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

When you say Palantir to the average person, some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.

Nobody is angry, you might not be doing much.

Why do so many people not trust you?

Why do so many people not trust Palantir?

We have to eliminate, probably, about to 10,000 terrorists.

If fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex, then what?

What if somebody evil gets a hold of what you guys are building, then what?

What's scary to me is if it's a foreign public, you like some really, really bad person.

Who today is your biggest enemy?

Are like the extreme populists on both political sides.

So in a situation with a madudo or a man show,

is there a possibility that Palantir wasn't involved?

I think guys were trying to kill Trump.

It means that if they're still around after Trump's president,

they're probably trying to get him and his kids again.

Why would Palantir start to protect the West against his longest terrorists?

That's truly the mission.

That was truly the mission.

But as I ran, really, I ran.

But a lot of people think it could turn into something like that.

I don't know, this is not appropriate, but I'd be very rumored.

So the rumours would do.

You'd go and you wipe out the leadership class.

You're all dead.

And you say, OK, you guys are now in charge.

We're going to make a deal.

Or we're going to kill all of you, too.

You know, this whole thing with Vectamin and PBD podcast

started with a phone, me, and Mario.

That's it.

And it grew today to 15 million subscribers almost

and 164 full-time employees.

And that relationship, or you watching us and supporting us,

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press that subscribe button.

It would mean the world to us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I feel I'm supposed to take sweetest doughnuts.

You know, this life meant for me.

I don't.

What's your name?

The future looks bright.

That day.

And Jay goes better than anything I ever saw.

It's right here.

You are a one-of-one.

I send you right there.

I think I'm going to serve you soon.

Great to have you on a podcast.

Thanks for having me, Patrick.

Yes.

And I know you like these mics.

Credit courses.

You're awesome.

Yes, Jake in the crew.

Jake, who picked these blue mics by the way?

You did.

Okay.

So credit goes to him.

But co-founder, Palantir.

We started that 23 years ago.

Yes.

The story you have from co-founding Palantir to Dan.

I think you were an investor in Free Press.

But Barry Weiss, if I'm not mistaken,

you were somewhat involved.

The new companies.

Yes.

I gave Barry some money when she started.

Because we need to rebuild our institutions in this country.

That's right.

And you move to Austin.

You're building a university.

University Austin.

You're doing another thing with Cicero,

which we'll talk about.

I want to get your opinion on Cicero and Cato

because those are two different mindset

and then recent.

Yes.

Two different statesmen.

One had a temper.

His way or the highway.

The other one was compromised.

Open to, which is kind of the broth you guys went.

And then recently,

you put, I think, some $11.8 million

into a drone company in Nigeria.

Well, that's random.

I run a big venture capital.

Yes.

We're doing a lot in AI and defense.

Yeah.

ABC.

It's called ABC.

And listen,

I'm most of the best defense stuff

we focus on America.

Of course.

I do think in Africa,

working with the very, very best group

that we could find there.

It's important because there's a lot of bad guys there too.

Yeah, I agree.

So that's interesting.

We'll get into that.

I'm curious.

The drone business is very important.

We're seeing with these wars with Ukraine and Russia.

If you would ask the average person five years ago,

if Ukraine and Russia go to war,

what would be the most important tool to use?

Nobody would get drones.

Millions millions millions of drones

and blowing up all these other things.

But okay, got a lot of questions.

And the time we got this interview was phenomenal

because we got the Iran stuff going on.

We got El Manjo that was just killed

and what's going on with Mexico?

We have something we don't want to be in port of Ireland right now.

No, and we, you know,

it's a place where we used to go to a lot

because for vacation spot,

Americans go to Cancun.

They go to port of Ireland.

We hit the Costco, man.

They hit it out of all the places.

I know.

The airport is scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I want to start off with your background.

Palantir.

When you say Palantir to the average person,

some is good, some is bad,

some is neutral, some are scared.

You know, it gets good if they know who you are.

But one of my favorite signs

on the Old Defense Secretary of Rome's failure sign

is asking instead of nobody,

is anger you, you might not be doing much.

You know, do you subscribe to that?

Oh, totally.

Okay, totally.

At what age did you subscribe to that?

Pretty young, actually.

I was a pretty obnoxious kid.

Were you?

Oh, yeah, I had all sorts of opinions.

I always have.

Tell me about your parents.

Who were your parents?

My parents, my parents were awesome.

My mom passed away a long time ago.

My dad's not doing well, which is sad,

but they're amazing people.

My father was very competitive.

He was one of eight kids.

He brought him all out to California.

He was our chess coach when we were a little for fun.

He does a chemical engineer.

And we won the state championship when I was a kid.

My brothers did too.

And we thought we must be really smart.

And then he kept winning 20 years in a row.

So he's just a very competitive guy.

Everything, every game, every sport,

and a really optimistic, positive competitive guy.

Chef, so you guys played chess?

How old were you when you won the championship?

I was the kid of six champion twice a row.

And fifth and sixth grade.

And we won the nationals in junior high school.

But it's like, it's because we worked really hard at it

because he was a good coach.

You got to spend, you got to spend only 30, 40 hours a week

to be the best.

And this is a fair amount.

But we grew up in Fremont, California, and Silicon Valley.

Then these were tournaments in California and around the country.

Who were you in high school?

I was a public high school.

I was a nerdy guy.

I was a valedictorian and I had a bunch of really smart friends

who taught me a bunch of stuff about.

And we went and went way ahead in math and science and stuff.

So at what point did you and Peter Thiel link up?

Because I think when I heard a story

about you were still in college

and you were doing something with them

how did that relationship start?

You know, a lot of the smartest kids

in Stanford computer science were going to paper out at the time

of something where I really admired the talent

that was there.

You have to realize that company.

There was one company started by Peter Thiel

and a bunch of his smartest friends.

Max Levchin started it and David Sacks.

All these guys were there in Good Hoffman.

And there's one company, the Elon Musk started

with Roll Off and a bunch of other really smart people.

It was called X at the time.

And X didn't continue to merge to make paper out there

because they were fighting each other and they merged.

So it's all the smartest friends around.

Both Elon and Peter knows the prize.

It was a place you wanted to be.

They actually rejected me in my freshman year

but they let me in my sophomore year to go help them.

Was that like the place everybody wanted to work?

Not everyone, but I think it's for me

I noticed a lot of the smartest

most interesting people going there.

So it was one I was trying to find.

How was the story coming to you guys?

Because you know, it's kind of like, well, you know,

at that time when you look at the numbers,

it's not like Elon is today's Elon.

No, it wasn't, it wasn't, they weren't.

But how did you know that these,

was there, would they talk about it in the small circles?

Like, well, I mean, I was a computer scientist.

I was already ahead.

I'd already done mostly the undergrad work

for I got there, which is normal nowadays.

And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists

and they were all trying to go work there.

And so, and their first smartest friends were working there.

And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review,

which Peter had started.

So I met people that way and see the through it.

Got it. So Peter's way,

how proactive was Peter of trying to get it

in front of all the smartest kids coming out?

Well, this is, this is like,

this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses.

So Peter was very good at that.

So what we spent a lot of our time on now

and flying up to Seagull, the kids are Harvard MIT this week.

Because when you, we spent a lot of time on this.

So, so walk me through it.

So what does that look like?

Is it, you know, do you, do you go straight to the top?

Do you establish relationships?

Are there programs to go meet the kids?

How does that, how does that work?

Actually, it's a good question.

People don't ask.

So, Palantir, we had a whole playbook when we started.

That you know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent.

And so you'd have, you'd have your, your fellows,

you'd have your spies, you have your advisors.

You have all these like spies.

He's still the, these young men and women on your team.

