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

When you say "pallantir" to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared. Nobody is angry, you might not be doing much. Why do so many people not trust you? Why do so many people not trust Pallantir? We have to eliminate, probably, about to 10,000 terrorists. The fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex, then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building, then what? What's scary to me is if it's a far-rept public, you like some really, really bad person. Who today is your biggest enemy? There are like the extreme populists on both political sides. So in a situation with a madudo or a man show, is there a possibility that Palantir wasn't involved? I think guys were trying to kill Trump. It means that if they're still around after Trump's president, they're probably trying to get him and his kids again. Why would Spalantir start to protect the West against his longest terrorists? That's truly the mission. That was truly the mission. But as I ran, really, I ran. But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that. I don't know, this is not appropriate, but I'd be very rummaged. So the rummages would do. You'd go and you wipe out the leadership class, you're all dead. And you say, "Okay, you guys are now in charge. We're going to make a deal, or we're going to kill all of you too." You know, the Sultan with Vectamin and PbDPathias started with a phone, me, and Mario. That's it. And it grew today to 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full-time employees. And that relationship, or you watching us and supporting us wouldn't happen without you. But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel? And it would mean the world to us. If you could press that subscribe button and notification on why it allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you. So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button. It would mean the world to us. Thank you so much. Thank you. I feel I'm supposed to take a sweet bit of the week. Know this life meant for me. I don't. What's your damage? The future looks bright. And J. Good is better than anything I ever saw. You are one of one. I send you right there. I think I'm going to search this book. Great to have you on a podcast. Thanks for having me, Patrick. Yes, and I know you like these mics. Credit, mercy. Awesome. Yes, Jake in the crew. Jake, who picked these blue mics by the way? You did. Okay. So credit goes to him, but co-founder, Palantir. Started that 23 years ago. Yes. The story you have from co-founding Palantir to Dan. I think you were an investor in free press. But Barry Weiss found that mistake and you were somewhat involved. The new companies. Yes. I gave Barry some money when she started because we need to rebuild our institutions in this country. That's right. And you move to Austin. You're building a university. University Austin. You're doing another thing with Cicero, which we'll talk about. I want to get your opinion on Cicero on Cato because those are two different mindset and reason. You're going to be in a relationship? Yes, two different statesmen. One had a temper. His way or the highway. The other one was compromised open to, which is kind of the route you guys went. And then recently you put, I think some $11.8 million into a drone company in Nigeria. Well, that's right. I run a big venture capital for you. We're doing a lot in AI and defense. A VC. Most of the best defense stuff we focus on America. I do think in Africa, working with the very, very best group that we could find there. It's important because there's a lot of bad guys there too. Yeah, I agree. So that's interesting. We'll get into that. Some curious. The drone business is very important. We're seeing with these wars with Ukraine and Russia. If you would ask the average person five years ago, if Ukraine and Russia go to war, what will be the most important tool to use? Nobody would get strong. Millions. Millions. Millions of drones and blowing up all these other things. Okay. Got a lot of questions. In the time we got this interview is phenomenal because we got the Iran stuff going on. We got El Mencho that was just killed. And, you know, what's going on with Mexico? We asked. I don't want to be in Port of Ireland right now. No, and we, you know, it's a place where we used to go to a lot. Because for vacation spot, Americans go to Cancun. They go to Port of Ireland. We hit the Costco, man. They hit it. The car. Out of all the places. I know. The airport is scary. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to start off with your background. Palantir. When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good. Some is bad. Some is neutral. Some are scared. You know what? It's good if they know who you are. But one of my favorite signs on the old Defense Secretary of Rome's valley, a sign is asking instead of nobody is angry. You might not be doing much. You know, do you subscribe to that? Oh, totally. Okay. Totally. What age did you subscribe to that? Pretty young actually. I was a pretty obnoxious kid. Were you? Oh yeah. I had all sorts of opinions. I always have. Tell me about your parents. Who were your parents? My parents. My parents were awesome. My mom passed away a long time ago. My dad's not doing what was just sad. But they were amazing people. My father was very competitive. He was one of eight kids. He brought him all out to California. He was our chess coach when we were little for fun. He does a chemical engineer. But we won the state championship when I was a kid. My brothers did too. And we thought we must be really smart. And then he kept winning 20 years in our house. He's just a very competitive guy. Everything. Every game. Every sport. And we're really optimistic. Positive competitive guy. Chefs. So you guys play chess. How old were you when you won the championship? I was the K-6 champion twice in a row. And fifth and sixth grade. And we won the nationals in junior high school. So, but it's like it's because we worked really hard at it because he was a good coach. You got to spend. You got to spend only 30, 40 hours a week to be the best. And this is a fair month. But we grew up in Fremont, California, and Silicon Valley. Then these were tournaments in California and around the country. Who were you in high school? I was a public high school. I was a nerdy guy. I was a valedictorian. And I had a bunch of really smart friends who taught me a bunch of stuff about. And we went, get went way ahead in math and science and stuff. So at what point did you and Peter Thiel link up? Because I think when I heard a story about you were still in college and you were doing something with them how did that relationship start? You know, a lot of the smartest kids in Stanford computer science were going to PayPal at the time of something where I really admired the talent that was there. You have to realize that company. There was one company started by Peter Thiel and a bunch of his smartest friends. Max Levchin started it and David Sacks. All these guys were there in Good Hoffman. And there's one company. The Elon Musk started with Roll Off and a bunch of other really smart people. It was called X at the time. And X didn't continue to merge to make PayPal. They were fighting each other and they merged. So it's all the smartest friends around both Elon and Peter. No surprise. It was a place you wanted to be. They actually rejected me my freshman year but they let me in my sophomore year to go help them. Was that like the place everybody wanted to work? Not everyone, but I think for me it was like notice a lot. The smartest one was interesting people going there. So it was one I was trying to find it. How was the story coming to you guys? Because you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, at that time when you look at the numbers, it's not like Elon is today's Elon. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. They weren't. But how did you know that these, that was there, would they talk about it in the small circles? Like, well, but I mean, I was a computer scientist. I was already ahead. I'd already done mostly the undergrad work for I got there, which is normal nowadays. And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists. They were all trying to go work there. And so they're first smartest friends were working there. And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review, which Peter had started. So I met people that way to do it. Got it. So Peter's way, how proactive was Peter of trying to get it in front of all the smartest kids coming out? Well, this is this is like, this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses. So Peter was very good at that. So what we spent a lot of our time on now and find up to see all the kids are Harvard MIT this week. Because when you, we spent a lot of time on this. So so walk me through it. So what does that look like? Is it, you know, do you, do you go straight to the top? Do you establish relationships? Are there programs to go meet the kids? How does that, how does that work? Actually, it's a good question. People don't ask. So, Palantir, we had a whole playbook when we started that you know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent. And so you'd have, you'd have your fellows, you'd have your spies, you have your advisors, you have all these like spies. So these young men and women on your team, and they're like talented, good-beard scientists, and they help you map out who the other best people are. And they help you throw parties, and they help you get to know them. You know, professors there as well. And you just, you just have people who are young, smart, technical people who are social. And they're there and they're mapping it out. They're helping you meet the right people. So when I come in, there's different groups we've met. People who want to work with us. We want to learn from them. So it's mutually beneficial thing where you're getting to know all the top talent and you're helping connect them to your top companies. And it becomes a way to work with them all. But how do you filter them out? Like, how do you know? It's like a chicken and egg you start with. Like, you see, I'll have a superstar from my portfolio who's like one of our best engineers who just came from MIT. And they have like, five or six of their smartest friends in a younger year. And you'll go meet those kids. Who are the smartest guys you know? So it's in network. It's purely word of mouth. So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys. And they would say, you have to meet John. He's the smartest guy I know. So you're asking them what's-- Yeah. Then you might talk to, when you might work on projects with them. So you get to know a little bit. But yeah, you're just purely through the network. I mean, it's a lot of things. The same way if you're a football coach or you're a baseball coach, you got to do this for talents and tech. But what do you look for? So in football, you may look for speed. You know, like right now, I met with one of the law firms that represents a lot of young talent. Nowadays, they're recruiting kids at 10, 11, 12 years old. I said, so what do you look for? They said coachability and personality. I said, why personality? Personality-quil sponsorship. You got personality. I can get some sponsorship money. You're coachable. We can put you, of course, you got to have the physical abilities. What did you guys look for? You know, it depends if you're hiring entrepreneurs or hiring an engineer and engineering leaders. It's because they're different. Give me both. An entrepreneur needs to have opinions. And my entrepreneur needs to be able to say, here's my hypothesis about the world. Here's why I'm right. Usually they want to have some chip on their shoulders. Some of them are trying to prove. Yeah. They will have to be someone. You can tell they're ambitious. They believe in things. You don't need smart, interesting, curious people to build things. But you need to have a certain level of leadership and opinions about the world, I think, to build things. It is the mindset of recourse. That's '04, right? You were at Palantir '04 to '09. We were all sad PayPal. And they categorized you as being part of the PayPal Mafia. Second, you know, I was 15 years younger than Peter. I was younger than Peter. I was younger than Ian. I was a junior kid. I don't get any credit for PayPal. Well, you were still there. You were still-- That's a lot of fun for us, guys. And were you in meetings? Were you watching them? Were you-- And what was that like? What was Elon like in meetings? What was Peter like in meetings? What was that like? Give me some of the-- I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon, but be honest. But I mean, these guys were-- were very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast. No tolerance for things that are broken. You fix it right away. You work to the problems. You get everything done today. You don't talk about what you're going to do next week. You just use move. You know, people would be there late at night fixing problems. Just passionate about their work. What was the demo of the age? What would you say the average is? Would you say 25? 0 by 8? You guys in their 20s, mostly. In their 20s. Where you can-- As you can be demanding of getting them to-- Now, at the same time, was Elon and Peter also there driving working with them? Yeah, in different contexts. Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the thinker. He's not the one. He's not the technical guy himself. I think Elon is more of the operator. He's more of there in the room. I mean, I was in Paul Alto a couple weeks ago. I was meeting a friend and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at XA. This is just-- he's just-- he just-- they're working. Where he's kind of the more the workhorse just pushed through, saw the details of the technical problems. Was the level of intent-- like, who was the most intense guy at Apple? The most intense. I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working. But there's other engineers who are just there all the time pushing hard, right? I think when you're in operation about guys like Max Leipzig and others, we're just as far as I can tell it's always working. Who were some of the guys that you worked with that would maybe junior guys like you that came out and became big stars as well? Yeah, so I mean, a lot of the guys who were there, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal that quickly became billion dollar companies, right? So-- and a lot of these guys are older than me, but it was the guys that, you know, Jadon Steve who built YouTube. It was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn. It was obviously Elon did a Tesla in SpaceX. I mean, you know, there's guys who built Ironport. There's just-- there's so many things that came out of there. God. And so from there, how did the opportunity to be a co-founder of a Palantir come up? Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund. And I was-- you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized. And I started bringing in my smartest friends to help. And there weren't really other managers there. So I'd help start building things. And a bunch of my smartest friends are broading. One summer to help us, they weren't interested in finance. I thought it was boring. And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about-- PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia for stealing all of our money. And so we got to know the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys. There was secret service in the FBI. And right after this happened, it was 9/11. And so these guys were spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought didn't make any sense. And they were really-- they kept asking us for advice. They're confused about it, do you think? It was-- it was-- I mean, President Bush created what was called the Department of Homeland Security at the time. I shouldn't be too mean about it. But you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department, people can't really fire people in government easily. So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire. And then they said there's pushments in the new department. So it was a bit of a mess. I thought, look at this. They knew the departments were in your fire. So there's-- so therefore, the whole of the department didn't really know very well what he was doing. And this was my impression. And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff. And it became really obvious to us that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things that were going on out there were just way ahead technically of where the government was at that point. And this was a problem because the government was using all-- the government was spending $38 billion a year gathering data, looking at the data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also abusing our civil liberties. So it was a mess. So you know what? There's actually a really important problem here to solve. A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and go get them instead. B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any controls. That's crazy. So that's when you said, why don't we go do it? You guys say, let's go do it ourselves. And I started having my friends. I brought that summer to help build a prototype, in which it sounds even crazier than finance. But at least it was interesting. They enjoyed it to help help me build it. And my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later, he moved down here in Miami. He and I controlled the team and Stefan Kell and my co-founder. And when you started building that up. And CIA was apparently one of the first investors in the company. They eventually gave us money. I think it was the second or third round. But it was only $2 million. And we actually bought them back. The reason we needed them is that Peter-- it basically no one would give us money. First of all, Alex Carpenter went all over Sanchez Road. Like, what? You guys have all this talent, because they can measure talent, even like then. Like, why aren't you doing social media? Why aren't you doing something new and exciting, working with the government's crazy? What's wrong with you guys? It's not possible. So he didn't think it was a good idea to help. No, no, no. This is Alex and I talking to the investor. So all the investors were being-- They were telling you guys. They're telling us you guys are crazy. No one does this. Why are you doing this? It's not possible. It doesn't make any sense. These are some big names. Credible. These are the big names. These are-- we got turned down by everyone. I turned down by Excel. I said, Koya, the guy at Cliner Perkins at the time. And they're a great firm. I admire them very much. But the guy at the time was no longer there. He started laughing at us on the phone because Alex didn't have a technical degree. He was like, you guys don't even know what you're doing. And he's like, it's a doctorate, but it's not even a relevant doctorate. Like, they're laughing us out of the room, basically. And what is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of it? And what's he telling you? Oh, we really-- Because Alex is a very unique type of guy himself. We were not happy with these people. Peter Teele told me it was probably really good for me because it gave me an even bigger chip in my shoulder to make sure we succeeded after being mocked and turned down. I was only funded in himself. And you know, people to fund these things. So when we got in QTL, which is CIA's venture capital arm at the time, did give us a little bit of money in Peter Gioci for more of that was really critical. And then how long later did you guys pay the $2 million back? I think we bought it for a much higher amount. We had some option. I forget. I must have been five or six years later. OK. So they still made some money on it. Oh, they made plenty of money on it. And more importantly, we saved the government billions of dollars versus what they were doing. I mean, you literally have things going on. The DHS guys, I remember there was some unistage thing where it was like $3 billion to integrate all the data. And we came, we showed them we couldn't on the same thing for them out of the box at a month. Don't waste billions of dollars. So it turns out confidence saves the government lots of money and protects civil liberties. People don't realize it's both of those things. What is the desire to constantly use names that are from, I believe, Lord of the Rings, right? What does that come from? Peter gets credit for naming-- Peter gets credit. You know, but I'm a fan of it. I think, listen, and we wrote about this at that time. So at the time when we're creating this, we say, this is a dangerous thing to create. But we believe it's a worthy thing to create. It took a lot of courage. Like, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on. It could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things. But it was really important to both help. We have to eliminate, probably, about to 10,000 terrorists that might not have eliminated. We worked with all sorts of amazing groups in the government alongside them with the technology and with the ability. And we help protect civil liberties and make sure the government watchers are being watched. Now, of course, you create this technology if it gets into the wrong hands and they turn off the autotrails, who knows what back you've done with it. So there's good and bad here. Yeah. And we'll get into that as well. But going back to the meetings of going, meeting with investors and them saying, you know what, you guys don't know what you're doing. You don't even have the real degree Alex said in one of the interviews. I think he may have said it to you. He said, I wish we would have told him to f off and just laugh so-- We were so polite. They would have probably respected us more if we had just like-- Were you naturally polite? Or were you intentionally becoming polite because you needed the money? I thought you were supposed to do it. We needed the money, man. I didn't know you were supposed to do it. So, but it wasn't naturally because you were disagreeable for a talent-- Well, yeah, at the same time, I think both of us are not the kind of people. We're probably a little more arrogant now that-- No, we've done success. More arrogant now. We didn't know that we didn't know for sure we knew what we were doing. We felt we were doing something smart, but it was our first time. He said, I think it was, I wish we were more arrogant and certain areas, unless arrogant and certain areas. That's well said. You know what was interesting when you're creating our company, we kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch. And in some cases, it was probably frankly genius. In other cases, we could just hire someone and knew what they were doing. And it's like, when you're building a company, I talk about having adults in the room. There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring into a startup because you don't want people running a machine in a standard way. You want to be creative. But there's certain parts that once you get there, you probably do want the adults to show you how it's done. So there's some things we need to be able to learn from others. What was your strength in the partnership as a founder? What was his? I was really good at recruiting the first few hundred people and kind of pushing forward on the kind of like the product strategy and whatnot. Alex was really intuitive about institutions, about how the world works, about how we come across, about how to get into certain places, about how to make deals happen, about how to communicate with the right way that you're coming across to create value for the other person in a way they understand, the way they can get it done. Alex is a philosopher and he understands how people and organizations work and navigate the world. Got it. Got it. So his, was he more the one selling the vision? You were more recruiting the people, both of us. I think recruiting is a lot about selling vision as well. When we gave people their offers initially, this is really early on, at the beginning, we give them three options of like higher salary, middle or lower salary, and higher upside, middle or upside. And I put on the sheet sheet of paper, the lawyers hated this, but I put an asterix that it might not be exactly right. I'd say, okay, if the company's worth $5 billion, and this is much solution, here's what your shares might be worth. And it'd be like, you know, here, here, the companies worth a billion dollars, here's what might be worth. And people would say, Joe, you can't show people if it's for $5 billion. That's totally unrealistic. But you had to say, no, here's why it could be worth. And now it's worth what? $335 or $100 billion? Yeah, it was a lot bigger than that. So you couldn't say it's worth $5 billion. People thought I was ridiculous. So let me get to straight. So you're sitting in front of me and you're telling me, Pat, you can take 200K salary, 350, I'm just making up numbers. 500K salary, okay, 500K salary, if it's $5 billion, you're gonna get $10 million. Yeah, but up here, like $50 million. $20 billion, it's gonna be $50 million. That's literally what you got. Something like that, lower salary is a course, but yeah, yeah, exactly. Wow. And so based on what I would choose, would you judge me and put me in the totally, I tell you, if you choose the high salary and low upside, then I have to go, be very skeptical of you. Would you still hire me or no? Sometimes, but usually, you know, I work out, because we measure everything. Sure. After the fact, all the very best guys choose a low salary because they want to get in the game. They want to be part of the mission. Yeah. And by the way, how much, especially since you said you recruit the first few hundred people at Palantir, and you were at PayPal and you watch how they recruited you, how much have you noticed recruiting change from then till today due to AI? So, oh no, it's not just AI, it's that people recognize talent so much better. So Palantir was getting the best of the best. We get the top hill, all the top schools, Facebook, and Google kind of caught on to some of this. They started giving big signing bonuses. And so, in like 2009 or 2008, 2009, they started giving 150K signing bonuses, which at the time, that sounded like a lot of money for 20 year olds, ridiculous. Now, the top AI companies, it's like multi-million dollar signing bonuses for them. I saw this one guy got a billion out of offer. He turned it down. This was like nine months ago, 10 months ago. Yeah, that's like the very best guy. He's probably taking some knowledge from him place to another. So it's a little sketchy kind of what they're paying for there. But for this the raw talent, you're still getting millions of dollars for coming into companies. Just being the most talented kind of math Olympian. And the young guy coming in. Yeah, but it's like, think about it. It's like, it's like, you know, you hire a young guy for a basketball team who's the best basketball player. Similarly, the gold medal programmer in the world who's gonna add this unique ability with that worth. So it's worth a lot. So today, it's not uncommon for a young guy to get a five-million dollar signing bonus cutoff. For the very, it's like a being taught athlete. How do you protect yourself with the guy walks in six months? Well, he's a clawback. Yeah, you start you structure it in some way that like they're it's built in. I mean, if you walk in here, you might be able to keep it, but he hopefully distribute a lot in a year. But he's getting equity and he's vesting into his upside. So you don't want to leave to suit. If the company's doing well, he's gonna stay 'cause he's gonna earn that. He got the equity in the just. He's gonna get the equity for the next four years. He's gonna want to stay in earn that. So you got the signing bonus, you got the salary, and you got the equity. And sometimes a signed bonus, you might ask to take his equity if he's bullish, which by the way, the best people often do. They want a bigger piece of the game. So I give you five million dollars worth of share today that could be worth 100 million dollars. Maybe it takes a million of it in cash and he gets these comfortable and he has four million of it in shares 'cause he's smart and he wants to make the big money. Yeah. Yeah, so that's one thing that's changed with recruiting the cost. How much cost to get the key? It's the cost and what else? What else has changed? I mean, so it add up our second company after a palancier. It's very successful as a $10 trillion in this platform for wealth managers. And you know, the guy used to work for me, Scott will. He had won the gold medal and programming three years in a row. So like, it's like King of the Nerds basically. Right? Everyone knew who he was and these competitions. And he worked for me and then he went on. Now he's running one of the top AI companies. But the fact that I was able to hire him and people like him just by like showing up with these contests and hanging out, now there's like hundreds of other firms going after these contests, sponsoring these contests. They all know who these kids are. The game's gotten harder. You have to look harder for these top people now. And it's harder to recruit them. And you better, you better, I have an advantage 'cause of everything I've built. But you better have a reason why they should be coming to work with you if you're just a random new person. It's really tough. - What's a differentiator? - All right, I've built multiple different multi-billion dollar companies. And the next, and this is my main thing I'm doing, come work with me on it. That's a pretty good pitch versus you never heard of me before. Right? So it's a lot harder. - Got it. So the differentiator is, Memorial Authority, previous track record I've won before will build in something big again. Come join us. - I'll tell you the best thing is this other guy you know is there who's a genius. You want to work with him and learn from him. So it's all about chicken and egg. - I got to start with the best people. And the other best people, that's how Palantir really did it. We started with a bunch of the best guys. The other ones want to be with them. So it's, you gotta have a nucleus you start with. - What else did you do at the beginning? The first few hundred of Palantir you recruit. I mean, that's a big thing to say. That's the foundation. What other methods did you look at certain schools to recruit from that? - Yes, we have teams that have about 20 of the top universities. We