Joe Lonsdale

It's weird stuff, man.

There could be someone who's that sick in the military-industrial complex. I mean... I fall in between these factions because on one hand, I think we wasted trillions of dollars over in Afghanistan and Iraq and probably shouldn't have been there in the way we were.

I think we had to do something after the 9-11 attack, but we probably shouldn't have gone and stayed there and spent all the money and all the lives. But at the same time, we do need to stop the bad guys from causing problems. But yeah, I think there are some pretty sick people who are much, much more aggressive about just always being at war, which is terrible.

It's not sustainable.

This is the goal. We're not cost-plus people. I think there's this really sick disease of people that their whole incentive is cost-plus. They just want to use more of their stuff and sell more of their stuff. Their incentives are pretty screwed up. I think the better way to do it

is uh exactly you gotta you gotta you gotta make things you gotta make things much much much cheaper and better and then change the incentives around have it be more like a software thing not like a you know not like a thing where you're just selling as many as possible at six percent i mean you gotta that brings up a whole another topic i mean what about your personal security i'm genuinely curious i mean you've got to be off you know lockheed

I thought you meant killing all the terrorists. I think the guy who runs Lockheed, Jim, he ran American Tower. He's a great businessman. He's not from the military industrial complex himself. He's been brought in to figure it out and fix some things because there's some things that are broken there. He seems like an honorable guy to me.

I don't think those kind of guys are... Let's be honest, I'm a step down from... Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and Fain. They're both 15 years older than me. They're both important mentors to me. They're my co-founders. I think they're the ones who have more security than me. We have my security guy outside. I'm not that worried, though.

It's interesting, though. In this case, I think it's not the right way to think about it because it's not like there's some evil genius behind Raytheon or something. Raytheon is like a conglomeration of... of all of this stuff that merged together in the 90s. There were some great families, great people, maybe in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, who created some of this stuff.

And back then, by the way, it was legit. It was the best stuff in the world. And so you have this conglomeration, and then you have all these bureaucrats and all these committees. And the problem with the military industrial people is they become more like the broken bureaucracy in government. And these bureaucrats... They're mostly cowards.

They're mostly people who just automatically want to fill out more forms. They want to go along with whatever's safe. I think part of the problem with these companies is the fact that they're actually not bold, and they're not thoughtful, and they're not courageous. I'm not really afraid of the bureaucrats. I'm kind of just disgusted by them.

Brothers, sisters? I'm the oldest of three boys. I have two amazing younger brothers. I was with one of them yesterday in Miami. They both live in Austin, although one of them spends a lot of time in Asia. Right on. What did you grow up doing? What were your hobbies? A lot of sports, a lot of video games. What kind of sports? I was a baseball player. I was a swimmer.

Got the gold medal in breaststroke for the East Bay Swim League. Nice, nice. My family's very competitive. We're very competitive, whether it's sports, whether it's games. Each of my brothers and I were state chess champions. My dad was the top chess coach. We thought it was because we were smart. After we left my elementary school, he kept coaching.

They kept winning the state every year for 20 years. No kidding. My dad was super competitive. You still play chess? For fun, yeah. You know, when you're playing at that age, when we were playing seriously, competitively, it wasn't about being smart. It was about my dad training us, and we had to do it 30 hours a week if we wanted to stay on top.

So it was a very serious commitment from the age of like 6 to 12 or so.

I think I am. Don't ask my brother, Jeff. Are you teaching your kids chess? We're starting to. It's actually really funny. So my oldest kids are daughters. I have five kids. So my daughters, the older ones, are four, six, and seven and a half. And they do little tactics with me and stuff. But I came in the other day when I was trying to teach them.

And they said, Daddy, look, the pieces aren't fighting anymore. They're getting married. I'm working on it.

Like every Nintendo game. We played baseball a lot. I was a pitcher. We played a lot of video games. Parents think it's bad for kids, but I thought it was pretty fun.

42.

I was lucky to grow up in Silicon Valley. I obviously was nerdy myself, but I had even nerdier friends who were teaching me stuff. I had a small group of friends who were way ahead in math and stuff. Programming and math have a lot in common, so I got these guys teaching me how to program at 9, 10, 11 years old, which is normal nowadays, but back then that was pretty unusual.