And they're like talented, good to your scientists.

And they help you map out who the other best people are.

And they help you throw parties.

And they help you get to know them.

You know, professors there as well.

And you're just, you just have people

who are young, smart, technical people who are social.

And they're there and they're mapping it out.

And they're helping you meet the right people.

So when I come in, there's different groups we've met.

People who want to work with us.

We want to learn from them.

So it's mutually beneficial thing

where you're getting to know all the top talent

and you're helping connect them to your top companies.

And it becomes a way to work with them all.

But how do you filter them out?

Like how do you know?

You know, it's like a chicken and egg you start with.

Like you see, I all have a superstar from my portfolio

who's like one of our best engineers who just came from MIT.

And they have like five or six of their smartest friends

in the younger year.

And you'll go meet those kids.

Who are the smartest guys you know?

So it's a network.

It's a purely word of mouth.

So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys.

And it would say, you have to meet John.

He's the smartest guy I know.

So you're asking him what's the most important thing?

Then you might talk to him.

And you might work on projects with him.

So you get to know a little bit.

But yeah, you're just purely through the network.

And I mean, it's a lot of things.

The same way if you're a football coach

or you're a baseball coach,

you got to do this for talents and tech.

But what do you look for?

So in football, you may look for speed.

You know, like right now, I met with one of the law firms

that represents a lot of young talent.

Nowadays they're recruiting kids at 10, 11, 12 years old.

I said, so what do you look for?

They said coachability and personality.

I said, why personality?

Personality equals sponsorship.

You got personality.

I can get some sponsorship money.

You're coachable.

We can put you, of course, you've got to have

the physical abilities.

What did you guys look for?

You know, it depends if you're hiring entrepreneur

or hiring an engineer and engineering leaders.

That's because they're different.

Give me both.

And entrepreneur needs to have opinions.

And my entrepreneur needs to be able to say,

here's my hypothesis about the world.

Here's why I'm right.

Usually they want to have some chip on their shoulders.

Some of them they're trying to approve.

Like they will have to be someone.

You can tell they're ambitious.

They believe in things.

You don't need smart, interesting, curious people

to build things, but you need to have like

a certain level of leadership and opinions

about the world, I think, to build things.

It is the mindset of recourse.

That's 04, right?

You were at Palantir 04 to 09.

We were also at PayPal.

And they categorized you as being part of the PayPal mafia.

Second, you know, I was 15 years younger than Peter.

I'm 12 years younger than Elon.

I was a junior kid.

I don't get any credit for PayPal.

Well, you were still there.

You were still there.

I was learning from this guy.

And were you in meetings, were you watching him?

And what was he like?

What was Elon like in meetings?

What was Peter like in meetings?

What was he like?

Give him some of the answers.

I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon,

it'd be honest, but I mean, these guys were very opinionated,

very interested, very ambitious, very fast.

No tolerance for things that are broken.

You fix it right away.

You know, you work to the problems.

You get everything done today.

You don't talk about what you're gonna do next week.

You just use move.

You know, people would be there late at night

fixing problems.

You know, just passionate about their work.

What was the demo of the age?

What would you say the average is?

Would you say 25, 0 by the way?

You guys in their 20s, mostly.

In their 20s.

Where you can, as you can be demanding

of getting them to, now at the same time was Elon

and Peter also there driving working with them?

Yeah, in different different contexts, right?

Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher,

the thinker, he's not the one,

he's not the technical guy himself.

I think Elon is more of the operator.

He's more of there in the room.

I mean, I was in Paul Alto a couple weeks ago, right?

And I was meeting a friend and Elon was in the back

doing engineering reviews at XAA.

This is just, he's just, he's just there working working.

Where he, he's kind of the more the work horse

just pushed through, saw the details

of the technical problems.

Was the level of intent, like,

who was the most intense guy at Apple?

The most intense.

I mean, I think Elon's always been one

of the very most intense people I've ever seen

in terms of working, but there's other engineers

who are just there all the time pushing hard, right?

I think when you're in operation about guys like Max

Leipzig and others were just as far as I could tell,

it's always working.

Who were some of the guys that you worked with

that would maybe junior guys like you

that came out and became big stars as well?

Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of the guys who were there,

there were 16 different companies that were started

after PayPal that quickly became billion dollar companies, right?

So, and a lot of these guys are older than me,

but it was the guys that, you know,

Chad and Steve who built YouTube,

it was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn.

It was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX.

I mean, you know, there's guys who built Ironport.

There's just, there's so many things that came out of there.

God.

So, from there, how did the opportunity

to be a co-founder of a Palantir come up?

Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund,

and I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized

and I started bringing in my smartest friends to help

and there weren't really other managers there,

so I'd help start building things.

And a bunch of my smartest friends

I brought in one summer to help us,

they weren't interested in finance.

I thought it was boring.

And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about,

you know, at PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese

and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money

and so we got to know the guys who were helping us

to rest the bad guys.

There was secret service in the FBI.

And right after this happened, it was 9-11.

And so these guys were spending billions of dollars

on stuff that we thought didn't make any sense.

And they were really, they kept asking us for advice.

They're confused about it, do you think?

They, it was, it was, I mean, President Bush created

what was called the Department of Homeland Security

at the time.

I shouldn't be too mean about it,

but you know how it works in government?

Is that when you create a new department,

people can't really fire people in government easily.

So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they want to fire

and then they said there's pushments in the new department.

So it was a bit of a mess.

I've got to tell you what's the new department stuff

in your fire.

So there's, so there's, so therefore,

the whole of the department didn't really know

very well what he was doing.

And first was my impression

and they were spending money on just nonsense stuff.

And it became really obvious to us

that Silicon Valley, Google, PayPal, all these things

that were going on out there were just way ahead technically

of where the government was at that point.

And this was a problem because the government was using all,

the government was spending $38 billion a year

gathering data, looking at the data,

failing to stop the terrorists,

but also abusing our civil liberties.

So it was a mess.

So we said, you know what?

There's actually a really important problem here to solve.

A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again

and go get them instead.

B, I don't want everyone in the government

seeing all of my data without any controls.

That's crazy.

And so that's when you said,

why don't we go do it?

You guys say, let's go do it ourselves.

And I started having my friends.

I brought that summer to help build a prototype

in which it, which it sounds even crazier than finance,

but at least it was interesting.

They enjoyed it to help help me build it.

And my roommate, who I'm actually seeing later,

he moved down here in Miami.

He and I controlled the team

and Stefan Kellan, my co-founder,

and when he started building that up.

And CIA was apparently one of the first investors

in the company.

They eventually gave us money.

I think it was the second or the third round,

but it was only $2 million and we actually bought them back.

The reason we needed them is that Peter,

it basically known to give us money.

First of all, Alex Carpenter went all over Santel Road.

Like, you guys have all this talent

because they can measure talent even back then.

Like, why aren't you doing social media?

Why aren't you doing something new and exciting,

working with the government's crazy?

What's wrong with you guys?

It's not possible.

So he didn't think it was a good idea to help.

No, no, this is Alex and I talking to the investors.

So all the investors were being telling you guys,

they're telling us you guys are crazy.

No one does this.

Why are you doing this?

It's not possible.

It doesn't make any sense.

These are some big names.

Credible.

These are the big names.

These are, we got turned down by everyone.

I turned down by Excel by Sequoia.

The guy at Cliner Perkins at the time,

and they're a great firm.

I admire them very much.

But the guy at the time was no longer there.

He started laughing at us on the phone

because Alex didn't have a technical degree.

He's like, you guys don't even know what you're doing.

It's a doctorate, but it's not even a relevant doctorate.

They're laughing us out of the room, basically.

