You were at Palantir 0409. We were also at PayPal and they categorized you as being part of the PayPal mafia second, you know. I'm 15 years younger than Peter. I'm 12 years younger in Elon. I was a junior kid that. I don't get any credit for PayPal. Well, you were still there. I was there learning for I was learning from these guys. And were you in meetings? Were you watching them? Were you there? and what was that like? What was Elon like in meetings? What was Peter like in meetings? What was that like? Give us some of the insight. I mean, I usually wasn't in meetings with Elon, be honest. But I mean, these guys were just very opinionated, very interested, very ambitious, very fast, no tolerance for things that are broken. You fix it right away. You know, you work through the problems. You get everything done today. You don't talk about what you're going to do next week. You just, you just move. You know, people would be there late at night fixing problems, you know, passionate about their work. What was the demo of the age? What would you say the averages? Would you say 25? These are a bunch of guys in their 20s mostly. In their 20s. Where you can, as you can be demanding of getting them to. Now, at the same time, was Elon and Peter also there driving, working with them? Yeah, in different contexts, right? Peter's more of the strategist, the philosopher, the thinker. He's not the one. He's not the technical guy himself. I think Elon is more of the operator.

He's more there in the room. I mean, I was in Palo Alto a couple weeks ago, right? And I was meeting a friend, and Elon was in the back doing engineering reviews at XAI. He's just there working, working work. He's kind of the more of the workhorse, just pushed through, solve the details of the technical problems. Was the level of intent, like who was the most intense guy at Apple?

The most intense. I mean, I think Elon's always been one of the very most intense people I've ever seen in terms of working, but there's other engineers who are just there all the time pushing hard, right? I think when you're in operation mode, guys like Max Leipch and others were just as far as I could tell, just always working.

Who were some of the guys that you worked with, that were maybe junior guys like you, that came out and became big stars as well? Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of the guys who were there, there were 16 different companies that were started after PayPal. that quickly became billion dollar companies right so and a lot of these guys were older

than me but it was the guys you know Chad and Steve who built YouTube it was Reid Hoffman

who built LinkedIn after PayPal, that quickly became billion-dollar companies, right? So, and a lot of these guys were older than me, but it was the guys, you know, Chad and Steve

who built YouTube.

It was Reid Hoffman who built LinkedIn.

It was obviously Elon did Tesla and SpaceX. I mean, you know, there's guys who built iron port. There's just, there's so many things that came out of there. Got it. And so from there, how did the opportunity to be a co-founder of a Palantir come up?

Well, I was working with Peter at his hedge fund.

And I was, you know, the hedge fund was a little bit disorganized. And I started bringing in my smartest friends to help. And there weren't really other managers there. So I'd helped start building things. And a bunch of my smartest friends I brought in one summer to help us. They, uh, they weren't interested in

finance. I thought it was boring. And so, and Peter and I had been talking a lot about, you know, at PayPal, we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money. And, uh, so we got to know all the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys. There was secret service in the FBI. And right after this happened, it was 9-11. And so these guys were

spending billions of dollars on stuff that we thought

didn't make any sense. And they kept asking us for advice. They're confused about how to do things. It was, it was, I mean, President Bush created what was called the Department of Homeland Security at the time. I shouldn't be too mean about it, but you know how it works in government is that when you create a new department,

people can't really fire people in government easily. So sometimes they'll have a lot of people they wanted to fire, and then instead they just pushed them into the new department. So it's a bit of a mess. Got it. Push them into new departments in your fire. So therefore the whole department didn't really know very well what it was doing at first was my impression. And they were spending money on just nonsense stuff and it became really obvious to us that Silicon Valley Google PayPal all

these things that were going on out there were just way ahead technically of where the government

was at that point and this was a problem because because the government was using all the government

was spending $38 billion a year gathering data looking at data, failing to stop the terrorists, but also

abusing our civil liberties. So it was a mess. So we said, you know what? There's actually a really

important problem here to solve. A, I'd like to stop the bad guys from attacking us again and

go get them instead. B, I don't want everyone in the government seeing all of my data without any

controls. That's crazy. The world moves fast. Your work day?

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