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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“Yeah, no, I appreciate you read the Frontier core essay. First of all, I'd push back a little bit on fully developed. I still think that if you go forward 100 years in time, we'll look at everything around today as the kind of an embarrassingly backwards emerging economy relative to what's possible for humanity. So I definitely don't think we've reached kind of like the apotheosis of like where we should be. You know, if you go back in time 100, 150 years from now, we know how backwards that was versus what was possible. Now there's many parts about society 100 years ago that might be more civilized than today in certain ways, but there's also things that were very backwards. And that'll probably be true in the future. But yes, to the point of your question, Harry, a lot of people use the term luxury beliefs. There's things you can afford to waste time on. When you already have a certain level of wealth and comfort, there's also, I think, a sense in a lot of parts of our society that when you take away accountability, things don't really matter as much anymore. So you could spend time on nonsense. If you're living in a place where, you know, if you have to work to eat and feed your family.”
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 say the vast majority of what I think hasn't stopped me from building many, many billion dollar companies hasn't stopped me from raising a lot of great funds because I'm very good at what I do at my fund and I'm very good at what I do with my companies. You know, that said, I don't think all of us need to always say everything we think in a polite, modern civilized society. You may have thoughts that it's good to dwell on yourself or to explore in private with other people first. You may have thoughts that are very offensive and you turn out to be wrong, you know, and I think that's partly how we learn is we have things that we think and we say, wow, I think this and you actually talk about it with people you trust close to you because you realize it's confident.”
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 a lot of people feel like they're being a good person by going along with it. Of course, you want everyone treated fairly, but the woke mind virus, the way it expresses itself, is not about helping them effectively. It's not about what's functional in a society. It's not tied to meritocracy. It's not tied to actually doing things that are useful. It's tied to kind of a performative, strange thing where you shame people, where you're very hateful towards people and don't forgive them if they ever violate your shibbalists. I mean, it's basically a very bad religion is what it is. And it's not correlated with a functional society.”
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 mean, I think all of us look around and you see this is something that it's probably some sort of postmodern religion, right? I think it seems as best I could tell human nature is that we all, or at least most of us have some kind of innate bias or desire for transcendence and for something that's more important than us and to understand our place and what meaning in the world and higher power. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in the ancient religions that have evolved over thousands of years. I think a lot of people, when they completely reject all of those, they need to find meaning in something else. I think a lot of them have grasped onto this kind of system, which I think Elon and Richard Dawkins originally most famously called the woke-mind virus. And it's a problem, Harry, because it's basically focusing on virtue signaling and focusing on things that don't matter as much for the sake of competence or the sake of a functional society. I think a lot of the Woke Mayavirus is reflecting progressive values that come from a good place.”
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
“Step back. No, exactly. Profit incentive, you're exactly right, is not a problem. It is a problem the way the current profit incentive works for prisons because that's not good either. If your only profit incentive is to house more people and get more people to come to jail, that's bad too. What you should be doing, and actually as a side note, we have a group we're sponsoring social profit corrections, SPC. What we're doing is we're taking a nonprofit. We're going to buy a for-profit prison, and we're going to run it as if the only way to make profit was pay for performance, was Laura recidivism, higher employment. So we want to show people, I don't care if it's for-profit or nonprofit, I want to show people that innovation and metrics and accountability could lead to much better results. And we've already done this now on probation and parole with my policy group and just by putting in metrics there. But I really want to show what's possible as an entrepreneur in this nonprofit area, something very important to do. There's all sorts of ways in which there's just gaps in the world that no one's going after. And sometimes you have to use nonprofits to go after them.”
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
“People can blame for profit prisons, but 90% of them are nonprofit. They're run by government unions. You have the best paid prison guards in the world in California, and you have 37 prisons there. Whether or not the people come out and get jobs and succeed or whether or not they come out and commit more crimes, these people still get paid the same amount. There's no accountability. So if you actually cared and you wanted these people to come back and do a better job in their community, you'd test ideas, you'd reward the people running the prisons where people are coming out doing better. You'd replace the people where they're coming out doing worse and fix the broken cultures, running those prisons. That's just one example of hundreds of organizations in our society where it's just there's no accountability and it's broken. And the leadership spends more time, A, fighting for raises for prison guards and raises for the unions with no accountability. And B, doing whatever virtue signaling is popular. I'm sure there's all sorts of keywords about whatever trans and whatever minority and whatever other stuff, but the actual truth is you're hurting those exact people. You're using the words the virtue signal for.”
