Joe Lonsdale, welcome back, man.
Thanks, Sean. It's good to be here. Lots of stuff going down.
Thank you. I've been excited to show it to you.
That's awesome. It's making me thirsty for a drink, but it's too early.
Well, hey, we got plenty to dive into if you change your mind.
All right. Maybe we'll grab a cigar later and shoot some stuff. That'd be fun.
Cool. We'll blow some stuff up after this. Love it.
But well man, you texted me, it feels like maybe 6 months ago, but we were talking about you had texted me an article or a tweet or something about Christians being persecuted in Nigeria and you I believe invested in a company down there to kind of combat that a little bit. So I was like, 'Hey, come on.'
A lot of stuff to go over. I mean, listen, there's I think there's like two things we all have to battle for great Americans and we believe in Western civilization. One is we got to stop the commies and two is we got to stop the radical Islamists. I think those are forces of evil all around the world.
You know, and it doesn't mean whatever moderate left, I don't mean to disagree with them. They're not evil. Maybe there's some moderate Muslims I think are good people I work with, but these extremists, man. And by the way, even if we solve everything in the Middle East, let's just pretend everything goes perfectly and we solve so many of the problems. Obviously, you're not going to solve it all, but let's say you solve a bunch of it. Africa is going to be a battleground for this nonsense for sure for the rest of our lives. And man, it is just nasty. Like, you see what they do to the Christians there? They'll take 70 of them into a church and they'll slaughter in the church and they'll rape and they'll pillage and they'll kidnap school girls and it's just on and on and on. Thousands being murdered. Very little push back. Let's stop these bad guys.
Crazy, man. I pulled some stats up while you're down here getting pictures and yeah, it said 388 million persecuted Christians worldwide, 4,849 murdered for their faith in 2026. 72% of those murders were in Nigeria alone. 163 worshippers abducted from two churches in January of 2026. Stuff is definitely popping off there. 8VC led 11.8 million round investment in Terara Industries. What is Terara Industries?
Yeah, these guys have raised tens of millions more since I backed them because once we back them a lot of people like to get involved. Listen, it's two young talented Nigerian men. One of them was a physics Olympiad, one of them had already built another company in his early 20s that was successful and they're building a defense prime for Africa. And obviously, you know, after Palantir I built a couple other big defense companies here, I know this space. Just a few. I appreciate you interviewing them. They're some great men. I want them to get credit, not me. I try to help them out and you know, it's like Africa needs stuff too and it's going to partner with a bunch of our stuff. And listen, these are really talented young men. They were already just trying to get going on it. We thought they deserve some resources and some help and some partnership. Like, I think it's good for us to be partners with the best and the brightest there who are on the side of the good guys.
So, how did this pop on your radar?
You know, we see a lot of things going on. I have some old friends, one of my interns built a couple big companies in Nigeria who's from actually a big Christian family there who's a prominent guy, really good guy. We have others who kind of track and try to talk to the physics Olympiad winners around the world and see what they're doing. So, there's lots of different ways. You kind of see this from a couple different sources. You see it's real and then you send people over and get engaged, you know.
Did you, I mean, so with Terara, did you found it? Did you co-found it?
This one we were the first big institutional investor. So, we took a big minority stake in the company early. I think it was about a 40 million valuation. We put, you know, we bought a quarter of the company or give or take. And then it since has raised, you know, 20, 30 million more. Let's close some really big contracts. And the idea is like, you know, we know a lot about this industry. Let's help them. Let's help them scale it up around Africa, have multiple spots, multiple governments they're working with. Let's have, there's certain things they're going to be the best at. There's certain things America has companies that are going to be the best at. Let's make sure we partner and help them. So, if they're building, for example, remote controlled cars that are already working, which they are. If they want to make those things autonomous, maybe you partner with someone like Overland, right? There's also all sorts of ways you can help them with our stuff as well.
Where are they based out of?
They're based out of a suburb of Lagos in Nigeria to start with, but then they also have stuff they're doing around East Africa as well. Now they're doing multiple places where they're manufacturing.
So what else are they doing and how does this tie into persecution of Christians?
Well, I mean, you have to be able to monitor things going on. You got to build sentry towers. You got to build sentry drones. You got to be able to build defense drones. You got to be able to build cars and other things that can drive around autonomously and watch and have guns on them. So you basically need to be able to arm these people cheaply and affordably with a way to see when the bad guys are coming and a way to fight back and a way to deter the bad guys. And you know, it's not just that, it's infrastructure as well that's being attacked by these crazy people. You got to defend for the country. You got to be able to defend all sorts of different kind of assets over there. But you want stuff that can help these innocent places defend themselves right now. They don't have any advanced modern military, you know.
