How To Win The War Of The Future - Joe Lonsdale - #934
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2025
⏱️ 96 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You mentioned you'd just been with Peter that I was explaining an idea from a friend earlier on, |
| 0:04.6 | George. He talks about non-fundable people, like N-of-Wans. Mike Isratel, good non-fungible person. |
| 0:10.8 | Yes. Who is some of the most non-fungible people that you've met across here? |
| 0:14.7 | I mean, of course, you know, you have to go with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also people early in my life, my original chess teacher, |
| 0:21.0 | Richard Sherman, he passed a few years ago, but he was like an intelligence officer and he dropped |
| 0:25.6 | out. I think he faked his own death and he was kind of living in poverty, teaching chess, |
| 0:29.8 | and was like this chess master's sense who taught me Eastern philosophy. So I've had some interesting |
| 0:33.6 | crazy people I met over the years, you know, who I've really shaped my life. Talk to me about the story of how you saw Peter out as a mentor. |
| 0:41.2 | Well, Peter was the founder of the Stanford Review, and he was just someone who I thought |
| 0:46.3 | was just a fascinating intellectual character at the time. And, you know, honestly, what it was |
| 0:51.1 | also is tracking talent. And so I think that's something I've always been |
| 0:54.3 | interested in is what are the most interesting brightest harsh working people doing. And a lot of the |
| 0:58.7 | smartest people at Stanford when I was there were going to work at PayPal. And these are people I was |
| 1:02.2 | really impressed by. So I said, wow, this is really interesting. I want to get to know this group. I want |
| 1:05.7 | to learn from them too. And I mean, 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 would come out of it, like LinkedIn and YouTube and, you know, 16 others. |
| 1:16.1 | But I did know as a lot of brightest people and I wanted to learn from them. |
| 1:19.6 | And, you know, I had a very strong interest not only in computer science, but in economics, in history, and philosophy, which is all stuff that Peter's very interested in. So when we did meet, you know, through the Stanford review, I think you got along intellectually. |
| 1:33.0 | How do you come to think about identifying people with that talent and that drive? |
| 1:39.2 | It was something that helped you before you were successful. |
| 1:42.3 | And it's obviously something that you need to do now. You need assess founders you need to assess businesses uh yeah how everybody can pretend to not |
| 1:49.8 | be a psychopath for 30 minutes well it's interesting it's interesting because you said earlier where |
| 1:54.2 | we're off i'm not going to say you were saying it about but you know anyone who like there's the one |
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