The Exchanges

Q guy at that younger guy at that time. So I'd like say, I'll test it and see how, like if I can get it to like break quickly, like if no one else is around, I wasn't trying to cause any damage. I'm sure you've seen much worse than me, but you're curious as a driver, like how will this react? And was it 10 years ago? When was it?

A Yeah, so it's 2019, uh, summer through, um, uh, spring of 2024, so about five years. Uh, and it was like a really cool phase because it went from that, like, kind of really aggressive R&D point to where that launch in San Francisco was the beginning of this incredible hockey stick that, uh, uh, is like actually the beginnings Of like, real scaled commercialization for autonomous driving, and, ah, and there's a couple things that were amazing about it, where one, there was a real aggressive transformation of the technology stack to kind of embrace these very machine learning, kind of new age of machine learning and kind of data-driven approaches, ah, ah, particularly on the behavioral side, where you're learning from large-scale data instead of engineering a system with heuristics and search and so forth.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so it's 2019, uh, summer through, um, uh, spring of 2024”

Q Yep. That makes sense. Well, let's, let's shift. So you guys, a lot of the top talent in the world, obviously crushed these problems at Waymo. It's it's everyone's seeing what it's starting to do now. It's amazing. And you decided to move into Construction, and starting, starting with excavators for the real world. Like, like, so how do you make that shift? Why, why'd you found bedrock?

A Yeah, so we, so part of it was really, um, appreciating how incredible those scalability capabilities we just talked about were, um, where you start with a beachhead, in Waymo's case was San Francisco, and now you have this fly where you're adding new capabilities, new geographies, new platforms, and setting aside the complexity of the public road driving domain, the generalization actually, like, really, really works well. Um, Um, we saw an opportunity to apply that to a space that never had that type of, uh, approach, uh, in it, which, which is, uh, automation of specialized heavy machinery, and construction was a especially exciting, uh, place to start where you have, um, large numbers of machine types. They're all in these slow moving, semi-controlled environments. Uh, you have astronomical amounts of, of work that needs to be done. You have an industry that, um, fundamentally has these Astronomical tailwinds where, um, manufacturing has to be, like, built at massive scale. Uh, you have, um, you know, on-shoring of manufacturing, re-industrialization. Infrastructure is going through a refresh cycle where you have to re-repave giant amounts of roads. You have housing shortages. You have energy. So you have these huge demands. At the same time, labor is going the opposite direction where, um, you're seeing the average age go above 50, Um, the, uh, uh, up to 40% of, of constru…

AI assessment note: “we saw an opportunity to apply that to a space that never had that type”

Q jobs. I believe it's going to bring prices down. I believe it's going to help our crumbling infrastructure. Uh, so I mean, this is, to me, it's obviously good, but a lot of people aren't going to understand that. People are not very good systems thinkers. They assume you're just drawing jobs. Like, how do you think about it? How do you explain this to people about why it's good?

A So this is not a zero sum game. Uh, there's an astronomical demand for projects for, uh, just given all the trends we're seeing, the data centers that need to be built, the housing that's too expensive, the roads that are in a refresh cycle. Uh, there's just not enough people to do this work, and it's actually getting a lot worse, like a lot worse. Uh, and this is the number, like, number one problem that we're hearing in the industry from almost everybody we talked to, and every single GC we talked to has more jobs that they could take on that they just, like, physically can't, and so when that happens, market forces come into play. You have prices that skyrocket. You have projects that just simply don't get done. The things that absolutely have to happen get done, but get, get done for a much higher cost. That cost gets burdened by companies, by consumers, by governments, which in the end goes to taxpayers, uh, and all of this Kind of perpetuates, um, and, uh, and we've heard of literally multi-billion dollar projects that got approved and funded, but don't get off the ground because they don't pencil out, meaning you just cannot do them profitably. And so when you think of something like the heavy machinery work that happens up front in the project, um, that might be, uh, it's actually a very painful, expensive, and unpredictable phase of it, but what it does is it can chang…

AI assessment note: “So this is not a zero sum game. Uh, there's an astronomical demand”

Q You can't fight to fix it unless you actually see what's happening. Exactly. So you had this experience, and then you had a very top show on Fox for a while, and what was that transition? Why'd you do that?