have playbooks for flying there. We would rate other companies. It sounds really bad when you talk about it. The most ridiculous version, one of this guy, Nathan, who was helping us build a company early on, he had worked at eBay because eBay bought PayPal. He didn't paypal. And we couldn't have got a conference room at eBay. And I was like, night, 2021 at the time. And we were interviewing people at eBay to come join our company. And I felt a little bit awkward about it. But I'm like, I guess this is what people do. Turns out you weren't supposed to do that. But anyway, it was-- - Did it work? - Yeah, well, there was such a badly run company that they didn't even have any idea that it was going on. Which is, you do that in my company. I'll mess you up, man. That's not cool. I'll be like, on your mobster friends. - Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, you almost have to have that mindset and build something big. - Yeah, you know, you're like, fight people. But eBay was like a sclerotic group of like MBAs who didn't really have strong opinions about the world. - At what point did you know, Palantir was special? Like it really had legs. - You know, it was, for me, it was like when I had some of these people joining Bob McGrew when he came in from, you know, he'd been Stanford PhD and had been at PayPal and was a super star. That's parlorism Peter gave us money for one round is when he joined and he ended up running a bunch of stuff at OpenAI after being at Palantir for 10 years. But when he came, these other guys came, when we started to get into the FBI and the, you know, it's just like three or four years and it was, it started to really work and all this top talent started coming. It was very special. - And what happened? So when you're saying FBI, what does that mean? Like they're approaching you guys, you're solving their problems, they're seeing-- - You know, it's so hard to sell the government. And I use, so the CIA, I use the thing it was like the CIA. It's actually like 200 competing awards that don't like each other. And the FBI's like that a little bit too. There's lots of parts of it. And so we are working and doing pilots with both sides, but we couldn't get a breakthrough. And at one point, we finally, it's kind of funny. They were jealous to each other. They wanted to be first, but they didn't want to be first. - Yeah, I see. The government's very funny. I've done other things to each other, the government. They both want to be able to tell everyone how innovative they are, but they don't want to take any risk in being the first one to do something. Because they can get fired and they're very risk-versed. People tend to be bureaucrats. - Yeah, I see. first few million dollars of revenue if we partner with them in DC, but they would have kind of locked us into something where they owned a big piece of the whole thing long term, the way they structured it. And that would have capped the value. We might probably would have been a better chance of being worth 100 million, and no chance of being worth a lot. That's a big of a difference. I mean, because they would have owned a piece of the market the way they wanted to structure it, and how that some rights. And for me, I'm just trying to make this thing work. So you're like, oh, he's going to give us millions of revenue. We'll be able to get over here. But it would have really, like, taken away a lot of the upside. He's very smart about how to structure these things and I protect yourself. And he's always been the thinker behind the scenes where you check everything worth. And here you make sure you're going the right direction. Why was Palantir started? It was started to protect the West against Islamist terrorists, and to make sure we save the government money and protect the civil liberties. That was the mission. And you're saying that to mean the interview when you're recruiting me. You know, I don't know if we used, yeah, we use a lot of words like that when we were first starting out. We were telling him, oh, you literally tell me we're going to save the free world. Oh, yeah, we say, listen, the technology cultures that exist in the West Coast, which of them interviewing you, you know, you're one of the great technologists, and you know, your friends are amongst the very top. The things we know how to do here, they do not know how to do that in this part of the world. And you see, they just don't. They're way behind and they're broken and they're wasting tens of billions of dollars and we're getting attacked and we're they're abusing our data and they're incompetent. And we're going to have to do this for them to come in. And it's important that at least some of the best people in the world go and help the government be less stupid. I mean, that is that is that is what if you want to matter, you know, got it. But that mission was full on bottom. You Alex, you guys are on the same page with the mission. Yeah, save the shy. We used to put it because this comes from the lower the rings. But you're saying the shy shy is this Western civilization is protecting the innocent. It's going off and doing the mission. Let me ask you the process. It is it. Okay. Pre the idea of Palantir. You're sitting in guys. This is a problem. We have to save, you know, the free world. We have to say, save the, you know, Western ideology. Here's the enemy. You know, what they're trying to do. How can we solve that problem? And then do you think about what company can we develop? They can solve this problem? Is there's a go mission first, solution second? What is the, I think, was the, the tools that were built at PayPal to, to stop the fraudster. This is the rush of when you were talking to Russian Chinese, right? You had to be able to stop those guys. So we built those tools. We how nasty was it? They made all of our competitors go bankrupt. Everything else was going bankrupt basically. This was existential for PayPal to solve. What kind of money did they get? I mean, it was like seven or eight million a month. That was back when I was a lot of money that you have to remember the early stages of PayPal. This is like, I mean, it's like seven or eight million a month at a time when it's scaling a lot of months. Enough to make it unprofitable. Got it. I don't know the exact numbers, but it was enough to make it unprofitable versus profitable. It was really key and it was annoying because you could, because you had to not accept certain things if you couldn't stop these guys, right? So it'd break a lot of stuff. They'd run money through system. They'd take it out. You might go to seven, eleven, buy something. They get your credit card, sell to the group of Russians. The Russians are going to open accounts, transfer a bunch of money. You're going to then skip PayPal $300. You say no, you'll charge it back. And then, and then we have to pay the, we have to come in and so there's always fraud you have to deal with. And then it turned out that like the types of problems we realized we were doing for investigating that, you could extend those to a lot more types of problems and build investigative software that didn't exist and be able to like look into all the data, bring the data together, basically have the human mind extended into the 38 billion dollars of data and make sure you only access we're allowed to access and how makes you have autotrials to do it right in order to get the bad guys. And so that created so much pain and annoyance that led to the mission and it inspired from there to start a company called Palantir that prevents what Russian shine into to you guys. Well, at 9/11 happened after that and we saw, and we got to know these guys and we saw them reacting to it badly. We said, wait a second, we got to help things at the same time. Yeah, those two got things. Got it. Why do so many people not trust Palantir? Every, every, by like a, you know how, when you think about every decade, there's a company that people look at us evil. You got Montsanto, you got Anron, you got all these guys, you know, 20 years ago, they hated these companies. They hated Aagchi. But man, when you think about Palantir, a lot of people say, what is your motive? What is the vision? What are you guys trying to do? Well, I'm not running it anymore, first of all. So I was, I was the other first decade, but I'll tell you, you know, first of all, when you're really successful people attack you, that's always going to happen. And second of all, this is a, this is unusual area. You have a company that is, that is helping, helping the government, you know, eliminate bad guys. It's helping the government do things who wants to do more effectively, more efficiently. And some of the things government's doing right now, people are not happy with. And so I think it's an interesting question. Like should a tech company stop helping the government when it is in peace with it? And I think Alex Carp's spoken really well on this. And I know, listen, Alex Carp comes from, you know, he had an African American mother, he's had a kind of Jewish professional, for a father, he comes from the left, obviously, Peter Till obviously is more on the right. And, you know, so we come from different political sides here, but they both agree that it's better for the world to make American government and America more efficient and work better. And not throw sand in the gear is not break things. And so the question is, like, should Silicon Valley get to decide policy? Or should the government get to decide policy? And our view is we want to watch the watchers, but the government should get to decide policy. Our public has a mechanism for deciding and we should follow that mechanism. First is being in charge ourselves. The fear becomes what if somebody evil runs it after Alex? Then what? What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building? Then what? Well, it's, see, that that's not what's scary. What's scary to me is if it's a foreign public, he likes some really, really bad person and they try to get around things and use technology and power ways they shouldn't. Pals are repossible, because it's very possible. That's that is scary to me. That's what we all have to fight to be part of the political process for our views there. And to make sure we have checks on power, which is quarter of their US Constitution. What Alex is doing, he isn't getting the data himself. Alex is running a company that builds technology for our clients, right? I should say our clients. I'm an advisor still on Pound Founder. I'm not running Pounder these days, but but but Pounder is helping them use their data. We're not, we're not data ourselves. You see what I'm saying? Like you're helping them see things and do things that couldn't do otherwise with their information, where it's not like Pounder itself has all the information. How many of the how many of the events that happens in the world were watching like, you know, this Palantir involved, for instance, and I know you're not involved today like, Maduro was Palantir involved in capturing a game, El Minto, the Mexico, you know, the cartel guy we just killed in Mexico, were you involved in gathering that intel? Because if you're thinking all these intel and by the way, a lot of agencies use you, right? It's not just CIA that uses you. So you know what everybody is doing. Not about we don't actually because the people who know are the people who have the clearance to see what's going on there. So there may be things that happen that Alex, even if he's running the company, may not have the top secret clearance for that particular operation to be involved in that. Is there anybody in the company that has the clearance to know what everything's going on? I actually don't know the answer to that question. That's an interesting question. I doubt, I doubt, I doubt they do because a lot of Palantir's work is with allies all over the world. And different allies have different clarences and different things they do. So it'd be very unlikely for someone to see everything. Now, the real question though, is do you want this operation to be done efficiently and effectively as possible? Or do you want to be done slightly stupider? I mean, that's really the question we're asking here. Should this be done in a slightly stupider way or a slightly better way? Because that's all Palantir's doing is it's on site with them helping them do it in a better way, given the information they're allowed to use. So in a situation with a Maduro or a man show, is there a possibility that Palantir was involved? It's very likely to me that the technology and that was involved in its capabilities were involved and then they helped them do it in a better way than they would have done it before, especially with the US operation. I don't know about the Mexican operation or not. I'm not just speed on what they're doing there. Meaning the Venezuela operation. Venezuela wanted to be surprised if it wasn't involved in some way. But again, Palantir is a tool being used. So my others in our government who are in charge who are making this job. I need to explain that. So how is that tool used? What does that tool help you do? If I explain different technology, I can say, here's what HubSpot helps you. Here's what Salesforce helps you. Here's what this technology helps you. How does Palantir help in that process? So what Palantir is, I mean, it's a lot of things at this point. But Palantir is bringing together data from a lot of different sources in the government. Like I said, when I started Palantir, government spent 30-something billion year gather data. I bet you it's a lot more than that now. So there's literally hundreds of thousands of databases. There's literally signal intelligence, human intelligence, and there's all sorts of rules about who could see what they could do. So they're not, for example, people are not allowed to spy on US'es and use that data. That'd be legal. Palantir would flag that and say, this is against the rules. You can't be doing this, right? So the whole thing is a rules engine that has very strict rules. And then so there's someone who's using it. They're getting all the stuff they're legally allowed to be doing based on the policy of our republic and they're bringing it all together and they're putting it together because it's very complicated if you have lots of databases. Is this the same person over here? Is this person over here? Is this Mohammed, is this Mohammed? Is this guy, was this the last common Hispanic last day in the Sarah, the same as this, and they're mapping it all out and they're taking all the information they can and they're using that with AI along with their judgment to ask questions and rate and make plans and figure things out and connect the dots and then get things done better. At the beginning stages, who didn't want to see Palantir succeed? The Primes, all the Primes. So in America, the Primes are the big defense companies. In America, we had for a long time the most competitive best defense companies. In the 20th century, there were maybe 80 or 90 of these. They just were dominant, best in the world. After the Cold War ended, we had a lower budget. Probably a good thing. I'd rather more money goes towards other things than war. Cold War ends with the Primes all to merge. They merged in these 8 or 9, 6 or so. Yeah, exactly. Maybe even 8 or something, but they're much smaller, much fewer number, much bigger companies