YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Lonsdale

lines on the record: 64
first: 2024-03-11
most recent: 2024-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I want to have a very happy and healthy family. I want the people I'm working with to be very satisfied in their careers and successful. And I want to have gone after and solved hundreds of problems of things that were broken in our society and lifted up millions of lives.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there's a lot of them. One of the ones that stands out a lot to me all the time, like in all these conversations I have every day, usually there's like one reason that dominates all the other reasons. And if you have three or four reasons for something, that means you have no reason for something. Like if you have four ways you're going to make money, you have zero ways you're going to make money. What's the one that's going to dominate? And if you haven't got to that, you're either thinking sloppily or you haven't figured it out yet. That's one of my favorite of those nine”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. It depends who you marry. It depends who you marry. My wife, my wife is very rational. We get along pretty well going after things. But you're right. There's something in general. My father, you know, was a champion chess coach, and our team won 20 years in a row, even after I was gone. He's coached this kid's team in elementary school. And he was really good at getting people to see what they were good at. And he was really good at like giving positive reinforcement that was true. You can't just do fake positive reinforcement. You have to like find what they're good at, help them discover what they're good at, and make them confident about it. So I think driving towards that is probably the most important thing. And I found in general with management. But, you know, in terms of bad advice, basically just everyone's wrong about most things, Harry. So it's hard for me. I don't have anyone in mind in particular.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the sort of fear, although I do think you need to drive right away as fast as possible towards the area of dysfunction.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very high IQ, very high clock speed, willingness just to go right to what matters and dismiss all the other bullshit. Not worried about offending or anything else, just like going towards the truth and the substance and the thing that matters the most and like attracting the best talent and driving towards the outcome. It's just very, very no-nonsense and kind of raw, raw substance.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's dependent if, for example, Elon wasn't doing six other things. I think he would probably be the best one. But I think he's very busy. He'd still be very talented.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very concerned about the geopolitical situation with China and Russia and the potential of war when I was in a country in Asia, I won't say the name, seeing our ambassador there who's on the other political side, but a very smart guy. Even he was telling me he thinks China is likely to strike in the next four years because they realize how much stronger we're getting and how much weaker they're getting. And so I'm just very worried about the possibility of war this decade, which is just a very terrible thing and would derail everything for everyone and hurt a lot of people.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably I've read a lot of parenting books and I thought I knew what I was doing and I realized I still have no idea what I'm doing. So my kids are great, but I'm still learning.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Bob McGrew was one of my superstars who ran Paleter Engineering early on, a key person we hired very early that made Peter more bullish in our company. He's been running research at OpenAI and doing a lot of work there for the last eight years. And I'd much rather be on Bob's team than think of peeing against him. So by going what I'm doing, I get to do something complimentary to Bob and Sam. That's probably the best strategy.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be some really big companies. We've identified about 12 areas like this where we think there's going to be more than $100 billion pulled out of those areas in terms of being able to go after them and create more efficient things. That's great for the economy. That's great space for venture to attack right now.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and it's opened them up to competition from the tech world, so suddenly we have that same, it kind of sounds silly, but you have that same kind of process of being a bully. But in effect, you're not really being a bully, you're going, you're upgrading this part of the economy, but you're going in, you're competing again with pre-internet companies. And so you have a chance to go after with top tech cultures, these kind of old kind of lazy areas. And that's a very, very good thing to do as an investor, as an entrepreneur. You want easy competition. You want to compete against things that are broken. When Elon's starting SpaceX, he's competing against like a decadent broken government department that is not the NASA of the 60s, right? He's competing against something that's basically not exploring the new possibilities anymore. And that's why SpaceX was possible. The same thing here, you have all these old, you know, there's like 200 billion plus a year made doing healthcare billing by hand with people who are probably overweight, sitting a big office buildings, working nine to three. And that's a very good thing to compete against, you know, and the fact that AI allows you to go after that to make it three times, four times more efficient.