SRS #302: Joe Lonsdale on Strait of Hormuz, China’s Secret Move on Cuba (Transcript)

Let’s help them. Let’s help them scale it up around Africa, have multiple spots, multiple governments they’re working with. There are certain things they’re going to be the best at. There are certain things America has companies that are going to be the best at. Let’s make sure we partner and help them. So if they’re building, for example, remote-controlled cars that are already working, which they are, if they want to make those things autonomous, maybe you partner with someone like Overland, right? There’s also all sorts of ways you can help them with our stuff as well.

Shawn Ryan: Where are they based out of?

Joe Lonsdale: They’re based out of a city, a suburb of Lagos in Nigeria to start with. But then they also have stuff they’re doing around East Africa as well. They’re doing multiple places where they’re manufacturing.

Shawn Ryan: So what else are they doing and how does this tie into persecution of Christians?

Joe Lonsdale: Well, you have to be able to monitor things going on. You got to build sentry towers, you got to build sentry drones, you got to be able to build defense drones, you got to be able to build cars and other things that can drive around autonomously and watch and have guns on them. So you basically need to be able to arm these people cheaply and affordably with a way to see where the bad guys are coming and a way to fight back and a way to deter the bad guys.

And so it’s not just that, it’s infrastructure as well that’s being attacked by these crazy people. You got to defend for the country. You got to be able to defend all sorts of different kinds of assets over there. But you want stuff that can help these innocent places defend themselves right now. They don’t have any advanced modern military.

Shawn Ryan: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m aware. So do you have a little more context of what’s going on on the ground there? Why are they persecuting Christians? Who’s defending them?

The Broader Islamist Threat and Iran’s Role

Joe Lonsdale: Well, this ties into the war that we’re fighting right now in the Middle East. Let’s be clear, right? This ties very closely into it— you have these basically crazy forces around the world that are funding Islamic jihadi terror, right? And that is unfortunately how the extreme Islamists view things, is that it’s their job for them to dominate and for everyone who’s not Muslim to basically submit or convert or pay a tax and have Muslims win.

And so Nigeria is a country in Africa that’s close to 50/50, right? Slightly more Muslims than Christians, so it’s a very obvious, very big target for these same jihadis in Iran who are sending out money to do bad things. It’s the same types of groups, the Muslim Brotherhood— the same ones that run CAIR in the U.S. and try to pretend that they’re nice guys when they’re not. Those are the same types of people who will go after this and say, “This is a chance for us to assert our Islamist dominance.” And so it’s a very big target to make sure the Christians lose and the Muslims win for them in that country.

Shawn Ryan: What are they doing to the Christians over there?

Joe Lonsdale: They’re intimidating them. They’re trying to scare them into converting. They’re trying to kill them when they’re in there. They’re trying to take their women. They’re trying to do basically horrible things.

Shawn Ryan: I mean, in Syria, I think they were crucifying them. I can’t remember if it was Syria or if that was Nigeria.

Joe Lonsdale: All over— there’s all over the Middle East they’ve done this. I mean, listen, Lebanon, stepping back for a second, Lebanon was a very safe Christian-dominated country, right? Lebanon was one of the success stories still for Christians in the Middle East. It was a relatively peaceful place overall. The constitution built in where it was shared power between kind of moderate Sunnis and Maronites and others.

And what happened with Iran in the ’80s when they started to fund all this kind of nonsense is they funded Hezbollah and they went in and they basically destroyed Lebanon as a safe place for people to live. And they made it a horrible broken country and they tortured people and they killed people there. They actually not only tortured the people there— we had a CIA chief who was there in the ’80s under Reagan, and they caught him and they kept him alive for months, skinning him alive, torturing him in every possible way to get his information.

And so people say Trump’s convinced to do this recently. Trump saw that happen then. By the way, you see that happen to the CIA chief of America, tortured for months to get all the information— do you want to let those guys get away with that? I wouldn’t want to let those guys get away with that.

Shawn Ryan: When did this happen?

Joe Lonsdale: This is the ’80s under Reagan.

Shawn Ryan: Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.

Joe Lonsdale: But this is why it’s such a big deal right now what’s happening— because for the first time, that was one of the things that fell when Iran first started projecting its power after taking over, right, in the late ’70s when the crazies came in and slaughtered people and tortured people and took over and started spreading their nastiness. They spread it to Africa, of course, and they have lots of things there.

But Lebanon was like the first really kind of pretty healthy Christian, part modern country to fall to this nonsense. And we may be within a month or two of actually cleaning out Hezbollah and taking it back, which is awesome.

Guest Introduction

Shawn Ryan: Interesting. Interesting. So let me give you an introduction here real quick before we get into all the geopolitical shit that’s going on in the world.

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies. After Palantir, founded Addepar, invested or co-founded multiple U.S. unicorns, billion-dollar companies— Epirus, Palantir, Anduril, Illumio, Syntego, Saronic, YugaByte, Asana. Co-founding Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies. Co-founder and managing partner of 8VC, a venture capital firm that pushes for policies that encourage innovation. Advisor to leading political figures, advocates for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges. Welcome back.

Joe Lonsdale: Thank you, sir.

Shawn Ryan: Welcome back.

Joe Lonsdale: Thank you.

Patreon Question: Data Center Infrastructure and AI Investment

Shawn Ryan: We got a Patreon. They’re the reason I get to sit with you here today, and so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Tim.

“It is being reported that the current data center infrastructure investment, roughly $650 billion, will last only 3 years, after which GPUs can be severely degraded and will need to be replaced. Traditional infrastructure investments like roads, railroads, and high voltage, which can last for 30 to 50 years with less of an investment. Is this level of maintenance for data centers feasible?”

Joe Lonsdale: I don’t think they’re totally useless after 3 years. I think the situation, though, is that there’s so much better stuff based on the new technology that you’re going to want some new stuff for certain workflows.

And listen, this is the most dynamic sector now of the US economy. There are trillions of dollars going into it. There are so many smart people from around the world figuring out what new chip designs, what new data center designs, how do you use AI to do every part of it better? How do you do the energy better? I’m getting pitches left and right— top guys around Elon, top guys around Jensen, all these top guys spending so much money on this.

I’m not worried. They’re going to figure it out. I think it’s a great space that we are spending trillions of dollars on. It’s going to drive America to the future. I’m super interested to talk about AI, but these guys are figuring out the infrastructure. It’s going the right way.

Energy, Nuclear Power, and America’s Future

SHAWN RYAN: Well, how are they going to power all this stuff?

JOE LONSDALE: I mean, I have friends who are getting the next natural gas turbines that were supposed to go to Turkey and they’re rerouting them and spending a bunch of money to put them in Texas. And doing it that way. We have all sorts of LNG massively coming online. We have all sorts of new solar. We have billions of dollars of batteries coming online to make solar work better.

I think it’s all of the above. I was with Joe Kraft yesterday when we had a political figure over who owns a bunch of coal. The solution is all of the above, right? The solution is every possible energy you can get. It’s going to keep energy prices healthy for a while, but it’s also going to create and is creating massive investments into energy to make it work.

Which, you look at China, by the way, China has now about 3 times the power we have. Starting with 1999, we’re about equal. We were way ahead of them, obviously, in the ’80s. I think that’s one advantage they have — they’ve put more of their resources into infrastructure. We’re going to need to put more resources into infrastructure. I think a lot of how well our working class does is going to be tied in part to how much we can build more cheap energy for everyone and bring prices down for everyone. So this is going to be a big fight.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, do you know where we’re at with the nuclear stuff?

JOE LONSDALE: There’s so many great companies going as fast as they can now.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a sh ton of good companies.

JOE LONSDALE: The NRC.

SHAWN RYAN: Taylor’s got Valor. What is Valor? Valerie.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah. J.U.

SHAWN RYAN: Just started that company, LIS, Laser Enrichment.

JOE LONSDALE: Commonwealth Fusion’s building their first fusion plants. They’re spending billions of dollars on it. And it’s very credible now how that fusion part’s getting better. The late 2030s is going to be huge. The solar is getting more efficient. There’s massive new plants there with batteries. Zach Dell’s putting in billions of dollars of batteries in the Texas grid to make it work better and make alternatives there work better. I think coal itself is getting more efficient even though they’re not supposed to talk about it. I think every level is good.

SHAWN RYAN: Everyone’s doing it.

JOE LONSDALE: I can’t believe we’re f*ing talking about coal. I mean, I just was with Joe last night, this guy who builds a bunch of it. But I think every level is good.

Now, listen, fusion and fission — really fission has been held back by stupid regulation and kind of got pushed 30, 40 years behind where it would be. I think we’re going to catch up. We’re going to do a massive amount of it. I think all of this stuff is good.

SHAWN RYAN: You think policy is coming around for nuclear?

JOE LONSDALE: It really is. It really is. Even the Texas legislature is putting in bonuses if someone gets a small plant done there. The NRC is now staffed by people who are no longer completely— I think we’ve, for the first time in 40 or maybe 50 years, started approving new designs again. We’re actually turning it back on.

It’s like we went through this crazy deindustrialization period in the U.S. from 1971 to like 2023 or whatever. And something about the Trump revolution, but also something about AI and how AI could be used to unlock productivity growth — it’s like we’re back. America is now growing again. We’re now fixing things again. This is an optimistic time. Our enemies should all be really scared. We are clearly going to be dominant. This is now the American century again if we keep it up.

SHAWN RYAN: Hope you’re right, man. Lots of sh going on in the world right now.

JOE LONSDALE: Oh yeah.

Global Hotspots: Iran, China, Russia, and the Americas

SHAWN RYAN: Iran, China’s making moves on Taiwan, Russia-Ukraine’s still going on. We’ve heard Maduro out. Cuba’s in a f*ing crisis.

JOE LONSDALE: I love it.

SHAWN RYAN: I love it.

JOE LONSDALE: It’s like leadership, man. Come on, guys are on the run. Where are we?

SHAWN RYAN: Where do you want to start?

JOE LONSDALE: The Americas. I mean, I love what we did in Venezuela. This is awesome. The guy’s clearly a criminal. And here’s what people don’t get. This is really important.

When you have a place like Venezuela that gets taken over by these cartels and these socialists and communists and just bad influences, it creates lots of problems for the US. First of all, they’re allied with our adversaries. They’re working with Hezbollah and others to create weapons with them. They’re allying with China for energy. They’re helping Russia.

