Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

For today's episode, I'm continuing the Realignment's live coverage from the Reagan Defense Forum last weekend following up on

yesterday's episode with the CEO of Palantier.

Today I'm focused on a conversation with Joe Lonsdale.

Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantier, and today he is a managing partner at 8 BC here in Austin, Texas.

And of course he's done a lot of really great interesting writing and podcasting on these big issues, not just defense but other topics as well too that fit into this building and addressing problems we see in our world, in our country.

So I recommend folks who enjoy Joe's takes on these issues that they go to blog.

Joe Lonsville.com, I'll link that in the show notes and the description as well.

Hope you all enjoy this conversation.

We had a bunch of different areas, but to sum up we're focusing on defense tech and how VCs could play a role in shaping the ecosystem and addressing the challenges we face.

Huge thank you to the Foundation for recognition for supporting the work for this

podcast and specifically our work at the Reagan Forum last weekend.

Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the realignment.

We're out at the R&DF this year.

Thanks for having me, Marshall. Okay, so these episodes are snappy. So let's just kind of get to it.

You would a really great piece at your blog, which I've specifically told to call out because you often fail

to mention these during the podcast appearances for accountability purposes so

you wrote a great blog piece linked in the show notes talking about the responsibilities that defense

VCs have. I'd love you just to like open with that framing.

Yeah, well you know this area is really important to me. Really proud to be here.

We see Palantiers in the top of the billing now.

If we used to be like the little kids trying to break our way

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