SPEAKER_01
If you took the normal path without AI and things we were building and knew we needed to build and assume we needed to build, we're taking the 2030s and 2040s and we're packing them into the next two or three years because so much is happening right now. And that means we're taking the 2050s and 2060s and going to put them into the end of the decade and the start of the next decade. It's just so much cool stuff. [SPEAKER_00] All right, Joe, I've been really looking forward to doing this with you. You're one of the most interesting people to me and I love a lot of the work that you've done and so really excited to chat and learn with you. Thanks for having me, Jack.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] One of the things I want to start with is I put you in this category of people who are both investors and founders the real way. A lot of people say that, but you really have done it. You've started many companies. You've started companies that you then become chairman. Some you've worked on for a long time. Obviously, there's Palantir, but there are many others. Then you also have your own VC firm. I'm curious, what's the mindset that you approach company building and investing with? Where do you start when you think about doing your work?
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think starting a second or third company is fundamentally an insane act after you've been successful because you already obviously have the money you need. So what are you doing? Because these things are so hard. You almost have to convince yourself every time that it's not going to be as hard as last time, even though you know it is.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I did it once then. I remember it was too hard. It's really, really hard. Yeah. But you just keep doing it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Well, I did two where I was CEO, Palantir and Adapar. And then I did a few where I was chairman and really in the weeds with OpenGov. I was with Zach last night, who was my CEO at OpenGov, who did very well. He sold it for $1.8 billion after 14 years. It was paddling through the dirt. I was saying it's so hard, especially compared to these things today. An AI founder who's just at a hundred million in no time. We were next to this kid last night who I'm backing, who's like, Joe, I'm not just doubling, I'm tripling revenue this quarter. And Zach and I are asleep. Because it was just so hard getting these things to work.
SPEAKER_00
A hundred million used to be eight years of hard work where basically everything went right.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Now one of these kids who worked for me has a billion in revenue in third year. Screw these kids. I love it. I'm investing in them. They're great kids, but it's they're great. You're adults. I should calm. But no, listen, I think building is really, really hard. There are gaps in the world that I see, just how my mind works. And there's this gap and there are people who are hurting because of this gap. There are things that are broken because of this gap and it is so broken and no one else is fixing it. And I have all these really smart friends. Let's go fix it. And so I just can't help that instinct to go fix things. We say at APC, the world is broken. Let's fix it. That's just my energy. So if no one else is going to do it, fine. Let's get people together and do it. But it's the last option that you much rather back a really competent person who's already all in, you know?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Do you think not enough investors have this instinct? Do you think it's right that most people don't do it? Or do you think there's actually more investors who can and should understand this is an interesting setup, just get some balls moving and then you can attract people to it. Or do you think it's right?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think if you haven't yourself gone all in and built a startup and gone through the pain of that over years, then you probably have no idea how to actually build a startup and you just shouldn't be doing it. And I think the first time you do it and probably the second time you should just be 100% all in and you shouldn't be distracted. So I think I'm a really bad example for people. You actually shouldn't try to do these things.
SPEAKER_00
But it's funny because even among investors who were former founders or who have done it before, I think many just don't take that as one of the options of actually I could just get this thing started, work with somebody, build around it. It takes a lot of energy. You have to pour a piece of your soul into something to really make it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Not that I do this right every time. I make new mistakes all the time, of course, but every once in a while. And frankly, the last several times I've been involved, it's not really mine. It's really I'm helping assemble the founding team. I'm helping bring together lots of talent. I'm helping bring together the mission. I'm giving them enough upside that it's theirs. And then, and then, so that's a little bit different than doing it yourself, obviously. So it's going to be a spectrum, you know?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, totally. I'd be curious to hear a little bit about how you're feeling in this general moment. We were just talking about how hard it used to be to build companies to 100 million of revenue. Now these AI companies are going nuts so fast. It's so fast. You strike me as someone with a contrarian, asking mindset. And one of the things I wonder is, is it uncomfortable in any way when [SPEAKER_01] So it's going to be a spectrum. Yeah, totally. I'd be curious to hear a little bit about how you're feeling in this general moment. We were just talking about how hard it used to be to build companies to 100 million of revenue. Now these AI companies are going nuts. So fast.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's so fast. [SPEAKER_00] You strike me as a Peter Thiel contrarian mindset of things. [SPEAKER_00] And one of the things I wonder is whether it's uncomfortable in any way when the whole world sees something and you're like, we might be in that quadrant of the two by two that is both contrarian and right. [SPEAKER_00] Are you in the mindset of, AI is actually the thing most people have right, and so I just need to go do it better than everybody else? [SPEAKER_00] Or do you take the view that when everybody's here, I should actually be spending my time here, because there's going to be a new wave by 2030?
SPEAKER_01
You can still make a bunch of sub-quadrants and they could be wrong about some things and you could be right about some things, but you're all inside the big AI is right thing.
SPEAKER_00
Right. [SPEAKER_01] It's not like you just, that's a super simple model. [SPEAKER_01] But yes. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, obviously this stuff is working in lots of ways in AI. [SPEAKER_01] I think people are probably not focused enough on productivity as the kind of grail you should be going after.
SPEAKER_01
I think they're not focused enough on the moats created just by the very most talented technologists. So I think going after the very, very best teams and going after problems that are going to lead to higher productivity. And then there's all these nuances for how big industries work. I've been obsessed with a lot of these large industries for a long time. So I think we have advantages there, but it is non-consensus there. I'm really bullish on this stuff right now. And it's working. [SPEAKER_00] What are you going to say? It's all working. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Let's go after the very best of it and help it.
SPEAKER_00
I can't remember where I heard this, but somebody was saying there is a form of contrarianism, even among good ideas, which is that you can believe harder than everybody else. [SPEAKER_01] You believe more, you can understand more of the nuances of what's working.
SPEAKER_01
So the thing, I've gotten really lucky the last few years. I get no credit for Palantir figuring out what it did the last five years. The only credit I get is that I originally built the company. I did hire a bunch of those people who are in charge, but it's them now who have done it recently. But the stuff that we figured out at Palantir turned out to be relevant to a ton of other AI companies. It's the center of the AI world in terms of what's working and in many ways was right around Palantir. And that's a huge advantage for us. I think we understand a lot of the nuances. How do you apply a workflow ontology here?
SPEAKER_01
How do you apply the FTE motion to this thing and go deeper on this with a SaaS plus FTE? [SPEAKER_00] It is interesting. [SPEAKER_00] The FTE thing is just everywhere now. [SPEAKER_00] It's almost a meme, but it's true. Palantir figured out the way you do these things in the AI world, and you have to use that. [SPEAKER_00] When you say Palantir figured out a lot of the modes of how AI is working, what else besides that FTE model? What about the technology itself? It's how do you extract the ontology of the workflows? How do you figure out where to apply LLMs and where not to apply LLMs? And then what do you have to build for it to work?
SPEAKER_01
There's a lot of stuff that people have got right. [SPEAKER_00] When you talk about the productivity stuff being under-explored and people don't appreciate how important it is, do you mean areas like productivity software? [SPEAKER_00] Are you talking about making individual professional workers more productive every day? [SPEAKER_00] Is it both? It's definitely both. It's also how should this industry work in 2035?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] What does this industry look like today and what does it look like if it's doing everything that's possible and what we know is likely to become possible? What matters? 2035 seems so far away now. I can't even think about May. [SPEAKER_01] We took the normal path without AI and things we were building and knew we needed to build, assuming we need to build, and we're taking the 2030s and 2040s and packing them into the next two or three years because so much is happening right now. [SPEAKER_01] And that means we're taking the 2050s and 2060s and going to put them into the end of the decade and the start of the next decade. [SPEAKER_01] It's so much cool stuff.
SPEAKER_01
My favorite one this week, every week there's something. My favorite one this week is I was with the guy who runs Joby Aviation. I was actually doing an episode with him, and it turns out there's going to be all these ways that jets and airplanes are going to be 10 or 20 times as efficient in the next decade. Cause so much is happening right now. Yeah. And that means we're taking the 2050s and 2060s and going to put them into the end of the decade and the start of the next decade. And it's just so much cool stuff.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And my favorite one this week, every week there's something. [SPEAKER_01] My favorite one this week is I was with the guy who runs Joby Aviation. [SPEAKER_01] I was actually doing an episode with him and it's just like, it turns out there's just going to be all these ways that jets and airplanes are going to be like 10 or 20 times as efficient in the next decade. [SPEAKER_01] And there's going to be massive things that would take him three months before you do an afternoon. [SPEAKER_01] Now with his aerodynamicist, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yep. [SPEAKER_00] By the way, it's funny because I feel like before AI took off or right at the beginning, right after ChatGPT, so much of the conversation felt like it was around AGI, ASI. [SPEAKER_00] And it's like, is this sci-fi terminator taking over? [SPEAKER_00] And then as everything has become super commercialized and these are great businesses and it's proliferating the economy in a weird way, it feels less sci-fi now and more just like there's just cool things to build. There's just so much and people underestimate really smart people.
SPEAKER_01
Like he was saying his right hand had just a list of 50 things he wished he could work on and build and it just wasn't the resources, wasn't the ability. [SPEAKER_00] Now we're going to get through it all. [SPEAKER_00] There's just so much to build. [SPEAKER_00] It's working. [SPEAKER_00] What's interesting is that mindset though, I don't think everybody has it.