But then second of all, they’re spreading — it’s like a virus. They’re spreading their ideology all around the rest of Latin America, all around the rest of the world. I was with the conservative president of Colombia, El Duque, who was the guy before this guy. And there were protesters coming into his country, and they were coming from Chile where they had just succeeded and worked to temporarily turn Chile left. Thank goodness we turned it back, but they turned it very left, and they were funded by Venezuela. They had Cuban people involved, and they had Russian technology.

It’s like these f*ers in Russia still think it’s the Soviet Union or something, and they’re still causing messes around the world. And you know why? Because if they succeed and they make these things go hard left, who is the bad guy going to partner with and plunder with? They’re going to work with the other bad guys.

Venezuela, Mexico, and the Cartel Problem

JOE LONSDALE: It really is — and I know some people say, “Oh, it’s too simple, you’re in preschool.” No, it really is. There’s the good guys and the bad guys, and you want the bad guys to lose. You don’t want the far-left authoritarian rapists, crazy people, to take over. And so Trump actually using a little bit of our authority, a little bit of our strength, a little bit of our frankly total dominance, and going in saying, “No, we’re not going to allow a crazy bad guy spreading evil, spreading crime, to be in charge of this place, a 3-hour flight from the South Coast.” Thank goodness there’s a man in charge.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, why — Mexico is — we’ve been talking about Mexico non-stop.

JOE LONSDALE: It’s complicated.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Why haven’t we done anything there?

JOE LONSDALE: I think we have done a little bit there. I would have done a lot more there. My wife actually researched a lot of the rules for Texas, what we could do. And we helped sponsor something that got the governor to declare an invasion back when Biden was president. He’s a good guy, but he didn’t end up acting more than declaring the invasion. If that was me and I was governor, I probably would have bombed a few fentanyl plants, because dude, that’s our border. If you put a fentanyl plant next to my border, I’d blow it up.

These guys are scared of Trump right now. He’s definitely taking some strong actions. I think we saw in Puerto Vallarta where they attacked the Costco and the airport after their leader got killed. I think there’s some joint operations right now to put a lot of pressure on the cartels. I think the cartels are laying much lower.

A lot of the border crossings were cartels. If you look at the amounts under Biden, it was insane. I think we cut it off on this administration pretty dramatically. So the cartel funding has gone way down because they’re not getting paid to get people across the border right now. And I think they’re very scared of the fentanyl stuff. I think we’re very busy, but we are doing a lot there. I think there’s a lot more we could do there to go after the cartels. And I bet we’ll see that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I know there’s a lot more we could be doing. One thing that I’ve just been diving into — because we didn’t hear anything about Venezuela forever, and then all of a sudden it popped and they’re f*ing yanking him out. I love it. But I’ve just been curious — why are we going there instead of Mexico? I mean, you’re talking about a 3-hour flight from Venezuela to the US. Mexico’s right at our border. Have you heard about — and the answer that I keep getting is voting fraud. The voting fraud.

JOE LONSDALE: I’ve heard a lot of rumors about that, and I believe that there was something they were involved with. I think the voting fraud could have been a part of it. But listen, these guys —

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I haven’t met anybody that can articulate how the voting fraud is happening through the Smartmatic machines that are affiliated with —

JOE LONSDALE: I understand in theory how they could have done something illegal with them and been involved. And I think having a state actor helping makes it a lot easier to create a lot of false records and to do a lot of sketchy work. Whether that was true or not, I just — I have to be honest, I don’t know enough to know. I could definitely see it being true.

I guess the thing I’d say, Shawn, is that there’s enough other reasons why Venezuela is something where we could act right away, where we could stop them from doing more deals with the Chinese. The Chinese delegation was there when we did it. There were big deals going down with our adversaries right off our coast, and we had caught them sponsoring lots of horrible things around the Americas and working with a lot of other bad forces. So I think the Venezuela-Cuba axis then helps us put pressure on Mexico to take more aggressive action there. It makes it easier for us to be successful because it turns off a lot of the funding for a lot of the worst elements.

SHAWN RYAN: So what’s going on in Cuba? You familiar with that?

Cuba, Iran, and Trust in Government

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, we had all those funny, crazy far-left idiots there the last few, last couple weeks. I don’t know if you saw that at all. It’s like these people must just hate America and hate the West so much. It’s just crazy who go there and try to pump it up. Such a failed country. It’s been about a year of real extreme problems and real extreme suffering there. It’s not clear to me what the exact trigger is going to be. But the regime is in a huge amount of trouble.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, their infrastructure is falling apart right now.

JOE LONSDALE: It has been for decades, but it’s gotten really, really bad. They’re just so desperately poor and everyone’s like, the far left’s like, oh, it’s because you block them off. They trade with the rest of the world, by the way. They just don’t have property rights and they don’t have the incentive for anyone to invest. A lot of smart people, of course, have fled because why would you want to live in a place where people are making $20 a day and everyone’s forced to prostitute themselves. And if you do work really hard, you just get the attention of the government guys who steal it from you.

This, by the way, is like human history for 10,000 years — anyone who works really hard and builds something, if you can’t defend it, it just gets taken away by the thugs in charge.

SHAWN RYAN: That sounds like California.

JOE LONSDALE: But that’s why we were so miserably poor as a species for thousands and thousands of years. There were no property rights. The Enlightenment in the West is this really important thing we forget to teach kids about. The Enlightenment led to understanding of these things, led to understanding of why natural rights was so important. And then the battles to get those natural rights and to put John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” in place — that is core to everything. That’s why we have all the nice things we have. And Cuba doesn’t have that, so it’s a miserable place.

If we can get it back in the right direction, that’d be so good for them and for the world. I think Secretary Rubio is really passionate about this, and I think it’s pretty clear he has a plan. After Venezuela, this is clearly going to be something that we work on. I don’t know how we do it, but I think it’s a great thing to do in the next year.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting. Iran. Yeah, I’m against this.

JOE LONSDALE: You’re against doing anything in Iran?

SHAWN RYAN: I am.

The Iran Debate

JOE LONSDALE: I want to talk to you about this. Let’s do the counterfactual. You agree the U.S. Navy was created to fight back against jihadis in the 1780s? They’ve been a problem for 200 years, right? First of all.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, first of all, explain.

JOE LONSDALE: The reason we created the U.S. Navy was because you had Islamic forces around the Mediterranean that had been kidnapping — originally tens of millions of Europeans. There were millions of European women who were sex slaves to these people over several hundred years. This had been a thing they’d always done since the foundation of Islam. It’s in the Quran. You’re allowed to do it to non-Muslim women.

And when our ambassador goes and says, “Listen, we’re a new independent country, we’re not fighting with you, we have nothing to do with this. We’re just having trading ships there. Why are you taking our sailors?” — by the way, there’s no Israel, there’s none of that f*ing stuff — you know what they say? They say it’s their right as a superior group. “We’re the Muslims and we’re going to take them. That’s all right, because you’re not Muslim. We have a right to take you and to take what we want. That is what our holy book tells us.”

So you look at any American founder in the first 30, 40 years of this country, they’re like, “These guys are f*ing crazy.” And we actually literally created the Navy, went and fought back, bombed their cities, attacked their cities, went after the Barbary pirates, went after the core empires there that were doing this to us, and beat the hell out of them. And it was the right thing to do because they were stealing thousands of our sailors. You can’t let them get away with that.

So first of all, it was right to do that 200 years ago, obviously. Now listen to what it is today. You get a relatively modern country conquered and raped by this crazy theocracy — the same exact type of guys as 200 years ago. These are guys that are taking what they want, raping, killing.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sure you’ve seen, Joe — you don’t have to tell me about how you agree they’re evil.

JOE LONSDALE: You agree they’re evil. Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: They killed more of my f*ing friends than probably anybody else.

JOE LONSDALE: Okay, so give that—

SHAWN RYAN: They’ve f*ing hung dudes off bridges.

JOE LONSDALE: They’re doing it and they’re spreading their money to Venezuela. We caught them building things there. We caught them building things all around Africa. Obviously they destroyed the Christian country of Lebanon. They’re doing all sorts of other bad stuff.

Now we know, thanks to this war, they were lying. They did have missiles they were building. They could go 4,000 kilometers. So they’re going to have basically crazy jihadis. We know they’re building nukes at this point. They had 11 bombs — that was their starting point in their negotiations. Jared and Witkoff are sitting there, this administration is sitting there being told, “We have materials for 11 bombs you can’t get rid of — that’s where we are.”

And now we know that they could hold all of Europe hostage, and they’re obviously working to make that extend to the US. So you do nothing for 10, 20 years. You have tons of nukes, you have missiles that can go to every Western city, and you have crazy jihadis who don’t care if they die in battle as long as they can fulfill their “death to America” pledge because they’re so obsessed with it. This “death to America” existed long before any of this modern stuff or Israel.

So that’s the counterfactual. 20 years from now, our kids are in a world where it’s the nuclear-armed guys with crazy missiles — with whatever else AI and China stuff they have. By the way, we’re way ahead of them right now in AI, way f*ing ahead of them in AI. We are not necessarily going to be way ahead of them in 20 years. Right now there’s a giant gap. So it’s like we can move now when we’re way ahead and they can hurt us this much, or we could wait till God knows what happens when they’re nuclear jihadis threatening anywhere in the West.

I 100% agree it’s risky and dangerous and tough to act. It’s very scary. I think it’s much scarier just to let it go for 10, 20 years with these f*ers. That’s my point of view.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I just haven’t been presented with any proof that they have those type of weapons. And I haven’t even seen proof that whatever the missile is that they launched is from them.

JOE LONSDALE: You think there’s a false flag launch from Iran?

Trust in the Administration

SHAWN RYAN: I have no fing idea. I did not say that. I just said there hasn’t been any proof. And it’s getting hard to believe the administration. There’s been a lot of bait and switches that have happened within a lot of different areas. For example, the interview I put out yesterday was about glyphosate and all the cancer it’s causing. You’re familiar with the MAHA movement — Make America Healthy Again. Yeah, we’re going to get rid of all this stuff. And then they just fing declared a national security concern if we don’t give the pesticide companies immunity. Glyphosate. And they called it a national security concern. Iowa has the most cancer cases out of every state in the f*ing USA. You know who uses the most glyphosate?

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, obviously the corn there in Iowa.