And what is Alex's mindset like when he's walking out of them?

What's he telling you?

Oh, we really are.

Because Alex is a very unique type of guy himself.

We were not happy with these people.

Peter Teele told me it was probably really good for me

because it gave me an even bigger chip in my shoulder

to make sure we succeeded after being mocked and turned down.

I'm like, 30 of these guys.

And Peter couldn't just only find it in himself.

Can you give other people to find these things?

So when we got in QTAL, which is the CIA's

venture capital arm at the time to give us a little bit of money

and Peter gave us even more of that was really critical.

And then how long later did you guys pay the $2 million back?

I think we bought it for a much higher amount.

We had some option.

I forget.

I must have been five or six years later.

So they still made some money on it.

Oh, they made plenty of money on it.

And you know, and more importantly,

we saved the government billions of dollars

versus what they were doing.

You literally have things going on.

The DHS guys, I remember there was some unitist thing

where it was like $3 billion to integrate all the data.

And we came, we showed them we couldn't

do the same thing for them out of the box at a month.

Like, don't waste billions of dollars.

So it turns out competence saves the government

and lots of money and protects civil liberties.

People don't realize it's both of those things.

What is the desire to constantly use names that are from,

I believe, Lord of the Rings, right?

What does that come from?

Peter gets credit for naming.

Peter gets credit.

You know, but I'm a fan of it.

I think, listen, and we wrote about this at that time.

So at the time when we're creating this,

we say, this is a dangerous thing to create.

You know, but we believe it's a,

we believe it's a worthy thing to create.

And it took a lot of courage.

Like, there's a lot of different things we could have worked on.

It could have made a lot of money doing a lot of other things.

But it was really important to both help.

You know, we have to eliminate,

probably about to 10,000 terrorists

that might not have eliminated.

We worked with all sorts of amazing groups

in the government alongside them

with the technology and with the ability.

And we help protect civil liberties

and make sure the government watchers are being watched.

Now, of, you know, of course, if you create this technology,

it's if it gets into the wrong hands

and they turn off the autotrails.

You know what, what I can be done with it.

So there's, there's good and bad here.

Yeah. So, and, and we'll get in,

I want to get into that as well.

But going back to the meetings of gone meeting with investors

and them saying, you know what, you know,

you guys don't know what you're doing.

You don't even have the real degree Alex said

in one of the interviews.

I think he may have said it to you.

He said, I wish we would have told him to f off

and just laugh some way.

We were so polite.

They would have probably respected us more.

If we, if we are just like, were you naturally polite

or were you intentionally becoming polite

because you needed the money?

I thought you were supposed to do it.

We needed the money, man.

I know what you're supposed to do.

So, but, but it's, it wasn't naturally

because you were disagreeable for talent.

Well, yeah, at the same time,

I think both of us are not the kind of people.

We're probably a little more arrogant now that, no,

we've been successful.

More arrogant now.

We didn't know that we didn't know for sure

we knew what we were doing.

We felt we were doing something smart,

but it was our first time.

He said, he said, I think it was,

I wish we were more arrogant in certain areas

and less arrogant in certain areas.

That's, that, that, that, that's well said.

You know, it was interesting when you're creating our company.

We kind of reinvented a lot of things from scratch.

And in some cases, it was probably frankly genius.

In other cases, we could have just hired someone

and knew what they were doing.

And it's like, when you're building a company,

I talk about having adults in the room.

There's certain types of adults you don't want to bring in

to a startup because you don't want people

running a machine in a standard way.

You want to be creative,

but there's certain parts that once you get there,

you probably do want the adults to show you how it's done.

So there's, there's some things

we need to be able to learn from others.

What was your strength in the partnership

as a founder? What was his?

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I was really good at recruiting the first few hundred people

and kind of pushing forward on the kind of like

the product strategy and whatnot.

Alex was really intuitive about institutions,

about how the world works, about how we come across,

about how to get into certain places,

about how make deals happen,

about how to communicate in the right way

that you're coming across to create value

for the other person in a way they understand,

the way they can get it done.

Alex is a philosopher and he understands how

people and organizations work and how to navigate the world.

Got it, got it.

So his, was he more the one selling the vision?

You were more recruiting the people, both of us.

Well, I think recruiting is a lot about selling vision as well.

I, when we, when we gave people their offers initially,

we, this is really early on the beginning,

we give them three options of like higher salary,

middle or lower salary, and higher upside, middle or upside.

And I'd put on the sheet sheet of paper,

the lawyers hated this, but I put in the asterisk,

that it might not be exactly right.

I'd say, okay, if the company's worth $5 billion,

and this much solution, here's what your shares might be worth.

And it'd be like five, or you know,

you're here at the company's worth a billion dollars,

here's what might be worth.

And people would say, Joe, you can't show people

if it's for $5 billion.

That's totally unrealistic.

But you had to say, no, here's why it could be worth.

And now it's worth what?

$335 worth.

Yeah, now it's worth $100 billion.

Yeah, it was a lot bigger than that.

So you couldn't say it's worth $5 billion.

People thought I was ridiculous.

So let me get to straight.

So, so you're sitting in front of me,

and you're telling me, Pat, you can take 200K salary,

350, I'm just making up numbers.

500K salary, okay, 500K salary fits $5 billion.

You're going to get $10 million.

Yeah, but up here, like 50 million dollars,

it's going to be 50 million dollars.

Literally what you got.

Something like that, lower salary is a course,

but yeah, yeah, exactly.

Wow.

And so, based on what I would choose,

would you judge me and put me in the totally?

I tell you, if you choose the high salary

and low upside, then I have to go.

I'll be very skeptical of you.

Would you still hire me or no?

Sometimes, but usually, you know, I work out,

we measure everything.

Sure.

After the fact, all the very best guys

shows the low salary on the side.

All the very best guys choose a low salary upside.

Cause they want to get in the game.

They want to be part of the mission.

Yeah.

And by the way, how much,

especially since you said you recruit

the first few hundred people at Palantir.

So, and you were at PayPal

and you watch how they recruited you.

How much have you noticed recruiting change

from then till today due to AI?

So, oh, no, it's not just AI.

It's that people recognize talent so much better.

So, Palantir was getting the best of the best.

We get the top people, the top schools, Facebook

and Google kind of caught on to some of this.

They started giving big signing bonuses.

And so what, like, 2009 or 2008, 2009,

they started giving 150K signing bonuses,

which at the time, that sounded like a lot of money

for 20-year-olds, ridiculous.

Now, the top AI companies,

it's like multi-million dollar signing bonuses for them.

I saw this one guy got a billion out of offer.

He turned it down.

This was like nine months ago, 10 months ago.

Yeah, that's like the very best guy.

He's probably taking some knowledge for one place

to another.

So, it's a little sketchy kind of what they're paying for there.

But for this, the raw talent,

you're still getting millions of dollars

for coming into companies.

Just being the most talented,

kind of math Olympian.

That's a young guy coming in.

Yeah, but it's like, think about it.

It's like, it's like, you know,

you hire a young guy for a basketball team

who's the best basketball player.

Similarly, the gold medal programmer in the world

who's going to add this unique ability

with that worth.

So, it's worth a lot.

So, today, it's not uncommon for a young guy

to get a five-million dollar signing bonus cutoff.

For the very, it's going to be a top athlete.

How do you protect yourself

with the guy walks in six months?

Well, is there a clawback?

Yeah, you start your structure in some way

that it's built in.

I mean, if you walk in here,

you might be able to keep it,

but you hopefully distribute a lot in a year.

But he's getting equity and he's vesting into his upside.

So, you don't want to leave too soon.

If the company's doing, well, he's going to stay,

because he's going to earn that equity in a just...

