just transparency. They want to see, you know, I mean, we, we, we just— we heard it over and over again, we're going to go after these people. We haven't seen—
we've heard that, that I agree with you, fraud.
We haven't heard fuck all about that.
I agree. Why is the DOJ right now and the FBI are both really hurting the reputation of this administration because they're not going after and getting enough arrests right now and getting enough cases. I think that, I think that is 100% true. I, I, listen, I was talking to our friends there who are focused on fraud. There's a ton of fraud. We're helping them find— this is my— obsessed with this issue. I think there's way more fraud in this country than anyone realizes. We have to start making more charges and arrests. It's like, it's like way too slow. Like someone— and I don't know, they can't find the right people to run it. It's embarrassing. That part pisses me off.
Yeah. So anyways, it's just all these things that have happened that I'm just— I've lost a lot of trust.
And you shouldn't trust— you shouldn't trust the bad guys running Iran either, though. You also agree?
I don't trust the bad guys running Iran. And I don't— I don't necessarily think I would be against the war in Iran if they presented it to you differently, presented it to me in a different way. But, you know, like all the stuff you're saying, yes, it's true. Yes, it's my fucking friends that died over there. I saw it. They're my friends. I don't want to send my fucking kid back over there to die for any of this shit. I mean, we spent over 20 fucking years.
Yeah. Well, I think the way Afghanistan was run was just a travesty. We wasted trillions of dollars and everyone should be pissed off about it. And so I think that has created distrust that is fair to exist. There should be distrust after we wasted all our lives and all this money with not real clear aims. I 100% agree with that perspective. I, you know, I actually— so I have some mentors who ran British intelligence 20, 30 years ago. And I know these guys still pretty well because I'm always with Palantir. We got to know a bunch of them. They thought we were kind of like an Aboriginal species there visiting Silicon Valley versus like MI6, right? These guys, these guys are cool. And a couple of them have told me that they thought that a lot of the stuff that got us to go into Iraq because we kind of already wanted to go into Iraq, obviously, but they thought some of the stuff some of the evidence, like including from Chalabi, who was an Iranian spy, like purposely came from Iran even at that time. And what's interesting is even at that time, in my understanding, I went back and looked at it like the— a lot of the top voices out of like our ally Israel were saying Iran's the big problem, not Iraq.
So a lot of people are saying, oh, we fought Iraq for Israel. I don't think that's the case. I think in that particular instance, like Iran was very clever in getting us to focus more on Iraq. And even back then, I think they were the bad guys. Interesting. For what it's worth, that's, you know, I think they're clearly the worst and I'm very happy a lot of them are dead. But I 100% understand where you're coming from, not wanting to trust and not wanting to put more people over there.
Do you think we're fighting Iran for our own benefit, or do you think we're fighting Iran for Israel's benefit?
I think it's definitely our own benefit. I think, I think this is— by the way, China is like freaking pissed. You know, China sent several billion dollars of stuff with cargo planes to Iran that they were in the process of setting up to help defend them. This is their proxy ally. Like, their allies are Russia and Iran. They want Iran to exist and be able to cause trouble to, like, distract us and force us to split our forces if we ever have to deal with anything that might want to do this. Is like a— this is like a chess game where they're trying to build this ally and we just smash their ally. And by the way, you know, the strongest military in the world is right now. It's us. And because we're basically deploying all this new technology and all this new AI in ways that no one else is, we're learning how to make interceptors way cheaper. We're learning how to just coordinate all these things we never would have learned before. China has no idea how to do this stuff. Like I'm not saying you want to fight wars to get better, but this makes us so much stronger to smash their proxy, to smash their stuff and to learn how to use all this technology like this makes them a lot harder to challenge us for the next—
You want to talk about how AI is— Yeah, we're using over there.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, obviously from what I, from what I can say, and listen, I don't have my full clearances at this point anymore either, but I have a lot of friends on, on both sides. And, you know, we developed a lot of the targeting stuff at Palantir back in the day. You know, combined with AI, basically. I mean, just think about it for sake of argument. We know Israel and America both have some of the best hackers. And so they're— let's say you hacked into the street cameras, let's say you hacked into, you know, logistics in the country and who was sending what, where, like what payments are happening, what, you know, what, what, what, you know, just all sorts of things you basically can view. Look at emails, look where everyone is. It's just, it's so much information. How would a person look at these millions of pieces of data and figure out what's going on. AI is really, really good at that. So Palantir and a system like that will create what's called the ontology. Like, okay, like the concepts, the frameworks, here's the things we care about, here's how they can possibly relate to each other.
And then you take that ontology, you take that structure of how to think about things, and you overlay like just insane amounts of information we're able to get in different ways through human intelligence, through signal intelligence, through hacking. And then all of a sudden it's able to optimize and say like, here's this base you didn't know about storing all these munitions. Here's this key part of the command center. Here's this thing over here, 300 miles outside of Tehran. You never would have thought about this, like a backup for, for the supply for this key part of their missile launchers, things like that. And all of a sudden, like, so when, when, when our— when, when, when Israel in the first start of the war, like, sends 200 planes as a surprise attack and hits— they hit 500 targets in the first 20 minutes. Those targets were optimized between the two countries. And here's the things that we know we need to get rid of if we want to stop them from causing us more problems. More problems. So I mean, it's just really, really powerful how smart what we could do is, you know, that we couldn't do before.
Interesting. What else should we talk about that's going on over there?
Over there?
Yeah.
You know, it's, uh, worries about you.
What are you worried about with the Strait of Hormuz? You worried about that at all?
And this, you know, it's, it's, this, this is a tough one. I, I am worried. Listen, I think this is one of those things that could take a few weeks and it could take a few months. And it's really, really hard to stop asymmetric attacks. Right. Because I mean, I mean, so, so, so the Iranian— and listen, this is, this is, this is, this is one step removed. I don't have the exact information, but you have these mountains that they're firing out of. Right. And it's amazing because as far as we could tell, so, so what'll happen is they have railroads underground that are way under the granite and they'll take— they have tons of missiles there. It's not about how many missiles they have. It's about how many launchers. And they have launchers, and the launcher will come out and it'll go out the railroad to an opening, like a cave, it'll fire, and then it'll hurry back in, and we'll see where it fired from, and you could like destroy that so they can never use that again for a long time without spending, you know, months digging out, 'cause you just bomb the hell out of it.
But then they just go out another cave and another cave, and these guys have apparently built like hundreds of these caves. It's actually impressive.
Wow.
Right? It's like they've been preparing for 20, 30 years for this. And so they have these mountains that they're firing out of, and then you have, all along the Strait of Hormuz, you can, you can hide drones, right? You can hide all sorts of things in like hundreds of locations that each time it's a new attack, a new location. So it could take a while to find all of it, right? This is not— it's not— it's not easy. And it's not— listen, it's especially bad for Europe who turned off their— who turned off their energy economy. You want to talk about conspiracies, man? Like, Europe let Gazprom and Russia fund the green movement and turn off all their goddamn energy. And that's why they're in so much pain right now from this. You know, that's a true conspiracy, by the way. 100%. We, we found that it was a ton of Russia money that created the strength of the Green Parties all around Europe, and their main thing was turning off all their energy.
No shit.
100%. 100%. Like, Russia's not dumb. This is great for them, right? It's great for the Middle East too. The Green Parties are useful idiots, man.
Does it bother you that we're low on munitions?