SHAWN RYAN: 618 people died of cancer last year in the US. Why are we giving them immunity anyways?

JOE LONSDALE: That’s just one example. No, listen, I think that’s a particular one where I think there should be more open debate from the administration on it and discussion of it. I know Brooke Rollins — I’ve known her for a long time in the policy world. I think she’s a really smart lady. She did some really impressive things fighting the left in Texas when she ran TPPF. She’s now the agriculture secretary. That’s her call. You know, I think it’d be great — you should get her on the show. I can invite her. I know I can text her if you want. I’m serious. Why not? I feel like she’d have a lot of respect for a lot of things you do and a lot of things you’ve done in your service.

So I think that’s a fair debate. I’m not an expert on that one, but I think we should be debating it openly. I’d love to hear the smartest people on both sides. And if they’re just ignoring it when so many people believe as you do, that’s not appropriate. Let’s engage on it. Yeah, that’d be what I’d say.

SHAWN RYAN: There was — I didn’t mean to dive into that.

JOE LONSDALE: No, that’s fair. But you’re saying you don’t trust someone.

SHAWN RYAN: When I saw the release of the Epstein files and how that got butchered and how it continues to get butchered, that really pissed me off, man. And I never met the guy.

JOE LONSDALE: I agree he was a slimeball who seemed to know everyone because he was really good at networking and meeting people and tricking them to meet him. I don’t think everyone involved was messing with kids.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t either.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, right. So a lot of people just—

SHAWN RYAN: But I think it’s pretty obvious that some people involved were—

JOE LONSDALE: I think some people were — at the very least, a lot of people were messing with 21 and 22-year-old girls, and I think some of them might have been underage. I don’t know because I never met the guy, and he was a bad guy. But these other people, I just don’t know. But I’m curious — what should they do on it to rebuild trust there? That’s a tough one I don’t really follow at all.

SHAWN RYAN: What should they do to rebuild trust?

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, yeah. Be transparent.

SHAWN RYAN: I think that’s all anybody wants is just transparency. And they want to see — I mean, we just heard it over and over again. “We’re going to go after these people.” We haven’t seen—

JOE LONSDALE: We’ve heard that. I agree with you.

SHAWN RYAN: Fraud. We haven’t heard f* all about that.

Fraud, Trust, and the Iran Question

JOE LONSDALE: I agree. Why is the DOJ right now and the FBI are both really hurting the reputation of this administration? Because they’re not going after and getting enough arrests right now and getting enough cases. I think that— I think that is 100% true.

I listen, I was talking to our friends there who are focused on fraud. There’s a ton of fraud. We’re helping them find— this is my— obsessed with this issue. I think there’s way more fraud in this country than anyone realizes. We have to start making more charges and arrests. And it’s like way too slow. Someone— I don’t know, they can’t find the right people to run it. It’s embarrassing. That part pisses me off.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So anyways, it’s just all these things that have happened that I’m, I’m just— I’ve lost a lot of trust.

JOE LONSDALE: You shouldn’t trust— you shouldn’t trust the bad guys running Iran either, though. You also agree?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t trust the bad guys running Iran. And I don’t, I don’t necessarily think I would be against the war in Iran if they presented it to you differently. They presented it to me in a different way. But, you know, all the stuff you’re saying, yes, it’s true. Yes, it’s my fing friends that died over there. I saw it. They’re my friends, you know. I don’t want to send my fing kid back over there to die. Yeah, you know, for any of this shit. Yeah, I mean, we spent over 20 f*ing years.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, well, I think the way Afghanistan was run was just, is just, just a travesty. We wasted trillions of dollars and everyone should be pissed off about it. And so I think that has created distrust that is fair to exist. There should be distrust after the— we wasted all our lives and all this money with not real clear aims. So I 100% agree with that perspective.

I actually— so I have some mentors who ran British intelligence 20, 30 years ago. I know these guys still pretty well because they’re always with Palantir. We got to know a bunch of them. They thought we were kind of like an Aboriginal species. They’re visiting Silicon Valley versus like MI6, right? These guys are cool.

And a couple of them have told me that they thought that a lot of the stuff that got us to go into Iraq, because we kind of already wanted to go into Iraq, obviously, but they thought some of the stuff, some of the evidence, like including from Chalabi, who was an Iranian spy, like purposely came from Iran even at that time. And what’s interesting is even at that time, in my understanding, I went back and looked at it. A lot of the top voices out of like our ally Israel were saying Iran’s the big problem, not Iraq. So a lot of people are saying, oh, we fought Iraq for Israel. I don’t think that’s the case. I think in that particular instance, Iran was very clever in getting us to focus more on Iraq. And even back then, I think they were the bad guys.

SHAWN RYAN: So interesting.

JOE LONSDALE: For what it’s worth, I think they’re clearly the worst and I’m very happy a lot of them are dead. But I 100% understand where you’re coming from, not wanting to trust and not wanting to put more people over there.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think we’re fighting Iran for our own benefit, or do you think we’re fighting Iran for Israel’s benefit?

China’s Stake in Iran and the AI Advantage

JOE LONSDALE: I think it’s definitely our own benefit. I think this is— by the way, China is like freaking pissed. China sent several billion dollars of stuff with cargo planes to Iran that they were in the process of setting up to help defend them. This is their proxy ally. Their allies are Russia and Iran. They want Iran to exist and be able to cause trouble to distract us and force us to split our forces if we ever have to deal with anything they might want to do.

This is like a chess game where they’re trying to build this ally and we just smash their ally. And by the way, you know who the strongest military in the world is right now? It’s us. Because we’re basically deploying all this new technology and all this new AI in ways that no one else is. We’re learning how to make interceptors way cheaper. We’re learning how to just coordinate all these things we never would have learned before. China has no idea how to do this stuff.

I’m not saying you want to fight wars to get better, but this makes us so much stronger to smash their proxy ally, to smash their stuff. And to learn how to use all this technology. This makes them a lot harder to challenge us for the next—

SHAWN RYAN: You want to talk about how AI’s— yeah, what we’re using over there?

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, I mean, obviously from what I can say— and listen, I don’t have my full clearances at this point anymore either, but I have a lot of friends on both sides. And we developed a lot of the targeting stuff at Palantir back in the day, combined with AI basically.

Just think about it for sake of argument. We know Israel and America both have some of the best hackers. So let’s say you hacked into the street cameras, let’s say you hacked into logistics in the country and who was sending what, where, what payments are happening, what— just all sorts of things you basically can view, look at emails, look where everyone is. It’s just so much information. How would a person look at these millions of pieces of data and figure out what’s going on? AI is really, really good at that.

So Palantir and a system like that will create what’s called the ontology— the concepts, the frameworks, here’s the things we care about, here’s how they can possibly relate to each other. And then you take that ontology, you take that structure of how to think about things, and you overlay just insane amounts of information we’re able to get in different ways through human intelligence, through signal intelligence, through hacking.

And then all of a sudden, it’s able to optimize and say, here’s this base you didn’t know about storing all these munitions. Here’s this key part of the command center. Here’s this thing over here, 300 miles outside of Tehran, you never would have thought about. That’s like a backup for the supply for this key part of their missile launchers. Things like that.

And all of a sudden, when Israel in the first start of the war sends 200 planes as a surprise attack and hits 500 targets in the first 20 minutes, those targets were optimized between the two countries. Here’s the things that we know we need to get rid of if we want to stop them from causing us more problems. It’s just really, really powerful how smart what we could do is, that we couldn’t do before.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. What else should we talk about that’s going on over there?

JOE LONSDALE: Over there?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE LONSDALE: You know, it’s— What worries about you?

The Strait of Hormuz Threat

SHAWN RYAN: What are you worried about with the Strait of Hormuz? You worried about that at all?

JOE LONSDALE: This is a tough one. I am worried. Listen, I think this is one of those things that could take a few weeks and it could take a few months. And it’s really, really hard to stop asymmetric attacks.

The Iranian— listen, this is one step removed. I don’t have the exact information, but you have these mountains that they’re firing out of, right? And it’s amazing because as far as we could tell— so what’ll happen is they have railroads underground, they’re way under the granite, and they’ll take— they have tons of missiles there. It’s not about how many missiles they have, it’s about how many launchers.

They have launchers, and the launcher will come out and it’ll go out the railroad to an opening like a cave, it’ll fire and then it’ll hurry back in and we’ll see where it fired from. And you could destroy that so they can never use that again for a long time without spending months digging out because you just bomb the hell out of it. But then they just got another cave and another cave. And these guys have apparently built like hundreds of these caves. It’s actually impressive. Right? It’s like they’ve been preparing for 20, 30 years for this.

So they have these mountains that are firing out of. And then you have all along the Strait of Hormuz, you can hide drones, right? You can hide all sorts of things in like hundreds of locations that each time it’s a new attack, a new location. So it could take a while to find all of it, right? This is not easy.

And it’s especially bad for Europe who turned off their energy economy. You want to talk about conspiracies, man? Europe let Gazprom and Russia fund the green movement and turn off all their goddamn energy. And that’s why they’re in so much pain right now from this. That’s a true conspiracy, by the way. 100%. We’ve found that it was a ton of Russia money that created the strength of the green parties all around Europe, and their main thing was turning off all their energy.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOE LONSDALE: 100%. 100%. Russia’s not dumb. This is great for them, right? It’s great for the Middle East too. The green parties are useful idiots, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Does it bother you that we’re low on munitions?

JOE LONSDALE: There are some munitions we’re not low on, and there’s some interceptor things that we could use a lot more of. Listen, I think America is going to be in a lot better position after experiencing this. So one of our companies called Chaos has by far the best radar that they’re monetizing. But the guy running it, he helped build Epirus as well, the EMP company. He’s figured out how to do $5,000 interceptors now.

SHAWN RYAN: What?

JOE LONSDALE: He just proved it. He just proved it. Did a bunch of things last month. We’re going to make thousands of them this year. We’re going to make hopefully hundreds of thousands next year. I mean, America is going to be so strong coming out of this because we’re learning and we’re iterating, we’re getting better.

And it— you’re right. And it definitely bothers me that we had to waste like millions of dollars per shot on some stupid interceptors. That was dumb. But that’s because the primes are idiots. We’re just going to fix it for them. Totally honestly, you know, right on. It’s just— let’s just make it better.

What Is China Doing?