He's going to get the equity for the next four years.

He's going to want to stay in earn that.

So, you've got the signing bonus,

you've got the salary, and you've got the equity.

And sometimes a sign bonus,

you might ask to take his equity if he's bullish,

which by the way, the best people often do.

They want a bigger piece of the game.

So, I'd give you five million dollars.

I'd give you five million dollars worth of share today

that could be worth 100 million dollars.

So, he takes a million of it in cash,

and he gets these comfortable,

and he has four million of it in shares,

because he's smart and he wants to make the big money, you know?

Yeah. So, that's one thing that's changed

with recruiting the cost.

How much cost did he give you?

It's a cost.

What else has changed?

I mean, so it had a part of my second company

after a palate here.

It's very successful.

It's like $10 trillion in this platform for wealth managers.

And, you know, the guy used to work for me, Scott Wu.

He had won the gold medal and programming

three years in a row.

So, like, it's like King of the Nurse basically.

Everyone knew who he was and these competitions.

And he worked for me and then he went on.

And now he's running one of the top AI companies.

But the fact that I was able to hire him

and people like him just by like showing up

with these contests and hanging out,

now there's like hundreds of other firms

going after these contests, sponsoring these contests.

They all know who these kids are.

The game's gotten harder.

You have to look harder for these top people now.

And it's harder to recruit them.

And you better, I have an advantage

because of everything I built,

but you better have a reason why they should be coming

to work with you if you're just a random new person.

It's really tough.

I'm a differentiator.

All right, I've built multiple different

multi-billion dollar companies.

And this is my main thing I'm doing.

Come work with me on it.

That's a pretty good pitch versus,

you never heard of me before, right?

So, it's a lot harder.

Got it.

So, the differentiator is,

from moral authority, previous track record,

I've won before will build in something big again.

Come join us.

Say the best thing is this other guy you know is there

who's a genius and you want to work with him and learn from him.

So, it's all about chicken and egg.

I've got to start with the best people

and the other best people.

The balance that really did it.

We started with a bunch of the best guys.

The other ones want to be with them.

We want to learn from them.

So, you guys have a nucleus you start with.

What else did you do at the beginning?

The first few hundred or pound two you'll recruit.

I mean, that's a big thing to say.

That's the foundation.

Yeah.

What other methods did you look at certain schools

to recruit from that?

Yes, we had teams that had about 20 of the top universities.

We have playbooks for flying there.

We could raid other companies.

It sounds really bad when you talk about it.

The most ridiculous version,

one of this guy, Nathan, who was helping us build a company

early on, he had worked at eBay

because eBay bought PayPal.

He didn't paypal.

And we couldn't have got a conference room at eBay.

And I was like nine, 2021 at the time.

And we were interviewing people at eBay

to come join our company.

And I felt a little bit awkward about it.

But I'm like, I guess this is what people do sometimes.

Turns out you weren't supposed to do that.

But anyway, it was-

Did it work?

Yeah.

It was such a badly-run company

that they didn't even have any idea that it was going on.

Which is, you do that.

My company, I'll mess you up, man.

That's not cool.

I'll be like on your mobster, friends.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, listen, you almost have to have that mindset

and build something big.

You know, you're like, fight people.

But eBay was like a sporadic group of like MBAs

who didn't really have strong opinions about it.

At what point did you know,

Palantir was special?

Like it really had legs.

You know, it was, for me, it was like when I had

some of these people joining Bob McGrew

and he came in from, you know,

he'd been Stanford PhD and had been at PayPal.

I was a superstar.

That's part of the reason Peter gave us money

for one round is when he joined

he ended up running a bunch of stuff at OpenAI

after being at Palantir for 10 years.

But when he came, these other guys came,

when we started to get into the FBI

and the, you know, it's just like three or four years

and it was, it started to really work

and all this top talent started coming.

It was very special.

And what happened?

So when you're saying FBI, what does that mean?

Like they're approaching you guys,

you're solving their problems, they're seeing,

you know, it's so hard to sell the government.

And I use the CIA.

I use the thing it was like the CIA.

It's actually like 200 competing orgs

that don't like each other.

And the FBI is like that a little bit too.

There's lots of parts of it.

So we are working and doing pilots with both sides.

But we couldn't get a breakthrough.

And at one point, we finally, it's kind of funny.

They were jealous to each other.

They wanted to be first, but they didn't want to be first.

The CIA government is very funny.

I've done other things.

We sell the government.

They both want to be able to tell everyone how innovative

they are, but they don't want to take any risk

in being the first one to do something.

Because they can get fired and they're very risk-versed.

People tend to be bureaucrats.

And so we are doing all these things they needed,

but they're afraid they do the big contract.

And I think both of them thought

the other contract was going ahead

and then they both signed at once.

And then we got in and we started out real value.

And listen, this comes into a long time

to iterate and figure out how to help.

But it was once you started breaking in

and iterating with them, it was clear we were going to get there.

And what role was Teal Plane?

Teal was like the chairman of the board, co-founder, strategist.

He stopped us from making some really key mistakes

in years, two, three, four.

There would have been some bad partnerships we were going to sign.

He made sure it was funded.

He made sure the vision was the right direction.

Are you comfortable sharing one of them?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, there was a company that was going to get us

our first few million dollars of revenue

to be partnered with them in DC.

But they would have kind of locked us into something

where they owned a big piece of the whole thing long term,

the way they structured it.

And that would have capped the value.

We might probably would have been a better chance

of being worth 100 million

and no chance of being worth a lot.

That big of a difference.

I mean, because they would have owned a piece of the market

the way they wanted to structure it

and how that's some rights.

And for me, I'm just trying to make this thing work.

So you're like, oh, it's going to give us millions

of revenue.

We'll be able to get over here.

But it would have really taken away a lot of the upside.

And he's very smart about how to structure these things

and I protect yourself.

And he's always been the thinker behind the scenes

who you check everything with

and who you make sure you're going the right direction.

What why was Palantir started?

It was started to protect the West against Islamist terrorists

and to make sure we say the government money

and protect the civil liberties.

That was the mission.

That was the mission.

That's truly the mission.

That was truly the mission.

And you're saying that to me in the interview

when you're recruiting me.

You know, I don't know if we used, yeah,

we used a lot of words like that.

When we were first starting out,

we were telling him, are you literally telling me,

we're going to save the free world?

Oh, yeah, we say, listen, the technology cultures

that exist in the West Coast,

which of them interviewing you,

you know, you're one of the great technologists

and you know, your friends are amongst the very top.

The things we know how to do here,

they do not know how to do that

in this part of the world in DC.

They just don't.

They're way behind and they're broken

and they're wasting tens of billions of dollars

and we're getting attacked

and they're abusing our data and they're incompetent.

And we're going to have to do this for them to come in.

And it's important that at least some of the best people

in the world go and help the government be less stupid.

I mean, that is, that is, that is what,

if you want to matter, you know, got it.

But that mission was full on bottom.

You, Alex, you guys are on the same page with the mission.

Yeah, save the shire we used to put it

because this comes from the lower the rigs.

But you're saying the shire is this Western civilization

is protecting the innocent,

it's going off and doing the mission for them.

Let me ask you the process.

It is it, okay,

pre the idea of Palantir.

You're sending them guys, this is a problem.

We have to save, you know, the free world,

we have to save the, you know, Western ideology.

Here's the enemy, you know, what they're trying to do.

How can we solve that problem?

And then do you think about what company can we develop?

They can solve this problem?

It's, there's a go mission first, solution second.

What is the, what is the, the, the tools

that were built at PayPal to, to stop the frauds.

This is the rush of when you were talking.

The Russian in Chinese mouth, right?