There are some munitions we're not low on, and there's some interceptor things that we could use a lot more of. Listen, I think America is going to be in a lot better position after experiencing this. So in one of our companies called Chaos has by far the best radar that they're monetizing. But the guy running it, he helped build Epirus as well, the EMP company. He's figured out how to do $5,000 interceptors now.
What?
He just proved it. He just proved it. Did a bunch of things last month. We're going to make thousands of them this year. We're going to make hopefully hundreds of thousands next year. I mean, America is going to be so strong coming out of this because we're learning and we're iterating. We're getting better. And it definitely bothers me that we had to waste like millions of dollars per shot on some stupid interceptors. That was dumb. But that's because the primes are idiots. We're just going to fix it for them. Totally honestly, you know, right on. It's just— let's just make it better.
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They're, they're in shock. They're in shock. And there's, there's things released internally that said, you know what, it turns out America is a lot stronger than we realize, but they just have to want to use their strength. And their main objective with us is to make us not want to use our strength. And how do you make America not want to use our strength? There's, there's a few things. One is you fund the far left. You make fun of people who hate America. Those— that, that group that's down in Cuba right now saying how great Cuba is, how bad America is, the one hotel that has light in the whole goddamn country, those people are funded by China. It's the wife of the guy who's, who's been one of the main funders of everything, is the guy who's hiding out in Shanghai. So you have all sorts of Chinese money trying to make us hate ourselves. You have all sorts of, you know, I'm sure they love it when we, when we fight with ourselves in two extreme ways on the right. I think it's totally legit to push back on the war. I respect that.
I admire that. But there's people who there's people who are actually like pushing back on, on even America like being, being a world leader and saying we have to share power with China, like Tucker said to that Chinese spy the other day, you know, a few weeks ago on, on the podcast. Like, there's a lot of guys should be sharing any power. Yeah, exactly. I know you're not, you're not— he's, he's lost it. I think he's lost it. He's too extreme against us. And, and so China wants— and you know what they have? They have what's called cognitive warfare. They're very smart about this. They have land, sea, air, cyber. Cognitive is a fifth branch. And they, and they use all sorts of tactics. They capture whatever data they can. Same way we're capturing data to attack Iran and figure out targets. They're capturing data on everything and everyone going on in the country, building profiles and trying to figure out what do they do, what do they try, what do they push to make people not love America, to make people not want America to be free and have property rights. Because they know that is how that we— because it's the only way they're going to— they're going to get us at the end of the day.
If they, they have, uh, they've beefed up presence off the coast of Taiwan.
Oh, 100. But they've continued to do that for a long time. That's right.
But it's more now since the Iran stuff kicked off, correct? Am I off on this?
I think, I think, I think, I think they— I think even before the Iran kicked off, I saw they were putting a bunch of ships and doing exercises all around the island. I shouldn't, I shouldn't say. I'm supposed to go visit briefly in a little bit. It gets a little scary flying on your plane over the Chinese warships. Yeah, like, like, Sean, maybe don't hear the episode until after I land.
Right on. We'll push it.
No, I'm just kidding.
But, uh, I mean, how are these chip fabs going in Arizona?
You know, I think some parts, uh, worked pretty well. I think there's some parts culturally where it's, it's harder for some of the employees to ramp up in the US for some of the types of tasks, you know.
I mean, the reason I'm asking, because that's the big fear for us, right?
Well, I think, I think, yeah, I mean, and, you know, Elon announced TerraFab, which is awesome. He's going to try to massively— you see the size of that building? It's like this, like 3 or 4 miles long.
Wait, what are you talking about?
Elon announced this like massive project to do a massive fab for chips in Texas. No shit. I didn't even fucking hear about it. Yeah, it's the last— this is since recording, a few— the last few days, a couple weeks ago when it comes out. Yeah, I know, it's a big project worth talking to people about. It's really cool, and they're gonna try to do everything here at massive scale. Listen, I think these things take a while to get— I think China— sorry, I think I call it China, I think Taiwan, which is actually China, right? It's the good China. I think Taiwan has a lot of advantages there from building it for decades. And I think they should be our ally and we should be working with them and we should be doing some things here and then some things in their ecosystem. I mean, there's stuff that's done by hand by people who are doing it for 20 years, whether it's in Taiwan or Vietnam or other places that you're not just going to like replace right away with robots and you're not going to be able to pay people like to do a lot of that stuff here.
Like I think the high value stuff you could take, the low value stuff, I still think we can work with other countries. Like that's, it's just, it's just really, really hard to do it at scale without it. But yeah, but totally we gotta bring more here.
But does that worry you? That's what worries me the most. You know, if they do take it, then what the fuck are we gonna do in the end?
Yeah, I'm the one who should be more worried about that 'cause I'm building all these goddamn AI companies. What do you care? No, that's like, no, listen, listen. Obviously it would slow things down and obviously it'd be bad for the world. A lot of the chips are things like, like if you have like a minivan for your kids or like it's the chip opens and closes the door automatically, you're not, you know, you'll have to do it by hand instead. It's just like there's like a lot of the chip stuff is like we can like swap things in and out. We could keep the key ones. You don't have to like a lot of the chips we use are convenient, but they're so cheap that we use a lot more than we need. And there'd be ways to, there'd be ways to figure it out and to keep things going and to, And it wouldn't be as big of an economic impact right away, although it would obviously slow down the AI wave, which I don't want because I think that's something we should talk about. I think the AI wave is like way better than people realize.
It's like the coolest thing happening in the world right now.
Man, let's do it. I just had Brett Ancott in here with Figure AI.
I love it.
Robot. And yeah, what the fuck, dude? It's a whole different world.
There is— there's so much happening, man.
What is happening?
These kids— I was sitting with one of my old CEOs from 20 years ago. We built something together that we sold and it was like, it was like building back then. We were selling— it's called OpenGov and it did great. It was a great company. But it's like I was saying, it was like being like in a boat and like rowing through the dirt, like with a paddle because it's so frickin hard to build these things sometimes. It was so slow. And now there's like one of my AICOs was sitting next to us and he didn't hear my comment, but he like came over. He's like, Joe, we're not just going to double revenue this quarter, we're going to triple revenue this quarter. And it's like, holy crap, like this stuff is just like growing and changing and fixing things so fast. And you know, I think in terms of why people should care, 'cause I think it's a quick argument, like whatever, Joe, it's nice, you're gonna make a lot of money, who cares? You're already rich. Like why should like the 300 million Americans care? I think there's a few really great ones.
I think the number one is healthcare. AI is gonna make healthcare like half the cost if we let it. This is really important. Like we can make healthcare so much better, so much cheaper. So much, you know, it is one of those things where it's gonna be a big battle 'cause right now every state has laws. Against it because the scope of practice. But I think we're going to be able to prove some sandboxes. And if we can, that's going to be great. Like, the first of all, that's just like makes America way wealthier, right? We don't have our healthcare debt.
Man, I just saw— I think it's Mark Cuban's opening some pharmacy.
He's doing great work on the pharma side. Listen, Mark and I don't have the same politics, but I really admire his work on that because that is—
that is—
it's a great— I've—
this is going to take pharmaceuticals. You're going to get— be able to get them at cost, if I've read it correctly.