and they became so dominant, but they became more like the government themselves because they interacted with us so much. They became big bureaucracies. And these big bureaucracies, a lot of the best tech guys, they all fled to the tech world, to the best places in Silicon Valley, to other places and these places got really good at what we call innovation theater. They're going to convince Congress they're innovating, but they're not really innovating anymore. And they stopped innovating. And there's only two companies that broke through these primes. It was Palantir and SpaceX. Both Palantir and SpaceX, and it was really hard, it was really unfair. They beat the crap out of us. We do things that would save huge numbers of lives. I'll tell you, there's, so we work with the special forces at first because special forces are like the most elite like soldiers doing really important missions and their lives are on the line a lot. So they wanted the best tools. And when Palantir went somewhere at first, it was very often special forces guys using it for key missions to save their lives. Now at the time, they were, we were in Iraq and there are rebigades in Iraq and they saw us saving lives and special forces as they can we use it too. And the government wouldn't pay for it. So we said, of course, you can use it for free because we're patriots. That's the whole point. So go use it for free. Just give us the data back legally makes it was very much. This is like all sorts of people in the military working with our guys in the military embedded working with these guys, not PMCs. These are actual guys like Lieutenant colonels in the military. So the new plan is to colonels are reaching out to get government. Those don't want to fund it. Can you help with getting a general's permission pushing it in? Wow. Is your guys think ground? Because they're buddies lives are on the line, right? Sure. This is these are we have a lot of great soldiers without the approval of the US government. No, no, they people that approved they would use it for we're just like, they just we're not going to pay for it. I know because we don't want to get trouble stopping you using something that's going to work better. And so in this case, we stopped tons of deaths from IEDs because we're able to track where the IEDs most likely were we allowed track all sorts of things going on. They reported back all these deaths that we stopped. And then there was like a five whatever three or five billion dollar bid for the defense ground control system again. And we'd already been used better than anything they were doing before the way ahead everything they wanted. And they just like no bid gave it to a prime. And we actually pursued him at this point because it's not allowed. You have to consider others. We actually won the lawsuit. The generals in charge against the prime were ordering people behind the scenes to destroy the records of live loss. But some guys said that some guys that saved the lives that we'd saved so the general couldn't couldn't hide it. It's like it's a totally corrupt. It's totally corrupt. So we had to break through and then a lot of others saw this. And this is really shit to the culture of the military now in space. I broke through them. I went through a now yanderel. Of course, they're starting to stay away a second. We've got to be open to the outside stuff. We can't just only do the primes. But that was a big fight for us for years. Who's who should the primes are bigger than you guys right now? Everyone's still everyone's still bigger on revenue because palancier's still a small economy. Palantir's about half government, little bit less than half government revenue. It's like, you know, it's in the single digit billions for revenue. And there's primes being in tens of billions of revenue. They're much bigger than us been around forever. But we're growing much faster. That's why we're valued highly. But market cap wise, you're higher than the prime. Mark Capcage rise were higher, but revenue wise were so much. Do you do you do you I mean, you're not a part of a sensible one. You're an advisor. Is there any situations where palancier has to deal with the prime? Oh, yeah. All the time. No primes still run a lot of stuff. And by the way, there are still parts of things the primes do that are the best in the world and you have to work with them. The problem was is early on we've counter tried to do anything. The prime is they like, oh, we'll take 99% of the value. We'll give you one percent of the value. We'll take credit for your work. It's like they just beat you because it's because they're in charge when you say 99, it's a hundred million auto project. It literally pay you over a million bucks. They're giving me a million bucks for something. And then we'd actually do most of the work and it would drive us crazy. So in own nine, which is 17 years ago, what's top line revenue day year? Oh, I don't remember. But it was it in the millions or billions probably in the 10, 10 millions that we didn't cross the billion for 15 years. Took a long time. So in own nine companies been around for five years. And the revenue's in a million tens of millions, 10 millions. Yeah, got it. It might have just been crossing under that. I don't know the exact numbers. Got it. So if that's who didn't want you to exist at that time, who today is your biggest enemy? You know, and I really can't speak for the companies. This is just me now. Sure. You're looking at them from the outside. I would think the biggest threat to parents here are like the extreme populace on both political sides who don't want our country using better technology to succeed basically. And you know, there's a lot of there's 1200 laws right now in 50 states trying to be in different types of AI for things that I think are just ridiculous. I think most of the by the way, some of it's good. You have protect children. You got to like protect content creators. There's things there's legitimate things to push back on. But a lot of this stuff is nonsense. And if those nonsense passes, it's not just an enemy to counselors and enemy to like thousands of our best innovative companies right now. So I think that's actually the biggest threat. This point because Pounder is so dominant in any value, just so many thousands of companies. Can we like specify who would be fart? Are you saying things like a non interventionalist politician? Is that oh no, no, no. I'm talking about laws that are I'm talking about laws that are like like Bernie Sanders trying to stop all new data centers or something crazy like that or people who are saying we want to throw developers in jail if things don't go right with AI or something which there's laws like that. They're causing a Maryland, Virginia or there's people saying, you know, it's a lot of people who are technically illiterate writing state law to block things to create new regulators to stop you from deploying. Stuff like that would be it is I can't. And I see the president's working to deregulate and kind of still keep an open source and allow you to compete without making it too regulated. Yeah, David. David Sacks is working hard on this for because he's ahead of AI for the president and and you know, my view is that we should have certain regulatory frameworks to protect kids and protect common creators and have reasonable law but we but we shouldn't be having each day have its own regulatory code that is crazy. Did you see this recent movie that came out called Mercy? Have you seen Mercy? Have you seen Mercy? You haven't seen Mercy? Oh my god, you got to watch Mercy. So it's a movie with Chris Pratt. I've been telling everybody go watch this movie. Specifically you like in every employee at Palantin, you should go watch this. So Mercy is a story of this actor Chris Pratt who wakes up. He's locked into this chair. Okay, handcuffs shackles. And the judge is that face on the top. If you see the face on the top, that's the judge. It's an AI judge. You have 90 minutes to call for her. Why you didn't kill your wife. In this case in a movie, he killed his wife. He's like, what are you talking about? And she has access to every video to pull up. Can you go to this state? What happened that morning? When I walked into that scary stuff, man? Well, do you see a day in the next 20 years where we could be living in a world where judges could be AI, politicians could be AI? It could be some models. That's not the world I want to live in. How do we prevent that from happening? Well, you know, the Constitution is pretty clear about the rules. So I think we should make sure we stick to the Constitution. And if we're going to mend it, we should be really careful not to give AI random power like that. That would be my view. But the whole point of how America was designed is checks on power. The reason America is a truly great country that's like last as long as it has is our 250th anniversary this year is because our founders were philosophers from the Enlightenment. And they thought a lot about this. And they realized you have to check government power. You have to set it up with lots of different checks on itself. And the whole point is for the government itself not to be allowed to ever be evil. And by the way, that was how we built volunteers have audit trails and to watch the watchers and to have checks. You have to have checks on power. Otherwise, government is dangerous. Yeah. But if we're going into the robot era of developing robots. And if all of a sudden you have 400,000 robots that you program from your headquarters, and your competitors got 200,000 robots and third places got 17,000 robots. And all of a sudden, somebody becomes evil. Then what happens? Well, this is why this is why it's important for the military to have the most powerful robots and not not some kind of corporation that obviously is very important. And by the way, China is trying to build those faster than us. And that's why right now we're trying to make sure we stay ahead of China. And it's, listen, our military, how it's controlled by our government. It's a very important thing our public has to get right. But obviously, our military has to stay ahead of our, of anyone else. That'd be very bad not to have them not play on power. You said it eloquently of who you think volunteers enemies. Who do you think is the enemy of the state? Top three enemies. I think our top three enemies are probably our, probably our adversaries, right? I think I think our country right now is very polarized. It's very polarized. And I think social media unfortunately does that. What are adversaries to give an end to that? I think China using TikTok finds ways to polarize us more. I think Iran very clearly, the guys running Iran on a very big fan of the Persian people, but the guys running Iran are a bad guy, theocracy. And you saw when we hit Iran with Israel last time and the internet went down. You saw 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. And you saw a bunch of bots that are guys who pretend to be Christians who hate Jews and Alabama also got turned off for a while. All right. So they're trying to find ways to divide us, man. They're trying to find ways to pull us apart. What a powerful thing right there. The 15% of Christians who hate Jews and Alabama. Well, 15% of global Bitcoin hash rate went away. Sorry, that was another point. I mean, I was mining 15% of all Bitcoin in the world. We found that out because it went away as soon as we hit them. But then there's literally hundreds of thousands of bots that were like just angry Americans. They're angry because they're there. They're pretending to be Christian guys who hate Jews. They're pretending to be crazy people in America who are different, are different extremes or arguing. So there's a lot of stuff that's planted. That's planted to make us fight. You know, let me ask you if Iran was able to who actually knows this is a, this is an interesting thought. I'm curious what your answer will be. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Paschiniro. We chose Trutalian Craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skill pairs. We chose patience, spending two years perfect in every detail. And we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looksprite Collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless. This doesn't Ilan if he wanted to really run a report with the data that he has. Is he able to see who is behind the fake bots that are causing retweets to happen for a certain message that's going to undermine the certain way of thinking and pin people against each other? Somebody should know. Yeah, Ilan did something very courageous with his team a couple of months ago. And I don't know where it is now, but they put all the country of origin up on all these things. And you saw all these like very divisive stuff. You got this, you got this like, it pack his evil report, it pack thing. And it was like a European account, Taj Raihrini, an account, Taj Raihrini, an account, a Pakistan account. I was like, wait, is that like, and you guys have been saying you're from the south? You're obviously a foreign lobby who's doing this now, right? And you got a lot of versions of this. We're all of a sudden all these accounts that were, they were storing up trouble on both sides. We're actually foreigners. Yeah. I think it'd be interesting to see these numbers. I haven't looked at that much. Well, I mean, if you're a data company, a Palantir or ex-also data company, any of these guys, I would assume they know exactly who's behind it. You know, the problem is it's very easy to create accounts and be a real person or not be a real person. So I don't know if they know everything. I think there's a lot of bot farms. You can see the words coming from where, but if you're really good at this in your state actor, you can use different IP addresses, you can use different spoofs, you can do things to make it a little bit harder for them to tell. And so you might be able to create a lot of fake accounts. Who is using bot farms? Who are the Chinese customers or bot farms? Chinese are using probably the most of the ones. To create so division and to push things and to make the crazy politicians more popular. The Chinese love making socialist more popular in the US. They know that weekends us. They have a word for like crazy white person, which is like this kind of woke white crazy person on the left and they love to, they know it's a problem there. They want to ban it there, but they want to push it in America. Then they think it weekends us culturally. That's one of their models. They have a, they know the Chinese do cognitive warfare. You know this, right? So there's like land, sea, air, cyber, and cognitive. And they have a whole branch of their military. They're just doing cognitive warfare using all this stuff, whether it's especially TikTok, but all these other ones as well. And they're very good at it. What are the tools? That's how to TikTok. I mean, all the social media stuff, all the protests, like they are big funders of, they'll figure out something like a black lives matter thing of the figure out something going on with some environmental thing. And both Russia's done this too, historically. They find it a lot of green movements in Europe. They knew it was good for them to do that. And they'll figure out, and you know China nowadays, they take all the data they can. So there's companies like, you know, I'm told air wallocs does this. I don't know myself. I'm told air wallocs has all the data that goes through China. And the Chinese government has access to any data in China at all. And then we'll use it to model. They have models of you. They have models of me. They're models of everyone. And they try to figure out how to use those models to influence us and influence people about us for their ends and for our divisiveness. I mean, they're very good at it. I mean, we saw they did that with TikTok, right? And to the point where we saw what happened with Gen Z and LGBTQ and the tie between it, the percentage is going to make a two point that Bill Moore had to talk about. China used very clearly saw a few issues were very helpful to attack us with one of those issues is Jewish people. Chinese have decided that it's very helpful to create divisiveness around Jews and America. And that because they see attacking Jews or something is very, very useful to do it to rip us apart. And it is. It is. It's actually caused a lot of problems. Unpacked. That go a little bit deeper. So I think the Asian people maybe are a little more racist in some ways than we are. They think of things more of those terms. They just start. That's my experience. And so if you stop and think about this, there's a lot of Jews that are very successful. And these successful Jews in America, they see as an edge for America. And they see that it's, but they also see there's a lot of resentment. So that's a really easy way to create divisiveness against something that's helping us. And so that's like they go right at it. And they're very smart about how to do it. You go all over TikTok, you go all over anything they do. And it's like boom, let's let's just store that up. Let's store up the black lives matter stuff. Let's store up this other thing over here. They're very good at it. But have you ever seen how do you, by the way? I think you're 42. 