SPEAKER_00
And you can see this in high schoolers or something where some percentage of high schoolers I think are becoming, putting on an Ironman suit with AI, but you can also use AI to just skate by. And so you see these big divides. [SPEAKER_01] Well, it's like Soma, the sci-fi. It's a drug, right? [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] It's really scary. [SPEAKER_01] You can use AI to be your drug. [SPEAKER_01] You can use AI to not have to do much at all. [SPEAKER_01] You can use AI to lose all your agency. [SPEAKER_01] There's a very negative version of it. [SPEAKER_01] And then there's an extremely positive version of it. [SPEAKER_01] And this is a cultural thing.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] We got to figure out how do we get people to be more agentic themselves? [SPEAKER_01] How do we get people to engage and choose to get dopamine from iterating and winning and not from sitting there and attaching it to their brains. [SPEAKER_01] It's like TikTok is evil. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] And I hate that X is having to copy it because the financial incentive for social media is evil right now. Yeah. No, I mean, you're saying X, you know, on X, you go into a video, you start scrolling, you're on TikTok again.
SPEAKER_01
I've blocked TikTok for years, partially because of the CCP and stuff, but partially because also I don't have the willpower not to scroll these things. So I block it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I block Instagram.
SPEAKER_01
I can't deal with it. And I'm an investor with Elon on X, I guess SpaceX now, so maybe it doesn't matter, but I have it. And also I'm addicted to commenting my stupid views online. I'm arguing with Paul G today, or whatever. He's a good guy, but I got angry at him. But you go on this thing and it gets addictive late at night too. It's horrible. I'm going to have to turn it off. It's terrible. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I feel like tech probably lost a decent amount of trust with the public as a result of social media and people being like, they don't care. [SPEAKER_00] The tech industry is just here to monetize eyeballs and make money off of us.
SPEAKER_01
You know what's ironic? Generally market forces are really good in our society. They cause us to work hard to solve problems. They're going to bring down the costs of so many areas. If we can get rid of crony capitalism in the media itself, like with newspapers and in social media, market forces are terrible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Cause it's an attention economy, your incentive is to distract people and polarize them.
SPEAKER_01
So that is the worst area of society for tech.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And unfortunately that's what we're known by.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's really bad. [SPEAKER_00] It's also, I'm not anti-journalist.
I'm not against mainstream media or social media particularly, but with journalists who I really like, it's not their fault always, but they might write a great article and then somebody, some editor, puts the crazy headline on top of it because they got to grow a business. [SPEAKER_01] It's a very bad incentive and it's ripping apart our society right now. [SPEAKER_01] And these bubbles that it creates in social media, there's probably half your listeners who are typical listeners who are like, "Oh, that Joe Lonsdale guy." [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. He's like, I don't like him. He has different views than me and he offends me. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And the other ones are like, "Yeah, you go." And it's so unhealthy. [SPEAKER_00] Well, and the problem is, the middle of the bell curve who is neutral on Joe Lonsdale is not going to get shown this because that's not how the algorithm is going to work.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] If they're, if you have a typical listener who's like, "Oh, that Joe Lonsdale guy."
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. He's like, "I don't like him. He has different views than me and he offends me." [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And the other one's like, "Yeah, you go." And it's so unhealthy. [SPEAKER_00] Well, and the problem is the middle of the bell curve who is neutral on Joe Lonsdale is not going to get shown this because that's not how the algorithm is going to work. And so I'm going to show everyone who either loves me or hates me. Probably. You know, it's in general, I think we're some haters maybe. That's right.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. We'll try. That'll be our goal here. We'll run a survey afterwards. Thank you. I feel like that is probably the problem with social media though—it just amplifies extremes and a middle of the road, neutral, agreeable take is not incentivized.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I know. Most people are boring anyway. That's true. [SPEAKER_01] But here's the thing. I was on a walk with one of my mentors at the Dish just before this. And she comes from the moderate left and I'm, and I don't obviously. But I actually think with most issues there's a dialectic where there really is truth on both sides. And what I'm trying to do lately is step back and ask, what are the dumb people on each side saying, but what are the smart people on each side saying? And I think social media does not do that. I wish there was a way for it to do that.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] So relating this to AI, I feel like the tech industry has a currently missed opportunity to do a better job with our relations to—we need people to love AI more because otherwise we're going to ban it and it's going to hurt us. And they don't love it. All of society is going to hurt us. I don't think America loves AI right now. I think America—not enough people. And I'm like, I think they're scared, right?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] It's understandable. I think they're scared.
SPEAKER_01
Why don't they like it? What do you think? [SPEAKER_00] There's a threat for jobs, obviously. And so if you're in an industry where it looks like you're seeing all these headlines, you know, anyone personally who's worried about their job being lost, just to be totally honest, my life's going to be tougher because everyone talks about it, but no one knows it's not coming for me. [SPEAKER_00] Exactly.
SPEAKER_01
I think everybody believes it's going to happen to everybody. Who are we afraid for? I'm actually really curious. Who's the architect? Because you walk through it. It's hard to get to the person. You know, what's interesting is we should be—software engineering, let's take as a good example, it's probably the best application of AI right now. I just saw a chart that job postings for engineers are going up and are as high as ever right now. [SPEAKER_00] There's so much to build right now.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And so then you have the question of, are we basically just amplifying the value of that function? And so there's going to be more demand because it's more valuable. There will be. [SPEAKER_01] Oracle did cut, I think, 30 or 40,000 people because there were things that they had to do with 30 people that they now have to do with three people and they just don't have as many of those things to do. Right. So there are definitely already things where you're seeing some cuts for sure. The question is, can those people now in this economy do better? And I think most of them can, but that's been another question we have to ask about.
SPEAKER_00
But so then why do you think we're sort of failing to make AI look like a positive force for the world? [SPEAKER_01] Because everyone hates tech from social media. I think social media has had a terrible impact on our democracy. It's ripped things apart. It's very distracting for people. It's not good for kids. It's terrible for young girls, especially. I have five daughters and a son and I'm not letting my young girls on social media just for everything I've seen. I think it's poison for them. And so this is their last consumer experience with us. And now that this is the next social media to them, of course they're afraid of it. I think that's the energy.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. You were mentioning to me before that China likes AI more than America.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Some surveys show it's like 75 or 80% positive and we're like 30% positive. Now they may just take better direction from their leaders than we do. So it's a different cultural question. But I also think they're more optimistic about how they could build with it and create wealth with it, which people should be here too. I think this is going to—so the last time we had productivity go up a lot over 30 years was like 1870 to 1900. The working class person—the median was like 2.4 times wealthier in real terms for the working class. I think it's going to be more than that the next 30 years. I think it's going to be like four or five times wealthier in the next 30 years if we allow it to—this is amazing. And people just said, I think people will start to see, hopefully if we don't make it illegal, what it could do in the next five years. I think it's going to be really positive.
SPEAKER_00
It's almost like we need it to proliferate quickly though.
SPEAKER_01
The median was 2.4 times wealthier. There was an 1870, 1900. So more than twice as wealthy in real terms for working class. I think it's going to be more than that the next 30 years. I think it's going to be four or five times wealthier the next 30 years if we allow us to. This is amazing.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And people just said, I think people will start to see, hopefully if we don't make it illegal, what it could do the next five years. [SPEAKER_01] I think it's going to be really positive. It's almost like we need it to proliferate quickly though, because to that point, we were just talking about these founders who are having these explosive businesses.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] You have a lot of people who are resistant to AI. [SPEAKER_00] That sounds like the beginning of wealth inequality to me. Well, this is why we have to actually make sure that the applications of AI that help the middle class, help the working class, win faster and make sure they're legal. So right now, for example, the number one thing I think AI could do for 350 million people in the U.S. is we can make healthcare cost half as much, and really fast. Healthcare should cost half as much and it should be way better. It should be way more convenient. [SPEAKER_00] How?
SPEAKER_01
Well, there's a bunch of different levels of this, but we need healthcare services and AI. We need to actually have primary care work with deterministic AI where you're allowed to start a business that has one doctor and has a bunch of nurses and a bunch of others. And it has input through AI and they optimize it and they do things through AI that we know are safe. And we prove out here's a hundred different workflows. So Utah just allowed one workflow. They allowed, if you have a chronic disease and you've been prescribed medicine by a doctor, your re-prescription can involve AI. It doesn't have to involve a doctor and they're testing it out.
SPEAKER_01
But what I'm pushing right now is a healthcare AI sandbox legislation. We have Sister Institute, which gets things done in 20 states. So we're trying to get a few states to create an AI sandbox.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] We can very safely prove out dozens and then hundreds of primary care workflows. [SPEAKER_01] And then that would allow huge cuts in costs for these things. [SPEAKER_01] And then there's a bunch of other areas of healthcare, of course, it goes after as well, but generally you can have AI practice more safely for a bunch of things where it's actually better. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's going to be so many of these. We just have a marketing problem right now, it feels to me. [SPEAKER_01] Well, if you're, you guys are better marketers than me. I need help on that. Well, I don't know either.