SHAWN RYAN: Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the fing world. When that breaks, you’re fed. And now we’re bringing them back. It does look pretty f*ing cool. I gotta admit that. What’s China doing during all this?

China’s Cognitive Warfare Strategy

JOE LONSDALE: They’re in shock. And there’s things released internally. They said, you know what, it turns out America’s a lot stronger than we realize, but they just have to want to use their strength. And their main objective with us is to make us not want to use our strength.

And how do you make America not want to use our strength? There’s a few things. One is you fund the far left. You may fund the people who hate America, those that group that’s down in Cuba right now saying how great Cuba is, how bad America is, the one hotel that has light in the whole goddamn country. Those people are funded by China. It’s the wife of the guy who’s been one of the main funders of everything, is the guy who’s hiding out in Shanghai. So you have all sorts of Chinese money trying to make us hate ourselves.

You have all sorts of, I’m sure they love it when we fight with ourselves in two extreme ways on the right. I think it’s totally legit to push back on the war. I respect that, I admire that. But there’s people who are actually like pushing back on even America being a world leader and saying we have to share power with China, like Tucker said to that Chinese spy the other day, a few weeks ago on the podcast. Like there’s a lot of guys sharing any power with China. Exactly. He’s lost it. I think he’s lost it. He’s too extreme against us.

And China wants— and you know what they have? They have what’s called cognitive warfare. They’re very smart about this. They have land, sea, air, cyber. Cognitive is a fifth branch. And they use all sorts of tactics. They capture whatever data they can. Same way we’re capturing data to attack Iran and figure out targets, they’re capturing data on everything and everyone going on the country, building profiles. And trying to figure out what do they do, what do they try, what do they push to make people not love America, to make people not want America to be free and have property rights, because they know that is how— because it’s the only way they’re going to get us at the end of the day.

Taiwan, China, and the Chip War

SHAWN RYAN: If they— they have beefed up presence off the coast of Taiwan.

JOE LONSDALE: Oh, 100%. But they’ve continued to do that for a long time. That’s right.

SHAWN RYAN: But it’s more now since the Iran stuff kicked off, correct? Am I off on this?

JOE LONSDALE: I think even before the Iran stuff kicked off, I saw they were putting a bunch of ships and doing exercises all around the island. I shouldn’t— I shouldn’t say I’m supposed to go visit briefly in a little bit. It gets a little scary flying on your plane over the Chinese warships. You’re like, Shawn, maybe don’t air the episode until after I land.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, we’ll push it. But I mean, how are these chip fabs going in Arizona?

JOE LONSDALE: You know, I think some parts worked pretty well. I think there’s some parts culturally where it’s harder for some of the employees to ramp up in the US for some of the types of tasks.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, the reason I’m asking, because that’s the big fear for us, right?

JOE LONSDALE: Well, I think, yeah, and Elon announced TerraFab, which is awesome. He’s going to try to massively— you see the size of that building? It’s like 3 or 4 miles long.

SHAWN RYAN: Wait, what are you talking about?

JOE LONSDALE: Elon announced this massive project to do a massive fab for chips in Texas.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOE LONSDALE: I didn’t even f*ing hear about it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s the last—

JOE LONSDALE: This is since recording a few— the last few days, a couple weeks ago when it comes out. Yeah, I know, it’s a big project worth talking to people about. It’s really cool. And they’re going to try to do everything here at massive scale.

Listen, I think these things take a while to get— I think China— sorry, I think I call it China. I think Taiwan, which is actually China, right? It’s the good China. I think Taiwan has a lot of advantages there from building it for decades. And I think they should be our ally and we should be working with them and we should be doing some things here and then some things in their ecosystem.

I mean, there’s stuff that’s done by hand, by people who are doing it for 20 years, whether it’s in Taiwan or Vietnam or other places that you’re not just going to replace right away with robots. And you’re not going to be able to pay people to do a lot of that stuff here. I think the high-value stuff you could take, the low-value stuff, I still think we can work with other countries. It’s just really, really hard to do it at scale without it. But yeah, we got to bring more here.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, does that worry you? That’s what worries me the most. You know, if they do take it, then what the f* are we going to do in the end?

JOE LONSDALE: I’m the one who should be more worried about that because I’m building all these goddamn AI companies. You can’t— listen, obviously it would slow things down and obviously it’d be bad for the world. A lot of the chips are things like, if you have a minivan for your kids, it’s the chip that opens and closes the door automatically. You’ll have to do it by hand instead. There’s a lot of the chip stuff where we can swap things in and out. We could keep the key ones. A lot of the chips we use are convenient, but they’re so cheap that we use a lot more than we need. And there’d be ways to figure it out and to keep things going— it wouldn’t be as big of an economic impact right away, although it would obviously slow down the AI wave, which I don’t want because I think that’s something we should talk about. I think the AI wave is way better than people realize. It’s like the coolest thing happening in the world right now.

The AI Wave and What It Means for America

SHAWN RYAN: Man, let’s do it. I just had Brett Ancott in here with Figure AI.

JOE LONSDALE: I love it. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What the f*, dude? It’s a whole different world.

JOE LONSDALE: There is. There’s so much happening, man.

SHAWN RYAN: What is happening?

JOE LONSDALE: These kids— I was sitting with one of my old CEOs from 20 years ago. We built something together that we sold and it was like building back then. We were selling— it’s called OpenGov and it did great. It’s a great company. But it’s like I was saying, it was like being in a boat and rowing through the dirt with a paddle because it’s so frickin hard to build these things sometimes. It was so slow.

And now there’s one of my CEOs who was sitting next to us and he didn’t hear my comment, but he came over and he’s like, “Joe, we’re not just going to double revenue this quarter, we’re going to triple revenue this quarter.” And it’s like, holy crap, this stuff is just growing and changing and fixing things so fast.

And I think in terms of why people should care— because I think it’s a great argument, like whatever, Joe, it’s nice, you’re going to make a lot of money, who cares, you’re already rich. Why should the 300 million Americans care? I think there’s a few really great ones. I think the number one is healthcare. AI is going to make healthcare like half the cost if we let it. This is really important. We can make healthcare so much better, so much cheaper.

It is one of those things where it’s going to be a big battle because right now every state has laws against it because of scope of practice. But I think we’re going to be able to prove some sandboxes. And if we can, that’s going to be great. That just makes America way wealthier, right? We don’t have our healthcare debt.

Healthcare, Pharma, and the Fight Against Corruption

SHAWN RYAN: Man, I just saw— I think it’s Mark Cuban’s opening some pharmacy.

JOE LONSDALE: He’s doing great work on the pharmacy side. Listen, Mark and I don’t have the same politics, but I really admire his work on that because that is— it’s a great—

SHAWN RYAN: This is going to take pharmaceuticals. You’re going to be able to get them at cost, if I’ve read it correctly.

JOE LONSDALE: There’s a ton of— so what happens in the old days is the pharma companies are so corrupt that they had laws, they had agreements where you couldn’t even tell a patient about a generic option that was way cheaper. And this is like a PBM agreement. So in order to offer my drug over here, you’re not even allowed to offer a payment. And so my friends and I went to the Senate and we fought really hard and we won one battle and lost one battle.

The battle we won is you made it so it’s now legal for doctors to tell you about any generic, which is really important, obviously. But the other one is they’re still not able to share pricing. So they’re still able to gag you on pricing. And so it is really crazy. They just hide pricing on all this stuff and don’t let anyone share it. So there’s no market for a lot of these things and they just take advantage.

And so Mark’s getting around that by building his own thing in the middle, which is great. And Trump launched a site too, by the way, which is doing really well, which is saving people a ton of money. I don’t know if you’re—

SHAWN RYAN: Trump launched a—

JOE LONSDALE: Trump launched a pharma site. There’s a pharma site you can go on, search Trump’s pharma site. And it’s a direct-to-consumer thing. And you can get all this stuff way cheaper right now. It’s a big deal. He launched it a month ago. Joe Gebbia, who’s running design for the government, the Airbnb founder, he designed it all. It works great. So you can go on and do that.

So the pharma stuff, Mark Cuban stuff’s great. I have a company called Blink Health. It’s a cheaper PBM. A bunch of us are trying to solve the drug side because that’s a big, big thing to make cheaper. There’s going to be some drugs that always cost money, by the way, because you want to have innovation, but you want to make the generics and everything cheaper.

But then the bigger side of this, man, is the health systems and primary care. There’s not enough doctors for rural areas. You have to wait weeks sometimes. It’s really expensive to go in. There’s so many standard things. There’s hundreds of chronic conditions. You should be able to check on the phone and be able to enter the things and they’ve already checked you once and they can— Utah is doing a thing where AI can re-prescribe it once you’ve been prescribed because it’s safe if it’s done correctly and it has to be done safely in a deterministic way.

But by the way, this is not like a, “oh, AI might mess up” type of situation. You can quantify it, you can test the system a million times, you can show that it’s safer than doctors and you should have to show that. It should be regulated in some form, right? There should be some way it’s safe. But once you prove it’s safe, keeping it out is just keeping prices high for the sake of the medical companies. That’s bullshit.

Flying Cars and the Future of Transportation

SHAWN RYAN: What are you getting involved in?

JOE LONSDALE: Well, we’re building some things there, right? We’re building a bunch of things in medical AI healthcare and there’s a bunch of great entrepreneurs doing that. That’s a big wave coming. A bunch of our friends are working on that. We got to make it legal.

I’ll tell you another crazy AI thing that’s coming— have you followed Joby Aviation? It’s them and Archer are the two eVTOL companies. So these guys have been— Joby, we backed 11 years ago to start and they just got approved for 12 states where they’re going to be doing takeoff and landing. So you basically can do— flying cars in 12 states is coming this next year. It’s coming in the next year. It’s approved now.

SHAWN RYAN: So can we buy these cars or—

AI, Regulation, and Government Fraud

JOE LONSDALE: It’s like Uber. You’re going to be like— but you could use it. I got to check if it’s Tennessee. I think it might be, but it’s Texas for sure and Utah and a few other ones. I should check if it’s Tennessee or not, but you can have it come pick you up and take you downtown or something, which would be great. Yeah, we got to push government. I bet it would be here. I’ll check.