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, what is AI? AI, first of all, is going to help all those 500 companies and still have good tech cultures do a lot better. So it's going to make the existing SaaS companies worth a lot more. But what else could AI do? And this is where it's kind of fun. So if you think about starting a company in like 2015, going after a subsector in SaaS, a lot of what you were doing is kind of like this is kind of mean, but it's kind of like being a bully because you're basically taking a company in that subsector, in that part of logistics, in that part of finance. Usually a pre-internet company, or if not pre-internet company, was a pre-cloud company. And that was your competition, right? Your competition was stuff built in the 1980s, 1990s, most of the time. And so you're kind of being a bully because you're taking a modern tech culture and you're just wiping the floor with these guys. That's why we're able to win again and again and again with a very high percent chance. What is AI services? Well, in effect, what AI has done is it's opened up a big part of the economy that we couldn't go after a SaaS. A lot of these old services companies that were also started in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way to look at this, what have we been doing for the last 15 years? We call it the smart enterprise wave, right? You had the cloud, you had big data. Suddenly you had probably about 500 unicorns that are legit unicorns formed from the cloud and big data going after enterprise. And what were we really doing there? We were taking things from where they were to what's possible by upgrading infrastructure or by allowing nonlinear workflows. Listen, a lot of people throw a lot of shade at these enterprise companies. They have created trillions of dollars in value the last 15 years by upgrading a lot of parts of the economy. I've invested in and created a lot of these companies. A lot of them are still growing very quickly. They're very valuable companies. So that's something that I was able to do consistently with dozens of companies. Now, there's not as many of those left to do right now, right? There's not like a whole nother 500 companies that have not been upgraded, a whole other 500 subsectors of the economy. They need to be attacked. And so it's a question is, what do you do now in venture? So I think a lot of people who are focused on this enterprise model, they're stuck and they're confused and they're saying, what do you have?”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you are amongst the best in the world at something, it is worth doing almost no matter what. I think venture done by people who are not great entrepreneurs and don't have unfair advantages is very hard. I think it's possible if you have some unique skills to still do it well. I tend to be biased that I just have so many unfair advantages being a great entrepreneur who's built all these companies, who has all these networks of talent. Listen, Harry, I think this AI services trend we didn't end up talking much about is extremely important. I think AI is going to raise productivity and there's just a lot of ways that we're going to make a lot of money over that. Probably a lot of returns go to existing big companies, but there's also going to be a lot of returns to people who are doing full stack companies and replacing and fixing big parts of the economy. That's going to be captured by entrepreneurs. It's going to be captured by the venture capitalists to partner with the entrepreneurs. On average, does every venture fund do well to know? But do the top venture funds still continue doing really well, especially if you're raising the right side?”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's different rules for how these things work. Unfortunately, our core fund, Formation 8, did not get it out. I personally did not get any out. My Angel Fund was able to get a lot out for everyone else. And I took the distributions, didn't sell them. So unfortunately, I didn't end up, you know, I probably lost a few hundred million dollars from not selling, which is unfortunate. Now, we got about a quarter of it out when we were unlocked six months in when the price was already down somewhat. Wish we'd taken even more off then. So definitely some mistakes made there in terms of making money on it. That fund, I mean, listen, the Angel Fund was without it, like over 10x, Formation 8 fund ones, a big fund was still very, very good returns, despite not cashing in on the three or four X multiple from this. But obviously it's a big loss.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, wish was an exception on the consumer stuff, I thought, because I identified what was a really, really top data culture. So I invested in Wish at six million dollars post in 2010 out of my Angel Fund, and I led around with Jerry Yang and others at about 40 million posts as Series A. And the company went on to grow very, very quickly. It was basically like going after Walmart online, basically going after very cheap goods. There's about $600,000 merchants in China that were like very cheap, very hard to work with, constantly trying to defraud you. The idea was, of course, this stuff is not the best quality, but it's also the cheapest and you can kind of iterate to make a better quality. And listen, the company raised billions of dollars from lots of really smart investors. Goldman Sachs took a public at a $25 billion valuation. Obviously, we got something right.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned a few things. One is I learned a lot of people who do really well in different enterprise software areas, their next thing they want to do is to try consumer because consumer is just so different and so interesting and it turns out that A, I probably didn't have myself the magic touch when it came to like consumer online product stuff that just wasn't necessarily a thing I was very good at product for lots of their enterprise context. It's like what I really enjoy doing, lots of different strategy there in defense. I've created some cool defense things. I think I probably wasn't as good on the consumer side. And then also the framework I use is like a gap in the world where like I'm solving something that should exist in healthcare, should exist in defense. Either there wasn't a gap in the world in that part of consumer or else I wasn't the one to identify it. So I learned that, you know, I'm going to focus on the things I'm good at. I'm good at a lot of other things. So I don't need to do more stuff with celebrities online. And also I think things that are too much fun, there's probably like a warning flag.