A So finally off, it was connected to Brexit, because as I mentioned, when we moved here, um, I'd, I'd, uh, had some conversations actually enabled and facilitated by someone I'd met in the Obama administration, who happened to be, who I'd worked with on some policy issue, And I remember them saying that they were going back to Stanford to teach. Um, and so I said, well, that's nearby. Maybe they can help, um, you know, help me think through what I would do. So I ended up at Stanford for a couple of years, including at the D school at Stanford, which is an amazing, amazing institution where I really learned in order to teach it. I learned the methodology of innovation, which really has informed so much of the amazing success of, of the tech sector here in, in, in the Bay area. Um, it was, it was, um, Founded by, um, David Kelly, who's the founder of IDEO, which is the kind of original, you know, so amazing experience teaching at the d.school. Um, and it was during Brexit that I was back in the UK, I think the paperback version of my book, More Human, had come out, um, in which I came out publicly in favor of Brexit, and I was doing some, some TV stuff around that, and someone Pretty significant, was in the UK at the time, watching, uh, called Rupert Murdoch, and he just reached out and said, you know, would you like to have a conversation? And we did, um, got on well, and then a …

AI assessment note: “called Rupert Murdoch, and he just reached out and said, you know, would you”

Q And you've taken on obviously a ton of really hard regulatory, really, really hard engineering challenges. One of the hard challenges here is just manufacturing a skill. I guess Toyota has announced recently, like even more investment in you guys. Is that, is that a big part of solving that and like learning how to scale and scale this up?

A Absolutely. Having the world's leading automotive company that's known around the world for, uh, incredible quality and incredible reliability, um, and real attention to detail, having them deeply integrated with us, uh, is, has been, uh, very, very valuable. And then as we look to this, uh, manufacturing ramp, they build roughly ten million automobiles a year of the hundred million automobiles that the world, uh, Builds every year. So, ten million cars. It's a very complex machine. It takes incredible supply chain prowess, uh, and, uh, and doing that with the, again, the consistency and reliability that we're looking for, uh, having their expertise on manufacturing scale as, as we move from tens to hundreds to 1010, tens of thousands of aircraft a year, we think is, Incredibly valuable.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. Having the world's leading automotive company that's known around the world”

Q I'd say like Peter Thiel and you both got like boring jobs and then like realized that you had to leave and go do something better. Some of us kind of went more straight to the entrepreneurial journey after school. What, what, what is it about your personality that caused you to do the two years of boring stuff and then go do something cool? Like what, what happened there?

A Joe, the funny thing is those two years cost me dearly because the reality is when I was leaving, when I was leaving, uh, Harvard, I was actually very close to joining Facebook then, which would have been truly at zero. I was in Kirkland house when Mark launched it. Uh, and I was a huge fan of it. I actually had been pretty close to six degrees, which was one of the proto social networks that actually wrote the friending patents back in the day. So I was around it. I thought it was a huge deal, but honestly, Joe, here's the reality. I was still in the gold star game. I liked Being told I was good at things. And I thought that the, I thought that people knew things. Um, and so it was, you know, I kind of graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. I wanted, I actually got good grades in college. Then I left and I wanted other people to tell me I was still good at things. And Bain told me I was good at things. And so it took me an extra two years to figure out the emperor had no clothes and that honestly you could just do stuff. Uh, at which point kind of the journey began.

AI assessment note: “I was still in the gold star game. I liked Being told I was good”

Q he died in his sleep right after doing so in his forties, and so this is, It's a very, very scary regime. It's a very evil regime. Number two, China's preparing for war. You chair the Senate Intelligence Committee. You probably can't tell us everything you know, obviously. What's the latest you can tell us about their military buildup and its aggression and its nefarious dealings? What are they doing?

A China has undertaken the largest peacetime buildup in the history of mankind. Um, since the turn of the century, um, China's increased its military spending by more than 1000%. It's now got the largest military by far in the world. It's the second most technologically advanced. Um, in some ways it has some advantages over our military because Uh, it was upgrading from, say, junky aircraft in the 19 fifties and taking a huge leap ahead in technology to fourth and fifth and soon sixth generation fighters. Um, but it has expanded its military, um, faster than any nation has ever done in peacetime. And, and that's not just as conventional military either. That's its nuclear arsenal as well. You know, China has long claimed it would, um, only maintain what's known as a minimal deterrence, um, enough nuclear weapons to strike back if it was ever Attacked by nuclear power. Um, that went out the door with Xi Jinping as well. Um, they've more than doubled the number of warheads they have since Xi took office. It's gonna double again, our Pentagon estimates, by the end of this decade, and double again by the middle of the next decade. Um, this is all, of course, directed Towards what they view as the last real remaining piece of unfinished business in consolidating, uh, Chinese communist power, which is, um, going for the jugular in Taiwan and annexing it to the mainland. And of course t…

AI assessment note: “China has undertaken the largest peacetime buildup in the history of mankind.”

Q there, and so they have to be very, very careful in Hollywood not to piss off China, or they're permanently could be banned, it would destroy their, their business, and so China seems to have a censorship block over a lot of what's going on here. Like, it's insane to me we're still allowing this, like, but I don't know, what's going on here otherwise with China and our culture?