SPEAKER_01
You know, let's fight to actually bring down costs for people. That's a good marketing thing. [SPEAKER_00] One thing I don't think helps, you know, and you were close to this, obviously, if we can talk about a little bit, you know, at a high level at least, about the Department of War thing that just happened.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I mean, I'm actually interested to hear, so you think it doesn't help because the Department of War looks bad or Anthropic looks bad or what? No, I don't think that. I think what it is, when you have two companies or, you know, where you see them at odds and you see everybody fighting. Someone fighting. And there's this dynamic of when the pigs roll around in the mud, everybody's messy. And it's just like a negative energy around it. It's just like everybody's telling each other, everybody is trying to project that the other side's terrible.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] You know, what's funny is that the positive is that it is still being used right now with Palantir and Anthropic.
SPEAKER_01
And it's working really, really well. This is one of the most accurately fought wars with least civilian deaths and the most bad guys falling so fast, which is amazing. You know, it's just like there's all this positive for the U.S. if you believe in the U.S. [SPEAKER_00] It's a nasty primary election before the general election. [SPEAKER_00] It is like that. [SPEAKER_00] You know? [SPEAKER_00] And it's like, there's this sense I have where I'm like, on some level, if we all really care about AI getting there, you don't want a really nasty primary before the general. [SPEAKER_00] It doesn't help. [SPEAKER_00] It doesn't help.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And so I think there's a little bit of that. [SPEAKER_00] I'd be curious, you know, because you're obviously very close to the Department of War. And with my friend Emil and then Dario and others in the middle of this. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And so it's like, you know, with most people in tech, people got their tribe to some extent or whatever. [SPEAKER_00] And that's fine. We were talking about this ahead of time.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] That is my tribe. [SPEAKER_01] But I was trying to tell you ahead of time that even though I'm on it and I can explain why, I think they're right and Palmer's right. [SPEAKER_01] I actually introduced Dario and Palmer and was trying to get them on.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And it's how you're saying, you appreciate the moderate left and you want to hear the good side of the other side. This I think it's really important in this state. If you've heard about the D.O.W. and Anthropic battle and you only think there's stupid people on one of those sides, you have to assume it's smart people who want good outcomes for the world. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, smart people want good outcomes who have their good point of view. So my main point of view supporting the Department of War ultimately is that you can't have the gray, complicated, nuanced decisions about what's allowed being made by the company or having the company involved in those.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] to hear the good side of the other side. This is really important in this state. If you've heard about the D.O.W. and Anthropic battle and you only think there's stupid people on one of those sides, you have to assume it's smart people who want good outcomes for the world. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, smart people want good outcomes who have their good point of view.
SPEAKER_01
So my main point of view supporting the Department of War ultimately is that you can't have gray, complicated, nuanced decisions about what's allowed being made by the company or having the company involved in those. You have to be able to make those nuanced decisions at the Pentagon at the end of the day. And I think that's a fair, totally correct viewpoint.
SPEAKER_01
But stepping back, listen, originally Anthropic came from effective altruists. Very left, very different perspective. And originally they had 50 pages of demands for the Pentagon, which were ridiculous. And then to Dario's credit, A, he went and worked with the Pentagon ahead of time more flexibly. He was trying to help America. He does believe America is better than CCP. B, he got all that 50 pages of nonsense after lots of iteration with his team and lots of work down to just two requests.
SPEAKER_01
And he really has boundaries of why they created Anthropic and what their boundaries should be. And that's in his mind. And he's managing a bunch of co-founders who have different views, and they got them all the way there. They were working with them. They tried really hard. But at the end of the day, when they're in the room with the mail, there's 20 people, and the two demands were no autonomy and no surveillance.
SPEAKER_01
And they say, okay, well for autonomy, let's say we're going to be using one of Palmer's autonomous fighter jets and something we're planning, but in the tropics involved in playing the whole thing. Is that not allowed? Or let's say we're using some autonomy in how we respond to attack and they all last defense. It's okay. Well, what if we're doing an attack, but then it's part of the attack. We're using autonomy to respond to things as Tom's. There's all these nuances and Dario's response. [SPEAKER_00] Oh, just call me. We'll work it out. Just call me.
SPEAKER_01
And the secretary's like, well, I can't just call you. I'm in charge. Not you. I can't have a CEO making a decision. So I'm sorry, spec where Dario is coming from, but I think the part of where I had to make the partition I had to make, I'm very sad about that. [SPEAKER_00] And that's where I'm just like, to me, it's where I hope there's some way for the industry to want to think of it as all on a team of, this is going to be something that's good for the world.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think it's good for the world, but I think we have to have debates and it's fair to have debates and there's going to be really tough debates about how this is going to be used. And I think Dario is right. There are laws Congress does need to pass that it has not passed yet because it hasn't even anticipated some of the nuance of how you can even do surveillance and things with these tools you can never have done before. So I mean, listen, there's a lot of good points on both sides here. We're going to have to work together and hopefully our Republic can figure out some good rules. I hope it will. I think it will. On the defense side, you know, obviously you've been involved in a bunch of companies like Palantir, Andrel, Saronic.
SPEAKER_00
I started Palantir and Saronic and I only invested in Andrel. [SPEAKER_01] So those guys are crushing it. It's so impressive to see. Three of them used to work with us at Palantir and then Palmer's a good friend and it's great. And then Dino at Saronic, he's built more big ships than anyone else. The fastest built ships since World War II that are big. It's so fun. I mean, I wasn't doing venture ten years ago, obviously, but it seems like there was no interest in this stuff. And now outside of AI, it's the hottest.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] It wasn't just that there was no interest. When I wrote the check in Andrel, I had multiple people tell me they would never work with me again and to not even talk to them about their next round because it's so evil to be working in defense and working on weapons. You had to basically be willing to just go completely against the cultural zeitgeist and be excommunicated basically.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Which is crazy. But sometimes that's the most valuable thing to do, is when you stand up to everyone. Totally. [SPEAKER_00] Well, it is crazy. I mean, Trey Stevens wrote something recently that's basically about funding people who are saying the thing that's not popular and not exciting and it's going to be the creation of the next. I love this. It's one of my favorite things. What does no one else want to do that is really important to do? [SPEAKER_00] And to me, that's a definition of leadership. It also means you're playing in a space that other people aren't playing. Totally. [SPEAKER_00] Well, it is crazy.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Trey Stevens wrote something recently that's about funding people who are saying the thing that's not popular and not exciting and it's going to be the creation of the next. [SPEAKER_00] I love this is one of my favorite things. It's like, what does no one else want to do that is really important to do?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And by the way, to me, that's a definition of leadership. [SPEAKER_01] It also means you're playing in a space that other people aren't playing, but it also reflects a personality type that has a very— You're willing to just say, you guys are all wrong. [SPEAKER_01] That's important. [SPEAKER_01] Can I give you a crazy one right now that we're doing?
SPEAKER_01
That's what I want. So China during COVID ended up cutting off a lot of things from us and they had this whole big strategy of going after our biotech sector. And one of the really key things you need in biotech is to do primate testing. And this is very controversial in the US because obviously you're hurting monkeys. Of course. But my five-year-old daughter, by the way, gets it. I say, if mommy had a very bad disease and we had trying to work on a cure, do you want us to test the cure on mommy or do you want to test on the monkeys first in case it kills the monkey?
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[SPEAKER_01] Would you want to know that instead of killing mommy?
SPEAKER_01
She's like, test the monkeys. I'm like, how many?
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[SPEAKER_01] And she's like, hundreds of monkeys. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00] Hundreds of monkeys before mommy. What's the ratio? It's high. It's very high, right?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Because it's mommy. [SPEAKER_01] And actually, there's wisdom there. [SPEAKER_01] I think human life is more important than—even though I feel bad hurting a monkey. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] Well, you don't test the monkey right away. [SPEAKER_01] You obviously are testing. [SPEAKER_01] No, of course.
SPEAKER_01
You do all these other things first. You try to use AI to figure it out, but sometimes AI is not going to know as well as testing it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And so anyway, there's not nearly enough primates now and no one will touch it.
But so we started a company to provide safe human medicine. It's called, and we're providing massive numbers of primates, working with a bunch of biotech firms and we're breeding them here and bringing them over and no one will touch it because they're afraid because it sounds scary to do, right? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] But guess what? [SPEAKER_00] Would you rather save your sibling or the monkey? Yeah. That's a very taboo idea. [SPEAKER_00] But it's working. We're making tons of money and it's not evil. It—people might say it's evil. It's not evil. [SPEAKER_01] It's actually good. [SPEAKER_01] It's human. [SPEAKER_01] Well, it's funny.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I think a lot of ideas, there's a whole category of idea that sounds really bad when you say a snippet of it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. This evil man is doing his defense and killing monkeys. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, exactly. Can we get that on a headline here? I failed again. No, that thumbnail will get us a lot of clicks.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] That'll be perfect.
SPEAKER_00
But there's a lot of ideas like this where they sound bad if you take a certain snippet of them, but if you think the whole thing through, you're like, actually, that is an increase in overall morality.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's really good. But that's the type of idea that sounds like it could flip.
SPEAKER_00
And it's critical for bio supply chain. [SPEAKER_01] This is something our defense department is even aware of—that we need a supply chain for our industry.