But here’s the thing. So these guys are like the best airplane guys and they started with the insertion point at Joby, at the flying cars. Right there, like these winged things you get with 5 rotors. They’re building new airplanes too. And their best aerodynamicists in the world, when you had a new idea and you wanted to iterate, it used to take 3 months, 6 months, right? Because that’s just how long it takes to do these things and do the work and program it and test it out. Thanks to AI, you could do all that in an afternoon now. So every afternoon, the best guys in the world are doing like 3 to 6 months of work.

So here’s the thing that people don’t realize about AI. It’s like we’re living multiple years in one in terms of progress. So we’re taking like the 2020s and the 2030s and the 2040s, and we’re condensing it into the next few years. And the breakthroughs we have just on the airplane side — airplanes were basically stuck for 60 years, right? No one believed anything would happen. You’re going to start having way more efficient, way better airplanes coming out in the next few years thanks to AI. And it’s going to be like this shocker where everyone’s like, “What the heck?”

These guys actually have hydrogen fuel cells working now. No one’s ever got them working on planes. So hydrogen fuel cells, 3 times more efficient per weight, 2 times more efficient per conversion energy. So it’s 6 times more efficient for flying as a fuel in the air, which is pretty amazing. And then you have the new shapes of airplanes and designs of airplanes that we’ve thought about for years, never really been able to test. And the new designs are multiple times more efficient too. You do the multiplication, 6 times, even if it’s only 3, that’s 18 times. All of a sudden, air travel’s super cheap, way better for everyone in the 2030s. So it’s just like the world’s in a really good place thanks to this AI. This stuff really matters.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, everybody’s really concerned, but I mean, it does. I mean, I’ve been concerned too.

JOE LONSDALE: I’ve been worried, but it’s a lot of change.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. But I mean, I just think we’re going to be better off when we get on the other end of this. I think we already are better off.

JOE LONSDALE: I think it’s already getting better, but it’s going to be a huge leap the next 5 or 10 years. And listen, I think it’s fair to be scared. I’ll tell you, if I had to make the other argument, what am I most scared of?

I think it’s really good that Elon’s doing xAI because I think it shifts the Overton window, because you don’t want just a bunch of woke companies in charge. Listen, I think there are people I respect in Anthropic despite the fight they’ve had with the department and stuff. But there are some leftists there too. I think OpenAI kind of let themselves be conquered by the left. I think Elon with what he’s done is kind of pushing everything else to be more rational, basically.

Because it would be scary — let’s say you only had woke authoritarian AI things that are all of a sudden ruling against everything you and I believe. That would be bad. So listen, I think there are things we got to watch for and be careful with, but this stuff is going to make so much wealth for everyone.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, how do we — I think the big question in my mind is how do we regulate it, but remain competitive on the world stage?

Regulation, AI, and the Cost of Overreach

JOE LONSDALE: I think there’s — China and your next governor here, she’s kind of more on the regulation side, right? Blackburn, Senator Blackburn, she’s one of the ones who kind of pushes that. And listen, I respect where she’s coming from in certain areas. I think you want to protect children for sure. I think that’s right. I think there could be certain rules on privacy we all agree on that we want to put in place. I think that’s fair without breaking everything.

I think there probably should be some rules about what kind of images you can create about people. You shouldn’t just be able to take a picture of one of our wives and do whatever they want with it in a video. That’s not fair. That’s kind of messed up. There are probably things like that that we should be protecting for civilized society.

So I think the best way to do this is to do it nationally. I mean, Congress is so dysfunctional on both sides right now. Really what you do is you have moderates work together nationally on some basic things that we all agree on, and then just let it be free and then come back and revisit if something else is broken. That would be my take.

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re pretty much on the — you don’t want much regulation at all?

JOE LONSDALE: I want to protect kids and I want to protect creators. I think Senator Blackburn is big on protecting creators. There’s probably some rules there that are good and fair too. So I think there are basic things you could do for sure, and there’s some compromise.

But I think right now the vast majority of regulations in this country — like, there’s 9 million words per state of regulations. 9 million words per state. The vast majority is big companies stopping small companies and stopping new innovative companies from disrupting their business more efficiently. That is what regulation mostly does. Let’s be honest, right?

And here’s the crazy thing — one kind of regulation is licenses. You need licenses to do things, right? So there are 1,000 different types of things you might need a license to do. There are only 50 of them that you need a license in every state to do. So right away from the start, 95% of the things that they force licenses for is clearly just protecting their guild, because it’s perfectly safe to do without a license in another state.

So most of this stuff is guilds and big companies creating regulations to stop others. And healthcare, by the way, that’s exactly what it is — healthcare costs so much money because we put so many rules that you can’t compete. It’s a literally crazy amount of rules. You have to spend tens of millions of dollars just to get going and you can’t even do a new thing because they’ve blocked all the new stuff you could do.

So the areas where we have high costs, where everyone suffers, where the middle class or the working class suffers, are the areas where these guys have put in thousands and tens of thousands of rules. And by the way, that’s good for guys like me. If I just wanted to make tens of billions of dollars, I could put in all sorts of rules that I could afford the f*ing lawyers to follow. Guys in my situation who’ve built multiple big companies — we could deal with regulation, we can afford it, we could figure it out. But it crushes any new thing trying to compete. And so it’s bullshit. We shouldn’t be crushing all these new things.

The AGI Question

SHAWN RYAN: What about AGI?

JOE LONSDALE: So this is the — this is like the “did we create a new god” question, right? Because that’s obviously a fair question.

SHAWN RYAN: And it’s like, didn’t Jensen Huang just come out and say we’re there?

JOE LONSDALE: There’s AGI, there’s ASI, which is like general intelligence versus systemic intelligence. I think a lot of people are defining it as: when do we create something that has more intelligence than all of humanity combined and can do things that none of us combined can do? The question is, what’s the level?

I’m not even sure it’s the right way to think about it because it’s really more of a tool right now for lots of things. But sure, let’s just — I think it’s a fair question. Do you at some point create something that has so much more intelligence that it’s just so far ahead of you all that somehow it takes over?

Listen, I think right now I’m much more afraid of what people are going to do with AI. I’m not saying you couldn’t somehow create something that would do that. I think you have to be smart. I think that’s more of a 10 to 20-year-from-now question, but it’s definitely a question to watch for.

And I think as you’re building AI, one of the things it does as a tool is helps us analyze and understand what’s coming next. And we have to have — it’s actually really good. There are lots of these companies because we all need to be using these in different ways to understand and analyze and make sure we’re aware of what we’re building. It’s true.

Palantir, DOGE, and Government Fraud

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And you guys are getting in — Palantir, that’s getting into corruption, waste, fraud, all that kind of shit, right?

JOE LONSDALE: I mean, this is at the core of the DNA since we started Palantir. You saw PayPal back in the day before Palantir existed. The Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money, right? That was the big thing. And if you hear Elon talk about fraud, he knows it because he was part of that battle. He was part of that battle to stop that.

And he said, “Whoever squeals the loudest, that’s because you’re turning off their fraud.” I remember Peter was at chess club with some Russian guy who was pissed and was screaming, yelling, and he was complaining. And it’s because Peter was turning off all of his fraud at work, right? Because he was tied to these mafia guys.

So yes, this is core. Palantir, when it was first built, what came out of that experience was understanding how to do data investigations based on fraud. And yeah, Palantir is working right now with the SBA, with Kelly Loeffler — Administrator Loeffler is doing an amazing job there. Tons of stuff. And HUD — I mean, HUD is just like level one, ground level for fraud, right? Just paying off NGOs for get-out-the-vote purposes, paying off people in the community, basically in the inner cities. It’s just a lot of nonsense that you’re finding. And the question is —

SHAWN RYAN: Shit tons of fraud. I mean, I had Nick Shirley come on, talk about all the fraud going on.

JOE LONSDALE: He’s done a great job exposing a lot of stuff with the Somalis. I mean, these tribes are centers — the leering centers, I love it. Look, these tribes are so good at — because they coordinate. Because unfortunately, in Europe you get a tribe of these Islamists from wherever, like 15 of them, to go rape the teacher together and not tell anyone. Like, if you ask 15 of my cousins to go rape a teacher, they’d all punch you in the face. There’s no way they’d all go do something like that. But these tribes from these places are sick, and we’ve brought them into this country. There are a lot of broken tribes here, unfortunately. And yeah, there are tons of fraud tied to subcultures around LA that we’re finding. It’s really unfortunate. We got to turn all this stuff off.

SHAWN RYAN: So I mean, my question — you guys are going over — I keep saying “you guys” — Palantir, COVID-era PPP fraud. Palantir is now helping the Small Business Administration investigate fraud. You mentioned the HUD minority contracting abuse. Biden nearly tripled the size of the program. Most contracts were no-bid awarded. So anyways, this kind of sounds — didn’t we kind of do this with DOGE and it didn’t — well, DOGE turned off $160 billion of stuff.

JOE LONSDALE: It’s not nothing. That’s pretty good stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: No, no, no, no, I’m not saying it’s nothing. I’m saying quite a lot more. We all wanted a lot more to go.

JOE LONSDALE: There’s a lot more to find.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a whole distance. Yeah, but there was so much f*ing pushback.

DOGE, Government Fraud, and Political Accountability

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, and it was complicated. I think when DOGE first started, I was there at Mar-a-Lago briefly with Elon and Vivek and others, and they were interviewing people to become the secretaries, because Trump had him helping with transition. And so DOJ, right from the start, was kind of tied to the boss and tied to the president.

I think there had to be a cultural change with how it worked with the agencies and worked with the leadership in ways they’d be okay with it. But a lot of the best people did go into these agencies and keep working. It’s not like it went away fully, right? There are a lot of cultures there are still in a lot of these places and going. And I love that. The president’s put the vice president in charge of this, and I saw him recently. He says this is a big objective of his. He’s working hard on it.

And a lot of the grift that comes from fraud, Shawn, is how the Democratic Party funds its allies. This is just the truth.

SHAWN RYAN: This is what—

JOE LONSDALE: This is how the Democratic Party funds its friends and allies. It’s very good at it, right? We caught huge amounts of money going to these things that go to get out the vote for the left. There are hundreds of nonprofits in New York State recently that came out that are funding get out the vote. They’re funding candidates.

And so these people will have political power. They’ll get money for the NGOs. They get money for their businesses with Medicaid or whatever else, and they’ll give it right back. It’s like political largesse. They give it right back to people benefiting them, and they get more. And it’s huge amounts of money. So this is why, unfortunately, a lot of the left is not on our team for getting rid of fraud, because it’s funding so many of the people who vote for them and who support them. And this is a huge issue for us to go after much harder. We got to turn it off.