There's a ton of— well, there's a ton of— so what happens in the old days is the pharma companies are so corrupt that they had laws, they had agreements where you couldn't even tell a patient about a generic option that was way cheaper. And this is like a PBM agreement. So in order to offer my drug over here, you're not even allowed to offer a payment. And so my friends and I went to the Senate and we fought really hard and we won one battle and lost one battle. The battle we won is you made it so it's now legal for doctors to tell you about any generic, which is really important, by the way, 'cause obviously, but the other one, is they're still not able to share pricing. So they're still able to gag you on pricing. And so it is really crazy. So they just hide pricing on all this stuff and don't let anyone share it. So there's no market for a lot of these things and it's just they just take advantage. And so Mark's getting around that by building his own thing in the middle, which is great. And Trump launched a site too, by the way, which is doing really well, which is saving people a ton of money.
I don't know if you're—
Trump launched a pharma site. There's like a pharma site you can go on, search Trump's pharma site and it's a direct-to-consumer thing and you can get all this stuff way cheaper right now. It's a big deal. He launched it a month ago. Joe Gebbia, who's running design for the government, the Airbnb founder, he designed it all. It works great. So you can go on and do that. So, so the pharma stuff, Mark Cuban stuff's great. I have a company called Blink Health. It's a cheaper PBM. Like a bunch of us are trying to solve the drug side because that's a big, big thing to make cheaper. There's going to be some drugs that always cost money, by the way, because you want to have innovation, but you want to make the generics and everything cheaper. But then the bigger side of this, man, is the, is the health systems and is primary care. And like there's not enough doctors for rural areas. You have to wait weeks sometimes. It's really expensive to go in. There's so many like standard things. There's like hundreds of chronic conditions. You should be able to like check on the frickin phone and be able to enter the things and they've already checked you once and they can, you know, Utah is doing a thing where they can, AI can prescribe it once you've been prescribed because it's safe if it's done correctly and has to be done safely in a deterministic way.
But by the way, this is not, this is not like a, oh, AI might mess up type of situation. Like, like you can you can show that it's safer than doctors and you should have to show that you should be regulated in some form. Right. There should be some way it's safe. But once you prove it's safe, if keeping it, keeping it out, that's just, that's just keeping prices high for the sake of the medical companies. That's bullshit.
What are you getting involved in?
Well, so we're building, we're building something, we're building some things there, right? We're building a bunch of things in medical AI, healthcare, and there's a bunch of great entrepreneurs doing that. That's like a big wave coming. A bunch of our, bunch of our friends are working on that. We got to make it legal. You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you another crazy AI thing that's coming is, is have you followed Joby Aviation? There's them and Archer are the two eVTOL companies. So this is, so this is, so these guys have been, so Joby, we backed 11 years ago to start and they just got approved for 12 cities where they're going to be doing, sorry, 12 states where they're going to be doing takeoff and landing. So you basically can do me in flying cars in 12 states is coming this next year, which is amazing. It's coming in the next year. It's like, prove now.
So can we buy these cars or—
it's like Uber. You're going to like— you're going to be like— but you could use it. I got to check if it's Tennessee. I think it might be, but it's Texas for sure and Utah and a few other ones. I should check if it's Tennessee or not, but you can like have it come pick you up, you know, and take you to— take you downtown or something, which would be great. Yeah, we got to push government. I bet it would be here. I'll check. But here's the thing. So these guys are like the best airplane guys and they started with the insertion point at Joby at the flying cars. Right? They're like these winged things you get with 5 rotors. They're building new airplanes too. And, and their best aerodynamicists in the world, when you had a new idea and you wanted to iterate, it used to take 3 months, 6 months, right? Because that's just how long it takes to do these things and do the work and program it and test it out. Thanks to AI, you could do all that in an afternoon now. So every afternoon, the best guys in the world are doing like 3 to 6 months of work.
And so, so, so here's, here's the thing that people don't realize about AI. It's like we're living like multiple, multiple years in one in terms of progress. So we're taking like the 2020s and the 2030s and the 2040s, and we're condensing it into the next few years. And, and it's— I mean, the breakthroughs we have just on the airplane side, you know, airplanes were basically stuck for 60 years, right? No one believes anything would happen. You're going to start having like way more efficient, way better airplanes coming out in the next few years thanks to AI. And it's going to be like this shocker where everyone's like, what the heck? These guys actually have hydrogen fuel cells working now. No one's ever got them working on planes. So, so hydrogen fuel cells, 3 times more efficient per weight, 2 times more efficient per conversion energy. So it's 6 times more efficient for flying as a fuel in the air, which is pretty amazing. And then you have the new shapes of airplanes and designs of airplanes that we've thought about for years, never really been able to test. And the new designs are multiple times more efficient too.
You do the multiplication 6 times, even if it's only 3, that's 18 times. All of a sudden air travel is super cheap. Way better for everyone in the 2030s, right? So it's just like the world's in a really good place thanks to this AI. Like, this stuff really matters. Yeah.
I mean, everybody's really concerned, but I mean, it does. I mean, I've been concerned too.
I've been worried, but it's a lot of change.
Yeah. But I mean, I just— I think we're going to be better off when we get on the other end of this. I think we already are better off.
I think it's already getting better, but it's going to be a huge leap the next 5 or 10 years. And listen, I think it's fair to be scared. I'll tell you, if I had to make the other argument, What am I most scared of? I think it's really good that Elon's doing XAI because I think it shifts the Overton window because you don't want just a bunch of woke companies in charge. Listen, I think there's people I respect at Anthropic despite the fight they've had with the department and stuff. And there's some— but there's some leftists there too. I think OpenAI kind of let themselves be conquered by the left. I think Elon, with what he's done, is kind of pushing everything else to be more rational, basically. And that because it would be scary. Let's say you only had woke authoritarian AI things that are all of a sudden ruling against everything you and I believe. That'd be bad. So, so listen, I think there are things we got to watch for and be careful with, but, but this stuff is going to make so much wealth for everyone.
I mean, how do we— I think the big question in my mind is how, how do we regulate it but remain competitive on the world stage?
I think, I think, I think there's still—
with China.
And your next governor here, she's, she's kind of more on the regulation side, right? Blackburn, Senator Blackburn. She's one of the ones who kind of, kind of, kind of pushes that. And listen, I respect where she's coming from in certain areas. I think you want to protect children for sure. I think that's right. I think there could be certain— there could be certain rules on privacy we all agree on that we want to put in place. I think that's fair without breaking everything. Right. You know, I think there probably should be some rules about what kind of images you can create about people. You shouldn't just be able to, like, take a picture of a our wives and do whatever they want with it in a video. That's not fair. I don't know. That's kind of messed up. Yeah, right. It's like there's probably things like that that we should be protecting for civilized society. I, you know, so, so I think the best way to do this is to do it nationally. I mean, Congress is so dysfunctional on both sides right now. They're so dysfunctional. Like, really what you do is you have moderates work together nationally, put some basic, basic things in that we all agree on, and then just like let it be free and then come back and revisit if something else is broken.
Like, that would be my take.
You know, so you, you're pretty much on the— you don't want much regulation at all?
I want to protect kids, and I want to protect creators. I think, you know, Senator Blackburn is big on protecting creators. There's probably some rules there that's, that's good, that's fair too. So I think there's basic things you could do for sure, and there's some compromise. But, but I think right now the vast majority of regulations in this country— like, there's 9 million words per state, Sean, of regulations. 9 million words per state. The vast majority is big companies stopping small companies and stopping new innovative companies from disrupting their business more efficiently. Like, that is what regulation mostly does. Let's be honest, right? And here's the crazy thing. Like, like, so one kind of regulation is licenses. You need licenses to do things, right? So there's, there's 1,000 different types of things you might need a license to do. There's only 50 of them that you need a license in every state to do. So right away from the start, 95% of the things that they force licenses for is clearly just protecting their guild. Because it's perfectly safe to do without a license in another state. Right. So, so most of this stuff is guilds and big companies creating regulations to stop others.