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, I think this is what happens, frankly, to every civilization over time. One of my favorite authors on this, there's something called evolution of civilizations by Carol Quigley. I think Quigley was one of Bill Clinton's mentors, but real great thinker, and he maps out the different stages of civilizations. And you kind of map to institutions as well. But one of the kind of ideas is that as these things become dominant, the same things that led you to kind of grow and win and that you had to support to grow, become special interests. And the special interest starts worry less about what they're doing for civilization or for the company and more about what they're doing for themselves. So you start having lots of special interests fighting for themselves and not for the common good. And that really breaks things over time. And, you know, what you see in the US government, which you see in every other government, is you have hundreds of thousands, millions of rules, and the rules tend to be put in place by the big companies, by the unions. For example, with prisons, let's go to a specific. Prisons in America are very 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
“This is why most people are not crazy enough to go leave to the frontier because it is more dangerous. It is rougher. And what you really want is a dialectic, right? Let's be honest. I'm raising four young daughters. You don't want to raise four young daughters purely on the frontier. You want to raise your family somewhere where there is some aspects of the corps. But for a nation to advance, for a nation to solve problems, for a nation to not become decadent and broken and insular, it needs places that are the frontier. And so what a dialectic is, it's a reality, I think it's an important reality for all of us, is that there's truth on both extremes. You clearly need some things to be more like the core, but you also need some things to be more like the frontier. You need to take the properties of the frontier. You need to find ways of injecting them into parts of your society to allow it to be dynamic, to allow it to advance and innovate.”
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 we are all building things for spies, for intelligence. So that sounded probably even crazier than the restaurant and the brain simulation thing. We're trying to try to get a bunch of travel to see and talk to the spies. So people were trying to turn it off. So convincing them to keep that going, I think that was really critical as well at the time.”
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
“You know, being allowed in at PayPal was a really big deal. I think Max rejected me the first time as a freshman. He had an argument on a whiteboard and I thought he was going to bring me in anyway. I don't think he remembers this. So being a PayPal and learning from people there was really important. Peter taking me to work for him directly afterwards and I got exposed, of course, at that point to like the Facebook people and to the Kevin Harts at Zoom and all these guys I was getting to work with in the macro fund. And then convincing him to fund Palenteer and keep it going when a lot of people were trying to fight against it. At the time you probably know there were all sorts of crazy projects that were going on in kind of Peter Teal world. There was one thing that was giving people nightmares and other things that said brain simulation. There was like a spam company. There was a restaurant that I think ended up losing $7 million because the chef got into arguments with people. This is by the way very typical Peter Zenius I've learned a lot from is when you've had success you have a lot of stuff you try. But imagine Palantir was like these like I think three of us who were like 21.”
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
“As like, A's confidential. I think you're an amazing guy, Harry, and I think you should feel really good about yourself. I feel pretty good about myself, too. You know, it's funny when you posted your interview me, you get all these trolls online trying to poke you and hit you. I got a few really nasty comments in reply, which I actually appreciate because you kind of need the haters to drive you to kind of prove them wrong and keep going, you know. But I think, listen, you got to compare yourself to others to see what's possible and to challenge yourself. It doesn't mean you can't feel good about yourself too. I think it annoys people that I feel good about myself, but I do. I think it's cool.”
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
“Talented. We were very competitive. So I think when you're pushing yourself and you're competitive, you're always hyper aware of your feelings, right? So I guess, yes, I was always talented, but I was always very aware of something wasn't right or that I couldn't do something yet or there was people who were better than me at something. Because you know what? There's always someone who's better than you at whatever you're good at. In some ways, I was just very, very aware of what I needed to be better at if I was going to get to be the best. Even when I tie Tommy got to Stanford, I was feeling very good about myself and math and I took the hardest math class. There's 30 kids that, you know, back then they would get together in one class. And I was probably somewhere right in the middle, which was very annoying. I did not like being in the middle of any class. You know, there are people who are clearly just always going to be much better than me at that. I realized I was not going to be a mathematician. So, you know, I think part of being very competitive and talented is you're constantly aware of the fact that there are people much like Elon Musk here in Austin as far ahead of me as an entrepreneur, even though I've also started multiple billion dollar companies. There's still a long way to go to get better, 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
“Listen, I was always probably an overconfident child. I was lucky to be born gifted. I got 99s on everything and skipped some grades in math with my friends. You know, my friends and I were chess champions and math champions. And I love opinions. I generally felt like I was probably smarter than my teachers. So very obnoxious kid, right? Lots of confidence there. Unfortunately, my grandma finally passed last year at 103, and she would always tell me called her my bubby because it's a word in Yiddish for grandma. And she would always tell stories of me wowing her and oppressing people at age two, three, four, five. So I guess I kind of grew up with like a lot of confidence. I was the oldest of my generation, the oldest of 20 cousins on one side and nine cousins on the other side. So I guess I've always been lucky to be a leader, been talented, and have lots of opinions, which we got to hear today.”
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. That's the exact opposite of what a liberal education is supposed to be. 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. But it takes courage. It takes one person saying, no, this is ridiculous and being willing to stand up and be that leader. And others can say, yeah, I agree with him. That's ridiculous. So, I mean, the question is, do we have enough courageous people to lead us out of this?”
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