SHAWN RYAN: Sheesh. I mean, do you think this started—

JOE LONSDALE: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They’re finding a bunch of stuff with Administrator Loeffler on the SBA. They just announced a bunch of stuff in HUD a few weeks ago that they’re finding. There’s just all this stuff and we’re turning it off.

And you said the right thing. That’s also really getting me really annoyed — we should be doing more prosecutions. We should be putting more people in jail because you’re finding stuff. It’s very clearly fraud and you’re turning it off and we are not prosecuting. And I think the people running the DOJ are not nearly as competent as they need to be. I’ll just put it out there.

SHAWN RYAN: How the f* is this going to change?

JOE LONSDALE: We got to get more competent people whose job is to actually initiate and put people in jail for breaking the law.

SHAWN RYAN: How do we do that?

JOE LONSDALE: You put out the word to hire really competent lawyers. I don’t know. I’ve built orgs, you’ve built orgs.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I know what I would do, but nobody’s doing it.

JOE LONSDALE: What would you do?

SHAWN RYAN: I would f*ing fire everybody and bring in some new leadership.

JOE LONSDALE: That seems reasonable to me at this point. By the way, some leadership is really good in some of these places and they are working well with us. Loeffler is doing great work. There are people in the Department of War doing, I think, great work. Whether or not you agree with the war, these are competent people, right? So there are places where we have very competent leaders that Trump has brought in, and there are places where for whatever reason, I can’t tell, they’re not getting it done. So let’s fix it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Well, I hope it sticks. I really hope that sticks up.

The NGO Problem and Fighting Back

JOE LONSDALE: We got to turn this stuff off. We got to prosecute it. We got to make sure it can’t happen again. This drives me crazy, Shawn, because the government shouldn’t be able to give hundreds of billions to NGOs. What the heck, right? That’s wrong. But the problem is, if you go to the Senate and try to get the votes for that, you need 60 votes. You can’t get it because the Democrats won’t vote against funding this stuff. You know what I think we should do here to fix that?

SHAWN RYAN: What?

JOE LONSDALE: We should use the NGOs for our objectives at scale. We should say, okay, we’re going to be funding NGOs to help free speech in Europe. We’re going to be funding NGOs to root out the communists from all the universities around the country. We’re going to be funding NGOs to go do voter anti-voter fraud in the cities. We’re going to be funding NGOs to look at any other NGOs to make sure they’re not doing anything political.

These are all things we could do, and the left would hate it. And you know what? We might get the votes to turn off NGO funding if we actually use them for something on our team. I don’t know, just to throw it out there — why not be a little more aggressive? We’re in the generation that wants to fight. These old Republicans, man, they don’t know how to fight.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I think we’ve all figured that out.

JOE LONSDALE: We all figured it out. Come on, guys, we need to actually fight and win. Because there’s stuff we’re totally aligned on here, but we got to be fighting. Why don’t we have fighters? It’s like there’s this genteel class of patricians presiding over some kind of decline. I don’t get it. Come on, guys. Let’s fix it.

SHAWN RYAN: So what would we do? We start new NGOs or—

JOE LONSDALE: I mean, I’m in favor of just turning it all off, but because we can’t turn it all off, I would probably start new ones to bid for the money and use it for things on our side while we’re in power. But I’d want to design them in a way where they’re going to wind down no matter what, because you don’t want to create a whole new class of leeches, right? That’s always the problem.

I am not for having tons of leeches on our side like they have on their side. They have so many leeches just making money off this nonsense. There are whole agencies that we turned off that were basically doing nothing other than fraud and corruption. So we don’t want that. But we should be fighting back, and we should be doing whatever we can to get them to have to be forced to turn these off. That’s my view.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. It does make sense. What’s going on in Ukraine and Russia these days?

Ukraine, Russia, and Military Innovation

JOE LONSDALE: I really hope that this war has a good impact there. If we’re honest, the three militaries that are probably the best in the world right now, just from all their practice recently, are probably the US, Israel, and Ukraine. Obviously the US is the very best. But Israel and Ukraine have both gotten so much better because they’ve been forced to fight. I’ve been very impressed with the Ukrainians. There’s some really clever innovation that they’ve created by necessity to save themselves. It’s amazing stuff they’re doing.

Give me some examples, like stuff that’s impressing you over there — like figuring out, there’s this company, Sine Engineering, that we were involved with, just doing all of the maps of the battlefield for the drones and how to control them and how to counter them, and knowing what’s going on and knowing how to hide, knowing how to attack. There’s all sorts of new things. There’s electronic warfare that they and others are doing to create bubbles the enemy can’t see and sneak through, or to turn their stuff off during an attack in different ways, jamming them in different ways, creating shadows of things that don’t actually exist.

There’s all sorts of ways they’re producing lots of small things at scale that they can use to kind of halt the enemy’s advance and harass them in ways that no one’s ever done before. There are literally millions on both sides of these drones back and forth. And there are controls where one person — like I’ve played video games where you control a bunch of troops — it’s very different in the real world controlling hundreds of these things at once and getting really freaking good at it with AI plus the person. It’s kind of cool. It’s terrifying, but it’s kind of cool.

But listen, we’re turning off all the Shahid production right now. Another benefit of the Iranian thing is hopefully that turns off a lot more stuff to Russia. Russia’s already, by all accounts from everything I’ve heard, in huge budget troubles. They’re actually unwilling to project the next year of budget in Russia as of the last 4 months.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

JOE LONSDALE: Because they can’t do it at this rate. So they have to just do month-to-month planning. And so they’re under a lot of pressure right now. So I think turning off the Iranian stuff, and the budget pressures they’re under — hopefully we come to a good resolution in both. I think, listen, this is a risky thing, but hopefully Trump looks really freaking good 6 months from now and both of those things are in the right place. I think there’s a good chance of that. I hope so.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, right on. Joe, let’s take a quick break. When we come back, I want to get into some of the new companies that HTC has invested in.

JOE LONSDALE: Love it.

AGI, ASI, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Joe, we’re back from the break. We were talking about AGI and ASI. I’ve not even heard of ASI, but could you — I just want to dive in a little bit more on what that means. Can you explain that to me?

JOE LONSDALE: I think there are a lot of different levels you can define of what constitutes the computers being way, way ahead of us. There’s artificial systemic intelligence, there’s general intelligence which is lower, and one of the questions is at what point do people not even help the AI improve itself? Which is kind of a scary question, right?

If you want to compare, if chess is the right analogy — if you go back to chess, it used to be that people were better than the machines, but the machine could help you with tactics, right? So there are two types of chess. There’s the tactics, which is like the next 3, 5, or 10 moves. The computers are really good at that, even from the 1960s, because you can see the next set of moves. But people would be much better knowing what’s happening way farther ahead — position play. So there are things the human mind is better at and there are things the computer is better at.

As the computer got better at chess, it got to the point where the best computer was better than the best person. But for a long time, if you combined a computer and a person, it still made it a lot better because there were still some things that people were better at. People are so much better at position play that there would be a chimera — combined, it was better. And then it got to a point where the computer is so freaking good, it doesn’t even get any better if you add a person. It doesn’t need the help anymore. It’s just so far ahead.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Future of AI and Autonomous Systems

JOE LONSDALE: And that’s where it is obviously today for a long time at this point. And so the question is like with coding right now, for a long time only people did it and now we’re just starting to start to use the computer to do a little bit of things. And the computer’s gotten so much better in the last couple years that now you’re using a computer for a lot. Like you’re not even writing most code anymore. You have like 6 agents or 10 agents if you’re really good. Each of them coding for you and you’re telling it what to do and you’re coming back and testing it and telling it to build its own tests. But there’s still a person involved coordinating all of this stuff, right?

The question, I think, at what point does the coding thing be the thing that coordinates itself, right? At some high level. And at what point, even higher level than that, is the whole company basically being coordinated for all the tech side by a computer? And at what point does all the work on whatever important project just get iterated on by a computer instead? Which is kind of a scary proposition, right? Like, I don’t love this. At what point are they just replacing yours and my job?

It’s kind of creepy, right? Like, they go higher and higher, higher up the conceptual abstract stack. And so a lot of my smartest friends who run the AI labs still, when I talked to them the last few months, it’s like, “Oh yeah, it won’t be till the mid-2030s that we’re not having people actually help on some of these things.” But what does that even mean at that point? And then at what point is scientific discovery pushed ahead by the computers? I think we’re just starting to get what looked like scientific breakthroughs from computers, but they work really closely with people. At what point— is there a point where the breakthroughs are happening with the people not even involved?

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

JOE LONSDALE: Right? And none of us know the answer. I’d say like when you talk to the smartest guys like Dario who runs Anthropic, as of a few months ago, he thought that the next few years of this really fast advancement is kind of locked in. Like we used to have something called Moore’s Law with chips, right? Where the chips get better, double every year and a half. And this is like a lot of predict how the chips kept getting faster and faster. And the guys running the chip companies, Intel, all the other ones, they’d have all sorts of new tactics and new technologies they’re building that would let you make it twice as small, twice as fast over the next couple of years. And they could kind of always see ahead maybe 2 years, maybe 3 years.

It’s always like, “Wow, how are you going to make it smaller?” Like, “Well, we have to solve this and this and this problem.” And they keep going and they did it for a very long time. And so it’s similarly with Dario with this advanced pace where it keeps getting better with new data, new techniques, new tactics. He could see very confidently the next couple years and probably a third year of how it keeps getting better, which is pretty amazing because the pace right now, it’s like doubling every few months, right? In terms of what the agent is, it’s crazy. So he could see that going on for at least another couple years. If he’s right, that’s going to be very, very impressive in 3 years. But it would still probably take until sometime in the next decade or two to do some of these other things, replacing people. The question is, is it going to keep getting better or not? And it’s a fascinating situation.

SHAWN RYAN: Looking likely.

JOE LONSDALE: I tend to think the universe works in asymptotes and not exponentials. Like the idea of a singularity, Shawn, is that the thing starts getting better and better and then improves itself faster and faster and then just infinitely shoots upward and the whole everything changes. You basically have a god that you’ve created. Like that’s a secular person’s religious view from the tech world that we’re just going to change everything with a singularity. And I think you have these explosions that hit natural limits and then go over. And so my view for everything, every other phenomenon I’ve ever studied, is that these things don’t just go exponential forever. There’s limits to the universe and how these things work. So maybe it doesn’t go exponential. I don’t know that. I think it probably doesn’t, but some people think it probably does. That’s a really big question for us for 10, 20 years from now.