A Yeah, you lay it out very well, and it's one of the most One of the most vivid, um, stories I think resonates with most Americans because you just ask them, when was the last time you saw a movie with the Chinese villain or that cast communist China in a bad light? And the answer is it's been a very long time. Probably the last time was When seven years in Tibet was released and communist China came down on, uh, the production studios and Brad Pitt and the other actors, like a ton of bricks and they studios got the message. If you want access to the large and lucrative Chinese movie market. Can't have Chinese villains. You can't reflect communist China in a negative light at all. So you don't have any of the great movies that we remember from the Cold War, like Red Dawn or Rocky for. And speaking of Red Dawn, um, about 10 or maybe 12 years ago, there was an effort to remake Red Dawn in a story, a great story again from the Cold War about Communist Russia invading America and teenage kids fighting back like gorillas against them. Um, the movie was remade, and this time around it was Communist China invading, uh, the United States. That was until the studio suits got wind of it. And in post-production, they digitally manipulated Um, the content to turn it into a North Korean invasion of America. Just, just think about that. North Korea, a starving impoverished nation of twenty-fi…

AI assessment note: “That's the lengths to which Hollywood will go to not offend Chinese Communist censors.”

Q let's see what happens. I really appreciate your work on that. The other, the other part of coming for our kids, I love you right about this. Cause it's how I think about it too. And it's how some Chinese billionaires, by the way, joked to me about it very rudely is that there's a reverse opium war going on over the last decade. Tell us, what does that mean?

A Well, first off, if you've forgotten your high school history, which I often do as well, um, the opium wars, uh, were, uh, wars in the early to mid 18th century, um, that European countries waged against China to force China to keep the opium trade, uh, open for them. And China lost those wars and had to allow the opium trade and it lost territory and had to grant other concessions. In fact, China, China's leaders today still call that the beginning of their so-called century of humiliation. That only ended when, uh, Chinese communists won the civil war in 1949 and took power. Um, and, and now as if American teenagers are somehow responsible for what European imperialists did almost 200 years ago, they're killing American teenagers, um, to the tune of hundreds of thousands in, in recent years. So rather than opium flooding in to China 200 years ago, we have fentanyl Flooding in the United States via Mexican drug cartels. For a long time, it was just finish fentanyl pills, go to Mexico, and the cartels would ship it in. President Trump was able to stop that in his first term, but since then, they've been shipping in chemical ingredients, the precursors for fentanyl, essentially giving Chinese or giving Mexican drug cartels, you know, the ingredients and the menu on how to make it, even supplying pill presses for them, and that's what we have to crack down on now. Because, uh, Ch…

AI assessment note: “rather than opium flooding in to China 200 years ago, we have fentanyl Flooding”

Q Okay, well, we got to try this sometime. You know, Peter down the street. Let me know. I can come hang out with you guys on that. Tell us about Renaissance periodization. What was the gap you saw on the market? Why'd you, why'd you build it?

A Yeah. Um, my co-founder and I, Nick Shaw, we were in New York city as personal trainers in like, uh, training a lot of finance folks. We were totally oblivious to almost all the stuff that was happening in finance. A lot of people looked sad and we didn't know why. And, um, they actually So we were training those folks, and we realized it was kind of an interesting problem. A lot of our clients were super sharp, well-educated people, and very well-intentioned in trying to optimize how their health was, how their appearances were, so on and so forth. And a lot of the advice they were getting were from folks that weren't going about it in a rigorous scientific manner. Basically, like mysticism, tradition, the whole thing, like, just do this because it works. And you're like, but why? And they're like, well, I'm not a why person.

AI assessment note: “advice they were getting were from folks that weren't going about it in a rigorous scientific manner”

Q What were some of the things people assume were true that weren't necessarily true? What were some of those you were hearing?

A Oh my God. How long do you have? I'll do like a top two spot reduction. If you do a million crunches, your body fat on your abs will go away, which does not happen. It's all almost all systemic. Another one is that if you do lots and lots of cardio, you'll lose like an unbelievable amount of weight. And that's also not true because the biggest variable for weight control is your diet and not cardio. And I mean, the, the, the list just goes, oh, here's another one. Super foods like, I drink eight times a week, mostly six drinks at a time. And I eat like a McDonald's trash bin. And if I just take like this blueberry extract, I'm good. That's just not how it works. And so people would come to us and get very intelligent, very smart, very conscientious, well intentioned people and say, I want to get in shape. And we would have to untangle the world model of how fitness works. And we were like, you know what? We had to start putting out digital products, books, templates, coaching to like help people who really want to get in shape, actually get in shape without just being Kind of low-key lied to. Is, is lying via ignorance a lie? I'm not sure.