And healthcare, by the way, that's exactly what is— healthcare costs so much money because we put so many rules that you can't compete. Yeah, it's literally crazy amount of rules. You have to spend tens of millions of dollars just to get going and you can't even do a new thing because they've, they've blocked all the new stuff you could do. So like this, like our country, areas where we have high costs, where everyone suffers, where where the middle class or the working class suffers is the areas where these guys have put in thousands and tens of thousands of rules. And by the way, that's like good for guys like me. If I just wanted to make tens of billions of dollars, I could put in all sorts of rules and I could afford the fucking lawyers to go, to go follow those rules, right? Like, like guys in my situation who've built multiple big companies, like we could deal with regulation, we can afford it, we could figure it out. But, but, but, but, but it crushes any new thing trying to compete. It says bullshit. We shouldn't be crushing all these new things.
What about AGI?
So this is the— this is the— this is the like— this is like the did we create a new god question, right? Because that's like obviously a fair question. And it's— because I think—
didn't Jensen Huang just come out and say we're like, we're there?
There's AGI, there's ASI, which is like general intelligence versus like systemic intelligence. There's— I think— I think a lot of people are defining when do we create something that has more intelligence than all of humanity combined and can do things that none of us combined can do. The question is like, what's the— what's the level I'm not even sure it's the right way to think about it 'cause it's really more of a tool right now for lots of things. But sure, let's just, you know, I think it's a fair question. Like, do at some point you create something that has like so much more intelligence that's just so far ahead of you all that somehow it takes over? And listen, I think right now I'm much more afraid of what people are gonna do with AI. I'm not saying you couldn't somehow create something that would do that. I think you have to be smart. I think that's more of like a, 10, 20 years from now question, but it's definitely a question to watch for. And I think, I think as you're building AI, one of the things it does as a tool is helps us analyze and understand what's coming next.
And we have to have— it's actually really good there's lots of these companies because we all need to be using these in different ways to understand and analyze and make sure we're aware of what we're building. It's like, you know, it's true. Yeah.
Yeah. And you guys are getting in on Palantir that's getting into corruption, waste, fraud, all that kind of shit, right?
I mean, this is, this is at core of the DNA since we started Palantir. You saw PayPal back in the day before Palantir existed. The Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money, right? That was the big thing. And if you hear Elon talk about fraud, he knows it because he was part of that battle. He was part of that battle to stop that. And he said, like, you know, whoever squeals the loudest, that's because you're turning off their fraud. Like, I remember Peter was at chess club with some Russian guy who was pissed and was screaming, yelling, and he was, he was complaining. And it's because Peter was like turning off all of his fraud at work, right? Because he was tied to these mafia guys. So it's like, it's like, yes, this is like core, like Palantir when it was first built, what came out of that experience of understanding how to do data investigations based on fraud. And yeah, Palantir is working right now with the SBA, with Kelly Leffler, who's doing— Administrator Leffler is doing an amazing job there. Tons of stuff. And HUD, I mean, HUD is just like level one, ground level for fraud, right?
Just like paying off NGOs for get-out-the-vote purposes, paying off people in the community, basically in the inner cities. It's just a lot of nonsense that you're finding.
And the question is, shit tons of fraud. I mean, I had Nick Shirley come on, talk about all the fraud going on.
He's done a great job exposing a lot of stuff, you know, with the Somalis. I mean, these tribes are so good. These— the leering centers, I love it. Look, these tribes are so good at— because they coordinate. Because like, you couldn't get— unfortunately, in Europe, you get like a tribe of these, you know, Islamists from wherever, like 15 of them, to go rape the teacher together and not tell anyone. Like, if you ask 15 of my cousins to go rape a teacher, they'd all like punch you in the face and like there's no way they'd all go do something like that. But these— and these tribes from these places are sick and we've brought them into this country. There's a lot of broken tribes here, unfortunately. And yeah, there's tons of fraud tied— there's tons of fraud tied to subcultures around L.A. that we're finding. It's really— it's really unfortunate. We got to turn all this stuff off.
So, I mean, my question, I mean, I got— you guys are going over— I keep saying you guys— Palantir, COVID-era PPP fraud. Palantir is now helping Small Business Administration investigate fraud. Uh, you mentioned the HUD minority contracting abuse. Biden nearly tripled the size of the program. Uh, most contracts were no-bid awarded. So anyways, I mean, this, this kind of sounds— didn't we kind of do this with Doge and it didn't?
Well, Doge turned off $160 billion of stuff. It's not nothing. That's pretty good stuff.
No, no, no, no, I'm not saying it's not nothing. I'm saying a lot more. We all wanted it a lot to go.
There's a lot more to find.
There's a whole distance Yeah, but there was so much fucking pushback. Yeah.
And it was like complicated. I think, listen, I think when DOJ first started, like, listen, I mean, I was there at Mar-a-Lago briefly and with Elon and Vivek and others, and they were interviewing people to become the secretaries, right? Because Trump had them helping with the transition. And so DOJ right from the start was kind of like tied to the boss and tied to the president. And, and I think there, I think there had to be a cultural change with how it worked with the agencies and worked with the leadership in ways they'd be okay with it. But a lot of the best people did go into these agencies. And keep working. It's not like it went away fully, right? There are a lot of cultures there are still in a lot of these places and going. And I love that. Listen, the president's put the vice president in charge of this, right? And he's in— I just saw him recently. He says this is a big objective of his. He's working hard on it. And a lot of the grift that comes from fraud, Sean, is how the Democratic Party funds its allies. This is just— this is just the truth.
This is how the Democratic Party funds its friends and allies. It's very good at it. Right? We caught huge amounts of money going to these things that go to get out the vote for the left. There's— and there's, there's hundreds of nonprofits in New York State recently came out that are funding get out the vote. They're funding candidates, right? And so these, these people will have political power. They'll get money for the NGOs, they get money for their businesses with Medicaid or whatever else, and they'll, and they'll give it right back. It's like political largesse. They give it right back to people benefiting them, and they get more. And there's— and it's huge amounts of money. So this is why, unfortunately, A lot of the left is not on our team for getting rid of fraud because it's funding so many of the people who vote for them and who support them. And this is a huge issue for us to go after much harder. We got to turn it off. Sheesh.
I mean, do you think this is— this started? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Listen, they're finding a bunch of stuff with Administrator Leffler on the SBA. They just announced a bunch of stuff in HUD a few weeks ago that they're finding. There's just all stuff and we're turning it off. And you said the right thing. That's also really getting me. Really annoyed is we should be doing more prosecutions. We should be putting more people in jail because you're finding stuff, it's very clearly fraud, and you're turning it off. And we are not prosecuting. And I think the people running the DOJ are not nearly as competent as they need to be. I'll just put it out there.
How the fuck is this going to change?
We got to get more competent people whose job is to actually initiate and put people in jail for breaking the law.
How do we do that?
You put out the word to hire really competent lawyers. I don't know, like I've built orgs, you've built orgs.
It's like, it's like, I mean, I know what I would do, but nobody's doing it.
What would you do?
I would fucking fire everybody and bring in some new leadership.