SPEAKER_01
But no one, literally, I actually, so we're going to have to do the next round ourselves. I think even though it's crushing it, no one will touch it. Yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00
Everyone's a coward.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's crazy. [SPEAKER_00] It's crazy. [SPEAKER_00] I'll make all the money myself. But then I guess with these defense companies, it's like eventually it flips and then there becomes an insane amount of capital. [SPEAKER_00] And there's too much. [SPEAKER_00] And there's too much money. [SPEAKER_00] Then you can't even take all the money people want to give you.
SPEAKER_00
Saronic has billions and billions of interest for the next round. [SPEAKER_01] They're going to crush it. [SPEAKER_01] So guys, it's still a great investment here.
SPEAKER_01
I don't know a ton about defense in general.
SPEAKER_00
Is it a space where there will be a thousand blooming flowers? No. Or is it a space where there will be a small number of companies dominating?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] There will be a dozen neoprimes that will completely crush it. And I think— There will be that many though. Yeah. I mean, there's already probably eight or nine that are just really crushing it. I think Andrel is the biggest neoprime and it's going to make the most money. Yeah. And I think Saronic is going to be a massive, massive company. I mean, we need to 100X our shipbuilding capacity.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think a lot of ones like Saronic are already trying to work not only in defense, but figuring out how to work commercially. [SPEAKER_01] And Chaos is crushing it.
SPEAKER_01
Epirus is doing really well shooting down drones with microwave. Why can't the incumbent prime, incumbent primes catch up on the technology? I mean, what happened was in the nineties—80 of these companies merged to become eight primes. Yeah. And then you had the tech wave and all their core tech talent left and they don't have computer science talent and they don't understand what computer science talent is. So you've seen this, like when you start a really top tech culture, like why can't Anthropic be built by IBM? It's like, come on, even easier things than that. Why can't the incumbent prime, incumbent primes catch up on the technology?
SPEAKER_01
So what happened was in the nineties, 80 of these companies merged to become eight primes. Yeah. And then you had the tech wave and all their core tech talent left and they don't have computer science talent and they don't understand what computer science talent is. So you've seen this. When you start a really top tech culture, why can't Anthropic be built by IBM? It's, you know, it's even easier things than that.
SPEAKER_00
You're like, why can't a 30 billion market cap, incumbent, system of record. Why can't it build one of these applications that 30 engineers at a startup are building, even though they're putting 200 engineers on it. But how do they hire those right 30 engineers? How do they give them the upside?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] How do they have the culture? The engine that we track, I'm sure you guys do too at Benchmark. We track at ABC thousands of talented engineers. We have all sorts of ways of doing it. We try to get a map of what they're doing. And I've been doing this for 15 years. None of them are going into the primes. And the very few that did, they would leave very quickly because they'd be rejected. They wouldn't get an upside. They wouldn't get the right culture building. They wouldn't get treated the right way. They basically would be like the kid in the basement being yelled at who has to earn his stripes for 20 years. Why would they do that? These cultures are broken there.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And they're not showing any signs of fixing themselves. There's certain things they're good at. They're not doing the other stuff. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] What else are you interested in? I mean, we could talk about it. I want to, but outside of AI, what are the other areas? Bio, robotics, anything?
SPEAKER_01
Well, everything is tied back to AI in a way, because if you're doing things in robotics, our best, we have one robotics investment called Bedrock. It's a bunch of guys from Waymo with me, Boris. And he's doing excavation and it's working. So it's AI driven excavation, which is 25% of the construction spend in the US is going to change the value of quarries and mines. Super cool. [SPEAKER_00] By the way, it seems to me like robotics should be a bigger category than software. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I think eventually. I think most of it doesn't work yet. It might take 30 years. [SPEAKER_00] None of this stuff works.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I mean, his thing's working. It's my first big investment I made. Most of this stuff doesn't really work yet. That's the problem. I've looked at hundreds of things, not personally, but my team and I. [SPEAKER_00] Don't you just think Elon will figure this out as well, one day? [SPEAKER_00] I know. He'll figure out a big piece of it. I think. And I love Elon and I back. I'm not saying he'll make that. There's no other robots available. [SPEAKER_00] I'm just saying, don't you think this. Yeah. Why would this not end? Why would robots not end up working?
SPEAKER_01
I mean, no, I think the world models are harder than people think. And I've backed, I've tried to back everything Elon does. I think it just takes longer than even he thinks for some of these things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And since we can say the estimates are really hard to get right. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I don't know what's going to be there by 2030. I'd be surprised if we don't have some really cool robotics companies by 2040. [SPEAKER_01] Right. It's just, it's clearly coming. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah. What about other things? Is there anything in bio that you're interested in? There's a bunch of stuff going on in bio. But again, the discovery, rate of discovery is AI enabled.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think Demis' Nobel Prize was well deserved. I think we had 213,000 proteins we'd mapped out and understood how they work and understood the mechanism of action over many, many years of hard work. And I think his AI mapped out 200 million of them all of a sudden, just from figuring it out. And so we're still in the dark ages. We're just figuring it out. I saw a small model the other day with all this bio data and they were asking, how do you make a protein do these two other things to go after this disease? And just redesign the protein and figure it out. And we don't even know why it figured it out, but it did. So we're still, it's really cool. So, bio isn't just an AI story, but bio is an AI story. I mean, for example, if we can recreate a cell in a computer, that should unlock so much speed to drug development.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I mean, I guess other stuff we're doing is just competent people at execution. So, we were the first big investors in Quince. Oh, that's good. Did you buy stuff from there? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. My wife has her house full of Quince. It's 100 percent. My wife is obsessed with it. She's like, look, Joe, I'm making you money. I'm like, yes, darling. She's joking. No, it's, I don't know what this public there is, but it's more than doubling again this year in the billions of revenue. And it's just Sid's such a great executor. There's no AI story there, is there? Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] My wife has her house full of Quince. It's a whole hundred percent.
SPEAKER_01
My wife is obsessed with it. She's like, "Look, Joe, I'm making you money." I'm like, "Yes, darling." Yeah. She's joking. It's more than doubling again this year in the billions of revenue. And Sid's just such a great executor. There's no AI story there, is there? I mean, internally, of course you're using everything, you're using it to execute well. [SPEAKER_00] But really it's just a good business with good people. [SPEAKER_00] It's just really good. Listen, the real story there, by the way, is that I was the first big investor in Wish. And I led the seed in the A and then it went all the way up and all the way down.
SPEAKER_01
And there's lots of reasons why it did—basically trying to subsidize the Shein and the Temu competitors. Yeah. And there's weird postal changes. And then the CEO probably didn't hire enough people around him to replace himself. So when he had a breakdown, the whole thing crashed. So that was tough, but we learned a lot of lessons about how this stuff worked.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And so my partner Drew with Sid came up with the idea for Quince after that. [SPEAKER_01] It was a more really high-end luxury type thing with a similar framework. [SPEAKER_01] So that was my redemption story after having personally made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that thing. [SPEAKER_01] That's all right. Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00] It seems pretty good on Quince now. [SPEAKER_00] It's good.
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[SPEAKER_01] And you're doing well.
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[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And what about energy?
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It seems like that would be natural. You're in Texas, you know energy. I know there's all this cool energy stuff going around.
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[SPEAKER_00] And we need energy for your AI. [SPEAKER_00] We need it for other reasons too.
SPEAKER_00
I love it. [SPEAKER_01] It's actually really funny, Jack, because I go and they'll have me speak to these 200 guys and there's all this really complicated tech stuff to explain that we're doing and how it works and how hard it is. [SPEAKER_01] And they'll just, with a slow drawl, say, "You know, but they'll have $5 billion of energy assets and they just realize that your stuff's really complicated, but I got a lot of energy. [SPEAKER_01] It looks like we're going to make tens of billions of dollars on this." [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, it seems like a better business. [SPEAKER_01] Oh man, that's actually maybe the Texas guys are smarter than me.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] This is no, when we talk about investing in AI, different ways to do it. Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] We talk about six levels, right?
So we do energy as the base, we call it zero, then chips and then data centers and then the models and then software infrastructure and then apps and services, right? And there's zero through five, six levels. And we're obviously mostly level four and five. I have a few bets at level three with Elon's XAI, with Anthropic, and so on. Yeah. Unfortunately, all my friends were involved. [SPEAKER_01] Open AI was a nonprofit. [SPEAKER_01] I stupidly didn't get into it early on, but I should have done that. [SPEAKER_01] And then the data center stuff, I don't really do. [SPEAKER_01] And then chips, we're doing a little bit because it's pretty interesting now.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think Nvidia, AMD and Intel are 99% of the value right now. [SPEAKER_01] And that 1% is probably going to change to 15 or 20% from new things, is going to be my guess, because there's so many new architectures. [SPEAKER_01] And so we're doing a little bit there. [SPEAKER_01] And then, I mean, we've done a few things around energy. [SPEAKER_01] I think around nuclear, there's stuff with uranium that's interesting that we're definitely working on. [SPEAKER_01] I think General Fusion we're invested in, which I think is doing really important stuff. [SPEAKER_01] If fusion works, that'll be a mega windfall.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's the monkeys, by the way.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] It's a controversial supply chain. [SPEAKER_01] You can get monkeys, you can get uranium feedstock, you know? [SPEAKER_01] So I think these are good things to be doing. [SPEAKER_01] You know, if you do it with the top people, I think Scott's doing great at General Fusion. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
So we definitely will try to touch the things that aren't there in energy. I would say at HBC, it's not really our job to do the natural gas turbines and stuff. I think that's a great thing to do. [SPEAKER_00] Looking around at the venture market now, you've obviously been doing this for a long time. [SPEAKER_00] And we're in a chaotic moment. [SPEAKER_00] It's really fun.