You had to be able to stop those guys.

So the, we built those tools and we, how nasty was it?

Bet all of our competitors go bankrupt.

Everything else was going bankrupt, basically.

That this is, this was existential for PayPal to solve.

What kind of money did they get?

I mean, it was like seven or eight million a month.

That was back when I was a lot of money.

That you have to remember, early stages of PayPal.

This is like, I mean, it's like seven or eight million a month

at a time when it's scaling a lot of months.

Enough to make it unprofitable.

Got it.

I don't know the exact numbers,

but it was enough to make it unprofitable versus profitable.

It was really key and it was annoying

because you could, because you had to not accept certain things

if you couldn't stop these guys, right?

So it'd break a lot of stuff.

They'd run money through a system, they'd take it out.

You might go to seven, eleven, buy something,

they're going to get your credit card, sell to the group of Russians.

The Russians are going to open accounts, transfer a bunch of money.

You're going to then skip PayPal $300, you say, no,

you'll charge it back.

And then, and then, and then we have to pay the,

if you don't know what the other guy is paying.

And so there's always fraud you have to deal with.

And then it turned out that like the types of problems

we realized we were doing for investigating that,

you could extend those to a lot more types of problems

and build investigative software that didn't exist

and be able to like look into all the data,

bring data together, basically have the human mind extended

into the 38 billion dollars of data

and make sure you only access, we're allowed to access

and how make sure you have autotrails to do it right

in order to get the back guys.

And so that created so much pain and annoyance

that led to the mission and it inspired from there

to start a company called Palantir

that prevents what Russian-China did to you guys.

Well, at 9.11 happened after that and we saw,

and we got to know these guys and we saw them

reacting to a badly, we said, wait a second.

We got to help things at the same time.

Yeah, those two got things, got it.

Why do so many people not trust you?

Why do so many people not trust Palantir?

Every, by like, you know how,

when you think about every decade,

there's a company that people look at us evil.

You've got Monsanto, you've got Anron,

you've got all these guys, you know, 20 years ago,

they hated these companies, they hated AIG.

But man, when you think about Palantir,

a lot of people say, what is your motive?

What is the vision?

What are you guys trying to do?

Well, I'm not running it anymore, first of all.

So I was, I was the other first decade,

but I'll tell you, you know,

first of all, when you're really successful,

people attack you, that's always going to happen.

And second of all, this is a, this is unusual area.

You have a company that is helping,

helping the government, you know, eliminate bad guys.

It's helping the government do things

who wants to do more effectively, more efficiently.

And some of the things government's doing right now,

people are not happy with.

And so I think it's an interesting question,

like should a tech company stop helping the government

when it is a piece with it?

And I think Alex Carp's spoken really well on this.

And I know, listen, Alex Carp comes from,

you know, he had an African-American mother,

he's got a kind of Jewish professional,

for a photo father, he comes from the left, obviously,

Peter Till, obviously, he's more on the right.

And, you know, so we come from different political sides here,

but they both agree that it's better for the world

to make American government and America more efficient

and work better, and not throw sand in the gear

is not break things.

And so the question is, like, should Silicon Valley

get to decide policy, or should the government

get to decide policy?

And our view is, we want to watch the watchers,

but the government should get to decide policy.

Our public has a mechanism for deciding

and we should follow that mechanism.

The first is being in charge of ourselves.

If fear becomes, what if somebody evil runs it after Alex,

then what?

What if somebody evil gets to hold away

you guys are building, then what?

Well, it's, see, that that's not what's scary.

What's scary to me is if it's a far-re-public,

he lacks a really, really bad person,

and they try to get around things

and use technology and power in ways they shouldn't.

Pals are repossible, because it's very possible.

That is scary to me, and that's what we often fight

to be part of the political process for our views there.

And to make sure we have checks on power,

which is quarter of their US constitution.

What Alex is doing, he isn't getting the data himself.

Alex is running a company that builds technology

for our clients, right?

I should say our clients.

I'm an advisor, still a proud founder.

I'm not running a pound to these days,

but the pounder is helping them use their data.

We're not data ourselves.

You see what I'm saying?

Like you're helping them see things and do things

that couldn't do otherwise with their information

where it's not like pounder itself has all the information.

How many of the events that happens in the world

were watching like, you know,

this pounder involved them.

For instance, it, and I know you're not involved today.

Like Madoodle was pounder involved in capturing a game.

But Elmentio, the Mexico, you know,

the cartel guy we just killed in Mexico,

were you involved in gathering that intel?

Because if you're thinking all these intel,

and by the way, a lot of agencies use you, right?

It's not just CIA that uses you.

So you know what everybody is doing.

Not but we don't actually, because the people who know

are the people who have the clearance

to see what's going on there.

So there may be things that happen that Alex,

even if he's running the company,

may not have the top secret clearance

for that particular operation to be involved in that.

Is there anybody in the company that has the clearance

to know what everything's going on?

I actually don't know the answer to that question.

That's interesting.

I doubt they do, because a lot of pounders work

is with allies all over the world.

Different allies have different clarences

and different things they do.

So be very unlikely for someone to see everything.

Now, the real question though is,

do you want this operation to be done efficiently

and effectively as possible?

Or do you want to be done slightly stupider?

I mean, that's really the question we're asking here.

Should this be done in a slightly stupider way

or a slightly better way?

Because that's all pounders doing is on-site with them,

helping them do it in a better way,

given the information they're allowed to use.

So in a situation with a maduro or a mancho,

is there a possibility that pounder was involved?

It's very likely to me that the technology

and that was involved in its capabilities were involved,

and then they helped them do it in a better way

than they would have done it before,

especially with the US operation.

I don't know about the Mexican operation,

or not I'm not just speed on what they're doing there.

Meaning the Venezuela operation.

Venezuela wanted to be surprised

if it wasn't involved in some way.

But again, pounder is a tool being used.

So my others in our government who are in charge,

who are making the stride, if you explain that.

So how is that tool used?

What does that tool help you do?

If I explain different technology,

I can say, here's what HubSpot helps you.

Here's what Salesforce helps you.

Here's what this technology helps you.

How does pounder help in that process?

So what pounders, I mean, it's a lot of things

to explain, but pounders bringing together data

from a lot of different sources in the government.

Like I said, what I started to pound here,

government spent 30-something billion a year

of gathering data, I bet you it's a lot more than that now.

So there's literally hundreds of thousands of databases.

There's literally signal intelligence, human intelligence,

and there's all sorts of rules about who could see

what they could do.

So they're not, for example, people are not allowed

to spy on US'es and use that data.

That'd be legal pounder would flag that

and say, this is against the rules

you can't be doing this, right?

So the whole thing is a rules engine

that has very strict rules.

And then so there's someone who's using it,

they're getting all the stuff they're legally allowed

to be doing based on the policy of our republic

and they're bringing it all together

and they're putting it together.

Because it's very complicated if you're a lot today basis.

Is this the same person over here?

Is this person over here?

Is this Mohammed, is this Mohammed?

You know, is this guy, you know,

is this guy with this less common Hispanic last day

and the Sarah, the same as this, the Sarah,

and they're mapping it all out

and they're taking all the information they can

and they're using that with AI along with their judgment

to ask questions and write and make plans

and figure things out and connect the dots

and then get things done better.

At the beginning stages,

who didn't want to see Palantira succeed?

The Primes, all the Primes.

So in America, the Primes are the big defense companies.

In America, we had for a long time

the most competitive best defense companies.

In the 20th century, there were maybe 80 or 90 of these,

they just were dominant in the best of the world.

After the Cold War ended, we had to lower the budget,

probably a good thing.

I'd rather more money goes towards other things than war.