That seems reasonable to me at this point. Listen, by the way, some leadership's really good in some of these places, and they are working well with us. And like, Leffler's doing great work. Like, there's, there's people in the Department of War doing, I think, great work. Like, whether or not you agree with the war, these are competent people, right? And so there's like places where we have very competent leaders that Trump— President Trump's brought in. And there's places where, for whatever reason, I can't tell, they're not getting it done. So let's, let's, let's fix it. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I hope it sticks. I really hope that sticks up.
We got— and we got— we got to turn this stuff off. We got to prosecute it. We got to make it sure it can't happen again. This drives me crazy, Sean, because we have— first of all, like, the government shouldn't be able to give hundreds of billions in NGOs. Like, what the heck, right? That's wrong. But the problem is, if you go to the Senate and try to get the votes for that, you need 60 votes. You can't get it because the Democrats won't vote against funding this stuff. You know, you know what I think we should do here to fix that? What? We should use the NGOs for our objectives at scale. We should say, okay, we're going to be funding NGOs to help free speech in Europe. We're going to be funding NGOs to root out the communists from all the universities around the country. We're going to be funding NGOs to go do voter anti-voter fraud in, uh, in the cities. We're going to be funding NGOs to look at any other NGOs to make sure they're not doing anything political. Like, these are all things we could do and the left would hate it.
And you know what? We might get the votes to turn off NGO funding if we actually use them for something on our team. I don't know, just, just, just to throw it out there, you know, like, why not be a little more aggressive? You're— we're in the generation that wants to fight. These old Republicans, man, they don't know how to fight.
Yeah, I think we've all figured that out.
We all figured it out. Like, come on, guys. Like, we need to actually fight and win. Like, because there's stuff— there's stuff we're totally aligned on here, but we got to be fighting. Why don't we have fighters? It's like there's this genteel class of, like, patricians presiding over some kind of decline.
I don't get it.
Like, come on, guys. Yeah, fix it.
So what would we do? We start new NGOs or—
I mean, I mean, my— I'm in favor of just turning it all off. But because we can't turn it all off, I would probably start new ones to bid for the money and use it for things on our side while we're in power. But I'd want to design them in a way where they're going to wind down no matter what, because you don't want to create a whole new class of leeches, right? That's always the problem.
Yeah.
Because I am not for having tons of leeches on our side like they have on their side. They have so many leeches. Just make money off this nonsense. There's like whole agencies that we turned off that were basically doing nothing and just other than fraud and corruption. And so we don't want that. I don't want— that's not our side. But we should be fighting back and we should be— and we should be doing whatever we can to get them to be forced to turn these off. That's my view.
Makes— it does make sense. Does make sense. What's going on in Ukraine, Russia these days?
You know, I really hope that this war has a good impact there. If we're honest, like the three— the three militaries that are probably the best in the world right now, just from all their practice recently, is probably US, Israel, Ukraine. Obviously, US, the very best. But Israel and Ukraine have both gotten so much better because they've been forced to fight. I've been very impressed with the Ukrainians. There's some really, really clever innovation that they've created by necessity to save themselves. I mean, it's amazing stuff they're doing.
Well, give me some examples, like stuff that's impressing you over there, like figuring out—
like, there's this company, Sine Engineering, that were involved with just like doing all of the maps of the battlefield for the drones and how to control them and how to, how to counter them and knowing what's going on and knowing, knowing how to hide, knowing how to attack. There's all sorts of new things. There's electronic warfare, uh, that they and others are doing to create like bubbles the enemy can't see and sneak through, or to turn their stuff off during an attack into different ways, jamming them in different ways, creating shadows of things that don't actually exist. You know, there's just, there's all sorts of ways they're producing lots of small things at scale that they can use to kind of halt the enemy's advance and harass them in ways that no one's ever done before. I mean, there's literally millions on both sides of these drones back and forth. And there's controls where one person— like, I've played video games where you control a bunch of troops. It's very different in the real world controlling hundreds of these things at once and getting really freaking good at it with AI plus the person. It's kind of cool.
It's terrifying, but it's kind of cool, you know? But listen, I think we're turning off all the Shahid production right now. Another, another benefit of the, of the, of the, of the Iranian thing is hopefully that turns off a lot of more stuff to Russia. Russia's already, by all accounts, from everything I've heard, uh, they're in huge budget troubles. They're actually unwilling to project the next year of budget in Russia as of the last kind of 4 months.
No shit.
Because they're like, because they can't, because they can't do it at this rate. So they have to just like do it month-to-month planning. And so they're under a lot of pressure right now. So I think turning off the Iranian stuff. I think the budget pressures are under. Hopefully we come to a good resolution in both. I mean, I think, I think, listen, this is a risky thing, but hopefully Trump looks really freaking good 6 months from now and both of those things are in the right place. I think there's a chance, a good chance of that. I hope so.
Right on. Right on. Joe, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to get into some of the, some of the new companies that HTC has invested in.
Love it.
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Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elite's The Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime— not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.
All right, Joe, we're back from the break. We were talking about AGI and ASI. I've not even heard of ASI, but could you— I just want to dive in a little bit more on what that means. Can you explain, can you explain that to me?
Like, I think there's a lot of different levels you can define of like, like what, like what, uh, constitutes the computers being way, way ahead of us. And I think there's like artificial systemic intelligence, there's general intelligence, is lower systemic. It's like, and like one of the questions is like, at what point, like, do people not even help the AI improve itself? Which is kind of a scary question, right? So it's— if you want to compare, if chess is the right analogy, if you go back to chess, it used to be that, like, people were better than the machines, but the machine could help you with tactics, right? So there's two types of chess. There's the tactics, which is like the next 3, 5, 10 moves. The computers are really good at that, even from 1960s, because you can see— you can see the next set of moves. But people will be much better knowing what's happening way farther ahead, right? Position play. So there's things the human mind's better at and there's things the computer is better at. And as the computer got better at chess, it got to the point where the computer, the best computer, was better than the best person.
But for a long time, if you combined a computer and a person, it still made it a lot better because there were still some things that people were better at, right? So people were so much better at position play that there was a chimera, right? Combined, it was better. And then it got to a point where the computer is so freaking good, doesn't even get any better if you add a person, doesn't need to help anymore. It's just, it's so far ahead.
Yeah.
And that, and that, and that, you know, and that's, that's where it is obviously today for a long time at this point. And so the question is like with coding right now, for a long time only people did it and now we're just starting to start to use the computer to do a little bit of things. And the computer's gotten so much better in the last couple years that now you're using a computer for a lot. Like you're not even writing most code anymore. You have like 6 agents or 10 agents if you're really good. Each of them coding for you and you're telling it what to do and you're coming back and testing it and telling it to build its own tests. But there's still a person involved coordinating all of this stuff, right? The question, I think, at what point does the coding thing be the thing that coordinates itself, right? At some high level. And at what point, even higher level than that, is the whole company basically being coordinated for all the tech side by a computer? And at what point does all the work on whatever important project just get iterated on by a computer instead?
Which is kind of a scary proposition, right? Like, I don't love this. Like, it's not like, at what point are they just replacing yours and my job? And you know, it's like, it's silly that obviously computers don't want to listen to each other, but it's, you know, it's kind of creepy, right? Like, they go higher and higher, higher up the conceptual abstract stack. And so I think there's different ways of like saying how you measure it, but like, you know, a lot of my smartest friends who run the AI labs, Still, when I talked to him the last few months, it's like, oh yeah, it won't be till the mid-2030s that we're not having people actually help on some of these things. But what does that even mean at that point? And at what point is scientific discovery pushed ahead by the computers? I think we're just starting to get what looked like scientific breakthroughs from computers, but they work really closely with people. At what point, is there a point where the breakthroughs are happening with the people not even involved.