AI assessment note: “I'll do like a top two spot reduction... Another one is that if you do lots”

Q in my life in various contexts, all of a sudden they've lost 50 pounds. They look healthier. I think, I think it inspires them to start working out. So I think maybe for some of them, it's a really good thing. Cause all of a sudden it gives them confidence. What do you, what do you, what do you think about where those are going with, with all these tools?

A I think the birth of, so we used to call them GLP ones. Uh, terzepatide is already on the market. It's a GLP GIP dual agonist. The retatratide is currently in final stages of testing GLP GIP and glucagon triple agonist. So my preferred nomenclature for them Is just modern weight loss drugs and the very different than all weight loss drugs, which are usually derivatives of stimulants. You know, you take them and you're like, ah, losing weight. And then two months later, you can't feel anything anymore. And you regain the weight. No good. I think these drugs are a miracle. I think they have slight downsides, but massive upsides. For example, they massively reduce total body inflammation. They even have psychological enhancements where you, they make you less prone to addictive behaviors, seemingly of all kinds. The list of benefits goes on and on and on. The biggest one is weight loss, of course, but it's not the only one. As these drugs gain maturity and evolve over time, you're basically going to have a turn dial for people to lose as much fat and much weight as they want. And there are many different kinds of classes of drugs that are currently in development, currently in human trials. They're going to change the landscape of fitness and health altogether. I think this is one of the greatest things ever. And one of my biggest roles in social media currently is to maybe try to…

AI assessment note: “They're going to change the landscape of fitness and health altogether.”

Q the nature of humanity is that whenever, whenever something like this exists, people will start using it to express their views and to force people to do things and to push people to things. And it seems like a lot of the left captured these things and used them to attack and punish their enemies and, and force people to fund their stuff. I mean, isn't that how this iterated?

A I mean, a hundred percent, Joe, you're, you're absolutely right. You know, the, the, the left started using sort of business to get done through the, The back door of business , they couldn't give them to the front door government. I mean, the state of California is a perfect example. So the state of California is the largest pension fund in the United States. It's two hundred and eighty billion dollars. And what's crazy right now is they're only being funded at about 80 cents on the dollar. So if you're in the state of California, you're on their pension system, you don't expect to get your full pension. One of the reasons is, is that that pension system is essentially controlled by the government. I mean, the governor Gavin Newsom appoints a bunch of people there and even the state of California, they've said that we're going to use our pension dollars To promote an ESG and DEI agenda. It's not about actually maximizing returns and making sure that the people of California can have a pension with dignity, but they're using that to force oil and gas companies to go out of business because they have a lot of money. They want to remove that. Um, and they're using it in a very weaponized and politicized way to get done again through the backdoor business, but they can't get down to the front door.

AI assessment note: “I mean, a hundred percent, Joe, you're, you're absolutely right.”

Q it. Uh, I think one of the most important books I've read in the last few years. Let's just start off a little bit of the history and things you've talked about in the past. I think it's fair to say you're one of the most forward thinking kind of bloggers and thinkers online today. You went to Harvard and you, like you studied government. How'd you get into blogging?

A You know, I, um, I, I was first, I was running a small business, like an ed tech company with my friend, Andrew Finn. And we, uh, and I, and I was, I was blogging on the side as kind of just a, uh, a hobby, um, like five hours a week. But I, I, I had liked that more than I liked running the business. So at one point we just Decide we don't need both of us here. And I'm going to go and see like, what, what if I put 60 hours a week instead of five hours a week into blogging? So I started this new blog, wait, but why? Um, and, uh, what year was this? This was 2013. I mean, I guess the thesis was the, you know, people said blogging's dead. That was like a common thing to say back then. And like the internet was just flooded with content. You had Buzzfeed now producing a trillion articles a week. Um, and, but the, the thesis we had was kind of that There's actually not very much high quality, like really high quality stuff. There's a lot of like B minus content, C plus content out there. And if you can just work really hard and, and really put out, you know, a level content that people will notice. That was the idea.

AI assessment note: “I was blogging on the side as kind of just a hobby”

Q let's talk about it a little bit. You're, you're obviously prophetic because AI hadn't really been as much in the consciousness in 2015. A bunch of us were trying to invest in it, trying to figure it out, but obviously it didn't really explode like as something that was working until the last few years. So what did you see that led you to this conclusion? What, what'd you know?