Yeah. No, I'm aware. So, who, do you know a little, do you have a little more context of what's going on on the ground there? Why are they persecuting Christians? Who's defending them?
Well, this ties into the war that we're fighting right now in the Middle East. Let's be clear, right? This ties very closely into it. You have these basically crazy forces around the world that are funding Islamic jihadi terror, right? And that is unfortunately like how the extreme Islamists view things is that it's their job for them to dominate and for everyone who's not Muslim to have to basically either submit and convert or pay a tax and have Muslim win. And so Nigeria is a country in Africa that's close to 50/50, right? Slightly more Muslims than Christians. So it's a very obvious, very big target for these same jihadis in Iran who are sending out money to do bad things. It's the same types of groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, that's, you know, same ones that run CAIR in the US and try to pretend that they're nice guys when they're not. Those are the same types of people who will go after this and say, 'This is a chance for us to assert our Islamist dominance.' And so, it's a very big target to make sure the Christians lose and the Muslims win for them in that country.
What are they doing to the Christians over there?
They're intimidating them. They're trying to scare them into converting. They're trying to kill them when they're in their homes. They're trying to take their women. They're trying to basically horrible things, you know? I mean in Syria I think they were crucifying them, I can't remember if that was Nigeria.
All over there, all over the Middle East they've done this. I mean listen, Lebanon, let's stepping back for a second. Lebanon was a very safe Christian dominated country, right? This is like Lebanon was one of the success stories still for Christians in the Middle East. It was a relatively peaceful place overall. The constitution built in where it was shared power between kind of moderate Sunnis and Maronites and others. And what happened with Iran in the 80s when they started just to fund all this kind of nonsense is they funded Hezbollah and they went in and they basically destroyed Lebanon as a safe place for people to live and they made it a horrible broken country and they tortured people and they killed people there. They actually not only tortured the people there, we had a CIA chief who was there in the 80s under Reagan. And they caught him and they kept him alive for months, skinning him alive, torturing him in every possible way to get his information. And so people say Trump's like convinced to do this recently. Trump saw that happen then. By the way, you see that happen to CIA chief of America tortured for months to get all the information. Like, do you want to let those guys get away with that? I wouldn't want to let those guys get away with that.
This is the 80s under Reagan.
But this is like so this is why it's such a big deal right now that's happening is because for the first time like that was one of the things that fell when Iran first started projecting its power after taking over right in the late '70s when the crazies came in and slaughtered people and tortured people and took over and started kind of spreading their nastiness. They spread it to Africa of course and they have lots of things there but Lebanon was like the first really kind of like pretty healthy Christian like part modern country to fall to this nonsense and we may be within a month or two of actually cleaning out Hezbollah and taking it back which is awesome.
Interesting. Interesting. So, let me give you an introduction here real quick before we get into all the geopolitical stuff that's going on in the world. So Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies. After Palantir, founded Adapar, invested or co-founded multiple US unicorns, billion dollar companies, Epirus, Palantir, Anduril, Illumio, Synthego, Saronic, Yugabyte, Asana. Co-founding Cicero, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities and policy to transform lives and societies. Co-founder and managing partner of 8VC, a venture capital firm that pushes for policies that encourage innovation, adviser to leading political figures, advocates for a future where technology and policy work hand in hand to solve our biggest challenges. Welcome back.
You know, we got a Patreon. They're the reason I get to sit with you here today. And so, they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Tim. It is being reported that the current data center infrastructure investment roughly 650 billion will last only 3 years after which GPUs can be severely degraded and will need to be replaced. Traditional infrastructure investments like roads, railroads, and high voltage which can last for 30 to 50 years with less of an investment. Is this level of maintenance for data centers feasible?
I don't think they're totally useless after 3 years. I think the situation though is that there's so much better stuff based on the new technology that you're going to want some new stuff for certain workflows. And listen, this is the most dynamic sector now of the US economy. There's trillions of dollars going into it. There are so many smart people from around the world figuring out what new chip designs, what new data center designs, how do you use AI to do every part of it better? How do you do the energy better? I'm getting pitches left and right and people, it's, you know, top guys around Elon, top guys around Jensen, all these top guys spending so much money on this. I'm not worried they're not going to figure it out. I think it's a great space that we are spending trillions of dollars. It's going to drive America to the future. I'm super interested to talk about AI, but these guys are figuring out the infrastructure. It's going the right way.
What, how are they going to power all this stuff?