Holy shit.
Right? And none of us know the answer. I'd say like when you talk to the smartest guys like Dario who runs Anthropic, like as of a few months ago, he thought that like the next few years of this really fast advancement is kind of locked in. Like we used to have something called Moore's Law with chips, right? Where the chips get better, double every year and a half. And this is like a lot of predict how the chips kept getting faster and faster. And the guys running the chips companies, Intel, all the other ones, they'd have all sorts of new tactics and new technologies they're building that would like let you make it twice as, you know, twice as small, twice as fast over the next couple of years. And they kind of always be able to see ahead maybe 2 years, maybe 3 years. It's always like, wow, how are you going to make it smaller? Like, well, we have to solve this and this and this problem. And they keep going and they did it for a very long time. And so similarly with Dario, with this advanced pace where it keeps getting better with new data, new techniques, new tactics, he could see like very confidently the next couple years and probably a third year of how it keeps getting better, which is pretty amazing because the pace right now is like doubling every few months, right?
In terms of what the agents— it's crazy. So he could see that going on for at least another couple years. If he's right, that's going to be very, very impressive in 3 years. But it's still not— it would still probably take until sometime in the next decade or two to do some of these other things, replacing people. The question is, is it going to keep getting better or not? And it's a fascinating situation.
It's looking likely, you know.
It's— I, I tend to think the universe works in asymptotes and non-exponentials. Like, the idea of a singularity, Sean, is that the thing like starts getting better and better and then improves itself faster and faster, and then just infinitely shoots upward, and like the whole everything changes. You basically have a god that you've created. Like, that's like, uh, like a secular person's, you know, religious view from the tech world, that we're just gonna change everything with a singularity. And I think you have these explosions that like hit natural limits, and then go over. And so my view for everything, every other phenomenon I've ever studied, is that these things don't just go exponential forever. There's limits to the universe and how these things work. So maybe it doesn't go exponential. I don't know. I think it probably doesn't, but some people think it probably does. That's a really big question for us for 10, 20 years from now. Right on.
Right on. Let's talk about some of these companies that 8VC is investing in.
Yeah. What do you want to hear about?
I picked a handful here. First one I want to talk about is Overland AI.
I love it.
I've been kind of following that company for a couple of weeks. I just saw it. And then when I was getting ready for the interview today, I was like, oh, shit.
Byron is an impressive man. He's a professor out west. And he's won the national DARPA contest a bunch of times of how you navigate over kind of random terrain, right? So this is very different than a self-driving car, the problem Elon and Google and those guys are solving. Is driving on roads with people and bikes and it's a hard problem, right? There's a really hard problem. Obviously the problem he's solving is like over kind of like random 3D terrain, like in a forest. Like if you're going to launch an attack or if you're going to defend this, you know, if someone had to drive something out back over, you know, out behind here where you're shooting, it's like that's a different sort of self-driving problem. You need LIDAR for sure because you're like measuring ahead where it dips down. You might have ditches, you get stuck in, you might have rivers you're going around, mountains you're climbing over. So he's the best in the world at that. And his vehicles can go without humans interfering for, for, for, for, for days. And this is obviously very, very useful for our military to be able to go over complex terrain.
And originally he was, he was powering all the other Primes and all the other vehicles out there, but now he's building a bunch of his own.
Right on. What do these vehicles look like?
He's doing, he's doing both. Actually, it's interesting. His, I think the main one we're going to make a lot of are, uh, our smaller rugged all-terrain vehicles that can have a bunch of different kind of sensors and weapons on them, but they're, but they're not for carrying people in this particular case there. So I think, and they're much, much, much cheaper. So a tank is very useful for certain things, but these guys, you probably could have several hundred of them for the cost of a fully equipped tank with different sensors, with different weapons coordinating. I'd be a hell of a lot more scared if I was 100 miles away and there are 300 of these smart things coming at me than just a single tank. So there's, there's two different types of weapons.
So is this, is this, uh, similar to Saronic?
It is kind of analogous in the sense that you have autonomous— Saronic's building at scale autonomous, you know, warships. And Saronic's first product was a 25-footer. Saronic last year also built, as you know, the, the fastest-built big ship since World War II. So Saronic is now building at scale 180-footers, 150-footers, 100-footers, which is pretty awesome, right?
Yeah, man.
I mean, 180-foot autonomous boat can be more powerful than a 400-foot destroyer if it's autonomous, because the destroyer has a freaking hotel on it. This 180-foot's all weapons. So you actually have more weapons on the 180-footer than the destroyer. Damn. Which is pretty cool, right? And by the way, in a battle, what's the destroyer doing in a battle? It runs. It has to run away. It's 500 lives. It's going to get wiped out. These guys don't have to run away. They can freaking charge. Right? And you have a lot more of them for the same cost. So, so that's— so Saronik, what they're doing makes sense. But yeah, it's similar where over the land you're also going to want a lot of these things that are autonomous, that are, that are, that are much cheaper at scale. Go into a territory— if we ever have to fight in a jungle, ever have to fight in Ukraine, ever have to fight anywhere on the ground, you're going to want this stuff.
Has Saronik deployed anywhere yet?
Saronik has, but it's not— it's, it's, uh, because the war is going on, we're not, we're not able to talk about any of that right now, unfortunately.
Damn it. I can't wait till we can.
Yeah, you got to get Dino back. He's a big fan of yours. He's a— and he's a SEAL also, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We had him on.
Yeah, he loved it.
But how about TAP training?
Oh, yeah, that's really cool. Jason Spires, he's a really good guy. You know, actually, he had an interesting background. He wouldn't mind me saying because he overcame this thing where he was— he grew up really poor and he was dealing marijuana and they threw him in jail for a long time. For being good at it. And he got out of prison in his 20s and he went to Stanford and then he went to Palantir for a little bit. And I ended up meeting up with him and we helped him as he got this thing going. And just, you kind of root for guys like that who had a tough upbringing and were, you know, he didn't hurt anyone. He was just really good at selling this stuff. So they locked him up. And but like, he's someone I really admire. And, and he's— he obviously turned his life fully around and is a great entrepreneur. And this is one of the most important areas for our country right now. Is called Training All People, is how do you get people to get great jobs and get them exposed to like kind of more higher-end vocational training, working with machines that cost millions of dollars?
Not, you know, it's too expensive to build a school to train someone on a semiconductor machine that they might have to work with that costs tons of money. He's built instead with his co-founder some amazing VR technology. So the students are actually partnered with a bunch of these companies where they'll train people in VR, make sure they can get to the point where they're actually pretty proficient and learn a bunch of different stuff. And then— and they'll have trainers who've done this forever in their company, you know, helping them do it at scale. And then once they're good enough, they get to train on the real stuff. And so it makes it so much more affordable to take huge numbers of Americans and get them ready for high-paying jobs. And you see he's helping, you know, tens of thousands of people. Hopefully he'll be helping hundreds of thousands of people soon. Right on, man. Yeah, it's a good— it's a good, good thing to do.
How about Esper? That caught my attention. Cloud— I love it— cloud policy-making software. I love it. Malka is an impressive founder.