A I think that, uh, actually it's, I think that, uh, Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil and some others, I think they're, they're the prophets, um, because, um, all I did was read Some of their book. Basically my judge for whether it's a good thing to, something's a good thing to write about, um, is I just use my own self. Like it, do I find it interesting? I assume that my audience is a big group of me, um, because they're, they're close enough that usually that's a good gauge. So when I hear about, when I started hearing about AI in 2015, it was really, you know, that's pretty early where I think people forget how recently it still seemed just like a sci-fi concept. AI seemed like something that is in sci-fi movies only. Um, And in 2015, that started to change. It was actually 2014. I first started hearing about it. I wrote about it at the very beginning of 2015. And I started to hear about real serious people talking about it. I said, what's what's going on? So I read Nick Bostrom's book. I read, you know, The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil. Nick Bostrom's book is super intelligent. I mean, these are these are these books really, I think, were way ahead of their time and my eyes were wide. And so I said, holy shit, you know, and if I feel this way, I'm sure my readers are also kind of hearing about it, wondering what's going on and they're going to have their minds blown. I decide…

AI assessment note: “So I read Nick Bostrom's book. I read, you know, The Singularity is Near”

Q And I have to admit, when I first heard about Overland, I said, wait a second, I thought that was already solved in Tesla and everyone else's way ahead, but it turns out it's a very different problem in some ways to really perfectly solve driving on just like random train anywhere versus driving on a road, right?

A That's right. So on-road self-driving is very hard. Um, Uh, the major challenge there is not, you know, how do you actually traverse terrain? I mean, you're driving on roads which are engineered to be a very easy to drive on. Um, the challenge is dealing with all of the different, uh, agents that are in the environment. So think about other cars, bicyclists, pedestrians, um, understanding where they are and their intent. So that makes on-road self-driving very hard. But off-road self-driving, uh, has really a different focus, which is on the traversability of terrain. So, Um, you have to perceive the terrain around you. You have to represent that somehow, uh, and then find ways for your vehicle to move reliably through the terrain without rolling over or crashing.

AI assessment note: “off-road self-driving, uh, has really a different focus, which is on the traversability of terrain”

Q And so you founded the Cosmos Institute. What's the Cosmos Institute?

A So we're trying to, we're, we're an academy to try to cultivate these philosopher builders. So we think that that's a key archetype that we need, and I can kind of, you know, the historical thing I think you'll appreciate, because, you know, you know and think about a lot of these characters. So my contention is that whenever you have a technological revolution, you have two choices. You either build for freedom, or you watch as others build for control, and I'll give you examples of this. So Benjamin Franklin in the US, he builds Uh, a network of libraries and independent publishers that takes the printing press, innovation, and realizes the democratic ideal of enlightenment, sorry, of spreading knowledge. At the same time, you have Joseph Goebbels, who takes the printing press and turns it into a system of mass manipulation. Forward to the Industrial Revolution, you have people like Adam Smith, Theorizing about markets, creating broad prosperity. You have the Soviets taking industrial technology, twisting it into a system of economic domination. And then lastly, in the internet revolution, you have people like Tim Berners-Lee, who embed decentralization into the technical fabric of the world wide web, give us an expressive open internet. And you have China creating the great firewall and the social credit system that creates this web of conformity and control.

AI assessment note: “we're an academy to try to cultivate these philosopher builders.”

Q global kind of frameworks to take away our autonomy. And obviously to a lot of us who believe society should be free and work bottom up, this is like one of the worst things ever we'd fight to stop. Like, like what, what's the history in the enlightenment or, or, or more recently with this world government idea? Cause it comes up a lot in a lot of this work.

A Yeah. So one example here is when, when Alexis de Tocqueville comes to America in the 18 thirties or, you know, around 1830, he goes to New England townships and he sees something that's totally different from what he had seen in Paris. Paris is very hub and spoke. Like the, the, the government in Paris controls, you know, controls France at that time. And in America, in New England townships, you see something totally different, which is bottom up people associating spontaneously solving problems. They need a bridge, they go build a bridge. And it's this incredible release of energy. And Tocqueville thinks that this is very important. The reason he thinks it's important is not only because, like, of the vibrancy, but because he recognizes that in democracies in particular, the individual is weak. The individual versus the state is not a fair match. If you're a serious aristocrat, maybe you have a, you have a chance, but individuals in democracy are weak. They're also weak relative to other forces like The will of the majority. And so Tocqueville says it is essential that you have a decentralization and a vibrancy that comes from the bottom so that they can fend off these powerful forces. If they do not, then they'll end up with encroachment, they'll end up with what he calls soft despotism. We could talk about that. More, more recently, I think, you know, one of the most inter…

AI assessment note: “one of the most interesting debates on this issue is Leo Strauss versus Kojev”

Q I want to jump to just high level for people, the various approaches right now that dominate the AI discourse, right? So there's, I think you define these, there's the doomsayers, there's the accelerationists, I think there's the regulators, and there's techno-authoritarians, and there's a four list. So what do you think of each? What are the doomsayers, first of all?