SPEAKER_00
It's chaotic. It's a fun moment.
SPEAKER_01
Well, it seems like this is what—if you can't enjoy it now, when can you enjoy it? [SPEAKER_00] If you're not going to be enjoying it now, you should retire. This is the best time of whatever we've done. [SPEAKER_00] Compared to what I imagine 2022 was like.
SPEAKER_00
It was actually pretty painful four years ago because it wasn't clear to me yet how you could do AI or how AI was going to work.
SPEAKER_01
I was, unfortunately, not as smart as some people about how it's going to work. And then you couldn't really start a new SaaS company because I was trying to convince everyone that if you start a SaaS company now, you're competing against SaaS companies now, which is much harder than competing against things when we first started them. So there was a couple of years there where it was like, most of the good stuff was picked up. [SPEAKER_00] And I had to start Sironic then because I spent a lot of time on it because I had a lot of extra time back then, because there wasn't as much else to do. And that worked out.
SPEAKER_01
And then you couldn't really start a new SaaS company because I was trying to convince everyone that if you start a SaaS company now, you're competing against SaaS companies now, which is much harder than competing against things when we first started them. So there was a couple of years there where it was like, oh, most of the good stuff was picked up. [SPEAKER_00] And I had to start Sironic then because I spent a lot of time on it because I had a lot of extra time back then because there wasn't as much else to do. And that worked out. The defense was the right thing I think to do.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. But it's now like there's so much and we're two thirds of just AI productivity type stuff. [SPEAKER_00] What do you think is the structure of firm or individual that is best equipped to succeed right now? [SPEAKER_00] You need a lot of young people on your team who are friends with the other young people who are the best programmers and who are in the networks from talent. I just think you do. Yeah. I think it's going so young now. I mean, you even look at these accelerator programs are getting extremely young. These kids who are 18 but are AI native and have been programming for a long time.
SPEAKER_01
I actually hired Scott Wu as an 18 year old, 10 years ago. He'd won the gold medal three years ago at IOI and top in the world the previous year. And this guy Vlad on my team helped me hire him. And actually Alex Wang came to that same class and all these guys and it was seen as a really weird thing to do back then. But it was really productive. They were really at that level. They were still really good back then. Now it's 10 years later. It's obvious because a lot of these people are just so good even when they're younger.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I mean, there's some counter example. I had Brett Taylor on the show and he's an example of somebody who is in his forties and fully readjust. As a 43 year old, I'm not totally washed up yet. Hopefully, but it's rare. [SPEAKER_00] And I think for the subset who do that, I think it's a massive superpower because you have all these networks and talent capital. I think investing right now, even 10 years older than me, and it's actually really hard as a venture capitalist to be in the game. 10 years older than me, you're saying. There's people in their fifties there are some who are doing it.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I think there is just really hard to be in the game. And frankly, it takes a lot of humility. You also have to convince all these 22, 23 year olds to hang out with you. You have to go chase 22 year olds, which is hard. [SPEAKER_00] I think. Well, some of them are used to that in Miami, but this is a different version. We'll cut that. No, I mean, one of my favorite CEOs last night at an event for a friend and he's, I think he's 22 and I think he's the one who's tripling revenue this quarter. And he's an AI CS genius. That's who you need to be working with.
SPEAKER_01
By the way, there's a big advantage that these kids, adults, whatever you call them, that you have if you're that age, because you've never seen the old way of doing it. [SPEAKER_00] I know. And so you just have this fresh mind where you're not unwinding anything. [SPEAKER_00] And to his credit, he wants to learn from me where I think the old way is still relevant, which I appreciate as the old man now.
SPEAKER_01
But I think there are some of them who say, okay, we're going to do all these things in the new ways, but then you can step in and say, well, here's a couple of lessons. And so I do think you still want to mold it, but you do need to rethink from first principles almost everything right now. And by the way, every few months is, because it's changing every few months when it's possible, which is a weird time. I'm fidgeting around on this podcast because I tweaked my back out. [SPEAKER_00] So you need peptides. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, peptides.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] What do you think about all those peptides? They're everywhere right now. Do you think this is going to be a huge problem or do you think this is the next wave of medicine? [SPEAKER_00] So I first had some peptides because I tore up my knee playing basketball. And then, so I'm like, oh, to heal. And not only did it make me heal faster, it fixed my back problem. It's, oh, this is interesting. I should study these things.
SPEAKER_01
And one of our other friends actually, you know as well, Matt Mizeo, he had gotten pretty overweight, bad blood markers, not in shape at all, working too hard, making too much money. So he took some time off and started taking a bunch of peptides and exploring it. And then all of a sudden, seven months later, he's lost over 60 pounds. His blood markers are perfect. The girls in the office were asking who he was. He's married, but he's in great shape. He's crushing it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And he's actually our new CEO of a peptides company. [SPEAKER_01] Pretty overweight, bad blood markers, not in shape at all, working too hard, making too much money. So he took some time off, started taking a bunch of peptide stacks and exploring it. And then all of a sudden, seven months later, he's lost over 60 pounds. His blood markers are perfect. The girls in the office were asking who he was. He's married, but he's in great shape. He's crushing it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And so he's actually our new CEO of a peptides company. We're founding with us and it's called NoHo Labs. And it's growing crazy. This is one of the biggest markets in the world. One of my bio infrastructure companies I built makes billions of dollars producing GLP ones. So I'm watching peptides from that side. [SPEAKER_01] And now it turns out a bunch of these other peptides are also going to be, market worth hundreds of billions of dollars and we're going after it.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's growing. It's one of the fastest growing consumers I've ever been part of. And you can go online. We wanted to make, we're buying our own compounding pharmacy because we want to have everything done here, everything legit, everything super careful. Listen, RFK himself is rumored to be on these. He's also, I won't give any inside information. He runs HHS. These things are going to become, a bunch of these peptides. [SPEAKER_00] You're saying he's rumored to be on a bunch of them himself. A lot of smart old people are using them. A lot of my billionaire friends are all on these things. It's a legit thing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Was there some unlock that just made people discover a bunch of these things, and now we're just seeing a proliferation of new ideas happening at once or what happened here?
SPEAKER_01
I think they've been around for a little while and people just started sharing more stories. And I think the fact that people are willing to do the GLP ones and they work so well, because that is a peptide and that's like the cultural phenomenon, kind of opened people's minds up to the others. And now the HHS unlock is that they are taking some of them off the schedule to make it more legal to sell them and stuff. So I think it's more of a policy has been holding it back as well. Listen, we have an NIH in this country, which is National Institutes of Health. And if you're on a different political side, you can yell at me for what this administration is doing. I'm not saying I agree with all of it. There's different things, but the one thing the NIH should be doing is, there's something like peptides, which no one's allowed to patent because they already exist. The IP already exists. They should be studying them more. If there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans using something, why do we not have the NIH studying it? For me, that's why government exists is to do the tragedy of the commons type things. So I think they're, and the secretary agrees with me. So I think they're filing and start actually doing a lot more studies to approve it, which is great. Because then we can start approving these and make them safe. And listen, it seems obvious to me. They're super helpful.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] You've lived here for a long time. Obviously you still spend a lot of time here. But here you mean Woodside. That's right. We still have a house somewhere near here, but now as you spend most time in Texas, I'm curious. [SPEAKER_00] We're based with our six kids in Austin. My brother Max lives in Austin. I feel like there's probably some changes to your mindset by being out of California. I'm curious if it helps you think more clearly. Do you feel more in touch with the world outside of tech? Does it change anything? Is it just a place to live?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Oh, it's definitely a different culture. You definitely see, I mean, partially because of my policy work as well. I talk to a lot of people from red states and purple states, different parts of the country. And you see the skepticism of tech, you see the things they're afraid of. And you see more clearly to them it's just such an alien thing and how certain things come across much more negatively than I would see it coming from here and knowing the insiders, realizing what's going on is not as scary as they think. And so it's definitely given me more perspective. We really should be doing a better job marketing some of these things for our country and coming across in the right way and respectfully to people.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Listen, it's also a more sane place. I think there's a really healthy middle class in Texas. I think people who work for me there can live ten minutes away, even though you only pay them a hundred thousand dollars a year. Whereas if you pay seven hundred thousand dollars a year here in Woodside, they're living an hour away. And I think so I think it's just a healthier, better place for society the way it works. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, we also have more aggressive and challenging political swings happening here in general. And you've obviously been focused on politics for a long time, back since Stanford Review.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think I have people who work for me there who can live 10 minutes away, even though you only pay them a hundred thousand dollars a year.
