How To Win The War Of The Future - Joe Lonsdale - #934

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You mentioned you had just been with Peter Thiel. I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, George. He talks about non-fungible people, like N of 1s, Mike Isretel, good non-fungible person. Who is some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across?

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:14)
I mean, of course, you have to go with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life. My original chess teacher, Richard Sherman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like a intelligence officer and he dropped out. I think he faked his own death and he was living in poverty, teaching chess and was like this chess master sensei who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting, crazy people I've met over the years, you know, who really shaped my life.

**Chris Williamson** (0:37)
Talk to me about the story of how you saw Peter out as a mentor.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:41)
Well, Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review, and he was just someone who I thought was just a fascinating intellectual character at the time. Honestly, what it was also is tracking talent. So I think that's something I've always been interested in, is what are the most interesting, brightest, harsh working people doing, and a lot of the smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal. These are people I was really impressed by. So I said, well, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want to learn from them too. I didn't know at the time, of course, that it was going to be Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and who they are today, and that all these companies will come out of it like LinkedIn and Yelp and YouTube and 16 others. But I did know there's a lot of brightest people and I wanted to learn from them.
I had a very strong interest not only in computer science, but in economics, in history, in philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter is very interested in. So when we did meet through the Stanford Review, I think you got along intellectually.

**Chris Williamson** (1:33)
How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? It was something that helped you before you were successful, and it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need to assess founders, you need to assess businesses. Yeah. Everybody can pretend to not be a psychopath for 30 minutes.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:51)
Well, it's interesting because you said earlier, I'm not going to say who you were saying it about, but anyone who is the one guy we both know who's done a lot of drugs, and he's still pretty sane and functional, and that's really impressive, right? It's extreme. And so similarly, when you get people who are really, really bright, really off the charts, minds working great, most of those people are crazy. Most of those people are not functional in the real world, but crazy means lots of things, but not able to keep themselves functional in the real world because they're just too off the charts and too wacky. Maybe it's like extreme autism, maybe it's something else. But when you have people who are just off the charts and able to function in the real world, it's actually a pretty small subset.
I think it's a different type of person. It's like a certain type of ambition, a certain type of way of functioning. I'm not saying that these are necessarily the most social, genius, normal people, but they're still able to function with that kind of intellect and that's a good combination.

**Chris Williamson** (2:44)
What is the advantage of being able to function in the real world? I think there's a lot of glory placed on the reclusive madman genius working away in the back room on his own.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:55)
I think no value judgment, everyone can have different ways of impacting the world and doing amazing things.
To me, to do the things that impact the future of civilization, to build the stuff that's really hard to build, whether it's SpaceX or Palantir, which broke through these things in government, whether it's something that changes how nuclear power works or healthcare education. Those have to be people who can assemble lots of talent together and can work with the systems around our civilization. That requires working in the real world to really build a lot of types of things.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
Right. You're never going to be able to necessarily be a team leader if you don't have those people skills, skill sets. You might be able to be one of the leaders within the team or one of the leads, the tech lead or whatever it might be. I guess you're going to be pulled up in front of fucking Congress or some board, and you're going to have to defend yourself. And if you're in there blinking too hard, it's just not going to look right.