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm happy to talk about that. I've definitely had other failures if that's what you were trying to get at. So my friend started a company with Lady Gaga called Backplane. I was the chairman. It was like her social media little monsters.com. She would come and sit in the engineer's lapse. It was very cool. We all thought we were really cool. It was just the tide of her fame. It turned out we were able to triple her merch sales by like getting feedback from other people that we tried to apply to other artists and it just totally failed. Turned out that she was very different how she worked, her fan base is very different. The technology was irrelevant to anyone else. She's still popular, but she wasn't quite as hot the next year. And this thing just like had to shut down. It wasn't able to be self-sustaining. And so that was very fun to get to know her and do something my friend with her, but not successful.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, you have to. You have to. I'm too embarrassed to tell you things I've sold along the way because it was so stupid of me to have got out of them early because I've been in a lot of the top companies. And the lesson all of us face who are born by the time I was born was just basically to hold on to everything great forever. Of course, it didn't work anymore in 2021 briefly. We had some things that this spiked and then went down. But by the lesson was that I probably should have held everything for an extra 10 or 15 years. And Peter Teal had the same lesson. And I've learned a lot from Peter and he obviously sold out of Facebook too soon too. But I mean, these things are really, really hard to figure out. I've definitely sold out of a lot of things too soon. But, you know, you have to do new things. Money and success lets you have do more things that help have a positive impact. And that's kind of how I look at it.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what makes me happy is using it to fix things that are broken with this legislation, with the university, with a lot of the other causes we do. And frankly, using it to build things that should exist and the fixed problems too. Sometimes the best way to have an impact on the world is creating for-profit companies. You know, when we started OpenGov, I'd done pretty well at Palantir, although it was still earliest. I'd done well with Peter at the hedge fund and with some other my other Angel investing.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difference and you're teaching them something, and you're impacting tens of thousands of lives. And so when I think of money, I think of it as an ability to use it to do these things, which is really fun.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spoiler alert has a nice statue of a lion on it and it says Lonsdale. It's very cool. Put on my robe, you know, and sit back and sip the coffee and look at it. No, no, it's not something I think you focus on your liquidity to do more things. I mean, I'm kind of one of those crazy guys who's 95% illiquid because I'm constantly putting money into new things and building things and putting money into my university, putting money into Cicero. I spend a huge amount of money and cash flow on these nonprofits to try to have this impact. And it's kind of fun because every time you make more money, Harry, you can use it to do things. Like you can use it to send it to the Philippines or Africa and you can help a thousand people with a relatively small amount of money and help them a lot if you pick the right nonprofits with Cicero with these laws we're passing. It's hard to measure exactly because it's not perfect because you still have to convince people and has to be good. But for a couple hundred thousand dollars you take a law that's a really good law that's going to help a lot of people and hire people and go testify and there's a good chance you can get it done in a state where you're making a big”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely get a report in Atipar every week that tells me my net worth, which I'm not going to share on the podcast. But no, it's, I mean, you definitely.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really focus are the wealthiest people in the world. I think there's some lessons from that. So maybe that was a mistake. I'm proud to have been able to do so many things. That's something that's kind of a unique skill of mine. So it really is a trade-off you make, and maybe I shouldn't have made it, but you know what? I guess I have to say, at the end of the day, I do really enjoy running 8VC, working with my partners there, working with all these themes and entrepreneurs, kind of understanding what's going on in the economy. It's a fun thing to do. Maybe I'm a little bit less financially successful, but still whatever, we're still making billions of dollars here. So I think it's kind of silly to focus on money at that point, you know.