SPEAKER_01
Whereas if you pay $700,000 a year here in Woodside, they're living an hour away. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And I think it's just a healthier, better place for society the way it works. I think we also have more aggressive and challenging political swings happening here in general. [SPEAKER_00] And you've obviously been focused on politics for a long time, back since Stanford Review. I'm just trying to bring common sense, man. That's my point of view. We actually had someone intern with us who was editor at Stanford Review recently. [SPEAKER_00] I love it. All cap before benchmark. And I think it's really good.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] But I'm familiar with that school of thought and I think it's great. And I'm curious, as you've watched us go over the last few years through the swings of politics and political correctness and all of it, where are we now? Do you think people can more or less say what they want to say now? Do you think there are still Overton windows not where they should be? There's still a lot of things that I think polite society won't talk about or won't want to understand. And there's a lot of reasons for why things are broken.
SPEAKER_01
There's a lot of stuff in California that's very corrupt. I think people here are just starting to appreciate that they don't realize the billion dollars for San Francisco to NGOs is not to help the homeless. It's to help a very powerful political class of people who control things. They don't realize that the government worker unions here just run the state and really light insane amounts of money on fire. The budget went up 75% here in six years, 75% in six years. And things are getting not better. And for what? What have we gotten? Well, you get much better paid civil servants and you get a few million of them with much better pensions. And which is great except for the fact you can't afford that and you're breaking so many other things. And in Texas you had something where the cities, which are always a little bit blue, weren't permitting things because people are in NIMBYism. So we said, listen, if a city won't get back to a permit in 45 days, you go around it to the state and the state will approve it really quickly. And we passed this law and Austin building exploded the last three years. The prices are down 20% in Austin, not because people are leaving, but because there's just so much more stuff we brought online. And by the way, of course, Synronics building there, all these companies are building there. The things that we're building there really fast, you still like five to ten years later, be in permit hell if you're trying to do it in California. So we have to fix CEQA in California. I don't think the fact that people still don't know what CEQA is very much. I'm not sure things have shifted that much. The California Environmental Quality Act. It's crazy things in there where you're talking to 14 Indian tribes and you're in years and years and years of lawsuits to pay off environmental lawyers. The whole thing is just broken still. And by the way, there are candidates here, even on the left. The San Jose mayor on the left—I don't agree with him on everything, but he gets it. He gets it. These interests are broken. So I think you're just having some people come around.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Will the people here support the moderates on the left to get it? I don't know. I mean, sometimes I have hope that we're on a better path, but it's not getting there as quick. We need the leaders. Things take a while. We need the leaders to actually win and we need people to wake up and actually fight for it. [SPEAKER_01] And too many people here are too scared to fight for what makes sense, even in a moderate way. That's why it's still broken. But we need more courage, man. More courage. All right. Well, this was super fun, Joe. Thanks for doing this for me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Yeah. Too bad. And everyone in the early rounds.
SPEAKER_01
So those guys are crushing it, man. It's so impressive to see, you know, three of them used to work with us at Palantir and then Palmer's a good friend and it's just, yeah. And then Dino at Saronic, you know, he's built more big ships than anyone else. That's great. I mean, fastest built ships since World War II that are big. It's so fun. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I wasn't doing venture 10 years ago, obviously, but like, it seems like there was no interest in this stuff now. And now outside of AI, it's like the hottest. It wasn't just that there was no interest. Like when I wrote the check in Andrel, I had multiple people tell me they would never work
SPEAKER_01
with me again and to not even talk to them about their next round because it's so evil to be working in defense and working on weapons. It was like, you had to basically be willing to just go completely against the cultural zeitgeist and be excommunicated basically. It's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
Which is like, but by the way, sometimes that's the most valuable things to do is when you do
SPEAKER_01
stand up to everyone, you know? Totally.
SPEAKER_00
Well, it is crazy. I mean, Trey wrote something, Trey Stevens wrote something recently that's basically about like, you want to be funding people who are, you know, saying the thing that's not popular and not exciting and it's going to be the creation of the next. I love this is one of my favorite things.
SPEAKER_01
It's like, what does no one else want to do that is really important to do? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, to me, that's like a definition of leadership.
SPEAKER_01
It also, like, it both means you're playing in a space that other people aren't playing,
but it also reflects a personality type that has like a very- You're willing to just say, you guys are all wrong. That's important. Can I give you a crazy one right now that we're doing this working? That's what I want. So China during COVID ended up cutting off a lot of things from us and they had this whole big strategy of like going after our biotech sector. And one of the really key things you need in biotech is to do primate testing. And this is very controversial in the US because obviously you're hurting monkeys. Of course. But like my five-year-old daughter, by the way, gets it.
SPEAKER_01
I say, if mommy had a very bad disease and we had trying to work on a cure, do you want us to test the cure on mommy or do you want to test on the monkeys first in case it kills the monkey? Would you want to know that instead of killing mommy? She's like, she's like, test the monkeys. I'm like, how many? And she's like, hundreds of monkeys. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Hundreds of monkeys before mommy.
SPEAKER_01
What's the ratio? It's high. It's very high, right? Because it's mommy. And actually, but there's like wisdom there. Like I think human life is more important than even though I feel bad hurting a monkey. Yeah. Well, you don't test the monkey right away. You obviously are testing. No, of course. You do all these other things first. You try to use AI to figure it out, but sometimes AI is not going to know as well as testing it. And so anyway, there's not nearly enough primates now and no one will touch it. But so we started a company to provide safe human medicine. It's called, and we're providing like massive numbers of primates, working with a bunch
SPEAKER_01
of biotech firms and we're breeding them here and bringing them over and no one will touch it because they're afraid because it sounds scary to do, right?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. But guess what? Would you rather save your sibling or the monkey?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. That's a very taboo idea.
SPEAKER_00
But it's working.
SPEAKER_01
We're making tons of money and it's not evil. It like people might say it's evil. It's not evil. It's actually good. It's human. Well, it's funny.
SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of ideas, there's a whole category of idea that sounds really bad when you say a snippet of it. Yeah. This evil man is doing his defense and killing monkeys.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00
Can we get that on a headline here? I failed again. No, that thumbnail will get us a lot of clicks. That'll be perfect. But there's a lot of ideas like this where they sound bad if you take a certain snippet of them, but if you think the whole thing through, you're like, actually, that is an increase in overall morality. It's really good.
SPEAKER_01
But that's the type of idea that sounds like it could flip.
SPEAKER_00
And it's critical for like bio supply chain.
SPEAKER_01
This is like actually something our defense department is even aware of that we need a supply chain for our industry. But like no one, literally, I actually, so we're going to have to do the next round ourselves. I think even though it's crushing it, no one will touch it. Yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00
Everyone's a coward.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
It's crazy. I'll make all the money myself.
SPEAKER_01
But then I guess, I mean, with these defense companies, it's like eventually it flips and
SPEAKER_00
then there becomes an insane amount of capital. And there's too much. And there's too much money. Then you can't even take all the money people want to give you. Saronic has like billions and billions of interest for the next round.
SPEAKER_01
They're going to crush it. So guys, you know, it's still a great investment here. I don't know a ton about defense in general.
SPEAKER_00
Is it a space where there will be like a thousand blooming flowers? No. Or is it a space where there will be a small number of companies dominating? There will be like a dozen neoprimes that will completely crush it.
SPEAKER_01
And I think- There will be that many though. Yeah. I mean, there's already probably like eight or nine that are just really crushing it. I think Andrel is the biggest neoprime and it's going to make the most money. Yeah. And I think Saronic is going to be a massive, massive company. I mean, we need to, we're trying to 100X our shipbuilding capacity. I think a lot of ones like Saronic are already trying to work not only in defense, but figuring out how to work commercially. And, you know, Chaos is crushing it. Epirus is doing really well shooting down drones with microwave. Why can't the incumbent prime, incumbent primes catch up on the technology?
SPEAKER_01
I mean, so what happened was in the nineties is that like 80 of these companies merged to become like eight primes basically. Yeah. And then you had the tech wave and like all their core tech talent left and they don't have computer science talent and they don't understand what computer science talent is. So you, you've seen this, like when you start a really top tech culture, like why can't, you know, why can't Anthropic be built by IBM? You know, it's like, it's like, come on, even, even easier things than that.
SPEAKER_00
You're like, why can't a 30 billion market cap, you know, incumbent, you know, system of record. Why can't it build one of these applications that 30 engineers at a startup are building, even though they're putting 200 engineers on it. But how do they hire those right 30 engineers? How do they give them the upside?
SPEAKER_01
How do they have the culture? Like the engine that we track, you know, I'm sure you guys do too at Benchmark. We track at ABC thousands of talented engineers. We have all sorts of ways of doing it. We try to get a map of what they're doing. And I've been doing this for 15 years. Like none of them are going into the primes. And the very few that did, they would leave very quickly because they'd be rejected. They wouldn't get, they wouldn't get an upside. They wouldn't get the right culture building. They wouldn't get treated the right way. They basically be like the kid in the basement being yelled at who has to like earn his stripes for 20 years.
SPEAKER_01
Like why would they do that? Like these cultures are broken there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And they're not showing any signs of fixing themselves.
SPEAKER_01
Like there's certain things they're good at. There's not, they're not doing the other stuff. Yeah.
What else are you interested in? I mean, we could talk about it. I want to, but outside of AI, what are the other areas? Like bio robotics, like anything? Well, everything is like tied back to AI in a way, because if you're doing things in robotics, like our best, we have one robotics investment called bedrock. And it's a bunch of guys from Waymo with me, Boris. And he's, and he's like doing excavation and it's working, right? So it's AI driven excavation, which is 25% of the construction spend in the U S is going to change the value of quarries and mines and super cool.