I mean, listen, like I have friends who are like just getting the next natural gas turbines that were supposed to go to Turkey and they're rerouting them and spending a bunch of money to put them in Texas, right? And doing it that way. We have all sorts of LNG massively coming online. We have all sorts of new solar, we have, you know, billions of dollars of batteries coming online to make solar work better. I think it's all the above. As with Joe Craft yesterday when we had a political figure over who owns a bunch of coal, I mean, listen, the solution is all of the above, right? The solution is every possible energy you can get. It's going to keep energy prices, you know, healthy for a while. But it's also going to create and is creating massive investments into energy to make it work. Which you look at China, by the way, China has now about, I think, three times the power we have. Starting with 1999, we're about equal. We were way ahead of them obviously in the 80s. I think that's one advantage they have is they've put more of their kind of resources into infrastructure. We're going to need to put more resources into infrastructure. I think a lot of how well our working class does is going to be tied in part to how much we can build more cheap energy for everyone and bring prices down for everyone. So, this is going to be a big fight.
Where, I mean, do you know where we're at with the nuclear stuff?
There's so many great companies going as fast as they can. Now, there's a ton of good companies. Taylor's got Valor at what, Valor?
Um, JU just started that company, Lassiter, Commonwealth Fusion is building their first fusion plants. They're spending billions of dollars on it and it's very, very, you know, credible now how that fusion part's getting better. The late 2030s is going to be huge. The solar is getting more efficient. There's massive new plants there with batteries. Zach Dell's putting in billions of dollars of batteries in the Texas grid to make it work better and make alternatives there work better. I think, you know, coal itself's getting more efficient even though they're not supposed to talk about it. Like I think everyone's doing.
I can't believe we're talking about coal. I mean, well, I just was with Joe last night, this guy who's really investment, but like there's every, I think every level is good. Now, listen, fusion and fission, really fission has been held back by stupid regulation and kind of got pushed 30, 40 years behind where it would be. I think we're going to catch up. We're going to do a massive amount of it. I think all of this stuff is good.
You think policy is coming around for nuclear?
It really is. It really is. Like even like the Texas legislature is putting in like bonuses if someone gets a small, you know, plant done there. The NRC is now staffed by people who are no longer completely, I think we've for the first time in 40 years started approving, maybe 50 years by the way, I think we started approving new designs again. It's, we're actually turning it back on. It's like we went through this crazy de-industrialization period in the US from 1971 to like 2023 or whatever. And something about like the Trump revolution but also something about AI and how AI could be used to unlock productivity growth. It's like we're back, like America is now growing again. We're now fixing things again. This is an optimistic time. Our enemy should all be really scared. Like we are clearly going to be dominant. This is now the American century again if we keep it up.
Hope you're right. Hope you're right, man. Lots of stuff going on in the world right now.
Oh yeah. Iran, China's making moves on Taiwan. Russia, Ukraine's still going on. We got Maduro out. Cuba's at a crisis.
I love it. This is like, it's like leadership, man. Come on. Now guys are on the run.
Where do you want to start?
I mean, the Americas, let's just say this is, I mean, I love what we did with Venezuela. This is awesome. This is, the guy is clearly a criminal. And here's what people don't get. This is really important. When you have a place like Venezuela that gets taken over by these like cartels and these socialists and communists and just bad influences, it's lots of problems for the US. First of all, they're like allying with their adversaries. They're working with Hezbollah and others to create weapons with them. They're allying with China for energy. They're helping Russia. But then second of all, they're spreading. It's like a virus. They're spreading their ideology all around the rest of Latin America, all around the rest of the world. And so like when you, I was with the conservative president of Colombia, Duque, who was the guy before this guy and there were protesters coming into his country and they were coming from Chile where they had just succeeded and just like worked, you know, to temporarily turn Chile left. Thank goodness we turned it back, but they turned it very left. And they were funded by Venezuela. They were funded, that they had Cuban people involved and they had Russian technology. It's like these guys in Russia still think it's the Soviet Union or something and they're still causing messes around the world. And you know why? Because if they succeed and they make these things go hard left, like it's like having bad guys in charge. Who the bad guys going to partner with and like plunder with? They're going to work with the other bad guys.
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So, it really, and I know some people, oh, it's too simple. You're in preschool. No, it really is. There's like the good guys and the bad guys, and you want the bad guys to lose. You don't want the far-left authoritarian rapists like crazy people to take over. And so Trump actually using a little bit of our authority, a little bit of our strength, a little bit of our frankly total dominance and going in and saying, 'No, we're not going to allow a crazy bad guy spreading evil to be in, spreading crime to be in charge of this place three-hour flight from the south coast.' Thank goodness. Thank goodness there's a man in charge.