Her parents are from Afghanistan. Pakistan, actually. She grew up here. Very pro-liberty lady. She was just like, I love— I think you can be American from any background if you love liberty and you love our country and love our values. And she and my wife became friends actually because they're both, both interested in policy and they're both obsessed with the regulatory state being really broken and really hurting a lot of things in America. There's a kind of a core conservative value of how you make government less stupid. And so what she realized when she started this company is that technology and AI can actually make the regulatory state work a hell of a lot better. So it's a nonpartisan thing, right? You just like— no one wants government to be dumb because it's pretty dumb sometimes. And so if you're going to make— for example, if you're going to make a regulation, what's the process to make it, to check other states, to learn what's going on, to see what the code is? What's the process to review it? What's the process to see how it's working? How could you— what's the process so people in the field know what the regulations are so they can intelligently kind of use them and not just like— not just harass people unnecessarily?
So there's a lot of interesting tech to make it all that transparent. And she has a bunch of states using it to basically like make the regulations smarter, to get rid of bad regulations and just run that process. It's— and she's a profitable company growing really well, working both blue states and red states and just making government less stupid. So I love stuff like that.
And that's awesome. And then, and then the other one that really caught my attention was Bedrock.
Yeah, this is cool. This is cool. Boris, his— his— he's also— he's also a great lover of liberty. Let's get all these people in trouble with their other people. He is. His father, his father was like a genius from the Soviet Union who fled here, basically like one of those like physicists, I think. Oh, shit. And Boris was a great entrepreneur. I met him through a mentor of mine a long time ago. He's working on stuff in AI and he ended up selling a company to Google and he helped run part of their Waymo division. You know, Waymo is the self-driving cars. Mm-hmm. And so these are a bunch of, bunch of really, really talented guys. I mean, it's amazing what Waymo's done. I'm rooting for Elon against Waymo with Tesla, but they're obviously both comes from like great DNA. And his new company, it's, uh, it's, it's, uh, autonomous construction, autonomous excavation. And this is, this is, this is really, really cool because first of all, 25% of all the costs right now to build something in the US in construction is tied to excavation. Uh, and second of all, there's tons of things like there's quarries or 6,000 quarries where you can never basically get enough stuff out of them cheaply enough.
Everything's really expensive because you never have to hire tons of people right away, then you have to fire them all because you can't use it for a while. And And you can never get enough people for the right jobs. It's sloppy and it's like messy and a lot of it's boring. And so he actually has— it's working. I mean, he's raised a few hundred million more dollars recently since we invested from all sorts of top investors. And they're partnered. They're using Caterpillar machines. They're using their, you know, people, people love it and they're, they're, they're actually deployed and it's working. They're doing it in Texas, doing it in Alabama. Here's the funny thing. The tech, of course, unfortunately, the AI people are in California. But when they do stuff in the real world, they always come to the— guys come to the center of the country where the states are run well.
I mean, that's going to change. That's going to change a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, so, yeah, because it's not just excavators, right? It's, it's, it's construction.
It's going to be all sorts of construction stuff. You started with excavators. That's a really hard problem with multiple dimensions. Like you're digging on a hill and you have different kind of dirt coming up. And it's really interesting. You know, one of the crazy things is they train on like tons and tons of data, which is part of their advantage, is they partner now with Lots of different companies getting all the data and it— and the computer learns what to do. And so one of the things I learned how to do is when it's done digging and it's waiting, it'll go around and use the scooper to clean things up nearby and like smooth things out and like use everything because it learned from the guys doing it. Isn't that crazy?
That's why I mean, I feel like shit's going to get done at least 3 times. I mean, if typical 8-hour— what, 8-hour construction shift?
Well, you operate that machinery, think about it like 24 hours a day.
That's 3 times faster.
I'm always jealous. I'm always jealous of Japan because like they'll have their roads just like the guys will come at night because they respect their other people so much in their society and they don't have the weird unions that break things. So they just like work really hard at night, well-paid and get it done fast, right? So you can be on the road again. Now you could do it again without having to keep the union guy up at night, you know? Damn. No, but and by the way, here's the thing. This is like a classic Jevons paradox thing, which is really important for economics because a lot of people might see this and their first instinct might be, Well, fuck you, you're just getting rid of people's jobs, right? That, that, that might be the thing they think. And, and here's, here's what it is. It's that when you, when something goes down in cost, you, you can get, do a lot, have demand for a lot more of it, right? So the original Jevons paradox, it's important people understand, it's a key economics concept, is, is they figured out how to make coal plants twice as efficient in the 19th century.
There's a big deal because coal was like the big energy. And so if you own a bunch of coal mines a lot of people did. That was a big thing back then. And coal plants are twice as efficient. All of a sudden everyone's like, oh my God, they're not going to need our coal anymore. And you know what happened instead is demand for coal went way up because, because all of a sudden, because energy was so much cheaper, it was now much more in demand and there's much more uses of it. And it's the same thing here. If you can build buildings in America for much cheaper, suddenly a manufacturing project that you were forced to do in Mexico or forced to do in the Philippines or Vietnam or wherever else the hell the numbers said to do it, suddenly it makes a lot more sense to do it here because you're building it for much cheaper. And so suddenly, suddenly you're cut. So all— so the amount of economic activity you're going to create if we can make these things cheaper, it's going to go so up. There's going to be so much more stuff that just— right now there's all this stuff, Sean, that I really want to do here as a patriot.
And I do. I produce a lot of things here. I build things with the ships and everything else. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't pencil. Like, Joe, I'm sorry, it doesn't pencil. And you can't just be a crazy person. It has to pencil, right? But this makes a lot of stuff gonna pencil a hell of a lot better the next few years. So it's gonna lead to a massive boom in economic activity here. It's a very good thing for America.
Yeah, man. I mean, what do these machines look like? Are they just repurposing—
They're repurposing Caterpillar machines for now. Caterpillar, by the way, is crushing it the last few years. You can imagine 'cause of all the construction and data centers and demand for their machines around the world. So they're a very profitable, massive company and they love this. They know they can't build it themselves and so they're working really well. Partnering and figuring out, and we're equipping their machines. And you know, you know who else is gonna be going into this sector as well is our friend Travis, just announced it. Have you followed that at all? Travis Kalanick? No. So he's the one who built Uber, right? Very famously, amazing entrepreneur, super hardcore guy in terms of a builder. And his latest company, he's renaming Adams and he's going into the world of atoms. You can go, he did a whole manifesto online. So Bedrock's my favorite big company exists in this space, but in other parts of the space like mining, et cetera, Travis wants to figure out how to make the world of atoms work with AI. So this is gonna be a hopefully huge growth area for everyone in the next several years.
Man, that is wild.
Yeah.
What are you excited about?
You know, I'm excited. America is back, man. Like I said, I think, I think, I think our country went through something very weird for 50 years. Like all of a sudden we had way too many lawyers from the early '70s. We had this fiat currency. We got rid of the gold standard. We had all this bureaucracy sprout up. I mean, it was almost like, it was like, it was almost like the Soviet Union somehow had infiltrated us. I don't know. Something really bad happened where our culture went off the rails. Workers weren't paid as much. Finance got to be too big relative to workers. I think that's a major problem. I still think we gotta fix that with, and you know, there's all these things that were broken for 50 years and suddenly, and the airplanes didn't get better, healthcare got more expensive, everything got broken. Suddenly it's all reversed. Suddenly healthcare's gonna get cheaper. Airplanes are gonna get better and faster. Like government's gonna get less stupid with it, with this AI stuff. All this manufacturing is coming back. All of a sudden we're building ships again with Dino. Like America, China builds 230 times the amount of ships as much ships as we can.