SPEAKER_00
By the way, it seems to me like robotics should be like a bigger category than like software. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
I think eventually, I think most of it doesn't work yet. It might take 30 years.
SPEAKER_00
None of this stuff works.
Yeah. I mean, his thing's working. It's my first big investment I made. Most of this stuff doesn't really work yet. That's the problem. I've looked at hundreds of things, like not personally, but my team and I. Don't you just think like Elon will figure this out as well, you know, like one day. I know. He'll figure out a big piece of it. I think. And I love Elon and I back.
SPEAKER_01
I'm not saying he'll make that there's no other robots available.
SPEAKER_00
I'm just saying like, don't you think this. Yeah. Why would this not end? Why would robots not end up working? I mean, no, I think the world models are harder than people think as obviously.
SPEAKER_01
And I've backed. I've tried to back everything Elon does. I think it just takes longer than even he thinks for some of these things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And since we can say the estimates are really hard to get right.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I don't know what's going to be there by 2030. I'd be surprised if we don't have some really cool robotics companies by 2040. Right. It's just like it's clearly coming. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. What about other things? Like, is there anything in like bio that you're interested in? There's a bunch of stuff going on in bio. But again, like the discovery, rate of discovery is just like AI enabled.
SPEAKER_01
I think Demis' Nobel Prize was well deserved. Right. I think we had like 213,000 proteins we'd like mapped out and understood how they work and understood the mechanism of action over like many, many years of hard work. And I think his AI mapped out like a 200 million of them just like all of a sudden, you know, just from figuring it out. And so like we're still in the dark ages of we're just figuring out. Like I saw like a small model the other day with all this bio data and they were like, how do you make a protein do these two other things to go after this? Like just like, you know, this disease and just like redesign the protein and figure it out.
SPEAKER_01
And we don't even know why it figured it out, but it did. Like, so we're still, it's like, it's really cool. Like, so it's like, so I mean, bio isn't, I mean, listen, it's not just an AI story, but a bio is an AI story. I mean, like, for example, if we can like, if we can like recreate like a cell, you know, in a computer that should unlock so much speed, I would think to drug development.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess other stuff we're doing just like, just like competent people at execution.
SPEAKER_01
Like, so I mean, quince, we were the first big investors in. Oh, that's good.
SPEAKER_00
That's like, did you have, you bought stuff from there?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
My, my, my wife has her house full of quince.
SPEAKER_01
It's a whole hundred percent. My wife likes obsessed with it, which, uh, she's like, look, Joe, I'm making you money. I'm like, yes, darling. Yeah. She's joking. It's like, no, it's like, well, I don't know what this public there, but it's like more than doubling again this year and the billions of revenue. And it's just, just Sid's such a great executor. There's no AI story there, is there? I mean, internally, of course you're using everything, you're using it to execute well.
SPEAKER_00
But really it's just a good business with good people. It's just like really good.
SPEAKER_01
Listen, the real story there, by the way, is that I was the first big investor in Wish. And I led the seat in the A and then it went all the way up and all the way down. And there's lots of reasons why it did basically trying to subsidize the Shein and the Temu competitors basically. Yeah. And there's like weird postal changes. And then like the CEO, like probably didn't hire enough people around him to replace himself. So when he had to kind of a breakdown, like the whole thing kind of, kind of crashed. So that was, that was tough, but we learned a lot of lessons about how this stuff worked.
SPEAKER_01
And so actually my partner drew with Sid came up with the idea for, for Quinns after that. It was like a more really high end luxury type thing with a similar framework. So that, if anything, that was like my redemption story after having like personally made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that damn thing. That's all right.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. It seems pretty good on Quinns now. It's like, yeah, it's good.
SPEAKER_01
And you're doing well.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And what about energy? It seems like that would be natural. Like you're in Texas, like, you know, energy. I know there's all this cool energy stuff going around. And like we kind of need energy for your AI. We need it for other reasons too. I love it.
SPEAKER_01
It's actually really, it's actually really funny, Jack, because it's like all I go and they'll have me speak to like these like 200 guys and there's like all this really complicated tech stuff to explain that we're doing and how it works and how hard it is. And they'll just like with a slow draw, just feel like, you know, but you know, but they'll have like $5 billion of energy assets and they just realize that, you know, your stuff's really complicated, but. But I got a lot of energy. It looks like we're going to make tens of billions of dollars on this. Yeah, it seems like a better business.
SPEAKER_01
It's like, oh man, that's like actually maybe the Texas guys are smarter than me. It's like, this is like, no, when we talk about investing in AI. Different ways to do it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
We talk about six levels, right? So we do energy as the base, we call it zero, then chips and then data centers and then the models and then software infrastructure and then apps and services, right? And so there's like zero through five, six levels. And we're obviously mostly level four and five. I have a few bets at level three with Elon's XAI, with Anthropic and et cetera. Yeah. Unfortunately, all my friends were involved. Open AI was a nonprofit. I stupidly didn't get into it early on, but I should have done that. And then like the data center stuff, I don't really do. And then chips, we're doing a little bit because it's pretty interesting now.
SPEAKER_01
I think Nvidia, AMD and Intel are like 99% of the value right now. And that 1% is probably going to change to like 15 or 20% from new things, is going to be my guess, because there's so many new architectures. And so we're doing a little bit there. And then, I mean, we've done a few things around energy. I think around like nuclear, there's stuff with uranium that's interesting that we're definitely working on. I think General Matter we're invested in, which I think is doing really important stuff. If Fusion works, that'll be a mega online.
SPEAKER_00
It's like the monkeys, by the way.
SPEAKER_01
It's like a controversial supply chain. You can get monkeys, you can get like, you can get uranium feedstock, you know? So I think these are good things to be doing. You know, if you do it with the top people, I think Scott's doing great at General Matter. Yeah. So we definitely will try to touch the things that aren't there in energy. I would say like at HBC, it's not really our job to do like the natural gas turbines and stuff. I think that's a great thing to do. Looking around like the venture market now, you've obviously been doing this for a long
SPEAKER_00
time. And we're in like a kind of chaotic moment. It's really fun. It's chaotic. It's a fun moment.
SPEAKER_01
Well, it seems like this is what, you know, if you can't enjoy it now, like when can you
SPEAKER_00
enjoy it? If you're not going to be enjoying it now, you should retire.
SPEAKER_01
This is like the best time of whatever we've done.
SPEAKER_00
Compared to what I imagine 2022 or something was like. It was actually pretty painful like four years ago because it was like, it was like not clear
SPEAKER_01
to me yet. Like how you could do AI or how I was going to work. I was, unfortunately, it wasn't as smart as some people about how it's going to work. And then like, and then like you couldn't really start a new SaaS company because I was trying to convince everyone, like if you start a SaaS company now, you're competing against SaaS companies now, which is much harder than competing against things when we first started them. So there was a couple of years there. It was like, oh, this is like, most of the good stuff was picked up.
SPEAKER_00
And I had to like, so I started Sironic then because I spent a lot of time on it because
SPEAKER_01
I had a lot of extra time back then, you know, because there wasn't as much else to do. And that worked out. The defense was like the right thing I think to do. Yeah. But yeah, it's been now it's like, there's like so much and the, yeah, we're like two thirds of just like AI productivity type stuff. What do you think is like the, either the sort of like structure of firm or individual
SPEAKER_00
that is like best equipped to succeed right now? You need a lot of young people on your team who are friends with the other young people who
SPEAKER_01
are the best programmers and who are in the networks from talent. I just think you do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Like I think it's going so young now.
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you even like look at like these like accelerator programs are getting extremely
SPEAKER_00
young. I mean, these kids who are 18, but are AI native and have been programming for a long
SPEAKER_01
time. I actually hired Scott Wu as an 18 year old, 10 years ago. Like he'd won the gold medal three years ago at IOI and you know, top in the world the previous year. And like this guy Vlad on my team helped me like hire him. And actually Alex Wang came to that same class and all these guys that add a par and it was seen as like a really weird thing to do back then. But it was really productive. They were really at that level. They were still really, really good back then. Now it's just like 10 years later. It's obvious because like a lot of these people are just so good even when they're younger. I know.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I mean, there's some counter example, you know, I had them, Brett Taylor on the show and he's, you know, an example of somebody like, you know, you can be in your forties and fully readjust. As a 43 year old, I'm not totally washed up yet.
SPEAKER_01
Hopefully, but it's, it's rare.
SPEAKER_00
It's like, and I think, by the way, for the subset who do that, I think it's like a massive superpower because you have all these networks and talent capital. I think investing right now, even like 10 years older than me, and if you, and it's
SPEAKER_01
like, it's actually as really hard as a venture capitalist to like be in the game. 10 years older than you, you're saying. There's people in their fifties. There are some who are doing it. Yeah. I think there is just really hard to be in the game. It's, and frankly, it takes a lot of humility. You also have to, you have to convince all these 22, 23 year olds to hang out with you. You have to go chase 22 year olds, which is hard.
SPEAKER_00
I think.