43 now. I'm 47. I just turned 47 a few months ago. Have you ever seen that the Jewish story and the division being this high temperature wise in your lifetime? And our lifetimes is the eyes it's been and it's not just China. Partly what's happening here is this is the first war that Israel has been involved in in our lifetime with social media. And if you go on social media, just the ratio of people who are passionate against Israel versus for Israel is 100 to one probably just based on the number of Muslims in the world. There's like good Muslims that we're all there's going to be a lot of extreme ones who are really passionate about this issue doesn't mean they're not good people that disagree with me. And so that itself is going to create a lot of passion against Israel and Jesus. And so there's already that already exists. And then you can explain that to push it. How do you dress then? How do you dress it? I mean, man, this is a very, very tough issue. You got your brains. How do you dress it? How do you fix something like that? Because it doesn't seem like it's the temperature is getting any lower. Well, you know, I would like there to be peace in the middle east. And I think for me, the only way to have peace in the middle east is it's a it's a free the Iranian people and an all around sponsors of terror around the Middle East. And I think that leads to a very positive outcome. And hopefully Israel and Insadi and UAE can all sponsor and create peace in the, you know, in Gaza together with one once the theocrats are gone. And hopefully that's a much more positive outcome as long as the Iranian theory crotch are there, which is going to be a recurrent recurrent issue for us. So I really hope I really hope you take them out. That's I'll be honest about that. You really hope we take them out. Then well, I think they're evil evil people who have spread murder and terror and more terror to their own people than anyone else. And I love it. It's a horrible place. Yeah. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world and one of the most wonderful place in the world if we could get rid of the bad guys. Oh, if you do, I mean, there's a song by a singer named Moeen. And he says, De La Micheux be esfahan baggarde. My heart wants me to return to esfahan. Esfahan is one of the richest cities in Iran with history. When my mom and dad were still married to each other for those 10 or 11 years, the only vacation we ever went on was esfahan. And I've pictures till today as a kid going there with my sister and my mom and my dad great memories. But yeah, that's esfahan right there. And Moeen says De La Micheux be esfahan baggarde. I'd like to one day return. My heart wants me to one day return to this city esfahan. One of my favorite books is Cyropedia, which was written about Cyrus the Great, the Great, the Great Leader. And it's just used to actually train European aristocracy princes for like 2000 years. And there's all the wisdom of Cyrus. So you just you kind of get this like really sense of like the greatness of the Persian people from that. And it's like it's very optimistic. It's about virtue. It's about, you know, Machiavelli ended up becoming like the thing people use after him, which is the opposite. Machiavelli is like this very cynical take, which is it's a dialectic. It's also true. But I really like the the Persian side. And you grow up by mom's side Jewish and just like the what the Persians did for the Jews and then the natural alliance has been there for thousands of years. We're still that's that we're still that's what we still feel. So I think really hope this is something that can become a positive. Why do you think no matter what happens, it's always the Jews fault. No matter what happens, it's always I think you I think you're going to blame the people who are outsiders who are different, who are successful. I mean, I could say it kind of Jewish. I think it's slightly annoying sometimes when you're like it's like this little neurotic like smart person who like makes more money than you. You kind of want to punch me in the face, you know. I don't I don't know. You tell me. I can see that. I can see the tree with Thomas Solson. Thomas Solson. A lot of my sorrows. He said something so funny one time. He says, you know what my advice to Jews are for the world to start liking you a little bit. Start losing. Start losing. His mentor was Milton Freeman, who is the illustrious guy. Yeah, Milton Freeman, I'm obtaining a my house with Milton Friedman in it. I love him. I use you know, I got to spend lunch. I got a lunch with him like like 20 times because I was the other paper when he was there. Stanford. How was nice. He was amazing. He always had, he's always interested in new ideas and he's just he's really shaped a lot of my thinking. I'm like, I'm like, it's amazing man. Milton Friedman, you spent 20 times with Milton. Yeah, his wife was off in there too. They were in their early 90s when I was at Stanford and he was a Hoover. Yeah. You know how hard I've tried to do an interview with Thomas Solson. Their family made it. He's not still as still hard. He's he's such a great man. I mean, listen to him. The two of them, the debates, when you would watch them do the debates, what's the one book he wrote? Is it called reader? Things called reader. I don't know what the can you tap in Thomas Sol reader? I just had my son finish this book two years ago. He had a conflict of visions that I love. Look on that one right? Yeah, reader. Oh my god. It is like a must read. My son read this at 11, 12 years old. Any breaks down ideas in the simplest way? You know, this guy would be so much more famous if he wasn't black because because he's black, the left doesn't want anyone to know that he's conservative. Well, here's what's funny though. Conservatives today are not talking about him enough. I think conservatives need to remind what Thomas Solson, but go back to go back to that with Iran. So Iran, right now at any point, you and I are talking right now at any point, anything could happen. It was supposed to be this weekend. I think there's a negotiation on Thursday as my understanding. I don't know. I shouldn't be saying it. They said they're not going to do anything. I thought Whitcuff and Kushner walked that said, no, we're not renegotiating. Rob, do you have that one clip I sent you from the foreign minister where he's been, did you see this one for a few hours ago? Oh no. The foreign minister is being interviewed and he's asked about, hey, I noticed you said that there are 40,000 Americans that are in or surrounding areas of Iran and if US attacks, that's open game for you. I send it in the P.V. podcast group. If you don't have it, Rob, I'll just send it to you. You see it? It's right there. Bottom clip, right there. Yeah. She says, are you saying you would do something to your Americans? And you should see his answer. Go ahead, Rob. A thousand American personnel in the Middle East right now. In Iran's letter to the UN Security Council, you've seemed to threaten them because you said America will bear full responsibility. You said you don't want war, but if that's what happens, all bases, facilities and assets of the hostile force in the region will be legitimate targets. Are you saying Iran will hit US bases in the Gulf or will you also bomb the Gulf countries that are your neighbors? Well, I'm not going to say what we are going to do exactly. Obviously, we defend ourselves. If the US attack us, then we have every right to defend ourselves. If the US attacks us, that is the act of aggression. What we do in response is the act of self-defense. So, and it is justifiable and legitimate. So, our missiles cannot hit the American soil. So, obviously, we have to do something else. We have to hit the Americans base in the region. That is a fact. I'm not so what are you thinking is going to happen. Listen, I think these guys sent someone to assassinate Donald Trump. We know this with the in-battery regime at the bottom. They're told if they missed that he'd probably lose the election. So, wait and try to get him again after he lost the election. This was the official instructions we found. These were the these guys were trying to kill Trump. It means that if they're still around after Trump's president, they'll probably try to get him and his and his kids again. So, if I was the president, there's no chance to be around after how's president. That's all telling you. I mean, and by the way, I think it's very good for the world to eliminate this evil for for your people and for all of our people's. Yeah, a lot of people are worried it could turn into another Iraq and we spend a few trillion dollars. But is I around really Iraq? I don't think so, but a lot of people think it could turn into something like that. You know, you're here to two arguments. I think they're going to do a surgical mission the way they did Venezuela and it's going to be clean and here's what's going to happen and then the other side is like, how do we know that for a fact? So, if I was in charge, I'd be very Roman about it. So, I know this is not appropriate, but I'd be very Roman. So, you know, the Romans would do, you'd go and you wipe out the leadership class that you're all dead and you say, okay, you guys are now in charge. We're going to make a deal or we're going to kill all of you two and it's up to you because they're going to be IRGC, which can charge again probably right because there's a guy. So, they guns and say, okay, now here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a deal. Here's what's going to happen. Here's how your public's going to work and to be free people and if you don't do that, then we'll kill you all in six months. I don't think we should be occupying ourselves. I think Iraq was terribly run. I think trying to try to go and have people over there as ridiculous. But should these guys who have acted like they have had who spread terrorism around the region who have tried to kill Trump who have killed so many people should they be allowed to get away with that in a way? I wouldn't let them be away with it. I'll tell you that. How much do you think the attacks going to be a collaboration with Israel? Or do you think it's going to be? Well, Israel has really good intelligence there. Very region. And so obviously, if you're doing something, you need to work with your allies to do as good as possible. The same thing is like, you know, we were talking earlier about, are you going to use balance here to do an operation? You're going to use whatever you can to do it as best as possible. And I think in this case that involves our Israel. I have five walls, other allies too, hopefully. Is really customer volunteer? Yes, actually, we started working with Israel. It was one of my most problem illness because they're kind of like the NSA where they don't really want to work with outsiders and they don't really buy for anyone else. And it took us several years to break in, but we did break into work with them. While you were there or it was something that happened? It was something that I was working on even as an advisor, like shortly after. I got it. Is it recent like five, 10 years? No, no, it's been a while. It's been a while. So, okay, so they've been a customer for a while. There's over 40 countries as far as I know who are allies who work with poundery. Israel is not one of the first several, but it is the key countries originally were the five eyes, which are the core five allies, which is Canada, UK and New Zealand, Australia. Yeah, I saw somewhere where you, is there a structure where if there is a, who can't you work with? Is it based on the sanction? Well, well, I mean, first of all, the company was a mission driven, is a mission driven company. We never have wanted to work with, with our enemies. We're not going to work with the knowledge, not to work with Russia, not to work with North Korea, not from China, but not because of regulation. It's a choice. I mean, at this point, it's definitely regulation against it, too. I think early on, if we had tried to go work with those guys, maybe we somehow could have, because the government wouldn't have noticed, but that would not have been ever something we wanted to do, because we got a mission driven company to fight for the good guys in the West. But meaning, even if you tried to go these days, you tried to, because of what it does in the Department of War, of course, it wouldn't be allowed to. And by the way, I'm not even allowed to go to China anymore right now. You're not allowed to go to China? No, I mean, I mean, I've had friends who are running other defense companies, who are planes going for one case to Taiwan, and they made the force to plan through their emergency landing in China and searched all of stuff. And I know that I'm going to go, because you know, because you know, it's the thing, but they actually did emergency landing, searched all of stuff, because he was a key defense executive. And then along, going to Taiwan, so I'm not supposed to go there at all, nor are a lot of other people who who've worked in these areas. I've started a few big defense companies now. You're not not supposed to do it. Yeah. That made that makes sense for somebody like you to go there. It would be, I wouldn't want to go there. I mean, by the way, I used to love to go to Shanghai, it's a great, you're facing a fascinating part of the world, but not right now. Not right now. Oh, nine, you left. Why do you