Mhm. I mean, why, I mean, Mexico is, we've been talking about Mexico non-stop. It's complicated. Yeah. Why haven't we done anything there?
Yeah. Well, I think we have done a little bit there. I would have done a lot more there. You know, my wife actually researched a lot of the rules for Texas, what we could do, and we helped sponsor something that got the governor declared invasion back when Biden was president. He's a good guy, but he didn't end up acting more than declaring the invasion. If I was me and I was governor, I probably would have bombed a few fentanyl plants, you know, because I mean, dude, that's our border. If you put a federal plant next to my border, I'd blow it up. These guys are scared of Trump right now. He's definitely taking some strong actions. You know, I think we saw, was it Puerto Vallarta where they attacked the Costco and the airport after their leader got killed. I think there's some joint operations right now to put a lot of pressure on the cartels. I think the cartels are laying much lower. A lot of the border crossings were cartels. If you look at the amount under Biden, it was insane. I think we cut it off under this administration pretty dramatically. So the cartel funding has gone way down because they're not getting paid to get people across the border right now. And I think they're very scared of the fentanyl stuff. And so right now we're, I think we're very busy but we are doing a lot there. I think there's a lot more we could do there to go after the cartels and that's, you know, I bet we'll see that.
Yeah, I think I know there's a lot more we could be doing. One thing that, you know, I just been diving because we didn't hear anything about Venezuela, you know, forever and then all of a sudden it popped and.
I love it. And you know, but I've always, I've just been curious like why are we going there instead of Mexico? I mean, you're talking about a three-hour flight from me, Venezuela to the US. Mexico's right at our border. Have you heard about the... And the answer that I keep getting is voting fraud. The voting fraud.
I've heard a lot of rumors about that and I believe that there was something they were involved with. I think the voting fraud could have been a part of it. But listen, these guys...
Do you understand? I mean, I haven't met anybody that can articulate how the voting fraud is happening through the Smartmatic machines that they're affiliated with.
I understand in theory how they could have done something illegal with them and been involved. And I think it having a state actor helping makes it a lot easier to create a lot of false records and to do a lot of sketchy work. Whether that was true or not, I just, I have to be honest. I don't know enough to know. I could definitely see it being true. I guess the thing I'd say, Sean, is that there's enough other reasons why Venezuela is something where we could act right away, where we could stop them from doing more deals with the Chinese. The Chinese delegation was there when we did it. Like there was big deals going down with our adversaries right off our coast and we had caught them sponsoring lots of horrible things around the Americas and working with a lot of other kind of bad forces. So I think the Venezuela-Cuba axis then helps us put pressure on Mexico to take more aggressive action there and makes it easier for us to be successful because it turns off a lot of the funding for a lot of the worst elements.
So what's going on in Cuba? You familiar with that?
Yeah, we had all those funny crazy far-left idiots there the last couple weeks. I don't know if you saw that at all. It's like these people just hate America and hate the West so much. So like it's just crazy who go there and try to pump it up. Such a failed country. It's been about a year of like real extreme problems and real extreme suffering there. It's not clear to me like what the exact trigger's going to be. But the regime is in a huge amount of trouble.
I mean their infrastructure is falling apart right now.
Correct. It has been for decades, but it's gotten really, really bad. I mean, they're just so desperately poor and everyone's like, oh, the far left's like, oh, it's because you blocked them off. They trade with the rest of the world by the way. They just don't have property rights and they don't have the incentive for anyone to invest. And you know, I think a lot of smart people of course have fled because why would you want to live in a place where people are making $20 a day and everyone's forced to prostitute themselves and if you do work really hard, you just get the attention of the government guys who steal it from you, right? This, by the way, this is like human history for 10,000 years is anyone who works really hard and builds something, if you can't defend it, it just gets taken away by the thugs in charge. It sounds like California, but that's why we were so miserably poor as a species for thousands and thousands of years. There were no property rights. Like the enlightenment in the west is this really important thing we forget to teach kids about. Like the enlightenment that led to understanding of these things led to understanding of why natural rights was so important and then the battles to get those natural rights and to put, you know, John Locke, like life, liberty and property in place, like that is core to everything. That's why we have all the nice things we have and Cuba doesn't have that, right? And so it's a miserable place and if we can get it back in the right direction, that'd be so good for them and for the world. And you know, I think Secretary Rubio is really passionate about this and he's pretty clear he has a plan. And I think after Venezuela, this is clearly going to be something that we work on. I don't know how we do it, but I think it's a great thing to do in the next year.
Interesting. Interesting. Iran.
You're against doing anything in Iran?