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Atapar could have been bigger, faster if we'd gotten some things right earlier on. Now, I might have still made the same mistakes, spending more time on it, but I might have not. I might have figured some things out on probably cost us a couple years with some of the missing things where we had certain types of leadership, certain types of talent early on, could have helped us save some trouble. That's for sure. Probably same thing with OpenGO. OpenGov's a really strong spot. I also had a record quarter recently. It's an amazing company. I mean, Epirus as well, Bayesian Defense Company, but there are some leadership choices we made in DC where we probably could have done things faster and better. And really Andrew really got some of those things right. And EPRIS is some of the most important technology in this space and now has a great business side as well. But I think, again, there's probably like when you're not doing something full time, there's going to be things you miss. And I go back and forth on this because I'm able to get a lot of things going really well that are important that might not have happened otherwise. But I think there is a reason why like a lot of our most talented entrepreneurs.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are always exceptions. Now listen, there's always if you pick like the best market ever for some reason no one's going after and the people, even if they're not the most talented, have some special ability maybe to do that area. Sure, it's possible. And we always used to give the example of Twitter back in the day. I think Mark Zuckerberg put it very well. He said it was a clown car that fell into a gold mine, right? So, I mean, there are gold mines you can fall into if you're not the most talented people necessarily. But I think that's very rare. I think that's the exception that proves the rule. And, you know, a lot of times I'll start with the best people and we'll go towards a gap and we'll realize the way we're approaching it was wrong. And it's not working. But because you have the people, you figure it out, you iterate, you make it work. So, I mean, you get a lot more shots on goal when you have the right teams and the right culture.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're both necessary, right? You have to have the smartest, hardest working, most passionate people in the world to build these giant companies or even to build these nonprofits successfully. You have to have the best people. Anything I do, if it's not the best people, I don't know how to make it work.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, you got exposed to them, the challenges and the problems in the world. And listen, I wish we could do this. And here's, like, I guess I'm kind of lucky in a sense that I have so many areas where I see gaps. Like, I think what makes a strong entrepreneur and a strong venture investor is you see the gaps in the world and you want to fix them. You see, like, this is broken here. This is broken here. So there's just so many gaps in the world. We should be fixing them and we're not. And if I had more resources, if I had more wealth, if I had more time, if I had more competent people, we could be fixing this. We'd be helping so many people. So I think for me, trying to expose them to these gaps, trying to expose them to the fact that if we do have resources, if we are gifted where we're gifted with a great mind or a great ability, it's our job to go run towards these gaps and try to fix them. And hopefully share some of that passion. And I hope that I'll rub off and they'll want to do the same.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty rigorous about my scheduling. There's a lot of hours in the day. I find I work a lot better if I get at least seven hours of sleep. I find I have to work out. And so you schedule. You schedule with your kids. You schedule a workout. The time with the kids, the time with for your health, all of those are sacred. You only cut into them if it's an absolute emergency and you really, really push back and you make sure you hold those times. I try to be here for Shabbat dinner on Friday nights. We started early at five. Like I have lots of things that are just kind of sacred time with the kids than in the rest of the day. You do what you can. It turns out here you just got to go really fast in the kind of 60, 70 hours you have, you know?”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, this is one where I'm still learning. I'll tell you what, I was one of three boys, and we were, I guess I told you, were very competitive family. My father was so good at figuring out what I was interested in and then getting me to just go after it and be really competitive. And I haven't figured out how to do that quite as well with them, but I'm doing my best to support them. And I think it's most important to spend lots of time with them and show them I really care about them and give them individual attention, you know, and encourage them. But listen, I'm not an expert yet. I'm definitely learning as I go.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can to help them and get that. But when someone attacks you and kills you and is a bad guy and guilty, you have to go after the bad guys who did it and wipe them out. That's what you do when someone does that. And there's no other option.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think basically what creates a generation of civilians that hate Israel is you have the schools in that area have been run by people who teach people that Jews are pigs and Jews are wrong and our religion hates Jews and these are terrible people and you have kindergartens where people are going in and practicing showing how they're fighting and killing Jews. You have kids literally after the cross on October 7th calling their mom and dad saying I've killed 10 Jews, mom and dad and celebrating it. So you have basically effectively a death cult. And there's been a lot of death cults in history. There's been the Nazis. There's been some of the what the Comanches did here. There's just been all sorts of these horrible death cults throughout history. We can go back and name a bunch more of them. And when you have these things, it's very, very terrible. And you can let them attack you and destroy you, or you can attack them and make sure to take out the bad guys amongst them. Now, are there going to be people there who are angry at Israel? Yes, the whole generation has been brainwashed. Like the whole generation has been brainwashed. There are some good ones, by the way, despite being brainwashed. People are people and they're smart. And despite being brainwashed, they still deserve human dignity as much as possible.