leave? Well, well, I was still a state as an advisor, but I finished investing and I was starting out of par and out of par is a very large company in the wealth management area. So I was actually going to start a third division. I'd started the government side. I helped them get going on the early commercial side and that's, you know, the company is now about, I think, 60% commercial basically working with Fortune 500 and other companies around the world. I was thinking of starting a third division decide to build it separately as out of par. Adapar. Yeah. And so adapar, it takes the portfolio. It gives you a score. It assesses, well, adapar is a software that you kind of work and live in if you're a wealth advisor. If you're running a big area, so advisors are using it. Yeah. So there's hundreds of thousands of advisors on it serving use number of clients. There's $10 trillion on it. So if you're like a running a big bank with the top wealth management, armor, if you're like a big area like iconic on the west coast, LBL would be, would they, who else would be a customer? Like, Korean or omnir, all the big RAs, there's always big family offices out here. The biggest family on these is what are RAs mostly RAs, but there's, but there's tens of thousands of RAs in our country. It's a big, it's a, it's a very big industry. Got it. And so as the advisor, I'm seeing this as a database tracking my clients, is it also looking at their portfolio? Is it given any advice? Yeah, no, it's helping you run your whole business, everything. It's doing everything. It's all you're reporting, all your tax stuff, all your, everyone logs into it to do anything. It's like, it's like the place you live when you're done your job. I had Anthony Pampliano on the other day. I don't know if you know who he is. He's Pampliano great with his show, Big Bitcoin guy. Yeah. Very smart. He's a brother to the whole family, all the boys. And you know, he's saying advisors will be replaced very soon. Do you agree with that? I think a very high end, actually, the relationship really matters to people. So I think there's ways you can do things without people in some of these areas for some people. But I think the contours of the industry and of our humanities that we want to talk to people, we want to work through things you want to do. I do trust. Yeah, I do. Like I like talking to my golden guy. I like talking to the Morgan guy. I like talking to chase guys and JP Morgan guys. We can help those guys serve you cheaper than they do now. We help them serve more people more easily. But I think the relationship's going to be there. This is where everyone gets things wrong on AI, by the way, because AI does allow things to work in different ways. But it's like, I saw a great essay online where we're talking about a French garden is where you just like destroy everything and just build a new garden. However you want it, where's English Garden takes the land as it already is, right? And molds to it. I think Will and I just wrote about this. And I think that's more what tends to happen in industry is you take the world as it already is and you shift things and improve things and make things. But you work with it as it is. It's not just going to come in and blow everything out. That's not usually what happens. Yeah, that's a fear that that could take place. Do you think there is a place for regulation to prevent from a bad player getting in? Do you think regulation is needed for for for for what? What area? I'm just wondering if there's a place on what limits of a product I produce. Well, I think I think we want to have the so we already do have a lot of regulation in our world right now, right? So for example, in healthcare, there's there's like hundreds of thousands of rules. And if anything, the hundreds of thousands of rules, some of them make sense. Some of them are actually only there to protect the existing people to keep prices high. So for example, in healthcare, I think there's we need new rules that let you try new things that you have sandboxes because we could bring the cost of healthcare way. Yeah, like this is existential. We have $100 trillion of debt in this space. And I'm really excited, for example, here in Florida and a couple other states right now, we're doing studies with the legislature to try to prepare laws for next year that will allow us very safely to try some use cases that we think are safe that doctors want to try and things like that. If anything, we need new policy to allow us to try it because that would be great to bring the cost down. Yeah, I think the part with the one part that you could reduce a lot of costs is trademarks. How they're able to extend trademarks. So I'm able to protect myself with a patent. I get a patent for 20 years. And then the patent is about to expire. Whatever I'm selling could be worth 20 cents, $2, $5, $10 a sell. I'm still selling it for $5,000. And then I go get a lobbyist. I extend the patent for another 18 years. Then it goes 30 years. That's actually especially with hospitals as well. I think Trump was trying to do something, you know, a few years ago, with hospital, how much the cost was and the bottom on it draws it doing a really good job right now. Try to bring down costs of the care Medicaid. There's a lot of smart things we got. It'll be interesting what happens. So oh, nine, when you leave Palantin, you're an advisor. Are you at this, are you married at that time? Oh, you're saying no, no, I got married in 2016. 2016. Okay. So you're a rich young bachelor at this time. Is that fair to say? Okay. So how did you protect yourself? Because well, actually, I made a pretty dumb mistake if you read about it. I had a girlfriend who ended up doing me after I broke out, but they're in didn't marry her in 2020 to look 12, 2013. So you're right. You got to protect yourself. How do you do with it? Because you know, I think I think looking back on it, I was working really, really hard. And I had been a very nice relationship that didn't work out. And then I had a kind of rebound relationship with I don't want to talk too much about this person in particular, but it was something where it's probably not someone I should have been dating. And I'd met in New York and she was a Stanford, she was 21. I was 28. And it turns out you just got to be really careful like who you let into your life and how seriously you take relationships because if you're not careful, then it can cause a lot of trouble. And that's a good lesson for how do you protect yourself? I mean, I think how you protect yourself is you should listen more to your family. I think it's on my family. I didn't think and thought there were some issues with them. And I said, I don't know, she's really pretty. And I'm busy and who cares. And it's like, actually, it really matters to protect yourself and it's common sense who led into your life. I was very lucky that by the time actually I'd broken up a little bit a couple years of my time, they tried to see. I already had a new amazing girlfriend who was really wonderful. And I ended up becoming my wife and is someone that my family really admired her and her family and respected her a lot. And that's I think it's just really important to have the focus on getting a partner. You really really respect who's the right match for you. You know, he's had enough six kids. We have six beautiful young children. I'm very lucky guy. Five little girls, which is such a lot. Yeah. Well, you got the money for it. It's going to be expensive. There they're there. I mean, well, you don't want to ask that question because Trevor Bauer, I don't know if you follow baseball. He's a good friend. And he was playing baseball and he was doing great things. Saiyong, all this stuff. And then a girl accuses him just for the accusation. It shouldn't be. He lost a few hundred million dollars over it. Probably cost me a little bit too. For about a year, a lot of people didn't with the minutes. I became controversial because it became harder for about a year. I mean, obviously, I'm lucky. I was successful enough. I get bounced back and get through it. But it's totally unfair to guy like that to have to deal with that. And this is, yeah, I think there was a period where you were basically guilty as soon as you were accused. I think a lot of people now have seen enough people for that's been happened unfairly. The hopefully our culture is changing a little bit, but it's still very unfair out of the analysis. How do you, when you're rich and single, identify if a girl is with you for you or for you because of money? How do you do that? I want to and I want to push back by the way on one thing. I think it's unfair, how things work now. I think it was probably even more unfair how things worked in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. I think we have to acknowledge that because I'm obviously a lot of woke guy. But I think the world was in a place where a lot of men, it was a man's world and a lot of men were really nasty. Abuse woman horrible things and just got away with it. And I think that is wrong. So I think, so I think we have to realize that the pendulum was here and now it's like swung too far the other way. But you know what? I'd rather face a little bit of a tough time as a rich guy than have all these women being abused. So it's still wrong. It should be in the middle. But I think it's actually like, it's good that we're actually just protecting these women. This weekend, my wife and I were celebrating her birthday. So we go to Baharber and you know, Baharber, I couldn't walk anywhere without somebody saying hello to me was Jewish. It's like filled with Jews everywhere in that area. And so we decide one night we're on Game of Thrones, just to kind of tell you where we're at two episodes after the red wedding. Whatever they call that. That's kind of what we are, right? We haven't seen anything else. And then my wife, she says, babe, thank God I'm a woman born today because how different it was back in the days. So it was difficult. It was vicious. It was a whole little crazy. We're going to tell you a funny story about that. So I mentioned that I was in freedom and I just hang out with his colleague who was older than him was Dr. Bikeman. He was 96 when I was at Stanford. And he had been a reporter in the White House in the late 1930s. So he was like a window for me and to like, this is like completely different time, right? Because that's like 60, 60, 60, 20 years. 65 years ago from when I met him in the White House. And I thought the funniest, he's always stories. So he wouldn't have to be our White House. It would be spring break and they'd all go on the train. And it'd be journalists. It'd be senators from both parties. And it'd be the guys in the White House. And the first two stops of the train, all the girlfriends and escorts would get on. And they'd all go together. And these people would be attacking each other like crazy with the journalists for the business of government. But they'd both be with their girlfriend. They'd say, "Everyone else getting in trouble and never would say anything about that." Isn't that crazy? It was totally different. It was a man's world. It was a different world. And I'm not saying that's good. It's just fascinating how much the world has shifted. You never imagine that. Yeah. Do you believe that I believe that? I believe that. I believe that exactly. Oh, definitely. You read about it. You see about it. You know, it's a very different world. But go back to it. Advice. Think about it. Guys, ask, you know, I read Stephen Schwartzman's book and he's talking about how what it takes. He says he was going through the divorce. He was worried about what to do. He had been married for 25 years. He says, "I get recommended. Go see this one guy who's a very successful therapist, a marriage counselor." And I said, "I have four concerns. How do I at my age get back into the dating world?" Number two, what happens with my kids? Number three, what happens with my money? Number four, what happens with my friends? Do they choose her or me? And the guy gave them very good advice. That's tough. He said, "Your kids are going to be okay. You're going to be fine. There's plenty of girls that I can want to be with you." Number three, do you have a prenup with your wife? He says, "No." He says, "You're going to lose some money." And then number four, he says about friends. He says, "You're going to lose half your friends because they're going to side with her." I'm talking like for guy like you who made money is wealthy, is single, looking for a wife. How do you tell them apart? You meet people through friends, you meet people through people you admire. And I think there's a lot of wonderful families and a lot of wonderful young women out there. And I think it's the most important to be with someone who you really respect and where you have a shared strong base of values. And my wife couldn't, my wife converged to GJD as M&W. We have just a really strong base of tradition in our family that we're building together. And we talk a lot about values and what we care about. And she's someone who, I think if you have a really great wife, she makes you want to be a better person. So it's a live-up to her vision of things. Good for you guys. Good for you. Respect. So going through somebody you know and trusted, again, going back to the same way you recruited people. I mean, I got really lucky. I'm not sure I could find my son on my wife again. Sometimes he's got lucky. Are you going to hit double digits? That's the question. Are you guys going to reach double digits or is six as it? I think six kids might be it, but we'll see. We'll see what I get to you. I was telling you about a guy met yesterday who has 11 kids with his wife is 46, no twins, no adopting all theirs. And they hit 11 kids. I think it was more shake. It's from the mistaken orthodox things. So you left on nine and you went and did other things. The company started. We're talking about that. And then afterwards, you know, you guys, when did you start eight VC? When did you start making? So because PoundTair had always really top talent when people come out, similar to PayPal, they're starting great companies. I was mentoring and helping them. So a lot of my mentors like Joe, you're basically already running a fund, but you need more money and more people help. So I put that together. The first one was called formation eight. We did two big funds. And then we started a VC with most of that team that spun out. And we're on EPC fund six now. So we've done eight really large funds, a bunch of entities around it. And it's been the last couple of years. I mean, it's gone really, really well. Obviously raised a ton of funds. But the last couple of years, things have just accelerated faster than you've ever seen before because AI is just making productivity go up. It's making making a lot of businesses grow way faster. We've ever seen. I think it's four, about four times faster on average for the median top 100 versus the median cloud company. So I was in before. So it's just amazing what's going on. You think VC has been a net positive for capitalism or of course, okay, tell me why. So so so so what so here's what VC is like the evolutionary engine of our economy, right? So whenever whenever whenever you have new technology come along, whenever you have new possibilities come along, the question is how