Cold War ends with the Primes all to merge.

They merged in these eight or nine, six of them.

Yeah, exactly, maybe even eight or something,

but they're much smaller,

much fewer number, much bigger companies,

and they became so dominant,

but they became more like the government themselves

because they interact with us so much,

they became big bureaucracies.

And these big bureaucracies, a lot of the best tech guys,

they all fled to the tech world,

to the best places in Silicon Valley, to other places,

and these places got really good at what we call

innovation theater.

They're gonna convince in Congress, they're innovating,

but they're not really innovating anymore.

And they stopped innovating

and there's only two companies

that broke through these primes.

They're gonna do this balance here in SpaceX.

Both pounder SpaceX and it was really hard.

It was really unfair.

They beat the crap out of us.

We do things that would save huge numbers of lives.

I'll tell you, so we work with a special forces.

At first, a special forces are like the most elite

like soldiers doing really important missions

and their lives are on the line a lot.

So they wanted the best tools.

And when balance here went somewhere at first,

it was very often special forces guys

using it for key missions to save their lives.

Now, at the time, we were in Iraq

and there were army brigades in Iraq

and they saw us saving lives in special forces.

They can use it too.

And the government wouldn't pay for it.

So we said, of course, you can use it for free

because we're patriots, that's the whole point.

So go use it for free.

Just give us the data.

Back legally, it was for not.

Reaching out to you.

This is like all sorts of people in the military

working with our guys in the military embedded,

working with these guys, not PMCs.

These are actual guys in the military.

Like lieutenant colonels in the military.

So new types of colonels are reaching out to us.

And the government doesn't want to fund it.

Can you help us?

Getting a general's permission, pushing it in.

Wow.

These are guys in the ground,

because their buddy's lives are on the line, right?

Sure.

We have a lot of great soldiers without the approval

of the US government.

No, no.

People would approve if they would use it for free.

They would just say, we're not going to pay for it.

I don't know, because we don't want to get a trouble

stopping you using something.

It's going to work better.

And so in this case, we stopped tons of deaths

from IEDs, because we're able to track where the IEDs,

most likely where we're able to track all sorts of things

going on.

They reported back all these deaths that we stopped.

And then there was like a five, whatever,

three or five billion dollar bid

for the defense ground control system again.

And we'd already been used better than anything

they were doing before.

The way ahead, everything they wanted,

and they just, like, no bid gave it to a prime.

And we actually sued him at this point,

because it's not allowed.

You have to consider others.

We actually won the lawsuit.

The generals in charge are getting into the prime.

We're ordering people behind the scenes

to destroy the records of live loss,

but some guys that saved the lives that we'd saved

so the general couldn't hide it.

It's like, it's a totally corrupt.

It's totally corrupt.

So we had to break through.

And then a lot of others saw this.

And this is really just for the culture

and the military now.

And SpaceX broke through them, hell,

and tear broke through, and now Yandrel, of course.

They're starting to say, wait a second,

we've got to be open to the outside stuff.

We can't just only do the primes,

but that was a big fight for us for years.

Who's, which of the primes are bigger

than you guys right now?

Everyone's still, everyone's still bigger on revenue,

because Palantir's still a small economy.

Palantir's about half government,

a little bit less than half government revenue.

So it's like, you know,

it's in the single digit billions for revenue.

And there's primes being tens of billions of revenue

that are much bigger than I spit around forever.

But we're growing much faster.

That's why we're valued highly.

But market cap wise, you were hired in the prime.

Mark cap wise were higher, but revenue wise were still much.

Do you, do you, I mean, you're not a part of the sensor

or nine-year-old advisor?

Is there any situations where Palantir

has to deal with the prime?

Oh, yeah, all the time.

No primes still run a lot of stuff.

And by the way, there are still parts of things

the primes do that are the best in the world

and you have to work with them.

The problem was, is early on, we've counter tried to do anything.

The prime, they say, like, oh, we'll take 99% of the value.

We'll give you one percent of the value.

We'll take credit for your work.

It's like, it's like they just beat you.

It's because they're in charge.

When you say 99, it's a hundred million out of a project.

It literally paid you over a million bucks.

They're giving me a million bucks for something.

And then we'd actually do most of the work,

and it would drive us crazy.

So, in own nine, which is 17 years ago,

what's top line revenue day year?

Oh, I don't remember.

But it was.

Is it in the millions or billions?

Oh, probably in the 10, 10 millions.

That we didn't cross the billion for 15 years.

Took a long time.

So in own nine, companies been around for five years

and the revenue's in the million.

It's a tens of millions, probably.

Tens of millions.

Yeah, got it.

It might have just been crossing a hundred.

I don't know the exact numbers.

Got it.

So if that's who didn't want you to exist at that time,

who today is your biggest enemy?

You know, and I really can't speak for the company.

So this is just me now.

Sure you are.

Looking at them from the outside.

I would think the biggest threat to parents here

are like the extreme populace on both political sides

who don't want our country using better technology

to succeed basically.

And you know, there's a lot of,

there's 1200 laws right now in 50 states

trying to be in different types of AI for things

that I think are just ridiculous.

I think most of the, by the way,

some of it's good.

You got to like protect content creators.

There's things there's legitimate things

that push back on.

But a lot of this stuff is nonsense.

And if those nonsense passes,

it's not just naming the pounders

and naming it to like thousands

of our best innovative companies right now.

So, so I think that's actually the biggest threat.

This point because pounders so dominant

in any value, just so many thousands of companies.

Can we like specify who would be fart?

Are you saying things like a non-interventionalist politician?

Is that okay?

Oh no, no, no.

I'm talking about laws that are,

I'm talking about laws that are like,

like Bernie Sanders trying to stop all new data centers

or something crazy like that.

Or people who are saying,

we want to throw developers in jail

if things don't go right with AI or something,

which there's laws like that.

They're browsing in Maryland, Virginia.

Or there's people saying, you know,

it's a lot of people who are technically illiterate

writing state law to block things

to create new regulators to stop you from deploying.

It's stuff like that would be it is that.

Again, I see the president's working to deregulate

and kind of still keep an open source

and allow you to compete

without making it too regulated.

Yeah, David Sacks is working hard on this

for because he's the head of AI for the president.

And, and you know, my view is that

we should have certain regulatory frameworks

to protect kids and protect common creators

and have reasonable law,

but we shouldn't be having each day

have its own regulatory code.

That'd be crazy.

Did you see this recent movie that came out called Mercy?

Have you seen Mercy?

You haven't seen Mercy?

Oh my God, you got to watch Mercy.

So it's a movie with Chris Pratt.

I've been telling everybody to go watch this movie.

Specifically you, like in every employee

at Palantin, you should go watch this.

So Mercy is a story of this actor, Chris Pratt,

who wakes up, he's locked into this chair.

Okay, handcuffs shackles.

And the judge is that face on the top.

If you see the face on the top, that's the judge.

It's an AI judge.

You have 90 minutes to call for her.

Why you didn't kill your wife.

In this case in a movie, he killed his wife.

He's like, what are you talking about?

And she has access to every video to pull up.

Can you go to this state?

What happened that morning?

When I walked into that scary stuff, man.

Well, do you see a day in the next 20 years

where we could be living in a world where judges could be AI,

politicians could be AI?

It could be based on models.

That's not the world I want to live in.

How do we prevent that from happening?

Well, the Constitution is pretty clear about the rules.

So I think we should make sure we stick to the Constitution.

If we're going to amend it, we should be really

do.

I'm careful not to give AI a random power like that.

That'd be my view.

But the whole point of how America was designed

is checks on power.

The reason America is a truly great country that's

lasted as long as it has.