I am. I want to talk to you about this. So let's do the counterfactual. So you agree the US Navy was created to fight back against jihadists in the 1780s? Like they've been a problem for 200 years, right? First of all.
Okay. First of all, so I mean the reason we created the US Navy was because basically like you had Islamic forces around the Mediterranean that had been kidnapping originally, you know, tens of millions of Europeans. Basically, there were millions of European women who were sex slaves to these people over several hundred years. This had been a thing they had always done since the foundation of Islam. It's in the Quran. You're allowed to do it to non-Muslim women. And when our ambassador goes and says, 'Listen, we're a new independent country. We're not fighting with you. We have nothing to do with this. We're just having trading ships there. Why are you taking our sailors? Like, we have nothing to do with you.' By the way, there's no Israel. There's none of that stuff. And you know what they say? They say it's our right as a superior group. We're the Muslims and we're going to take them. It's our right because you're not Muslim and so we have a right to take you and to take what we want and that is what our holy book tells us. Like this is, and this is the conversation. So you look at any American founder, the first 30, 40 years of this country, they're like these guys are crazy. It's a terrible thing. And we actually literally created the Navy and we went and we fought back and we bombed their cities. We attacked their cities. We went after the Barbary pirates. We went after the core empires there that were doing this to us. We beat the crap out of them. And it was the right thing to do because they were stealing thousands of our sailors. You can't let them get away with that, right? So, first of all, it was right to do that. I'd assume you'd say based on what I said like 200 years ago, obviously, right?
And so, listen today what it is. So, you get a relatively modern country like conquered and raped by this crazy theocracy. Same exact type of guys as 200 years ago. These are guys that are taking what they want, raping, killing. I'm sure you've seen...
Joe. You don't have to tell me about how they're... Okay. So, you killed more of my friends than probably anybody else. So, they hung dudes off bridges.
They're doing it and they're spreading their money to Venezuela. We caught them building things there. We caught them building things all around Africa. Obviously, they destroyed the Christian country of Lebanon. They're doing all sorts of other bad stuff. Now, we know, thanks to this war, by the way, we now know they were lying. They did have missiles they were building. They could go 4,000 km. So, they're going to have basically crazy jihadis. We know they're building nukes at this point. They had 11 bombs they were going to have. That was their starting point in their negotiations. We have materials for 11 bombs. So, Jared and Witkoff are sitting there. This administration is sitting there being told we have 11 bombs you can't get rid of. That's where we are. And now we know they could hold all of Europe hostage and they were obviously working to make that go to the US. They obviously could go to Riyadh. So we now know they could hold... Did you really want the... So you do nothing for 10, 20 years. You have like tons of nukes. You have missiles that can go to every western city and you have crazy jihadis who don't care if they die in battle as long as they could destroy their death to America pledge because they're so obsessed with it. This death to America existed long before any of this stuff in the modern age of Israel. So that's the counterfactual. 20 years from now, our children are in a world where it's the nuclear armed guys with crazy missiles with whatever else AI and China stuff they have that they've now used. By the way, we're way ahead of them right now in AI. Way ahead of them in AI. We are not necessarily going to be way ahead of them in 20 years. I don't know where we're going to be, but right now there's a giant gap. Like, we are way ahead of them. So, it's like we can move now when we're way ahead and they can hurt us this much, or we could wait till God knows what happens when they're nuclear energy hotties who can threaten anywhere in the West. I mean, the thing is I 100% agree. It's like risky and dangerous and tough to act. It's very scary. I think it's much scarier just to let it go for 10, 20 years with these guys. That's my point of view.
Yeah. I mean, I just, I haven't been presented with any proof that they have those type of weapons. And I haven't even seen proof that whatever the missile is that they launched is from them.
You think there's a false flag launch from Iran?
I have no idea. I did not say that. I just said there hasn't been any proof. And it's just getting hard to believe the administration. I mean, there's been a lot of bait and switches that have happened within a lot of different areas. I mean, the interview I threw out yesterday was about glyphosate and all the cancer it's causing. And you know, I mean you're familiar with the MAHA movement. It was, you know, make America healthy again and yeah, we're gonna get rid of all this stuff. And then they just declared a national security concern for if we don't give the pesticide companies immunity, glyphosate. And they called it a national security concern. Well, for example, Iowa has the most cancer cases out of every state in the USA. You know who uses the most glyphosate?
Yeah, obviously the corn there in Iowa.
618,000 people died of cancer last year in the US. Why are we giving them immunity? Anyways, that's just one example.