A Okay, so that's the most, um, that's the intellectual incumbent, um, I would say. That's the most common, uh, dominant philosophy in the practitioner community, and it's three philosophies in a trench coat, but they're all very entangled. One is effective altruism, One is rationalism, one is long-termism. So three things, you might hear these terms, but you can kind of put them together and say those are, like, the doomsayers. And the gist of it is that AI could pose a risk to humanity, and we should pause. It's kind of like Oppenheimer when he had this, you know, hubristic awe of his own creation. Or you could say, like, a tragic kind of Prometheanism where, like, we got fire from the gods and now we regret it or something like this. And so that, that school tends to then follow, like, One of the main equations, people get mad at me for saying this, but this is actually the way that a lot of folks think about it, is even a tiny probability of doom multiplied by negative infinity utils equals negative infinity utils.

AI assessment note: “three philosophies in a trench coat... effective altruism, One is rationalism, one is long-termism”

Q it's 20 or 30 or 40%, has made it more productive. So there's been a little bit of a pushback where companies hired a ton and then all of a sudden they're not hiring as much. Like, doesn't this go back and forth where some years there's like people are really struggling to hire and other years there's too many people on the market? How do you think about that?

A So historically there's been about four open jobs for every one back in engineer in the US. So there are more open jobs than there are available talent. The impact that we've seen in the startup recession over the last two years has had some impact, but it has definitely been outpaced by the fact that you have all of these traditional industries also moving into software development. So you talked about India used to be a place of kind of low level outsourcing. That's exactly what a lot of the big financial institutions used to do. JP Morgan's a good example. Used to outsource a lot of their technology. Today, they're hiring thousands of engineers in the US. You have companies like Nike hiring a thousand engineers, CVS, thousands of engineers. So non-traditional tech has moved in to really drive up that demand and replace a lot of maybe what we've seen the challenge in the core tech market today.

AI assessment note: “non-traditional tech has moved in to really drive up that demand”

Q Stanford then, and it was really, really impressive to me how they work together and how they push things forward. And, and you, during the space race, even the cold war, it seems like the government and the universities were oftentimes even a decade or two ahead of the private sector. And today it oftentimes some, in some areas it's the opposite, especially the government's the opposite. What's your take?

A You know, I think you're right. It's hard to remember, but you know, the largest purchaser of electronics in the fifties and sixties was the U S government. There really was no commercial market at scale. In fact, the first large customers for integrated circuits from Fairchild, the semiconductor, which was one of the early chip companies were not only for the Apollo guidance systems, but for the minute man to, um, guidance system, which actually kept them in business because they could charge an exorbitant amount of money. But that shifted when we went to consumer products and PCs in the U.S. The amount of dollars being spent by PC companies and others just far exceeded what the military.

AI assessment note: “the largest purchaser of electronics in the fifties and sixties was the U S government”

Q of interesting talking to you about defense now, because in some ways, Palantir was like a fat startup, as was SpaceX, as was, as was, uh, you know, even Andrel in some ways. So a lot of these defense things, it's like, you can't quite do those things that lean startups get to. Is that how you think about it, too? Are the principles still apply, or is it different?

A Well, what's really funny is, um, you know, I, of all things, I use SpaceX as an example of how you actually can build, um, fancy word is an ambidextrous organization, a 20 dollar word that you use in universities to mean can you chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning can you execute, you know, that is do continual processes and incremental innovation at the same time you could do crazy things. In the same large organization. And, and of course, I think most people listening understand that SpaceX is launching out of three launch pads, two at Kennedy, one at Vandenberg, and that's operational excellence. Those Falcon nines are popping off. What about we might hit a 120 this year. Maybe we'll hit Elon's a 144, but, but in any case, they don't screw around. There's a, there's a book and, and that process needs to be fail safe. But when we look at Starship, you know, Elon's model is we're not blowing stuff up. We're not innovating. And if we're not blowing them up fast enough, we're not innovating fast enough. Different culture, different people, different risk profiles. But the big idea is everybody understands Falcon nine pays your salary, but starship will pay your pension and that innovation stuff that's at the edge will move to the core. And they're not separate organizations, even though they are, they're connected horizontally. The learning is going back and forth. The…

AI assessment note: “I use SpaceX as an example of how you actually can build an ambidextrous organization”

Q Did you become an entrepreneur after you got laid off?