SPEAKER_01
Well, some of them are used to that in Miami, but this is a different version versus. We'll cut that. We'll cut that. No, it's like, I mean, one of my favorite CEOs last night at an event for a friend and it is like, he's, I think he's 22 and he's, I think he's, he's the one who's tripling revenue this quarter. And he's just, he's a AI CS genius. I'm like, that's, that's, you need to be working. By the way, there's a big advantage that these kids, adults, whatever you, you know, that,
SPEAKER_00
that you have, if you're that age, cause you've never saw the old way of doing it. I know. And so you just have this fresh mind where you're not unwinding anything. And to some of their credit, like to his credit, he wants to learn from me where I think
SPEAKER_01
the old way is still relevant, which I, which I appreciate as the old man now, you know? But so I think there are some of them who's like, okay, we're going to do all these things, all the new ways, but then you can kind of step in and say, well, here's a couple of lessons. And so I do think you still want to mold it, but you do need to rethink from first principles, almost everything right now. And by the way, every few months is, you know, cause it, cause, cause it's changing every few months when it's possible, which is, this is a weird time. I'm fidgeting around on this podcast.
SPEAKER_00
Cause I tweaked my back out. So you need to peptides. Yeah, peptides. Yeah. What do you, what do you think about all those peptides? I mean, like they're like everywhere right now. Do you think this is like going to be like a huge, um, we're going to learn that it was all like a huge problem or do you think this is like next coming of like the great wave of medicine? So, so I first had some peptides because I tore up my knee, hellas king.
SPEAKER_01
And then, you know, so I'm like, oh God, to heal. And, and not only did it like make me heal faster, like fix my back problem. It's like, oh, this is interesting. I should study these things. And one of our other friends actually, you know as well, Matt Mizeo, uh, he, uh, had gotten pretty overweight, bad blood markers, not in shape at all, working too hard, making too much money. So he like took some time off, like started taking like a bunch of peptide sacks and exploring it. And then all of a sudden, like seven months later, he's like lost over 60 pounds. His blood markers are perfect. The girls in the office were asking who he was.
SPEAKER_01
He's married girls, you know, but, and he's like this, he's like, he's in great shape. He's crushing it. Yeah. And, and, uh, so he's actually our new CEO of a peptides company. We're doing the, he, he's founding with us and it's called, it's called NoHo Labs. And it's, it's like, it's like growing like crazy. This is one of the, I mean, listen, GLP ones is one of the biggest market in the world. One of my bio infrastructure companies I built is makes billions of dollars producing GLP ones. So I watching peptides from that side. Yeah. Uh, and now it turns out a bunch of these other peptides are also, I think going to be, you
SPEAKER_01
know, market worth hundreds of billions of dollars and we're going after it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
It's growing.
SPEAKER_01
It's one of the fastest growing consumers I've ever been part of. And you can go online. We wanted to make, we're buying our own compounding pharmacy cause we want to like have everything done here, everything legit, everything super careful. Listen, like RFK himself is, is, is rumored to be on these. He's also, I won't give any inside information. He runs HHS. I mean, these things are going to become a bunch of these peptides.
SPEAKER_00
You're saying he's rumored to be on a bunch of them himself.
SPEAKER_01
I want a lot of smart old people are lost. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of my billionaire friends are all on these things. It's like, it's a legit thing. Was there some unlock that just like made us discover, made people discover like a bunch
SPEAKER_00
of these things. And now we're just like, you know, there's, there's this just like proliferation of new ideas happening at once or what, what happened here? You know, I think they often have been around for a little while and people just started
SPEAKER_01
like sharing more stories. And I think maybe the fact that people are willing to do the GLP ones and they work so well, cause that is a peptide and that's like the cultural phenomenon kind of open people's mind up to the others. And now the HHS, the unlock is that they are taking some of them off the schedule to like make it like more legal to sell them and stuff. And so I, so I think, I think it's more of like a policy has been holding it back as well. I mean, listen, I, you know, we have an NIH in this country, which is national super health. And like, if you're on different political side, you can yell, yell at me for what this administration is doing.
SPEAKER_01
I'm not, I agree with all of it. There's like different things, but like the one thing the NIH should be doing is there's something like peptides, which no one's allowed to patent because they're already exist. The IP already exists. They should be studying them more. If there's tens of thousands, a hundred thousands of Americans using something, why the hell do we not have the NIH studying? I, for me, that's why government exists is to do the tragedy of the common type things. So I, and I think they're, and the secretary agrees with me. So I think they're filing and start actually doing a lot more studies to and approve it, which is great.
SPEAKER_01
Cause then we can start approving these and make them safe. And listen, it seems obvious to me. They're super helpful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
You lived here for a long time. Obviously you still spend a lot of time here. But here you mean Woodside.
SPEAKER_01
That's right. We still have a house somewhere near here, but you know, you know, now as you spend most time in Texas, I'm curious.
SPEAKER_00
We're based with our six kids in Austin, six kids in Austin. My brother, Max lives in Austin. I feel like, um, there's probably some changes to your mindset. I had imagined by being out of California, I'm just like curious if it like, does it like help you think more clearly? Do you feel more in touch with like the world outside of tech? Does it change anything? Is it just a place to live? Does it, is there anything about it other than it's just a place to live? Oh, it's definitely a different culture.
SPEAKER_01
You definitely, you definitely see, I mean, I'm talking, it's partially because of my policy work as well. I talked to a lot of people from a lot of red states in, in purple states, like in different parts of the country. And you see the skepticism of tech, you see the things they're afraid of. Uh, and you, and you kind of, you kind of see more clearly to them. It's just such an alien thing and how certain things come across like much more nightly than I would see it coming from here and kind of knowing the insiders realizing it's what's what's going on is not as scary as they think.
SPEAKER_01
And so it's definitely given me more perspective on, I guess, like you said, we really probably should be doing a better job marketing some of these things for our country and coming across in the right way and respectfully to people. Yeah. Listen, it's also a more sane place. I think there's like a really healthy middle class. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
In Texas.
SPEAKER_01
I think I have people who work for me there who can live 10 minutes away, even though you only pay them a hundred thousand dollars a year. Whereas if you, if here in Woodside, if you pay $700,000 a year, they're living an hour away. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
And I think, so I think it's just a healthier, better place for society the way it works.
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we also, I think have more, um, more, more aggressive and challenging
SPEAKER_00
like political swings happening here in general. And, um, you know, you've obviously been, you know, sort of focused on politics for a long time, like back since Stanford review. I'm just trying to bring common sense, man.
SPEAKER_01
That's my point of view. We actually had a, someone intern with us who was editor at Stanford review recently.
SPEAKER_00
I love it. All cap before benchmark, but, um, and I'm like, you know, it's like really good anyways. But so like, I'm, I'm like familiar with like the school of thought and I think it's great. And, you know, I, I'm just curious, like, as you've watched us go over the last few years through the sort of like, you know, swings of politics and political correctness and all of it, where are we now? Like, do you think that like, do you think people can more or less say what they want to say now? Do you think there are still like the Overton windows, not where it should be? Like, there's like, there's still a lot of things that I think like polite society, like,
SPEAKER_00
won't talk about. I won't want to understand. And you know, there's, there's a lot of reasons for why things are broken.
SPEAKER_01
There's a lot of stuff in California. That's very corrupt. I think people here are just starting to appreciate, like they don't realize the billion dollars for San Francisco to NGOs is not to help the homeless. It's to help a very powerful political class of people who control things. You don't realize that, you know, that the, the government worker unions here just really run the state and really just light insane amounts of money on fire. The budget's got up 75% here in six years, 75% in six years. And it's like, things are getting not better. And like for what? What have we gotten?
SPEAKER_01
Well, you get much better paid civil servants and you get a few million of them with much better pensions. And which is great except for the fact you can't afford that and you, and you're breaking so many other things. And, and so it's, and you know, and in Texas you'll have things like in Texas, we had something where the cities were, which cities are always a little bit blue and they weren't permitting things because the people are in MB. So we said, listen, if a city won't get back to a permit in 45 days, you go around it to the state and the state will approve it really quickly. And we passed this law and Austin building exploded the last three years.
SPEAKER_01
The prices are down 20% in Austin, not because people are leaving, but because there's just so much more stuff we brought online and here. And I, and I, and I, by the way, of course, Sironics building there, all these companies are building there. The things that we're building there really fast, you still like five to 10 years later, be in permit hell if you're trying to do in California. So we, and we have to fix CEQA in California. I don't think the fact that people still don't know what CEQA is very much. I'm not sure things have shifted that much. Like this California environmental quality act.
SPEAKER_01
It's like, there's just crazy things in there where you're like, you know, talking to like 14 Indian tribes and you're like in years and years and years of lawsuits to pay off environmental lawyers. I mean, the whole thing just broken still. So, so I, I, and by the way, there are candidates here, even on the left. Like I said, the San Jose mayor on the left, I don't agree with him on everything, but he like, he like gets it. He gets it. These interests are broken. So I think you're just having some people come around. Yeah. Will the people here support the moderates on the left to get it? Cause I don't know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there's sometimes I have hope that we're on like a better path, but it's not like it's, it's not getting there as quick. We need the leaders. Things take a while. We need the leaders to actually win and we need people to wake up and actually fight for
SPEAKER_01
it. And too many people here are too scared to fight for what makes sense, even in a moderate way, which, which is, that's why it's still broken. So, but we need more, more courage, man. More courage.
SPEAKER_00
All right. Well, this was super fun, Joe. Thanks for doing this to me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. check.