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way Israel was attacked by Hamas, Hamas now has to be destroyed. I'm very, very frustrated with people who kind of misunderstand what's going on here and are trying to, as usual, kind of go against the Jews. Basically, like Hamas uses civilians as human shields. They have our hostages, and it's very sad that they're using these civilians as human shields. But after they attacked us and went to war against us, we're not going to stop going after them. So I'd like them to stop using these people as human shields. I'd like them to give up the hostages. But, you know, the way it stands now is we're going to keep fighting. We're going to wipe out Hamas and hopefully we can work with others to have a government there that's not, you know, does not allow terrorism.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a very, very difficult topic. I was just reading Ben Gurion last night talking about how everyone told him, even his friends like Marshall at the time, General Marshall told him not to declare independence in 1948 because they'd be attacked and destroyed. And these people had worked their whole lives, basically. The context is these people had grown up. This is my grandmother's parents and grandparents constantly under pogroms, constantly being raped, killed, slaughtered with no home of their own. People have no idea how tough that history was for song wasn't just the Holocaust and just dreams to have a home of their own again. And so even though it was a tough odds, they decided to declare independence in the Arab armies attacked and tried to destroy them completely and fighting for their survival, they were barely able to survive and make it Israel is a home to the Jewish people. It's a definitely something that's extremely important to our peoples and needed home. We're not going to give it up. What we faced until we had that, what we still face now in other places is really bad.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really complicated one overall. My bias is done the right way. It is correct to push back on Putin and is correct to basically both push back on him, but also push back so hard that you come to the table and end the conflict. I think the idea that we want to keep the conflict going is a terrible mistake. And I think that this conflict was unnecessary if we'd had a president who was savvier about how to handle it. But at the same time, I wouldn't just leave them out to dry. I am very frustrated with a lot of the money we've wasted with bad elements there. I'm very frustrated with the law of our policy that leads to more war than necessary. But I wouldn't leave them out to dry either.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we probably should not be trading as much with Russia while they are being an aggressor nation. I think there's rumors recently of space nukes and all sorts of things they're doing. I think we showed them how far ahead we are using space, and so now they might try to like go out after us there. Listen, Russia has some really strong, smart people doing some very scary things, and I'm not a fan of Putin. I'm not a fan of what they're doing in Ukraine. We probably need to cut off people when they're bad actors. But we should be trying to trade with as many people as possible who are not run by crazy dictators.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's like a very, very terrible way for the world to go the next 20 years. I do think that thanks to the people running China and the things we're facing with them, that we are currently in a deglobalizing period, as much as possible, we need to have blocks where we all work together and where we, you know, I think comparative advantage and trade is a great thing for the world. We maybe shouldn't have traded quite how we did with China given this run by crazy people who we made more powerful. There's some legit arguments not to do that. I think there's some legit arguments that AI with manufacturing could bring some things back on shore in the US. And the US more than any other nation is able to be self-sufficient. But even though we're able to be self-sufficient, we're actually much stronger as a nation when we're working well with our partners. And so even if we have to decouple some from China for now, I really hope we still work with the rest of the world. I think it'd be a disaster to completely cut ourselves off. It would be bad for everyone.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us. And so I think China is a huge threat. Now, that said, Harry, the Chinese people are amazing. Again, this is a dialectic. On one hand, you have a crazy government, a crazy dictator. It's very scary. On the other hand, gosh, I wish we could work with the Chinese people more because they're innovative, they're smart, there's real innovation happening, they're not just copying there like they were 20 years ago a lot more. I'm very bullish on what could be done and will be done in Chinese tech. And I'm not as bullish right now because Xi being just killed a bunch of our friends there and scared off a bunch of them we're running things. So it's a bad time for them. But gosh, I wish we could have a free China that we could work with. The whole world would benefit from that so much. And so I really hope that in our lifetimes we get past this kind of like fight that's going on right now between these two sides and find ways to work again with the Chinese people because that would really help all of us.