8VC Portfolio Companies

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Let’s talk about some of these companies that 8VC is investing in.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah. What do you want to hear about?

SHAWN RYAN: I picked a handful here. First one I want to talk about is Overland AI. I love it. I’ve been kind of following that company for a couple of weeks. I just saw it. And then when I was getting ready for the interview today, I was like, “Oh, shit.”

Overland AI

JOE LONSDALE: Byron is an impressive man. He’s a professor out west. And he’s won the national DARPA contest a bunch of times of how you navigate over kind of random terrain, right? So this is very different than a self-driving car, the problem Elon and Google and those guys are solving. Is driving on roads with people and bikes. And it’s a hard problem, right? There’s a really hard problem. Obviously the problem he’s solving is like over kind of random 3D terrain, like in a forest. Like if you’re going to launch an attack, if you’re going to defend this, if someone had to drive something out back over behind here where you’re shooting, it’s like that’s a different sort of self-driving problem.

You need LiDAR for sure, because you’re measuring ahead where it dips down. You might have ditches, you get stuck, you might have rivers you’re going around, mountains you’re climbing over. So he’s the best in the world at that. And his vehicles can go without humans interfering for days. And this is obviously very, very useful for military to be able to go over complex terrain. And originally he was powering all the other Primes and all the other vehicles out there. But now he’s building a bunch of his own.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. What do these vehicles look like?

JOE LONSDALE: He’s doing both. Actually, it’s interesting. I think the main one we’re going to make a lot of are smaller rugged all-terrain vehicles that can have a bunch of different kinds of sensors and weapons on them, but they’re not for carrying people in this particular case. And they’re much, much, much cheaper. So a tank is very useful for certain things, but these guys, you probably could have several hundred of them for the cost of a fully equipped tank with different sensors, with different weapons coordinating. I’d be a hell of a lot more scared if I was 100 miles away and there were 300 of these smart things coming at me than just a single tank. So there are two different types of weapons.

Saronic Technologies

SHAWN RYAN: So is this similar to Saronic?

JOE LONSDALE: It is kind of analogous in the sense that you have autonomous— Saronic’s building at scale autonomous warships. And Saronic’s first product was a 25-footer. Saronic last year also built, as you know, the fastest-built big ship since World War II. So Saronic is now building at scale 180-footers, 150-footers, 100-footers, which is pretty awesome, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man.

JOE LONSDALE: I mean, a 180-foot autonomous boat can be more powerful than a 400-foot destroyer if it’s autonomous, because the destroyer has a freaking hotel on it. This 180-foot’s all weapons, so you actually have more weapons on the 180-footer than the destroyer.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

JOE LONSDALE: Which is pretty cool, right? And by the way, in a battle, what’s the destroyer doing in a battle? It runs. It has to run away. It’s 500 lives. It’s going to get wiped out. These guys don’t have to run, they can freaking charge, right? And you have a lot more of them for the same cost. So that’s— so Saronic, what they’re doing makes sense. But yeah, it’s similar where over the land you’re also going to want a lot of these things that are autonomous, that are much cheaper at scale. Go into a territory— if we ever have to fight in a jungle, ever have to fight in Ukraine, ever have to fight anywhere on the ground, you’re going to want this stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Is Saronic deployed anywhere yet?

JOE LONSDALE: Saronic has, but because the war is going on, we’re not able to talk about any of that right now, unfortunately.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn it. I can’t wait till we can.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, you gotta get Dino back. He’s a big fan of yours. And he’s a SEAL also, of course.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we had him on.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, he loved it.

TAP Training

SHAWN RYAN: How about TAP Training?

JOE LONSDALE: Oh yeah, that’s really cool. Jason Spires, he’s a really good guy. He had an interesting background. He wouldn’t mind me saying because he overcame this thing where he grew up really poor and he was dealing marijuana. They threw him in jail for a long time for being good at it. And he got out of prison in his 20s and he went to Stanford and then he went to Palantir for a little bit. And I ended up meeting up with him and we helped him as he got this thing going. And you kind of root for guys like that who had a tough upbringing. He didn’t hurt anyone. He was just really good at selling this stuff. So they locked him up. But he’s someone I really admire, and he obviously turned his life fully around and is a great entrepreneur.

And this is one of the most important areas for our country right now. It’s called Training All People. It’s how do you get people to get great jobs and get them exposed to more higher-end vocational training, working with machines that cost millions of dollars. It’s too expensive to build a school to train someone on a semiconductor machine that they might have to work with that costs tons of money. He’s built instead with his co-founder some amazing VR technology. So the students are actually partnered with a bunch of these companies where they’ll train people in VR, make sure they can get to the point where they’re actually pretty proficient and learn a bunch of different stuff. And they’ll have trainers who’ve done this forever in their company helping them do it at scale. And then once they’re good enough, they get to train on the real stuff. And so it makes it so much more affordable to take huge numbers of Americans and get them ready for high-paying jobs. And he’s helping tens of thousands of people. Hopefully he’ll be helping hundreds of thousands of people soon.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, man.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, it’s good. Good thing to do.

Esper

SHAWN RYAN: About Esper, that caught my attention. Cloud policy-making software.

JOE LONSDALE: I love it.

SHAWN RYAN: Cloud policy-making software.

Innovative Companies and America’s Future

JOE LONSDALE: I love it. Malika is an impressive founder. Her parents are from Afghanistan, actually. She grew up here. Very pro-liberty lady. So she’s like, I love— I think you can be American from any background if you love liberty and you love our country and love our values. And she and my wife became friends, actually, because they’re both interested in policy and they’re both obsessed with the regulatory state being really broken and really hurting a lot of things in America.

It’s a kind of a core conservative value of how you make government less stupid. And so what she realized when she started this company is that technology and AI can actually make the regulatory state work a hell of a lot better. So it’s a nonpartisan thing, right? You just like— no one wants government to be dumb because it’s pretty dumb sometimes.

And so if you’re going to make, for example, if you’re going to make a regulation, what’s the process to make it, to check other states, to learn what’s going on, to see what the code is? What’s the process to review it? What’s the process to see how it’s working? What’s the process so people in the field know what the regulations are so they can intelligently use them and not just harass people unnecessarily.

So there’s a lot of interesting tech to make it all transparent. And she has a bunch of states using it to basically make the regulations smarter, to get rid of bad regulations and just run that process. And she’s a profitable company growing really well, working both blue states and red states and just making government less stupid. So I love stuff like that.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that’s awesome. And then the other one that really caught my attention was Bedrock.

Bedrock: Autonomous Construction and Excavation

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, this is cool. This is cool. Boris— he’s also a great lover of liberty. Not to get all these people in trouble with their other people, but he is. His father was like a genius from the Soviet Union who fled here, basically, like one of those physicists, I think.

And Boris was a great entrepreneur. I met him through a mentor of mine a long time ago. He’s working on stuff in AI, and he ended up selling a company to Google and he helped run part of the Waymo division. You know, Waymo is the self-driving cars. And so these are a bunch of really, really talented guys. I mean, it’s amazing what Waymo has done. I’m rooting for Elon against Waymo with Tesla, but they obviously both come from like great DNA.

And his new company, it’s autonomous construction, autonomous excavation. And this is really, really cool because first of all, 25% of all the costs right now to build something in the US in construction is tied to excavation. And second of all, there’s tons of things like there’s quarries— 6,000 quarries where you can never basically get enough stuff out of them cheaply enough. Everything’s really expensive because you never get to hire tons of people right away. Then you have to fire them all because you can’t use it for a while and you can never get enough people for the right jobs. It’s sloppy and it’s messy and a lot of it’s boring.

And so he actually has— it’s working. I mean, he’s raised a few hundred million more dollars recently since we invested from all sorts of top investors and they’re partnered. They’re using Caterpillar machines. People love it and they’re actually deployed and it’s working. They’re doing it in Texas, doing it in Alabama. Here’s the funny thing. The tech, of course, unfortunately, the AI people are in California, but when they do stuff in the real world, they always come to the center of the country where the states are run well.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s going to change. That’s going to change a lot.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, so because it’s not just excavators, right?

JOE LONSDALE: It’s construction. It’s going to be all sorts of construction stuff. You started with excavators. That’s a really hard problem with multiple dimensions, like you’re digging on a hill and you have different kind of dirt coming up. And it’s really interesting. You know, one of the crazy things is they train on tons and tons of data, which is part of their advantage, is they partner now with lots of different companies getting all the data and the computer learns what to do.

And so one of the things it learned how to do is when it’s done digging and it’s waiting, it’ll go around and use the scooper to clean things up nearby and smooth things out and use everything because it learned from the guys doing it. Isn’t that crazy?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s wild. I mean, I feel like shit’s going to get done at least 3 times— I mean, if typical 8-hour construction shift? Well, you operate that machinery, think about it, like we have 24 hours a day. That’s 3 times faster.

The Jevons Paradox and Economic Growth

JOE LONSDALE: I’m always jealous of Japan because they’ll have their roads— the guys will come at night because they respect their other people so much in their society and they don’t have the weird unions that break things. So they just work really hard at night, well-paid, and get it done fast, right? So you can be on the road again. Now you could do it again without having to keep the union guy up at night.

But here’s the thing. This is like a classic Jevons paradox thing, which is really important for economics because a lot of people might see this and their first instinct might be, well, f* you, you’re just getting rid of people’s jobs, right? That might be the thing they think.

And here’s what it is. It’s that when something goes down in cost, you can get a lot more demand for a lot more of it, right? So the original Jevons paradox is important for people to understand. This is a key economics concept. They figured out how to make coal plants twice as efficient in the 19th century. It was a big deal because coal was like the big energy. And so if you own a bunch of coal mines— a lot of people did, that was a big thing back then— and coal plants are twice as efficient, all of a sudden everyone’s like, “Oh my God, they’re not going to need our coal anymore.” And you know what happened instead? Demand for coal went way up because all of a sudden, because energy was so much cheaper, it was now much more in demand and there were much more uses of it.

And it’s the same thing here. If you can build buildings in America for much cheaper, suddenly a manufacturing project that you were forced to do in Mexico or forced to do in the Philippines or Vietnam or wherever else the hell the numbers said to do it, suddenly it makes a lot more sense to do it here because you’re building it for much cheaper.