It's our 250th anniversary this year

is because our founders were philosophers

from the Enlightenment, and they found a lot about this.

And they realized you have to check government power.

You have to set it up with lots of different checks

on itself.

And the whole point is for the government

itself not to be allowed to ever be evil.

And by the way, that was how we built

Palantiris have audit trails and to watch the watchers

and to have checks, you have to have checks on power.

Otherwise, government is dangerous.

Yeah, but if we're going into the robot era

of developing robots, and if all of a sudden

you have 400,000 robots that you program

from your headquarters, and your competitors

got 200,000 robots, and third places got 17,000 robots.

And all of a sudden, somebody becomes evil

then what happens?

Well, this is why it's important for the military

to have the most powerful robots,

and not some kind of corporation that obviously

is very important.

And by the way, China is trying to build those faster

than us, and that's why right now we're trying to make sure

we stay ahead of China.

And it's, listen, our military,

how it's controlled by our government.

That's a very important thing our public has to get right.

But obviously our military has to stay ahead

of anyone else.

That'd be very bad not to have them not play on power.

You said it eloquently of who you think Palantiris enemy is.

Who do you think is the enemy of the state?

Top three enemies.

I think our top three enemies are probably

our adversaries, right?

I think our country right now is very polarized.

It's very polarized.

And I think social media unfortunately does that.

What are adversaries to give an edge of that?

I think China, using TikTok, finds ways to

polarize us more.

I think Iran, very clearly, the guys running Iran,

I'm a very big fan of the Persian people,

but the guys running Iran are a bad guy, theocracy.

And you saw when we hit Iran with Israel last time,

and the internet went down.

And you saw 15% of global Bitcoin

and hash rate went away.

And you saw a bunch of bots that are guys

who pretend to be Christians who hate Jews and Alabama

also got turned off for a while, right?

So they're trying to find ways to divide us, man.

They're trying to find ways to pull us apart.

What a powerful thing right there.

The 15% of Christians who hate Jews and Alabama.

Well, 15% of global Bitcoin and hash rate went away.

Sorry, that was another point.

So Iran was mining 15% of all Bitcoin in the world.

We found that out because it went away as soon as we hit them.

But then there's literally hundreds of thousands of bots.

They were like, just angry Americans.

They were angry Americans.

They're pretending to be Christian guys who hate Jews.

They're pretending to be crazy people in America

who are different extremes who are arguing.

So there's a lot of stuff that's planted.

That's planted to make us fight.

Let me ask you, if Iran was able to,

who actually knows?

This is an interesting thought.

I'm curious what your answer will be.

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We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail,

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This doesn't Ilan, if he wanted to really run a report

with the data that he has.

Is he able to see who is behind the fake bots

that are causing retweets to happen for a certain message

that's going to undermine a certain way of thinking

and pin people against each other?

Somebody should know.

Yeah, Ilan did something very courageous

with his team a couple of months ago.

And I don't know where it is now,

but they put all the country of origin up on all these things.

And you saw all these very divisive stuff.

You had this like A-pack is evil report, A-pack thing,

and it was like a European account, Tidra Iranian account,

Tidra, a Pakistani account.

I was like, wait a second, you guys have been saying

you're from the south, like what are you doing?

You're obviously a foreign lobby who's doing this now, right?

And you got a lot of versions of this.

We're all of a sudden, all of these accounts

that were, they were storing up trouble on both sides.

We're actually foreigners.

Yeah.

I think it'd be interesting to see, to see numbers,

I haven't looked at that much.

Well, I mean, if you were a data company,

a Palantir or X also a data company, any of these guys,

I would assume they know exactly who's behind it.

You know, the problem is it's very easy to create accounts

and be a real person or not be a real person.

So I don't know if they know everything.

I think there's a lot of bot farms.

You can see the words coming from where,

but if you're really good at this and you're a state actor,

you can use different IP addresses,

you can use different spoofs, you can do things

to make it a little bit harder for them to tell.

And so you might be able to create a lot of fake accounts.

Who is using bot farms?

Who are, to Chinese customers of bot farms?

Chinese are using probably the method of use.

To create so division and to push things

and to make the crazy politicians more popular.

The Chinese love making socialist more popular in the US.

They know it weakens us.

They have a word for like crazy white person,

which is like this kind of white crazy person on the left.

And they love to, they know it's a problem there.

They want to ban it there,

but they want to push it in America.

Then they think it weakens us culturally.

That's one of their models.

They have a, the Chinese do cognitive warfare.

You know this, right?

So there's like land, sea, air, cyber, and cognitive.

And they have a whole branch of their military.

They're just doing cognitive warfare,

using all this stuff, whether it's especially TikTok,

but all these other ones as well.

And they're very good at it.

What are the tools?

That's how to TikTok.

I mean, all the social media stuff, all the protests,

like there are big funders of,

they'll figure out something like a Black Lives Matter thing,

or they'll figure out something going on

with some environmental thing.

And both Russia's done this too historically.

They find it a lot of the green movements in Europe.

They knew it was good for them to do that.

And they'll figure out, and you know, China nowadays,

they take all the data they can.

So there's companies like, you know,

I'm told air wallocks does this.

I don't know myself.

I'm told air wallocks has all the data that goes through China.

And the Chinese government has access

any data in China at all.

And then we'll use it to model.

They have models of you.

They have models of me.

They have models of everyone.

They try to figure out how to use those models

to influence us and influence people about us

for their ends and for our divisiveness.

I mean, they're very good at it.

I mean, we saw they did that with TikTok, right?

And to the point where we saw what happened with Gen Z

and LGBTQ and the tie between it,

the percentage is going to,

they got to a point that Bill Moore had to talk about them.

They, the Chinese very clearly saw a few issues

were very helpful to attack us with.

One of those issues is Jewish people.

Chinese have decided that it's very helpful

to create divisiveness around Jews and America.

Because they see attacking Jews or something

is very, very useful to do that to rip us apart.

And it is.

It is.

It's actually caused a lot of problems.

Unpacked that, go a little bit deeper.

So I think the Asian people maybe are a little more racist

in some ways than we are.

They think of things more of those terms.

They just are, that's my experience.

And so if you stop and think about this,

there's a lot of Jews that are very successful.

And there's a stressful Jews in America.

They see as an edge for America.

And they see that it's,

but they also see there's a lot of resentment.

So that's a really easy way to create divisiveness

against something that's helping us.

And so that's like, they go right at it.

And they're very smart about how to do it.

You go all over TikTok.

You go all over everything they do.

And it's like, boom, let's just stir that up.

Let's stir up the Black Lives Matter stuff.

Let's stir up this other thing over here.

They're very good at it.

But have you ever seen, how old are you by the way?

I think you're 43 now.

43 now.

Yeah, I'm 47.

I just turned 47 a few months ago.

Have you ever seen the Jewish story

and the division being this high temperature wise

in your lifetime?

And our lifetimes is the highest it's been.

And it's not just China.

Partly what's happening here is this is the first war

that Israel has been involved in in our lifetime

with social media.

And if you go on social media,

just the ratio of people who are passionate

against Israel versus for Israel is 100 to 1, probably.

Just based on the number of Muslims in the world.

There's like good Muslims in the world.

There's going to be a lot of extreme ones

who are really passionate about this issue.

It doesn't mean they're not good people.

They can disagree with me.

And so that itself is going to create a lot of passion

against Israel and Jews, right?

And so there's already that already exists.

And then you can exploit that to push it.

How do you address that?

How do you address it?

I mean, man, this is a very, very tough issue.

I mean, you got your to brains.

How do you address that?

How do you fix something like that?

Because it doesn't seem like it's the temperature

is getting any lower.

Well, you know, I would like there to be peace

in the Middle East.