We're gonna 100x it in America the next, next several years. Like, all this stuff, like, he just, you know, he just— he'll announce it himself, but he just raised billions more. But there's all this stuff that's getting funded, all the stuff that's working, all the stuff that's growing. Like, America is going to be by far number one again, and we just got to make sure we don't rip ourselves apart, we don't let the left get in charge, because they'll break it.
I love to hear that. I love to hear that. I got a hot question for you. All right, you ready? Joe, drone swarms just flew over Barksdale Air Force Base for a week straight. This is where we keep nuclear B-52s. They resisted jamming, they were custom-built, and the military couldn't stop them. Your company, Epirus, literally builds the weapons designed to solve this problem. So what's actually going on here? Is this a real foreign adversary probing our nuclear infrastructure? Or is there any chance this is a psyop, a distraction from what's happening with Iran and everything else right now?
You know, it's a great question, and I, I almost texted my friends in the Pentagon to ask them about this because I was wondering it too. I probably should, huh? Although the reason they might not tell me is that they know I'd probably tell everyone I talk to. You listen, so I, I don't have inside information. I wish I did. Um, your listener's 100% right. Upris could Shoot these things down. I actually just posted something right before I went on the show a couple of hours ago. Epirus has a new autonomous thing where the truck drives autonomously, opens up and fires autonomously at the drones. You put a couple of these—
oh shit—
you put a couple of these at the base, they take the drones down right away because the anti-jamming is one thing. Epirus is not just jamming, Epirus is frying the circuits. Epirus is literally applying like an insane amount of energy all smushed into a ten-thousandth of a second and like, and like using AI and everything to get the power to hit the guy. And I tried all at once. And the burst just like is a cone of energy, just it fries these things. So yes, EPRIS 100% could fry these and turn them off. And, you know, so if we really need to, maybe they're going to adopt it. So let's, let's see. That's— I think that's the obvious solution.
Andy Lowery is coming here on Monday.
He is.
All right. He's bringing one.
Oh, really?
He's bringing one. We're going to get a walk around.
Let's get him on.
Fry the neighbors.
Andy's the CEO of EPRIS. Don't fry the neighbors or get us in trouble.
The neighbor's car.
Uh, the problem is, is once you fry some of these things, you can't turn them back on. They wouldn't be very happy with you.
There's a follow-up: if China takes Taiwan tomorrow and controls TSMC and those chip factories, can we even continue to build drones and AI weapon systems? So first of all, that's kind of what I was alluding to earlier about, you know, if they do take Taiwan, what does that mean? And you were talking about repurposing chips.
Yeah, so first of all, TSMC is part of like a massive ecosystem. So a lot of the design, a lot of the work, a lot of other things happen in America, happen around the world, happen in ASML in Europe. Like you couldn't just like take TSMC and just like own it for yourself. Like it would, it would stop working because you'd stop sending the designs, you'd stop doing the work. It's not been around, right?
So I thought it was all centralized.
No, it's actually really interesting. I think America actually does capture more of the profits from the chip ecosystem than Taiwan does. This is what people miss. Like they, they definitely, they definitely capture more of the revenue because of like the cost. But if you look at the actual profits, we're still capturing more than they are because we do so much of the work. It's a very distributed industry where a lot of that's happening at Lam Research and Applied Materials and all these companies that maybe you haven't heard of that are in Silicon Valley that are, that are part of the US still. And so, so they couldn't just take it all away. Now, that said, they can massively slow down everything in global chip production. They could definitely cut off all the newest stuff. It would take a long time to redo it, which is why we're trying to obviously build what we can here. But listen, it would set back AI by 5 or 10 years. Would it stop us from building drones? No. Like, we have another separate problem right now, which is that we don't do enough rare earth refining, which is something the Department of War has done a really good job trying to change.
There's been at least a couple of companies are putting a lot of money into to, you know, they're going to mine rare earths, they're going to refine rare earths. And you need those things to be able to build the magnets and the drones' motors. Like most of the Ukrainian drones on both sides involve China and their supply chain, which is not good for us. That's like a— it's a shame right now. That's what— how it works. So we gotta fix that. But that's not necessarily just a TSMC problem. That's a separate problem we gotta fix that we're working on.
How— I mean, you were talking about Elon, you know, getting— diving into the—
Seraphab. Yeah.
How, how—
I mean, you gotta bring someone on who knows more about it cuz it's, it's a new thing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious But what is the timeline? Is there one?
I have nothing but respect for Elon as the number one builder in the world. I think when you're a great entrepreneur, at least if I speak for others as well and for my own things where I've built 5 or 6 pretty big companies, like I think you almost have to trick yourself, at least for me, into thinking it's going to be faster than it is because otherwise you can't get yourself to do it. You know what I'm saying? Like when you start one of these companies, at least in my experience, maybe I'm just slower, but they always take longer. They're always harder. I think, I think Elon has done the most amazing things, but he's also made predictions where things take longer. And that's— I think that's just normal for a great entrepreneur. So I think it's just really hard to know how long things are going to take. And I think whatever someone guesses is a great entrepreneur, you could sometimes maybe add a few more years. And so I think this thing takes a while. That said, they're going really fast. They have the best people in the world. And it's really good for America that they're doing it.
So I'm rooting for them.
Is that an Austin doob?
Yeah, it actually is.
And that is wild, man.
It's so cool. We're just finishing our STEM building for my new university right next to SpaceX and Boring Company, right there next to all this stuff. We have 30 acres now, this awesome building we're going to be doing. They're actually helping us. They're going to be doing like robotics and electrical engineering and all sorts of stuff there. So it's a really fun area right now.
Bam! That's cool.
University of Austin, we're crushing it.
That's cool. What are you guys doing over there at University of Austin? We talked about it last time you were here.
Yeah, it's great. The third class is joining right now. These are about— oh shit, uh, Peter Thiel has already hired away a few of our, a few of our people from the first two classes, and a bunch of them online you can go look. They're doing all sorts of cool companies, all sorts of cool internships with Boring Company and Palantir and all sorts of different groups we partner with. Uh, listen, these are amazing young people. To, to have a really top score, Sean, and then to turn down an Ivy League or another top school and go to a new university, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to have an opinion. You know, you have to want to be part of like the, you know, frankly, it's the country elite. It's the new elite. It's the people who don't want to be part of the old kind of broken Harvard-Yale kind of, kind of loser mess, like CFR, you know, guys who predict everything wrong about what's going to happen in the Middle East and are just like part of the old kind of corrupt old guard. Like they want to be part of the builders.
They want to be part of the the actual competent people who think for themselves and don't just echo what you're supposed to say. I think, I think it's going really well.
It's awesome, man.
Yeah.
Well, Joe, it's awesome catching up, man.
It's great to see you.
Love what you're doing.
Cheers.
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Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist known for his work at the intersection of innovation and public policy. He is a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a data analytics platform used by governments, defense agencies, and large enterprises. His work there focused on applying data systems to complex institutional challenges.
After Palantir, Lonsdale founded Addepar, a financial technology platform designed to improve transparency and analysis in wealth management.
He has also been active in defense and national security startups. Of the nine U.S. defense unicorns that have emerged in recent years, he founded three and was an early investor in three others.
Lonsdale is a co-founder of Cicero, an organization focused on education policy and expanding opportunity. He also leads 8VC, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies and engages in policy discussions related to innovation and economic growth. Through this work, he has advised political leaders and worked to connect the technology sector with policymakers.
His career spans company building, investment, and policy involvement, with a focus on how technology can be applied to large-scale institutional problems.
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