And so also the amount of economic activity you’re going to create, if we can make these things cheaper, it’s going to go so up. There’s going to be so much more stuff. Right now there’s all this stuff, Shawn, that I really want to do here as a patriot. And I do. I produce a lot of things here. I build things with the ships and everything else. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t pencil. Like, “Joe, I’m sorry, it doesn’t pencil.” And you can’t just be a crazy person. It has to pencil, right?

But this makes a lot of stuff going to pencil a hell of a lot better the next few years. So it’s going to lead to a massive boom in economic activity here. It’s a very good thing for America.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man. I mean, what do these machines look like? Are they just repurposing?

JOE LONSDALE: They’re repurposing Caterpillar machines for now. Caterpillar, by the way, is crushing it the last few years. You can imagine because of all the construction and data centers and demand for their machines around the world. So they’re a very profitable, massive company and they love this. They know they can’t build it themselves. And so they’re working really well and partnering and figuring out and we’re equipping their machines.

And you know who else is going to be going into this sector as well is our friend Travis— he just announced it. Have you followed that at all? Travis Kalanick?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOE LONSDALE: So he’s the one who built Uber, right? Very famously. Amazing entrepreneur, super hardcore guy in terms of a builder. And his latest company, he’s renaming it Adams and he’s going into the world of atoms. You can go— he did a whole manifesto online. So Bedrock’s my favorite big company that exists in this space, but in other parts of the space like mining, etc., Travis wants to figure out how to make the world of atoms work with AI. So this is going to be a hopefully huge growth area for everyone in the next several years.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is wild.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah.

America Is Back: A Vision for the Future

SHAWN RYAN: What are you excited about?

JOE LONSDALE: You know, America is back, man. Like I said, I think our country went through something very weird for 50 years. All of a sudden we had way too many lawyers from the early ’70s. We had this fiat currency. We got rid of the gold standard. We had all this bureaucracy sprout up. I mean, it’s almost like the Soviet Union somehow infiltrated us. I don’t know. Something really bad happened where our culture went off the rails. Workers weren’t paid as much. Finance got to be too big relative to workers. I think it’s a major problem. I still think we got to fix that.

And there’s all these things that were broken for 50 years. And suddenly the airplanes didn’t get better, healthcare got more expensive, everything got broken. Suddenly it’s all reversed. Suddenly healthcare is going to get cheaper. Airplanes are going to get better and faster. Government’s going to get less stupid with this AI stuff. All this manufacturing is coming back. All of a sudden we’re building ships again with Dino. Like, China builds 230 times as many ships as we can. We’re going to 100x it in America the next several years.

Like, all this stuff— he just, you know, he’ll announce it himself, but he just raised billions more. There’s all this stuff that’s getting funded. All the stuff that’s working, all the stuff that’s growing. Like, America is going to be by far number one again, and we just got to make sure we don’t rip ourselves apart, we don’t let the left get in charge, because they’ll break it.

Drone Swarms Over Barksdale Air Force Base

SHAWN RYAN: I love to hear that. I love to hear that. I got a hot question for you. All right, you ready? Joe, drone swarms just flew over Barksdale Air Force Base for a week straight. This is where we keep nuclear B-52s. They resisted jamming, they were custom built and the military couldn’t stop them. Your company, Epirus, literally builds the weapons designed to solve this problem. So what’s actually going on here? Is this a real foreign adversary probing our nuclear infrastructure, or is there any chance this is a psyop, a distraction from what’s happening with Iran and everything else right now?

JOE LONSDALE: You know, it’s a great question. And I almost texted my friends in the Pentagon to ask them about this because I was wondering it too. I probably should, huh? Although the reason they might not tell me is that they know I’d probably tell everyone I talk to. So I don’t have inside information. I wish I did.

Your listener’s 100% right. Epirus could shoot these things down. I actually just posted something right before I went on the show a couple hours ago. Epirus has a new autonomous thing where the truck drives autonomously, opens up and fires autonomously at the drones. You put a couple of these—

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit.

JOE LONSDALE: You put a couple of these at the base, they take the drones down right away. Anti-jamming is one thing. Epirus is not just jamming, Epirus is frying the circuits. Epirus is literally applying like an insane amount of energy all smushed into a ten-thousandth of a second and using AI and everything to get the power to hit the gallium nitride all at once. And the burst just like is a cone of energy, just fries these things. So yes, Epirus 100% could fry these and turn them off. And so if we really need to, maybe they’re going to adopt it. I think that’s the obvious solution.

SHAWN RYAN: Andy Lowery is coming here on Monday.

JOE LONSDALE: He is?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOE LONSDALE: All right.

SHAWN RYAN: He’s bringing one.

JOE LONSDALE: Oh, good. Really?

SHAWN RYAN: He’s bringing one. We’re going to get a walk around.

JOE LONSDALE: Let’s get him on.

SHAWN RYAN: Fry the neighbors.

JOE LONSDALE: Andy’s the CEO of Epirus. Yeah, don’t fry the neighbors or get us in trouble.

SHAWN RYAN: The neighbor’s cars.

TSMC, Chip Ecosystems, and Rare Earth Dependencies

JOE LONSDALE: The problem is, once you fry some of these things, you can’t turn them back on. They wouldn’t be very happy with you.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a follow-up. If China takes Taiwan tomorrow and controls TSMC, in those chip factories, can we even continue to build drones and AI weapon systems? So first of all, that’s kind of what I was alluding to earlier about, if they do take Taiwan, what does that mean? And you were talking about repurposing chips.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, so first of all, TSMC is part of a massive ecosystem. So a lot of the design, a lot of the work, a lot of other things happen in America, happen around the world, happen in the ASML in Europe. Like you couldn’t just take TSMC and just own it for yourself. It would stop working because you’d stop sending the designs, you’d stop doing the work. It’s not better, right?

SHAWN RYAN: So I thought it was all centralized.

JOE LONSDALE: No, it’s actually really interesting. I think America actually does capture more of the profits from the chip ecosystem than Taiwan does. This is what people miss. They definitely capture more of the revenue because of the cost. But if you look at the actual profits, we’re still capturing more than they are because we do so much of the work.

It is a very distributed industry where a lot of that’s happening. At Lam Research and Applied Materials and all these companies that maybe you haven’t heard of that are in Silicon Valley that are part of the US still. And so they couldn’t just take it all away.

Now, that said, they can massively slow down everything in global chip production. They could definitely cut off all the newest stuff. It would take a long time to redo it, which is why we’re trying to obviously build what we can here. But listen, it would set back AI by 5 or 10 years.

Would it stop us from building drones? No. Like we have another separate problem right now, which is that we don’t do enough rare earth refining, which is something the Department of War has done a really good job trying to change. There’s been at least a couple of companies putting a lot of money into it — they’re going to mine rare earths, they’re going to refine rare earths. And you need those things to be able to build the magnets and the drone motors.

Most of the Ukrainian drones on both sides involve China and their supply chain, which is not good for us. That’s a shame right now. That’s how it works. So we got to fix that. But it’s not necessarily just a TSMC problem. That’s a separate problem we got to fix that we’re working on.

TerraFab, Elon Musk, and the University of Austin

SHAWN RYAN: How — I mean, you were talking about Elon getting into this.

JOE LONSDALE: TerraFab. Yeah. You got to bring someone on who knows more about it because it’s a new thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. I’m just curious, what is the timeline? Is there one?

JOE LONSDALE: I have nothing but respect for Elon as the number one builder in the world. I think when you’re a great entrepreneur — at least if I speak for others as well and for my own things where I’ve built 5 or 6 pretty big companies — I think you almost have to trick yourself, at least for me, into thinking it’s going to be faster than it is, because otherwise you can’t get yourself to do it.

When you start one of these companies, at least in my experience, maybe I’m just slower, but they always take longer. They’re always harder. I think Elon has done the most amazing things, but he’s also made predictions where things take longer. And I think that’s just normal for a great entrepreneur.

So I think it’s just really hard to know how long things are going to take. And I think whatever someone guesses as a great entrepreneur, you could sometimes maybe add a few more years. So I think this thing takes a while. That said, they’re going really fast. They have the best people in the world and it’s really good for America that they’re doing it. So I’m rooting for them.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that in Austin too?

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, it actually is.

SHAWN RYAN: That is wild, man.

JOE LONSDALE: That is so cool. We’re just finishing our STEM building for a new university right next to SpaceX and Boring Company, right there next to all this stuff. We have 30 acres and have this awesome building we’re going to be doing. They’re actually helping us — they’re going to be doing robotics and electrical engineering and all sorts of stuff there. So it’s a really fun area right now.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, that’s cool.

JOE LONSDALE: University of Austin, we’re crushing it.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s cool. What are you guys doing over there at University of Austin? We talked about it last time you were here.

JOE LONSDALE: Yeah, it’s great. Third class is joining right now. This is about —

SHAWN RYAN: Oh shit.

JOE LONSDALE: Peter Thiel has already hired away a few of our people from the first two classes and a bunch of them online. You can go look. They’re doing all sorts of cool companies, all sorts of cool internships with Boring Company and Palantir and all sorts of different groups we partner with.

Listen, these are amazing young people. To have a really top score, Shawn, and then to turn down an Ivy League or another top school and go to a new university — you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to have an opinion. You have to want to be part of the country elite. It’s the new elite. It’s the people who don’t want to be part of the old kind of broken Harvard-Yale kind of loser mess, like CFR guys who predict everything wrong about what’s going to happen in the Middle East and are just part of the old kind of corrupt old guard.

They want to be part of the builders. They want to be part of the actual competent people who think for themselves and don’t just echo what you’re supposed to say. I think it’s going really well.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s awesome, man. Yeah. Well, Joe, it’s awesome catching up, man.

JOE LONSDALE: It’s great to see you.

SHAWN RYAN: I love what you’re doing. No matter where you’re watching The Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

Related Posts

• Transcript of Mohandas Pai Interview: Raj Shamani FO539 – Truth About India’s Tax System
• Transcript of Alex Hormozi Interview: The Diary Of A CEO – Jul 20, 2026
• Transcript of Scott Bessent Interview: The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
• How To Buy A Used Luxury Car Safely
• Only In America Interview: w/ Indra Nooyi (Transcript)