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would force them to divest of TikTok. I think that's fine for Americans though on TikTok. I think right now China controls the TikTok algorithms. I don't care if the guys based in Singapore. Some of the data is here. It's very clear China controls algorithms that are able to brainwash tens of millions of our people. That's totally unacceptable. Listen, Xi Jinping is a very problematic guy. We talk about Trump and Biden and all their issues. Xi Jinping was like basically like turned in by his mother in his youth to this terrible government. I think he's saying poems with other Maoists, you know, as they were killing tens of millions of people. He was saying poems about harding your heart to the destruction of America. Like this guy is a problem. He's a wacky guy. He's very scary. China is by far our biggest threat to have that kind of dictatorship. A lot of people like to pretend it's just like, oh, Americans are just being like nativist or hawkish or whatever. No, this guy was hiring a lot of his best and brightest to build military technology and is obsessed with obsessed with.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to be more on the side of the focus on the States because I think that's what I can control and what matters. I do agree this is a really important election. And I think we have very, very imperfect people inside who are running. Overall, I probably tend to agree with a lot more of Trump's policy. And even though he himself is a bit of a sledgehammer, I think a lot of the people around him, for example, the person who ran the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs, OIRA, Paul Ray, basically the regulator of the regulators who goes in and tries to make the rules to strengthen the regulatory state. So I think the people who are smart with a bias towards going after unaccountable bureaucracy, shrinking the wasteful parts of government, making it accountable tend to be more on the right. I think Trump's extremely imperfect. He has all sorts of issues that bother me. I wish we had other people. But I think his side is more likely to push these things in the right direction in terms of the stuff that's really, really broken. And hopefully he doesn't break things in the meantime.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this. Maybe that sounds too technocratic, but the solution here unfortunately involves involves details, involves smart people standing up and saying, no, this is the wrong direction. We're going to put in a direction that preserves our property rights, that preserves our court systems, that preserves our liberty, preserves the fundamental constitution of our country, but that pushes back on this nonsense and that goes after every last unaccountable bureaucracy. Everywhere you see something unaccountable, we're going to make it accountable. We're going to put laws in to make it accountable. We're going to tie its performance to its pay. If you get rid of these unaccountable things, you get rid of the local monopolies. I think over time, we're going to win this battle. It's going to be one thing at a time. It's going to be actual people who are entrepreneurs, who are thoughtful doing this. It's not just going to be some sledgehammer approach.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need the intellectual sophistication as well to go in and to say, okay, here is the unaccountable bureaucracies. Here's the way the regulatory state works now. Here's the solution. Here's the way we're going to fix this system. What's really dangerous when things start to break here is you get populists on the right, you get populists on the left, and they just want to tear everything down. And that is not a healthy attitude. You need a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. So there's a lot of things to fix here. One of the most important things to fix is the administrative state. The administrative state has millions of rules. They've been captured by corporations. They've been captured by special interest. We need an administrative state that has a system that eliminates rules over time, that makes it really hard for rules to fight for themselves, that forces them to fight for themselves and accountable to a driven ways and makes that self naturally shrink in a healthy day-driven way. So there's all sorts of really smart policy you're drawing up for how you can use technology, how you can use data to make the administrative state have to justify itself, to make every rule have to justify itself or else go away.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really am an optimist, but I'm also a realist. So we have to say, like, here is the mess we're facing, and now here is what we do. It turns out that these crazy radical ideologues are all the”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to build one that I would send them to. No, listen, I think going to these places, eyes wide open, they've gotten a lot worse by the way the last 20 years. Like when I went to Stanford, it was not like this. There were always issues. Of course they got in some trouble. I think I got my first B ever because I wrote a defensive John Locke, which our introduction to humanities group did not like at all. They laughed at me for trying to defend John Locke, this horrible old, naive white man who believed in property and life and liberty and these silly outdated concepts. But listen, I mean, things were a little annoying then. They've gotten much, much worse now. Now, if you go in eyes wide open, it's, you know, you're learning how to deal with it, but it's tough. It's like your social life now is hurt really badly at Stanford if you're part of the conservative paper. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. And listen, after October 7th as a Jew, like seeing what's happened where there's very clear discrimination against Jews on these campuses, there's very clear unwillingness to condemn genocide or whatever else. The whole thing has gone very strange.