A No, I ended up, um, eventually making my way to Google. Google at the time was sort of scaling, and it was soaking in all the talent, um, in Silicon Valley, or at least all the entrepreneurial talent, and so, um, I joined there and, um, I, I ended up working on two things. One is I helped buy in the Android team and start a lot of the early mobile efforts. And then second, I worked on some early, um, AI and machine learning for ads targeting related products. So I worked more on the product side. Um, and then after that I left to start a company and, um, Uh, sold that to Twitter, and then I worked at Twitter for a bunch of years, and then started another company, so.

AI assessment note: “No, I ended up, um, eventually making my way to Google.”

Q now to fight anti-Semitism? A lot of my friends who have a lot of resources, I guess that's an anti-Semitic trope, but it's just, I mean, it's true. Sometimes they have a lot of resources in our people. They want to use it for good. They want to use the help. Like what else could we be doing to kind of, kind of help our society during this tough time?

A Well, I think all of us have the capacity to push back against hate, to fight antisemitism, to create a more, you know, a world where everyone feels valued. So what are things you can do? Look, if you're an individual, you can volunteer, you can do stuff online. You have to speak out when you see hate, whether it's flagging a post that's problematic or interrupting someone when they're making an antisemitic comment. Yep. I think you have to share facts. You know, like don't like forward some crazy email from your mother's neighbors, you know, father-in-law, you know, that talks about the space lasers or controlling the weather. I mean, I think know your facts because I think the truth will set you free and stay measured and controlled. But I also think like different parties can do a role. So I mentioned a few minutes ago, you know, we're suing all these, um, institutions. We're working with a whole bevy of law firms. Like, I mean, the biggest firms in the country like Jones Day and Davis Polk and, um, uh, Latham and Watkins and Arnold and Porter, the biggest firms are working with us. That's what they're doing. We're working with corporations. We created something called the Workplace Pledge Against Anti-Semitism. Google, WPP, Apollo, J. Crew, a bunch of gigantic companies and firms have joined that. Um, We are, you know, I don't know if you saw or not, but earlier this year, …

AI assessment note: “Look, if you're an individual, you can volunteer, you can do stuff online.”

Q you were, you were showing something that people all need to see, is it's these kids in the inner city who were failing and suddenly succeeding. They weren't, clearly weren't failing because they were dumb or because they were incapable. It was, it was clear they weren't interested or didn't care or didn't think it mattered to get good craze, right? I thought that was a really interesting insight, right?

A The incentives weren't there for them, right? And it was interesting, one of the, an eleven-year-old really schooled me one day in New York City, uh, and I think it was in Crown Heights. And he, I asked him, well, why do you like the experiment? And he says, oh, I said, is it the money? He says, no, it's not about the money, man. He said, although it's nice. He said, in every other aspect of life, I'm, I'm basically need to be an adult. But when I come to school, I'm not treated like one. And so for him, the incentives, this really was his job. Now he could focus on it. And I never had, I mean, you know, sometimes you, you do the right thing for the wrong, for, for lucky reasons. And I never thought of that as a mechanism, but these kids really liked the idea of making this, what they were truly focused on in their occupation. We do that in middle-class and upper middle-class households all the time, but in the inner cities, not so much. And so I was, I think that was one of the reasons it worked well.

AI assessment note: “The incentives weren't there for them, right? And it was interesting”

Q education work you did, which I love, uh, the most noteworthy probably was your study on police use of force, right? And this was in 2016, shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown. Uh, I apologize, you probably told the story a lot of times, but can you reprise it briefly for us? What did you discover about the police use of force, and why did it piss people off?

A Yeah. Well, you know, look, I was upset because I was watching, just like you and everybody else, these videos come out, and we were watching this, and, and everyone had to be thinking, is this really the norm in America? You know, and we, we watched and we watched cities in protest over these videos and I wanted to do something about it. Now, as you know, I'm an economist, economist, and I believe in comparative advantage. So protesting is not my comparative advantage, but I'm a data nerd. So I decided, let me see, let me go collect some data and I will demonstrate that police are biased. And then, you know, that'll help. That'll help this movement along. And so I collected millions and millions of data points, uh, both on the lower level uses of force, putting your hands on a suspect, throwing them up against a car, maybe hitting them with a baton and other physical types of force that are not lethal. And then we also collected a lot of data on actual lethal uses of force, uh, officer involved shootings, for example. And what we found was that on the lower level uses of force, there are racial differences that we couldn't explain. Uh, and we put them through formal bias test, and there is bias that goes on in the lower level uses of force. What we didn't find was any, that that bias actually, uh, Was still there as the force ratcheted up. So for officer involved shootings, we…

AI assessment note: “for officer involved shootings, we found no racial differences and no bias”

Q And what were some of the most important lessons you learned being a Navy SEAL?