Yeah. No, listen, I think that's a particular one where I think there should be more open debate from the administration on it and discussion of it. I listen, I know Brooke Rollins for a long time in the policy world. I think she's a really smart lady. She did some really impressive things fighting the left in Texas when she ran TPPF. She's now the agricultural secretary. That's her call. You know, I think it'd be great to, you should get her on the show. I can invite her. I can text her if you want. Let's see what she says, you know. No, I'm serious. Why not? Like I don't know. I feel like she'd have a lot of respect for a lot of things you do and a lot of things you've done in your service. So I think that's a fair debate. I'm not an expert on that one, but I think we should be debating it openly and I'd love to hear the smartest people on both sides. And I think if they're just ignoring it when so many people believe as you do, that's not appropriate. So, let's engage on it. That'd be what I say.
That was, I didn't mean to dive into that.
No, that's fair. That's great. But you're saying you don't trust...
You're saying you don't trust someone from when I saw the release of the Epstein Files and how that got butchered and how it continues to get butchered, that really pissed me off, man. And then, you know...
And by the way, I never met the guy. I agree. He was a slime ball who seemed to know everyone because he was really good at networking and meeting people and tricking them to meet him.
I don't think everyone involved was like messing with kids like I know.
Yeah. Right. So, a lot of people just like...
But I think it's pretty obvious that some people involved were.
I think some people were very, at the very least a lot of people were messing with 21 and 22 year old girls. And I think some of them might have been underage and I don't know because I never met the guy and he was a bad guy. But these other people I just don't know. But I'm actually curious like what should they do on it to rebuild trust there? Actually, that's a tough one I don't really follow at all.
What should they do to rebuild trust?
Yeah. How do we... Transparent. That's I think that's all anybody wants is just transparency and they want to see, you know, I mean, we just heard it over and over again. We're going to go after these people. We haven't seen...
That voting fraud. We haven't heard about that. I agree. Why is the DOJ right now and the FBI are both really hurting the reputation of this administration? Because they're not going after and getting enough arrests right now and getting enough cases. I think that is 100% true. I was talking to our friends there who are focused on fraud. There's a ton of fraud. We're helping them find. This is my, I'm obsessed with this issue. I think there's way more fraud in this country than anyone realizes. We have to start making more charges and arrests and it's like way too slow. Like someone, and I don't know, they can't find the right people to run it. It's embarrassing. That part pisses me off.
Yeah. So anyways, it's just all these things that have happened that I'm just, I've lost a lot of trust and I'm...
You shouldn't trust the bad guys running Iran either, though. You also agree.
I don't trust the bad guys running Iran. And I don't necessarily think I would be against the war in Iran.
If they present it to you...
If they presented it to me in a different way, but you know, like all the stuff you're saying, yes, it's true. Yes, it's my friends that died over there. I saw it. They're my friends. You know, I don't want to send my kid back over there to die. Yeah. I mean, we spent over 20 years.
Yeah. Well, I think the way Afghanistan was run was just a travesty. We wasted trillions of dollars and everyone should be pissed off about it. And so, I think that has created distrust that is fair to exist. There should be distrust after we wasted all these lives and all this money with not real clarity. So, I 100% agree with that perspective. I actually, so I have some mentors who ran British intelligence 20, 30 years ago and I know these guys still pretty well because obviously with Palantir we got to know a bunch of them. They thought we were kind of like an Aboriginal species. They're visiting in Silicon Valley versus like MI6, right? These guys are cool. And a couple of them have told me that they thought that a lot of...
The stuff that got us to go into Iraq, because we kind of already wanted to go into Iraq obviously, but they thought some of the stuff, some of the evidence, like including from Chalabi who was an Iranian spy, purposely came from Iran even at that time. And what's interesting is even at that time, in my understanding, I went back and looked at it, a lot of the top voices out of our ally Israel were saying Iran's the big problem, not Iraq. So a lot of people are saying, oh, we fought Iraq for Israel. I don't think that's the case. I think in that particular instance, Iran was very clever in getting us to focus more on Iraq. And even back then, I think they were the bad guys.
For what it's worth, I think they're clearly the worst. And I'm very happy a lot of them are dead. But I 100% understand where you're coming from, not wanting to trust and not wanting to put more people over there.
Do you think we're fighting Iran for our own benefit or do you think we're fighting Iran for Israel's benefit?
