Joe Lonsdale

These guys, there's this overvalue on credentialism, right? It was just fake credentials. And now we're shifting towards human judgment and common sense. It's like nature is healing here, man. Things are going back to the right way. And I think a lot of people know that their time is over.

I'm scared of that. I'm scared of, I don't know. I mean, I get him pardoning his son, although the way he did it was super sketchy because he basically did it for the whole Ukraine period. I hope he can still do that investigation and find out what went on. I mean, the guy, it's such a corrupt family. It's just terrible. You saw the thing where he paid one of my friends in a booklet.

It was art that was made with his own shit. I can't even say it. It's crazy to see this stuff. It's like he literally was $300,000 behind on rent, so he tried to pay it with the art made from his shit. And he did. He got away with it. He's a pardon now, so I don't think you can go after him for anything. Yeah, I'm worried you're going to see a bunch of more mass pardons. I really hope not.

The joke is he'd pardon SBF because SBF gives so much money to the Democrats and, you know, the crazy guy. I really hope not. It's just the whole thing's crazy, man. Do you have any concerns with the upcoming administration? Yeah, listen, I think you can't agree 100% with anyone. I actually posted on X recently, like, you know, I disagree with the longshoremen decision that came out recently.

The what? So Trump said that we're not going to automate the ports and that it's a waste of money to automate the ports. I know about equipment and it's not worth buying this equipment and we should just let the unions keep going. And what I posted is, I think Trump's clearly wrong on this, but it's okay to disagree with someone and still respect them and follow them in other areas.

So I don't think we have to agree. I'm never going to agree with someone 100%. I'm never going to be afraid to say it. I think that's how America's supposed to work. And if people don't think America works that way, too bad. I'm just going to keep speaking out. And so I 100% love the Trump's president. I agree with a bunch of stuff he's doing.

but giving in to these crazy corrupt union mafia people. Not what I would have done. I get it in the sense that A, there's a vibe shift where you want the union vote for the right, and B, he doesn't want a giant strike to deal with as he comes into office, so I respect that, and that's his decision. I wouldn't have done it in a way that attacked automation. I think that's silly.

Yeah, that's interesting.

With Epirus when it got started?

So the thing we were talking about earlier is... Basically, we realized that China was going to be an adversary, that this crazy guy is actually a communist who's coming in, that he's forcing his best and brightest to work on new ways to get us. And we said, okay, what does a war look like in the 21st century? What is the warfare going to have happen?

And you're going to have these massive numbers of drones is by far the best way to fight, and you're going to need ways to stop them. And so what are the most important weapons? Well, if you could have force fields, if you have the Star Trek shields, that's pretty freaking cool. And it turns out that in venture capital, there's two things, right?

In venture capital, there's what's the best talent in the world and what's possible now that wasn't possible before. We have access to the best talent. We're lucky to have that. So what's newly possible? Well, it turns out these chips are now fast enough to control power on small time scales to make our electronic warfare weapons work way better. So we said, okay, this is a really key area.

Because we know there's a new possibility here, let's prove it out. And it was really fun, because with about... $30, $40 million on our side, we're able to go to the desert and have a competition against guys who've raised and spent and given billions and billions by the government, tens of billions by the government for their stuff.

And when the hardened drones flew for the same size, same power, we shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away. Nine and a half times farther away than the guys who got billions of dollars of contracts. And it's because there's these new possibilities that they didn't know how to do. How was it developed? Where'd you guys develop this? El Segundo.

Nathan Mintz, Bill Maher, a bunch of guys, Andy Lowery, a bunch of really key guys on their team. And the DNA was a combination. We have the DNA from the Silicon Valley world, and we have the DNA from the electronic warfare world.

So there are some people who have worked at some of these other places, because there's just certain expertise that's been built up in America that no one else has that you need to build on what already exists and build on the kind of knowledge of how gallium nitrate can be worked with, as well as what's nearly possible. Is Leonidas an offensive weapon as well as a defensive weapon?

There's lots of ways. At its core, it's a defensive thing in a sense that you can have something protecting a city or a base or a squadron. But if you're going to be attacking the bad guys and you're going forward, you want to have these things. You want to have ways of stopping the drone and other attacks from getting you during an offensive.

Or, by the way, you want to just turn off the area you're attacking. Imagine if there's an area you're going after and all the electronics go dead. That's probably pretty useful right before an attack.

It's pretty crazy, right? It is. We used to think about this in terms of when I was a kid, you thought about the EMP from a nuke going off in the high atmosphere. That's actually a much more aggressive and scary version of these things. But this thing, that can only be used once. This thing could keep being used without hurting anyone at all. Could this take out a nuke mid-flight?

So it's frying electronics. So if you think about it for satellite defense, for example, which is not what we're doing right now, but it's just me talking out of my butt, so excuse me if I get something wrong. But my bias would be that if something's targeting a satellite, it needs to be adjusting its flight in order to hit it.