A Oh, geez, there's a lot. I mean, I take a lot of what I learned, and I try to impart it into the company across leadership, decision-making, Constantly balancing risk and reward. I'll tell you one of the most important lessons that I've learned, and I'll tell you the story behind it, is the difference between an amateur and a professional. And I learned very early on that an amateur does something until they get it right. A professional does something until they can't get it wrong. And I fortunately and unfortunately learned this the hard way, but in a very safe environment in a training base in San Diego, where part of SEAL training, they tie your hands and legs up, they throw you in the deep end of a 15 foot pool, and they make you float around and do things for about 15 minutes, and then they untie you and take you out and say you've passed the test. Well, I struggled with parts of that, and I went and practiced until I got it right. When test day came, I got it wrong. Right? So what that meant is I had to train until I couldn't get it wrong, so when the pressure's on, you get it right.

AI assessment note: “one of the most important lessons that I've learned... is the difference between an amateur”

Q So prior to Saronic, after being an AVCL for a long time, you, you came back and you worked on private equity. You were at Vista Equity, uh, which is obviously a very successful investment group, probably making a lot of money there. Why make the jump to a startup? You're already successful, have a safe, good life. Like, why'd you, why'd you come back to the startup world then?

A You know, it really was that, that call to serve again. It was the draw to get back into defense. You know, when I left the military, I didn't necessarily think I was going to work in defense over again. I kind of wanted to go the other direction and candidly needed to go the other direction for a little while. Um, What I was able to gain in the private sector, working at Vista Equity Partners, understanding finance, investing, operations, and then being able to combine that with my military experience to go and co-found and build Saronic has been invaluable. But again, it was that It was that draw to get back into defense. I started feeling that call to serve again, and we're at a really critical time in our country where we need to build new products and solutions for our defense industrial base in a way that we haven't done over the last 20 and 30 years.

AI assessment note: “You know, it really was that, that call to serve again.”

Q So in your book, you share, you share some vignettes about working with Trump and some really high stakes meetings with Xi Jinping with Angela Merkel. Can you tell us about a favorite story?

A Yeah. Well, one of my favorite stories is about president Xi from China. I knew China pretty well because over the years we had 18 different factories making different things at different companies in China. So I was in China 80 times before the Trump campaign, and I also got money from the various funds in China, so I felt I understood it pretty well. Anyhow, so the first big state visit was President Xi with a hundred-person delegation to Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago is in Palm Beach. It's the old Margaret Merriweather Post estate, When she died, she left it to the State Department. They didn't want to keep it because the upkeep was too much, so Trump finally bought it. And so here we are in this very, very luxurious setting, a meeting with Xi. The meeting was, a meeting was a dinner meeting. And it was scheduled to begin at six 30. About three o'clock that afternoon, I get a call at my house in Palm Beach. I was a member of the National Security Council in addition to commerce. So I got a call. We had an emergency National Security Council meeting at four o'clock. Naturally, they wouldn't say over an open phone what it was about. So we got there, and if you look in the pictures in the book, you'll see this little tiny crowded room with Trump, Mnuchin, myself, and a bunch of, small bunch of people, and that's where we decided To launch the 52 missiles into Syria to retaliate for th…

AI assessment note: “one of my favorite stories is about president Xi from China.”

Q That's, that's, that's status. You know, your, your sports was barksmanship. Is that true? I think you set a record in the, it's a hundred meter small bore in the Olympic trials.

A Yeah. Um, I had, as I had mentioned when I was a kid, I wasn't very good at baseball or basketball or football and things, but when I was 10 years old, my paternal grandfather, Took me to a recreation hall that had a bowling alley. He was an expert bowler, and they also had a shooting gallery. Well, I wasn't too interested in bowling. Ball was too damn heavy for me, but I was interested in shooting, and it turned out I had an aptitude for it. So, by the time I was 14, I won the New Jersey State Championship, and when I was 16, I set the U.S. record over the Olympic small bore rifle course, but that was also a strange learning experience. By then, Winchester was my sponsor, and they were trying to encourage me, take a year off from school, get ready for the Olympics, because they figured with another year or so of Just doing that and nothing else, it might get to be pretty good. So, they gave me a spotter. When you're shooting outdoors, particularly with . . Well, that makes a lot of demand on you to make sure you're counting the right number of rounds. So Winchester gave me a guy whose job was to spot and make sure I fired the right number. Well, when they announced the scores, and they said to my great pleasure that it was a new national record, it seemed like the score in prone, the simplest thing because you're lying on the ground, Seemed like the score prone was nine or 10 …

AI assessment note: “when I was 16, I set the U.S. record over the Olympic small bore”