I think it's definitely our own benefit. I think this is, by the way, China is like freaking pissed. You know, China sent several billion dollars of stuff with cargo planes to Iran that they were in the process of setting up to help defend them. This is their proxy ally. Like their allies are Russia and Iran. They want Iran to exist and be able to cause trouble to distract us and force us to split our forces if we ever have to deal with anything they might want to do. This is like a chess game where they're trying to build this ally and we just smashed their ally. And by the way, you know who the strongest military in the world is right now? It's us. And because we're basically deploying all this new technology and all this new AI in ways that no one else is, we're learning how to make interceptors way cheaper. We're learning how to just coordinate all these things we never would have learned before. China has no idea how to do this stuff. Like I'm not saying you want to fight wars to get better, but this makes us so much stronger to smash their proxy ally, to smash their stuff, and to learn how to use all this technology. Like this makes them a lot harder to challenge us for the next...
You want to talk about how AI's what we're using over there.
Yeah. I mean, obviously from what I can say, and listen, I don't have my full clearances at this point anymore either, but I have a lot of friends on both sides. And you know, we developed a lot of the targeting stuff at Palantir back in the day, combined with AI basically. I mean, just think about it for sake of argument. We know Israel and America both have some of the best hackers. And so let's say you hacked into the street cameras. Let's say you hacked into logistics in the country and who was sending what where, what payments are happening, just all sorts of things. You basically can view, look at emails, where everyone is. It's just so much information. How would a person look at these millions of pieces of data and figure out what's going on? AI is really, really good at that. So Palantir in a system like that will create what's called the ontology, like the concepts, the frameworks, here's the things we care about, here's how they can possibly relate to each other. And then you take that ontology, you take that structure of how to think about things, and you overlay just insane amounts of information we're able to get in different ways through human intelligence, through signal intelligence, through hacking. And then all of a sudden it's able to optimize and say, here's this base you didn't know about storing all these munitions, here's this key part of the command center, here's this thing over here 300 miles outside of Tehran you never would have thought about that's like a backup for the supply for this key part of their missile launchers, things like that. And all of a sudden, so when Israel in the first start of the war sends 200 planes as a surprise attack and hits 500 targets in the first 20 minutes, those targets were optimized between the two countries. Here's the things that we know we need to get rid of if we want to stop them from causing us more problems. So, I mean, it's just really, really powerful how smart what we could do is, that we couldn't do before.
Interesting. What else should we talk about that's going on over there?
What are you worried about with the Strait of Hormuz? You worried about that at all?
And this, you know, this is a tough one. I am worried. Listen, I think this is one of those things that could take a few weeks and it could take a few months. And it's really, really hard to stop asymmetric attacks, right? Because I mean, so the Iranian, and listen, this is one step removed, I don't have the exact information, but you have these mountains that they're firing out of, right? And it's amazing because as far as we could tell, so what'll happen is they have railroads underground. They're way under the granite and they'll take, they have tons of missiles there. It's not about how many missiles they have. It's about how many launchers. And they have launchers and the launcher will come out and it'll go out the railroad to an opening like a cave. It'll fire and then it'll hurry back in and we'll see where it fired from and you could destroy that. So they can never use that again for a long time without spending months digging out because you respawn the hell out of it. But then they go out another cave and another cave and these guys have apparently built like hundreds of these caves. It's actually impressive.
Right. It's like they've been preparing for 20, 30 years for this. And so they have these mountains that they're firing out of. And then you have all along the Strait of Hormuz, you can hide drones, right? You can hide all sorts of things in like hundreds of locations that each time it's a new attack, a new location. So it could take a while to find all of it, right? It's not easy. And listen, it's especially bad for Europe who turned off their energy economy. You want to talk about conspiracies, man? Europe let Gazprom and Russia fund the green movement and turn off all their goddamn energy and that's why they're in so much pain right now from this.
You know that's a true conspiracy by the way, 100%. We found that it was a ton of Russia money that created the strength of the green parties all around Europe and their main thing was turning off all their energy.
100%, 100%. Like Russia's not dumb, this is great for them, right? It's great for the Middle East too. The green parties are useful idiots, man.
Does it bother you that we're low on munitions?
There are some munitions we're not low on and there's some interceptor things that we could use a lot more of. Listen, I think America's going to be in a lot better position after experiencing this. So, one of our companies called Chaos has by far the best radar that they're monetizing, but the guy running it who helped build Epirus as well, the EMP company, he's figured out how to do $5,000 interceptors now.
He just proved it. He just proved it. Did a bunch of things last month. We're going to make thousands of them this year. We're going to make hopefully hundreds of thousands next year. I mean, America is going to be so strong coming out of this because we're learning and we're iterating. We're getting better. And it definitely bothers me that we had to waste like millions of dollars per shot on some stupid interceptors. That was dumb. But that's because the primes are idiots. We're just going to fix it for them.
Totally. Honestly, you know, right on. Let's just make it better.