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self censorship to not just not say what they think because they're afraid to get in trouble at these places. That's the exact opposite of what a liberal education is supposed to be. A liberal education is supposed to be UCOM at university and you explore ideas and you test out ideas, you test out the boundaries of different ideas, you learn who you are, you learn about the world. Pursuing knowledge, you're pursuing truth above all else. You think these kids at these top universities are pursuing truth? They are not pursuing truth. They're pursuing how to advance themselves by shutting up and going along. I mean, it is the opposite of what it's supposed to be. And it's been conquered by a perverse ideology over the last 50 years that really has been a source of a lot of the nonsense in our society has spread from these universities.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're taught to shut up and virtue signal and be very careful what you say and you learn like that there's something wrong with you. I think it's even worse in the UK, frankly, but in the US it's pretty bad too. There's something wrong with you if you want to speak out, something wrong with you if you have your own opinions that are different than the status quo. So Harry, what's happened is that there's now more administrators at Yale than there are students and almost as many at Harvard. And the professor's always been a little to the left. That's no big deal. That's kind of like a normal natural consequence of the culture of these places, but it's moved a lot, lot more that way to the point where you can't even get to be a PhD postdoc or get into these programs at all. There's no chance you're getting tenure if you're not basically a Marxist in most of these like departments at this point on the humaniest side. So that's a problem with the administrators then, which of which there are thousands and tens of thousands are to the radical left of the professors. The professors themselves are afraid to speak out, even the ones that are moderate left. The students, you know, two-thirds report.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know we're very famously with my co founders Barry Weiss of the Free Press and Neil Ferguson, the great historian. We've been starting the University of Austin. It's going extremely well. We've admitted a big part of our first undergraduate class for this fall. The goal is to have a university where people come and rather than focus on not offending people, they focus on learning about the intellectual foundations of the West and having strong interdisciplinary centers where we teach bold, courageous leaders to go out into the world and to build things.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“California were responsible for probation, and the states responsible for state prison. And so you had all these counties that would just send people right to prison right away because who cares? They just get them out, get them out of here. It's wasting our time. And there was a bypass and law passed about 15 years ago, and it said the counties are going to get measured on how bloody they do for rehabilitation. They're going to get to keep the upside of not sending people back to prison. Suddenly, all these counties, these same offices that were lazy and doing nothing before, now they're being measured, now they have goals. A lot of them started sharing their results. They started sharing best practices to rehabilitate people to make people commit less crimes, to help them get back on their feet. They started experimenting with things. And, you know, it basically saved the state a billion dollars over the next decade. And it was a huge success because you took something that was broken. And yes, by the way, those places became less woke. When you make these things accountable, whatever they are, they become less woke because they're now focused on actually getting things done. So the wokeness was like maybe an indicator of brokenness, but the brokenness itself.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's coming out of something that's decadent. Like the fact that that thing is decadent is what we should be fixing. If there is a health system that has a monopoly and it's very wasteful and spending twice as much as it should and making healthcare unaffordable to the poor in our country and unaffordable in general because we don't have infinite resources, it's something people don't always understand. We don't have infinite resources. So, I mean, if we have more resources, we could all have better results for everyone. So if you have something that's broken and decadent is not facing competition, it's not forcing itself to become more fit to improve, to compete, that's a problem, right? So the things in our society that are not fit, that are lazy, that are broken, that are incompetent, those are the things we should be focused on. We should be fixing. We should be exposing them to competition. We should be exposing them to metrics. We should be finding ways to take broken things and make them compete against other things and replace the leaders that are not succeeding and inspire people to take notes. I'll give you another example because I think it's important to go down to the details. You know, the counties in California.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if your work fails, then you're not going to be able to feed your family. Like people are focused on reality because they're tied to reality because it matters to them. If you're living in a place where you have a kind of a nonsense, bureaucratic job, basically virtue signaling at work anyway and just kind of going through the motions and you're going to be funded no matter what by the city or by the government or whatever it is. And there's no sense of possible failure because you're in a monopoly or somebody tied to the government. Yeah, you have more time to basically screw around and have nonsense beliefs and spend all your time woke virtue signaling. So yeah, there's definitely something about the unaccountable core that leads to kind of nonsense stuff.”
2024-03-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security| Why the "Woke Mind Virus" is a "Post-Modern Religion" and Is it Too Late to Reverse | Why the Education System is Broken | Investing Lessons from Wish, Palantir and Lady Gaga | Joe Lonsda · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source