are you going to take those new possibilities and do a better job in your business? How are you going to do a better job in this area of logistics and this area of healthcare, this area of finance, right? Media, whatever it is. And so what VC really is is taking a bunch of smart, you know, smart builders who have new ideas and it's figuring out how do you empower these smart people to run really hard at creating value in these areas from the new possibilities. And so there's really there's a little two things of VC one is the top talent and two is like what's nearly possible to create value. So how do you do it? How do you find it? So so so first of all, you have to be interested in industries. You have to be interested in how things work. How does logistics work? How are these carriers working with the warehouses working with other people? How are they getting bucked? What is a brokerage work? Like what are all the pieces of the industry? How is this how is healthcare delivery working in America where all the pieces and and you have to and as you start to work on companies helping them, you get to know the leaders. And so over the last 15 years, like we'll bring, you know, hundred of the top logistics leaders like, you know, to my to our vineyard and app of value. Well, hang out with them. We'll see what's going on. We'll we'll hang out with the people who build all the wrong all the hospital systems and we're using our things there while you know I'm depending on tomorrow morning. I swear I'm going up to DC to spend a lot of time with the guys building around things and defense. And so you have to be very interested in enjoy these industries, get to know them. And every time you have a success, every time your company helps an industry work better. Now you've built a bunch of trusts. Now you know who the good guys are. Now the next one, two, three, four, five are going to be easier. So you have these big VC firms that have had a bunch of these wins. And then networks get stronger and stronger. You can learn how to take town, learn how to build these things. And it's a huge engine of innovation. As a fact, America is the best in the world at this. And it's I think it's one of the coolest sectors that exists, you know, in the world. What's the business model? The business model is teaming up with somebody else and raising a billion out of fund. And you go find the companies and then you take the 20% of the upside and then you split some of the money and put your own money in it. Give me the business model. So here's the, I think here's the right way to think about it, especially for our generation. I've got people R age is like, you go off and you build a great company and you work really hard. I got pal tiered to work. I get out of part of work. So now I'm one of the maybe 100 guys in our country who's built a couple of big, successful companies. And now I know all these other builders. And I know how to build things I've learned. So now these young guys come to me and they want advice. And so I started advising them. And I realize, wait a second, I know all this talent. I have always ideas. And then I raise the fund. Because now I have the credibility because I've built things. I know how to mentor. I know how to coach these guys because I've done it myself. And I bring people around me who help build these companies as well. So I have 70 people on the team who are the top designers, top tech people, you know, ways to manage it. Then you raise the money and you charge, you charge, it's an illiquid vehicle. It means people lock up their money for effectively 12 years usually. It's how it works. Well, it's 10, it's 10 with like three extensions. And so these funds usually last 12 to 15 years just because they do because they take so off. It's a good problem. And so you can lock so you can people give you the money and you get some fee on the money to pay the team. And then and you invest and you invest it. And most of the money goes into the ground. The first kind of like you first, first you write it's like that you call it a series A or a series, but you lead around you take a big piece of the company. And then you'll follow along with more money in the future rounds alongside other friends. So a big part of your job is to help them recruit talents. A big part of your jobs help them have other people put money in after you, right? And so because I know all the other people, you know, when I'm down here in Miami, there's a bunch of big fund managers, we work together and and and you're helping them learn how to build a team, helping them learn how to work with the industry, helping them learn how to raise the money. And and then when you have, you know, sometimes you sell the company to someone else, sometimes take a public. And so it's a business model of kind of helping people create these things, helping them succeed. How do you find winners? How much of it is? Well, you want to boundaries the entrepreneur. And you know, there's no single right answer. Some people are like, it's about the markets. Some people are like, it's about the entrepreneur. Some people is about the technology culture and tech talent. Some people are just like, oh, it's just art. And I just know, you know, there's lots of ways of doing it. For for me, it's a, it's a combination like you have for, we spent a lot of time on technology culture. I want to accompany this recruiting is very, very best. Just like with the sports team, the very best athletes in the world, the best technologist. And what I want to place for the best guys, want to go there because they've heard someone else is there who's amazing. And then I want an area that we believe is a market that has new possibilities that there is a gap. This should be a struggle. And usually what I really care about is there's a mission. I really want there to be a mission that matters. Like I'm going to put up most of my money into things where there's great team, the gap. And I, and it's because with you, the mission does, the mission brings in the really best people. The mission makes best people want to work harder on it. And it makes it something that can be a lot bigger. So, Palantir was a, was a really big mission out of parts, a big mission in finance. A lot of my new defense companies were trying to help us, you know, scale our shipbuilding with Seronic. We're trying to help fix areas of health. You're trying to save kids with rare diseases. So I think these missions really attract great talent. So mission, the big of the mission. And what, what process of filtering? I remember when I raised my first round, you know, and I sold my insurance company, they came in, they did an extensive background check, you know, they did all this stuff on me. How do you, how do you find out? In Florida, we got to do longer background checks. You do, right? Yeah, you do. That's right. That's a good point. And it looks like Palantir's moving in Florida anyway. Yeah, they're moving down here. But what do you do? Are you doing background checks? That's one of the, that's one of the steps in the process. This is not the most important one, but it's just good to, what's the most important one? The most important one is to know who the founders are and to, and to, and to have them be people you can verify somehow on your network are just are from the network from the, you have a little bit of credibility, a little bit of background. I have to, this is my, my advantage is that I'm tied to hundreds of these like top tech networks now from things I've built, things I've invested in. Right. We have to use, and we have to use that network. So it's not that, it's not that there's not some in the middle of nowhere who could be great, but if you're in the middle of nowhere and you are really great, your job is to, is to find, get to know other people and press their like, what red flags do you have? There's so many red flags for us. It's just because we, we have a very particular thing where we're, we're not investing in small businesses, we're investing in things that can get to be really, really big and changing industries. And so one red flag is being too obsessed with patents. Usually people think patents matter a lot. For most of these things, it's more about the team and the execution is not, I have 20 pounds. It doesn't really matter. So if you talk to much about that, it shows you're not thinking about the thing that's valuable, which is the execution. It's a red flag. The person is not full time. People are always trying to do things part time that's never ends up being the giant company. So you need people who are 100% all in full time. It's a, it's a red, it's a red flag if they don't plan on doing this for a long time. You, you need to be their obsession in their life. You know, it's, it's a red flag if they talk a lot about work life balance because work life balance is great for some things. But this is like winning a gold in the Olympics. You think the Olympic gold medalists had a good balance. No, we're all in. Yeah, we're all in. So those are types. They're just like, it's a big red flag is not one that's interesting. If the, if the top first five or 10 people don't own a good piece of the company. So if you're keeping it all for one founder and he's paying and giving very, very, very little bit of upside, the first five or 10 people, that's, that's a wrong culture. And it's probably not the very best people. It's the very best people in our industry. They want to own a piece of something they're doing. Right. So give me to give me the opposite of red flags. You know, it's, it's like it's if people we know, mission is one mission. Superstar talent is really key. You know, early poll from from the industry, top guys from the industry who want to be advisors who are eager to help. You know, it's, it's, but it's usually all to come down to the people on one of our network things. What's the biggest success story you've had? Best, best story so far. There's a lot of stuff. We backed the Android or early on. It's a top defense new defense company. We backed a company called a Quincy the beginning and it's now, you know, 10 billion valuation. It's probably going to double next year. Cognition and we backed early on. It'll, you know, it's worth, you know, it's worth 15 billion. It's like a bunch of these top guys. Just, you know, seronics, like just raising a big round is building hundreds of ships for the US Navy. It's doing really well. We help start that actually. That's your stuff. Your niche is national defense security. That's AI health care logistics to events in big sales. Things we sold in logistics that have worked out. I love just fixing things that are broken man and making it work better. Do you do you feel the criticism of open AI is getting right now? Chad, you be these getting right now. Sphere. Which, which part of that? You know, revenue, you know, the conversation about, you know, they may start adding ads in there, even though you said that. That was the last resort. I thought that was a funny attack. Yeah. I thought I'd be making a front of them for that. Listen, I saw that. I thought it was very creative on some of the things. Listen, I was, I'm a little friends with Elon and I'm longest his company. So now I have emerged that I got a bunch of SpaceX. I did before too. I'm also a small investor in an anthropic, which is just an extraordinary technology. And there's people who are attacking them up for various things. But I just, anthropic has pulled away ahead in the coding area. And I just, 25 now. I don't know what the, it's 380, 380 posts. But that's, I think that's even cheap for where they're going because they're just growing so fast and like all of our companies are, are using this. And it's, it's really fun. Like a lot of my smartest friends who are already extremely well-fingued. Do anything they want or staying up coding right now because it's so fun what you could do with these tools. It's just this crazy time right now. Are you more long with anthropic than open AI? Yeah, I'm most long SpaceX next to the AI. I'm second most long anthropic. Open AI, I do think it could possibly have some struggles here. But I don't know. There's obviously, it's amazing what they accomplished and they really kind of brought a lot of this to the world. So they get to deserve a lot of credit for that. I think Elon, along with Sam both deserve credit for building that team really on. No question. Yeah, he was had enough profit. Yeah. And then he turned it to profit. And then that's where the few took place between the two of them. It's unfortunate. I think these, I think these like these fields are not productive for our for our society. But I understand I worry Elon's coming from and I hope they make it, you know, they make it work for everyone. I get his argument. I totally get a Elon's argument. Who else are you along with? Who, what else is it that, you know, I had a call with my bank, rice, listen, send me to top 10 nuclear companies out there that are finding ways to tap into the nuclear energy. And then I said, okay, we looked at some of the made a decision. We had a call with their, and then I said, let's look into these three companies, which we did. And it's done fairly well. But for you, you're in this world. What else are you saying? Yeah, no friends that are friends that founders fund have a company with a really talented guy building nuclear fuel as well and making sure you have that in America. It's really important to do. And we're looking into that space. It's, you know, it's interesting because Elon says all you need is solar energy, which is true of the extreme. But I think I think we did kind of screw up the regulation on the nuclear space and that would be, I love the fact that the Department of War is trying to do more of that now. So I think that's a good thing to be doing. Yeah. You know, the areas that I most bullish on. So in America right now, we have $5 trillion of wages in our services economy. That's like every type of service. And at about 40% of that, and at over $2 trillion area, we've already seen you could double or triple the productivity, at least double, if not triple the productivity. So this is, this is, and companies that we're exposed to. And it's like the backend of a law firm helping it. It's like the backend of logistics payments is like health, health care billing, health care billing sounds small and boring. It's 280 billion a year spends on health care bill. Right. 200 billion. 120 of that's paid to companies. 