And I think for me, the only way to have peace

in the Middle East is to free the Iranian people

and all around sponsors of terror around the Middle East.

And I think that leads to a very positive outcome.

And hopefully Israel and Insadi and UAE can all sponsor

and create peace in the, you know, in Gaza together

with when most of the Theoprots are gone.

And hopefully that's a much more positive outcome.

As long as the Iranian Theoprots are there,

we're just going to be a recurrent issue for us.

So I really hope you take them out.

That's, I'll be honest about that.

You really hope we take them out.

Then well, I think they're evil, evil,

people who have spread murder and terror

and more terror to their own people than anyone else.

And also, it's a horrible place.

Yeah, it was one of the most beautiful places

in the world and one of the most wonderful places

the world if we could get rid of the bad guys.

Oh, if you do, I mean, there's a song

by a singer named Moeen.

And he says,

My heart wants me to return to Esfahan.

Esfahan is one of the richest cities in Iran with history.

When my mom and dad were still married to each other

for those 10 or 11 years,

the only vacation we ever went on was Esfahan.

And I picked her still today as a kid,

going there with my sister and my mom

and my dad, Craig Memories.

But yeah, that's Esfahan right there.

And Moeen says,

De la mijad bes faan badger them.

I'd like to one day return.

My heart wants me to one day return to this city Esfahan.

One of my favorite books is Cyropedia,

which was written about Cyrus, the great leader.

And it was used actually to train European

and aristocracy princes for like 2,000 years.

And there's all the wisdom of Cyrus.

So you just, you kind of get this like,

really sense of like the greatness

of the Persian people from that.

And it's like, it's very optimistic.

It's about virtue.

It's about, you know, Machia Valley ended up

becoming like the thing people used after him,

which is the opposite.

Machia Valley is like this very cynical take,

which is, it's a dialectic.

It's also true.

But I really like the Persian's idea.

And you grew up on mom's side's Jewish

and just like the, what the Persians did for the Jews

and the natural alliance has been there for thousands of years.

We still, that's what we still feel.

So I think really hope this is something

that can become a positive.

Why do you think no matter what happens,

it's always the juice fault.

No matter what happens, it's always the truth.

I think you, I think you're going to blame the people

who are outsiders who are different,

who are successful.

I mean, I could say it kind of Jewish.

I think it's slightly annoying sometimes

when you're like, it's like this little neurotic,

like smart person who like makes more money

than you.

You kind of want to punch them in the face, you know?

I don't know.

I don't know.

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Tell me.

I can't see that.

I can't see what Tom the soul said.

Tom the soul said, I love my soul.

He said something so funny one time.

He says, you know what my advice to Jews are?

But for the world to start liking you a little bit,

start losing, start losing.

His mentor was Milton Friedman, who is the illustrious guy.

Yeah, Milton Friedman, I'm opinioning

of my house with Milton Friedman in it.

I love him.

I got to spend a lunch.

I got a lunch with him like 20 times

because I was the editor of a paper

when he was there at Stanford.

How was nice?

He was amazing.

He always had, he's always interested in the new ideas

and he's really shaped a lot of my thinking.

I'm like, oh my God, I'm like, it's amazing man.

Milton Friedman, you spent 20 times with Milton?

Yeah, his wife was off in there too.

They were in their early 90s when I was at Stanford

and he was a hoover, yeah.

You know how hard I've tried to do an interview

with Thomas Solder family?

I know.

It's still hard.

He's such a great man.

I mean, listen, him, the two of them, the debates,

when you would watch them do the debates,

what's the one book he wrote?

Is it called Reader?

Things called Reader?

I don't know what the,

can you tap and Thomas Solder Reader?

I just had my son finish this book two years ago.

Is it called Reader?

He had a conflict of visions that I love.

Click on that one right?

It's between you.

Yeah, Reader, oh my God.

It is like a must read.

My son read this at 11, 12 years old

and he breaks down ideas in the simplest way.

You know this guy would be so much more famous

if he wasn't black because he's black,

the left doesn't want anyone to know that he's conservative.

Well, here's what's funny though.

Conservatives today are now talking about him enough.

I think conservatives need to remind with Thomas Solder,

but go back to that with Iran.

So Iran, right now at any point,

you and I are talking right now at any point,

anything could happen.

It was supposed to be this weekend.

I think there's a negotiation on Thursday

as my understanding.

I don't know.

I shouldn't be saying it.

They said they're not gonna do anything.

I thought Whitcuff and Kushner Walk that said,

no, we're not renegotiating.

Rob, do you have that one clip I sent you

from the foreign minister where he's been,

did you see this one a few hours ago?

I don't know.

The foreign minister's been interviewed

and he's asked about, hey, I noticed you said

that there are 40,000 Americans that are in

or surrounding areas of Iran and if US attacks,

that's open game for you.

I sent it in the Pivoty podcast group.

If you don't have it, Rob, I'll just send it to you.

You see it?

It's right there, bottom clip, right there, yeah.

And she says, are you saying you would do something

to the Americans and you should see his answer.

Go ahead, Rob.

1000 American personnel in the Middle East right now.

In Iran's letter to the UN Security Council,

you've seen to threaten them

because you said America will bear full responsibility.

You said you don't want war,

but if that's what happens,

all bases, facilities and assets of the hostile force

in the region will be legitimate targets.

Are you saying Iran will hit US bases in the Gulf

or will you also bomb the Gulf countries

that are your neighbors?

Well, I'm not going to say what we are going to do exactly.

Obviously, we defend ourselves.

If the US attack us, then we have every right

to defend ourselves.

If the US attacks us, that is the act of aggression.

What we do in response is the act of self defense.

So and it is justifiable and legitimate.

So our missiles cannot hit the American soil.

So obviously, we have to do something else.

If you have to hit, you know the American base.

You say in the region.

That is a fact.

All right.

I'm not sorry. What do you think is going to happen?

Listen, I think these guys sent someone

to assassinate Donald Trump.

We know this with a better regime kind of them.

They're told if they missed,

that he'd probably lose the election.

So wait and try to get him again after he lost the election.

This was the official instructions we found.

These were the, these guys were trying to kill Trump.

It means that if they're still around

after Trump's president,

they'll probably try to get him and his kids again.

So if I was the president,

there's no chance they'd be around after his president.

That's all I tell you.

I mean, and by the way,

I think it's very good for the world to eliminate this evil

for your people and for all of our peoples.

Yeah, a lot of people are worried

it could turn into another Iraq

and we spend a few trillion dollars.

But is I around really Iraq?

I don't think so, but a lot of people think

it could turn into something like that.

You know, you're here to two arguments.

I think they're going to do a surgical mission

the way they did Venezuela.

And it's going to be clean.

And here's what's going to happen.

And then the other side is like,

how do we know that for a fact?

So if I was in charge,

I'd be very Roman about it.

So, and I don't know, maybe this is not appropriate,

but I'd be very Roman.

So you know, the Romans would do, you'd go

and you wipe out the leadership class that you're all dead.

And you say, okay, you guys are now in charge.

We're going to make a deal

or we're going to kill all of you too.

It's up to you.

Because they don't have the IRGC,

which is in charge again, probably, right?

Because there's a guy, so they guns.

And say, okay, now here's what we're going to do.

We're going to make a deal.

Here's what's going to happen.

Here's what your public's going to work

to be free people.

And if you don't do that,

then we'll kill you all in six months, too.

And we'll give you another chance.

But I don't think we should be occupying.

Our sauce as bullshit.

I think Iraq was terribly run.

I think trying to go and have people

over there as ridiculous.

But should these guys who have acted like they've had

who spread terrorism around the region,

who have tried to kill Trump,