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Welcome to Hollywood versus Reality. They do it right. What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch any of this. Little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're... And now we're bringing them back. It does look pretty cool. I got to admit that.
What's China doing during all this?
They're in shock. They're in shock. And there's things released internally that said, you know what, it turns out America's a lot stronger than we realize, but they just have to want to use their strength. And their main objective with us is to make us not want to use our strength. And how do you make America not want to use our strength? There's a few things. One is you fund the far left. You fund the people who hate America. That group that's down in Cuba right now saying how great Cuba is, how bad America is. The one hotel that has light in the whole goddamn country. Those people are funded by China. It's the wife of the guy who's been one of the main funders of everything is the Neville guy who's hiding out in Shanghai. So you have all sorts of Chinese money trying to make us hate ourselves. You have all sorts of, you know, I'm sure they love it when we fight with ourselves in two extreme ways on the right. I think it's totally legit to push back on the war. I respect that. I admire that. But there's people who are actually pushing back on even America being a world leader and saying we have to share power with China like Tucker said to that Chinese spy the other day, a few weeks ago on the podcast. Like there's a lot of guys...
We shouldn't be sharing any power with China.
Exactly. I know you're not. He's lost it. I think he's lost it. He's too extreme against us. And so China wants, and you know what they have? They have what's called cognitive warfare. They're very smart about this. They have land, sea, air, cyber. Cognitive is a fifth branch. And they use all sorts of tactics. They capture whatever data they can. Same way we're capturing data to attack Iran and figure out targets. They're capturing data on everything and everyone going on in the country, building profiles and trying to figure out what do they do, what do they try, what do they push to make people not love America, to make people not want America to be free and have property rights because they know that is how they're going to get us at the end of the day.
If they, they've beefed up presence off the coast of Taiwan.
Oh 100%. I think they've continued to do that for a longer time. That's right.
But it's more now since the Iran stuff kicked off. Correct. Am I off on this?
I think even before the Iran kicked off, I saw they're putting a bunch of ships and doing exercises all around the island. I shouldn't say, I'm supposed to go visit briefly in a little bit. It gets a little scary flying on your plane over the Chinese warships. Like Sean, maybe don't air the episode until after I land.
Right on. We'll push it. No, I'm just kidding. But I mean, how are these chip fabs going in Arizona?
You know, I think some parts worked pretty well. I think there's some parts culturally where it's harder for some of the employees to ramp up in the US for some of the types of tasks, you know.
I mean, the reason I'm asking because that's the big fear for us, right?
Well, I think, yeah. I mean, and you know, Elon announced Tariff, which is awesome. He's going to try to massively... You see the size of that building? It's like this like 3 or 4 miles long.
Wait, what are you talking about? Elon announced this like massive project to do a massive fab for chips in Texas.
Yeah, it's the last, this is since we're recording a few last few days. It'll be a couple weeks ago when it comes out. Yeah, I know. It's a big project worth talking to people about. It's really cool. They're going to try to do everything here at massive scale.
Listen, I think these things take a while to get. I think China, sorry, I think Taiwan, which is actually China, right? It's the good China. I think Taiwan has a lot of advantages there from building it for decades and I think they should be our ally and we should be working with them and we should be doing some things here and then some things in their ecosystem. I mean there's stuff that's done by hand by people who are doing it for 20 years whether it's in Taiwan or Vietnam or other places that you're not just going to replace right away with robots and you're not going to be able to pay people to do a lot of that stuff here. Like I think the high value stuff you could take, the low value stuff, I still think we can work with other countries. Like it's just really, really hard to do it at scale without it. But yeah, but totally we got to bring more here.
I mean does that worry you? That's what worries me the most. I mean if they do take it then what the fuck are we going to do in the end?
I'm the one who should be more worried about that because I'm building all these goddamn AI companies. What do you think? It's like, listen, obviously it would slow things down and obviously it'd be bad for the world. A lot of the chips are things like if you have like a minivan for your kids, the chip opens and closes the door automatically. You'll have to do it by hand instead. This is like, there's like a lot of the chip stuff is like we can swap things in and out. We could keep the key ones. You don't have to, like a lot of the chips we use are convenient, but they're so cheap that we use a lot more than we need. And there'd be ways to figure it out and to keep things going and it wouldn't be as big of an economic impact right away. Although it would obviously slow down the AI wave, which I don't want because that's something we should talk about. I think the AI wave is like way better than people realize, is like the coolest thing happening in the world right now.
Man, let's do it. I just had Brett Adcock in here with Figure AI.
What the... Dude, it's a whole different world already.
There is, there's so much happening, man.