160 of that's internal I have systems. There's a massive part of the economy. We already are tripling the efficiency of that. So, so what that means is a lot of this stuff's very disinflationary. It's creating a ton of value. And the things are just scaling like my best health care billing company with a bunch of ex-pound tier guys. It's going to double from like, you know, so if I double to over a hundred million revenue this year, but that's still tiny compared to where it's going, right? And as that grows, it's making the whole economy more efficient. So this is why venture capital is this engine, it's like taking these possibilities and fixing stuff to make it cheap for for all of us. So it's a really positive thing. Why 11.8 million in a Nigerian drone company? Okay. No, you know, there's, listen, this, the guy running it first of all, physics Olympian, it's co-founder, building our business. These are super talented. They're super talented young men there. As you probably saw, there's a lot of people being slaughtered in Africa, especially a lot of Christians in Nigeria being killed for the wrong reasons. A security all over Africa is a huge deal. One of the main reasons you can't build infrastructure in invest in Africa right now is there's a problem with security everywhere there. And you know, I happen to know a lot about the defense space. I've started multiple companies here. We feel like these guys were really talented and they could they could scale a lot of production of doing real controlled cars, century towers, drones. And we thought that some of our US technology is welcome partner with them and help them and help them secure Africa. Even if we get rid of the Iranian guys, even if we like make the Middle East somehow of peace, which I hope we do, which by and by the way, they're good at making drones. They sell their drugs. All guys. Russia. You saw he drones are very good. We have to get really good. We're really going to shoot them now. Now I'm working on it. But, but, but basically, even if that's all peaceful, Africa's probably going to be a mess for quite a while. I think helping the good guys there is a good thing to do. Why is it so difficult for drone companies to excel in America? The regulation here is just intense. Well, so to build the engines behind these things, and you need certain rare earth elements and you need certain refining, which is very messy. And we just don't have the capacity in the US for that. So in Ukraine, unfortunately, right now, a lot of the supply chains coming through China for both sides, which is unfortunate. A lot of the supply chain is coming from both sides through China. There's a lot of the rare earth refining and elements and engines and things are built out. They're using so even like, you know, air-eximate famously is building. I think hundreds of thousands of drones to help the Ukrainians. I think it's a very cool thing he's doing there. And he built in a Mexico. But I think a lot of even that potentially would be coming. Some things are from China. So there's just, there's just a lot. And so we're trying to ramp up and it is the regulation. It's partial regulation. It's actually interesting. If you ask like Peter T. All my friends there is like the regulatory stuff, kill these industries. You can talk to Elon. And the thing I was talking about this, he's like, no, we just need more founders. We're willing to build these things in America. And I think he's probably right that as we try to build these things here, you could probably convince them to change regulations to make it possible. Because we do want to be possible now. So I think we're trying to do it now. We're trying to fix it. Yeah. And you think Greenland is one of the reasons that it plays such a big role in this? You know, I think Greenland is a place where if there's ever going to be an attack on America from the other side of the planet, it has to rush through China or whatever. A lot of things have to fly over Greenland. So I think for the golden dome, it's important. I think there's also a lot of resources there. I think there's like a certain spirit of expansion. It's very healthy. I think I think you want to be growing and not shrinking. I think you want to be, I think, I think, I think you, man, he's like, it's some ways. It's very simple. It's like a very complex but it's very simple. And the question is, are you shrinking and getting weaker and under the climate? Are you growing and stronger? And America and its current state, where it's expanding, manufacturing, it's like confident, it's just, it's the economy taking Greenland and building things for Greenland. Like if Greenland was more part of us, we could build infrastructure there. We could have ports that would then enable investment that couldn't happen otherwise. It'd be really good for Greenland. So I think it actually would be really good for the world for us to do more in Greenland. I know where it stands. Yeah. What do you get with tariffs? What Supreme Court ruling against it's 6-3, you know? You looked at the Kavanaugh ruling. He kind of goes into depth on how you could have done it legally. So it's kind of like a playbook for how you could still do it if you want, which I think is very interesting. It was a very funny 6-3 ruling, because I, in my own way, I'm not a legal scar. But from best I can tell, it was like three different rulings. It was like three here, three here, three here. And but the 6th agreed, like the three left and three moderate right or wherever you want to call them. Agreed that it's not legal. But then I think at least the moderate right part of the ruling is like, well, here's how it could be legal. So they're probably ways you could still go back and do it. It's my impression. Yeah. But right now, the lawsuits, you know, I, I mean, being in the rooms and eos like look, we don't have to pay the terrorists. We don't have to agree to do this. Look what your Supreme Court said to you. So it's almost like they're undermining Cam to say you don't have the kind of authority you thought you had. You can't do so. How do, how does that, how do you think, you know, it's unfortunate, but this is our system of government is we have three separate co-ecal branches and it's really annoying when the branches sometimes check you. But we, I think it's a good that we have checks on. I don't know. I mean, I agree with the the Trumps shouldn't be able to do it. Are you part of the Curtis Yarvan camp? We had them on and I don't know if you know Curtis Yarvan. I know. He hasn't, he hasn't liked you when guys like me try to fix things. He's very cynical. So whenever we're like, yeah, my policy group, we're like fixing things or making things work better, he's like, oh, you guys are all naive. Everything's broken. That's, you know, he's dead. It is my view. He is negative, but he, the way he was arguing it on, you know, he's for, he's for a monarchy rather than having a democracy and he thinks it's more effective. It could get things more done. You know, he, just, just, just wait until the monarch decides your wife's attractive, man. I don't know if I, I don't know if I want to live under the ass. So I think checks on power very wise. We're going to go back to the, the train days. He's again, he's going to say, I want to train in on your wife. Give it to me, right? Listen, all this money you're making, you know, you're one of these guys that's made billions as well yourself. What is something you, you buy? Like are you comic cards? You know, do you collect cars? That's funny. Comic books. You need cars. What do you, you're in Game of Thrones earlier? I don't think Game of Thrones. I set up a thing in my yard in California back then and we had the Game of Thrones throne and we, and we like have the, the theater outside. It's fun. Um, you know, what do I collect? I, I mean, I have a couple planes, but they're for business, really. Um, I have, you know, a ski house where I host people, we live in your, we host people. Most of my money on the excess money actually goes to the university. It goes to my policy work. It costs about it. So I cost about a quarter million dollars to like get a mission driven piece of legislation passed. It helps a lot of people. So for example, vocational schools, I care a lot about. And I think it's really sloppy right now because if you want us, if you want to like spend more money on vocational schools, that's fine. But if the guy running the vocational school is not very good, it's not going to be good results. So what we, like in Texas, for example, there's 27 vocational schools in Texas has it so that you fund the schools in proportion to the success of the kids. So the students coming out, you see their salaries and that determines the funding. And what that did is it doubled the salaries coming out. You took hundreds of thousands of people who would have had tough lives. You mean, how much, much better lives. And so getting that law passed in another state, $600,000 for me, that's like really, that's like, that's a really cool form of philanthropy where I could take something make our country more functional. So I have teams in 23 states. So I spend a lot of money trying just like, fix stuff that's broken because that's for me, that's a really fun way to do it. So that's your game. That's your fun. I love, I love, I love thinking about like, how do we go in and like, make healthcare cheaper and better here? How do we make the prison system? Like right now, like prison guards and prisoners, it's a mess. The cultures are broken. How do you create accountability for the prison guards? How do you create better results for rehabilitation when they come out? These things like this to me is interesting. Death thinking, right? Solving problems makes sense. So you probably have a lot of friends in New York and California. Okay. You saw the Exodus. California lost the trillion during COVID when folks left. He got some people back and I he lost another trillion with the wall tax. I moved in COVID a bunch of other my friends moved to Austin right now. Yeah. Right. So how is this the worst of it or is California is going to, it's just getting started. I'll tell you what, so I've had a problem without California's been run forever since I've opinions on these things and don't really want to listen for a long time. I'm actually pretty optimistic because right now I have like 70 or 80 acquaintances and friends in California who've made a lot of money and they're like, Joey, you were right. This is broken. I want to fight for it and they're doing all sorts of things to fight for it. They're they're they're looking at building endowments to oppose the far left unions to help the moderates, help pro-growth strategies. They're looking at things to bring in more talent. They're looking at things to expose more of the fraud. They're they're fighting for a good candidates. You know, the mayor of San Jose, someone who's a very moderate, very, very strong, mayor. He's probably moderate left, which is good because it's California, but he's someone respect from both sides. A lot of us are backing him. You know, there's just a lot of good talent in California saying, wait a second, we got to actually fight for this place. So I'm a Texan and I'm doing a lot more in Texas, but I'm proud to see my friends in California waking up and I really hope they could fight back and say, it's there's a few hundred million dollars a year Patrick that comes from the far left unions. It's for people who work for the state automatically. They've forced them to fund them. So it's like a few hundred million dollars a year of like corruption and they just like fights. But if you can get these other guys to step up, we can do more if you're a hundred million dollars a year. So that's all I hope you do. Yeah, this is Jerry Manjaring, where it would change the representatives to now they're going to have control of what 48 out of 52. It's going to be on the left. So I don't know how they're going to be moving that. That's going to be a lot of work. Could take a couple decades. It's a lot it's a lot of work to fight back, but I think it's a not I think it's a noble thing to do if you're going to live in California issue, have you to get in touch? You're going to do what you have to get in touch. And I live in Texas and I fight for I fight for the good guys there too. Yeah, it's very obvious. Last thing, very wise, free press. Why that investment? You know, I got to know Barry and we both agreed. There's a lot of American institutions that have been conquered by the crazy ideological people that are that are really decaying our civilizations. So our our our our media is broken. Our universities are broken. There's parts of our government that are broken. But in the only way we really can fix this is we build a new. And so she and I actually co-founded the new university together at the time when I met her, she was also co-founding a new media or I think I was one of the very first investors there. And I'm really proud of what she's done. I think she's she has millions and millions of people was sent to her now. She had a newsroom that was probably about a third left, a third independent and the third right, which is like the most balanced newsroom in the country or yeah, that was a free press. I don't know what she has now at CBS, but that was it. I assume she's trying to build the same thing at CBS. And you know, I think that's really really impressive to have a newsroom this balance because no one else is doing it. And it's I think it's worth trying. So I don't think she's getting so much pushback. Why do she has? She has. She's got a lot of lights center. She's going to want to have both sides in her newsroom. So people say, wait a second, I thought you were on my side, but you're saying this left thing. And then people left say, I thought you're on my side on this, but you're saying this right thing to the top please. You're attacking me on both sides. She's attacking both sides. But you know what? It's she's getting attacked by both sides. That's probably a pretty good sign that she's doing something better than most others. Yeah, no, no question. And by the way, you got a podcast. You got a you got a you the American optimist. Yes, I love that. Tell me about it. You know, I I know a lot of interesting friends who are building the future and you know, and I know a lot of friends around the government. So I just find out. Sit down with them for a few hours a month and put it out and people like it. And you're the best booker because you can get all the money. But all my friends are willing to do it. So, so who have you had so far on the show? No, you're that teal. Who else have you have yet on? Oh gosh, it's all sorts of people. It goes from Ashton Kutcher to you know, the Senator Tom Conn, a bunch of senators, a bunch of governors, you know, a bunch of bunch of people who built the biggest companies in Silicon Valley to drink cancer, running AI, you know, all sorts of Steve's running for governor and I saw that. All sorts of characters there. You know, a lot of my friends. Andrew said them. Oh, good. And Boris built way more. You have that on this screen. And now he's he's building a company. It's the first AI for excavation. We're doing a ton of excavators. He's raised tons of money there. People got people got angry at me for having a read on because he's on the left. And like meanwhile, Russ, of course, is running the OMB for this administration. So I tried to out both sides. Yeah, Alex Byron, you don't know. I haven't had an I haven't had an I haven't had Alex Carp on. I had Maria on from Venezuela before we. Oh wow. Venezuela is just kind of fun. Yeah, we had Iran as well on a zoom in. Yeah. Now it'll be interesting to see what they do. But we're going to put the link below to the podcast. This was very interesting talk and to keep you can ask great story. Appreciate you for making it time to come down. You're a great work, Patrick. This is for me. Appreciate you buddy. Take care. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Pasquinero. We chose True Italian Craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skill pins. Introducing the Future Looks Bride Collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary. Rather, intentional, luxurious, timeless. [BLANK_AUDIO]