Joe Lonsdale

There's these really sketchy NGOs and it probably shouldn't be illegal to run one of them in the red state, but at the very least, if you get any money from government, you should have to be way more transparent on your outcomes, way more transparent on everything you're doing. Because a lot of these things are just actually lobbying groups for the extremes.

Do you think any blue states will start to adopt this? I think so. And this is one of those things, is you have to first do it somewhere and prove it works. And then it becomes clear that the moderates are going to do it and the blue state to fix it as well. So I think that is the fight. I have a lot of friends who are moderate Democrats in SF, and they're fighting hard against the far left.

That's the battle. It's the moderates against the far left. And I think the moderates are going to win, and they're going to start putting in these accountability, putting in these incentives. defunding the stuff that's corrupt. That's what we have to do to fix our cities. I'm bullish it's going to happen.

It's a really tough battle because there's so much money for these extremists in our country right now. In California, there's over 2 million people working for the government. They all have to give a piece of their paycheck to the government unions who then are part of funding this whole complex.

So there's a lot of corruption in our country and there's a lot of money going towards the wrong things. But you know what? I think, like I said, there's a vibe shift. It's a vibe shift away from the bureaucracy, away from the cowards, away from the people who are acting based on guilt. And it's going towards greatness, going towards courage. going towards kind of like a positive ambition.

So I think we're going the right way.

Yeah, and that's really similar in some ways to the vocational thing we talked about. Obviously, they're different systems, but think about it. If you're running a probation system, if you're running a prison system, Whether or not you're on the right or the left, there's certain things we want to have happen.

We don't want people to have to go back to prison, but we want people to succeed and not commit a crime, right? If someone's going to come out of prison, you want them to have a job, right? You want them to be employed. So what do you do? You want to create incentives in the system for the people running it to hit certain goals, to have more people come out and be employed.

And it turns out there's lots of programs that work to make people more likely to be employed, and there's lots of programs that don't. And in fact, right now, most of our prisons, they're terrible cultures. The guards hate the prisoners, the prisoners hate the guards. It's run badly. There's exceptions to this, but most of them run really badly, and there's bad leadership.

And I mean, you can't automatically create good leadership, but you can replace bad leadership. You can incentivize good leadership. None of our states do this pretty much right now. So it's just stuff like that that we're trying to work with the governors and work with the legislators and like, let's just make these systems work better for society, you know? Am I missing anything with this?

Well, you have to have really great people around you who are in charge of each of the organizations. Somehow Elon stays as CEO. I don't know. I think he's an alien. He's great. He's a genius. But for me, I can't be in charge of all these things at once, nor would I be as good at it if I was trying to do all of them. It doesn't make any sense. So you get someone who's better than you at it.

And I work as usually a chairman with them or as a co-founder with them. and we partner together. The more you can surround yourself with attracting more and more great people who come and want to work with you, who are inspired by stuff you're doing and want to be part of it, the more advantage you have. It does kind of snowball the advantage. You just try to find and get really great people.

We don't always get things right. Lots of our things screw up. There's lots of mistakes you've got to iterate. It's not like we're not infallible. We're making mistakes all the time, but you've just got to do your best to push in the right direction. Do you want to talk about any of those mistakes? Anything big that you've learned from them? Oh, goodness. There's everywhere.

I mean, there's just a general thing. For me, you asked how I do it all at once. I think when I was younger, I thought I could be in charge of a lot of things at once. And if you're in charge of too much at once, then a lot of it starts to break at once, and then you're really screwed. So my new rule right now is I'm only responsible for the failure of one thing at a time.

I'm going to take that advice. It's important, because especially once you start to have your success, it's happened to all my friends who've been really successful, is that all of a sudden you try to do a lot at once, because you're like, I can do that thing, I can do these five things. And it turns out, no, actually, now you're totally screwed.

So you really want to have other people who are each responsible for whatever's going on. You want to have teams that are great, that are responsible. By the way, they have to own a piece of it, too. This is why nonprofits are really hard for me. Because I get a lot more for-profits because I'm for-profit. The people there, they own a big piece of it. They're going to sleep thinking about it.

They're waking up thinking about it. Equity works really, really well. You give people real upside and things and then they own them.

We have a pretty big talent network. We spend a lot of time on this. We have fellows and people we nurture and take relationships with at about 20 different universities. We have people on our team who spend a lot of time figuring out where is the top talent right now, making sure we're helpful to them, make sure we get to know them, be in the right circles. But I'm still figuring it out.

It's one of the reasons I'm happy to be on here. Maybe some smart person will hear about it and want to come work with us.

I think some of the, I mean, obviously defense stuff's really exciting. I think some of the bio stuff for me is really important because it's cool because it's saving lives. Defense does save lives too, but there's almost nothing that feels more pure than when you build a therapeutic company that's actually treating and saving lives where you invest in one of these things.