Joe Lonsdale

And, you know, one of the friends, his dad was at Intel, and they got these, they called the Pentium chips, remember, back in the 90s. And they'd get them, and we did this rig where you'd, like, figure out how to overclock them and, you know, use, like, liquid nitrogen or whatever to cool it off. And it's just silly stuff, and it makes the Quake II game work a little better.

But it's just, I kind of was in that whole scene, and a lot of my friends' older brothers and people were building companies. So I was really lucky to be exposed to this stuff. Very interesting. Yeah. Where did you go after high school? So I went to Stanford Computer Science, which is right in the area. It's in the Bay Area as well. And it's actually funny.

My mom made me apply last minute to Stanford. I was always going to go to Caltech or MIT. Actually, I went back and read it. It was the most obnoxious application thing ever because I was so eager for them to think I was so great. When you read it, you're like, screw this kid. We shouldn't let him in anywhere because he thinks he's the coolest guy ever. It was terrible. I was 17.

pretty overconfident. But Stanford won because I did it last minute and it didn't sound quite as arrogant. I think they let me in. So Stanford, you started interning at PayPal. Yeah, so all the really smart and interesting programmers. I met a bunch of them who were a little older than me. I was lucky to be a little bit ahead in programming already before I got there.

So I got to know some of the older kids. And some of the really bright ones were going to work at PayPal and were interning at PayPal, et cetera. And so I applied my freshman year. I thought, this is really cool. I want to go work with these people. And I'd known who Peter Thiel was. He'd founded the Stanford Review, which I was working with and became a big editor of.

And they actually rejected me in my first year I applied there. So I applied again. I got in sophomore year.

They were definitely not big names. No one knew who any of these people were, not at all. It's such a coincidence that all these companies came out of PayPal. But now that we know who Elon is and who Peter Thiel is and who these guys are, it's like, of course, they're all together there. There's got to be a lot of crazy stuff that comes out of it. There's a power law.

There are actually two groups. It was Elon had x.com and Peter had Confinity. And they had a bunch of their smartest friends each building stuff. And there were about eight companies in the space, in the payment space. And these guys were at war with each other. They were obsessed.

This really talented team was trying to win, and they finally realized they should merge rather than destroy each other. And the companies merged. And I hear Elon kept trying to rename it X. He finally got his way later. But no, it was an amazing group of people. I was just a kid. I get no credit at all for anything that happened there, but I learned a hell of a lot from all these people.

That's a hell of a group of mentors. Do you keep in touch with all these guys? A bunch of them, yeah. David Sachs has that show. They let me on last week. They're all entertaining. Peter's someone I see a lot and he still backs a lot of things I do. Elon lives in Austin, Texas now and is a He's a good friend. I text him and bug him sometimes.

I'm trying to be helpful with the stuff going on in government. You are involved with that, right? I do my best to help. I have a bunch of friends who are involved full-time. I've passed a bunch of people in, and I'm obsessed with the policy world. I'm trying to be helpful there. Good.

I didn't build anything in social media, but I worked for Peter Thiel after PayPal. He had a global macro hedge fund, but he also was the first investor in Facebook at the time. I don't get any credit for that either, but I got to know really well the Facebook founders and the office and the culture. Then right after that, he backed me to start Palantir with my roommate from Stanford.

I'd always been pretty interested in it. If you look at So computer science is like maybe a young man who likes things young men like. There's games and there's cool defense stuff. And when you grew up in computer science in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, you'd constantly hear stories about stuff the NSA was doing and the U.S.

government was doing that was way ahead of everything else back in the 60s and 70s. So it was almost this mythical... where there's just some of the coolest, most talented guys were there.

There's literally stuff that was done by the NSA in the 70s that the very top academics at Stanford and MIT and et cetera only figured out 15 years later what the heck they were doing and why they were doing it that way. It was just this, this is what the cool guys are doing and the smartest people are doing. They're working on these problems.

As a kid, you watch James Bond and you look at this stuff, you want to get the bad guys. You want to stop the bad guys. I was always fascinated by that world. At PayPal, The thing that came up, by the way, was central to this, was the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money. You know about this?

So PayPal was losing several million dollars a month, back then that was a lot of money, and it was very unprofitable because you'd go use your card down the street at 7-Eleven and the cashier there is not getting paid very well. So they're secretly taking the numbers and they sell 100 numbers online to the Russians

for like 500 bucks, and then the Russians would take those numbers, run them through accounts, pretend you did transactions. And you get this thing later that says, PayPal, $200. And you're like, I didn't do PayPal $200. So you say no to your credit card company. It's called a chargeback. PayPal has to eat it. And so this was happening at massive scale.

And PayPal and its competitors were going under thanks to this. And so we had to figure out at PayPal How do you go after it? We actually ended up taking a bunch of our customer service people, building these tools for them, building investigative tools, and then helping them figure out how to stop and catch some of the bad guys and then turn them into Secret Service and FBI.

So I ended up getting to know a bunch of these Secret Service and FBI guys around 2001, 2002.