Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist

India’s tech ecosystem has hit an indisputable inflection point in recent years. For decades, American corporations outsourced basic services to India, while India outsourced its top talent to Silicon Valley. But today, India’s tech economy boasts homegrown software giants and a flourishing startup scene. This week, we get a front-row look into India’s startup evolution with one of its top talents...

Every year, more than 20,000 Americans receive a bone marrow transplant — a Nobel prize-winning procedure that saves many lives but also carries great risk. For leukemia patients, it's a choice of last resort, as nearly 20% die from the transplant. Ivan Dimov, co-founder & CEO of Orca Bio , and his team have created a novel cell therapy alternative that has already saved over 400 lives in clinical...

What are the forces behind the scenes that drive financial markets? How do bubbles form — and are we in one now? What do the world's best investors understand and how do they consistently come out ahead?  This week we dive into global finance with one of the sharpest minds in macro investing: Whitney Baker, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Totem Macro . Whitney previously worked at two of t...

U.S. e-commerce sales eclipsed $1 trillion last year and are expected to double or triple over the next decade. As online demand increases, how can small businesses compete with retail giants like Amazon and Walmart? What capabilities do they need? And can a new model help level the playing field?  This week, we explore the future of logistics and e-commerce with Tyler Scriven, co-founder and CEO...

Leonard Leo is one of the most effective agents of legal and cultural change in America today. What's his playbook?  How can we apply it to other broken areas of society?  And why should the technology world be especially interested in his work? In the mid-20th century, the U.S. judicial system took a sharp left turn, resulting in hyper-politicized courts, runaway bureaucracies, and many other dis...

What are the single most effective policies for helping the world's poor? And what are we doing right now that's ineffective and should be stopped? The answers may surprise you.  In his latest book " Best Things First ," Bjorn Lomborg reveals the 12 best solutions to address the most pressing global challenges. He gathered the world's top economists to analyze the policies that would do the most g...

By the summer of 2012, ride-sharing had arrived: Uber launched its everyman product, UberX, and Lyft debuted hot on its heels. Today, Lyft's market cap hovers around $5 billion while Uber's is north of $140 billion. How did Uber explode to global dominance? What was different about its culture? And how did it take on taxi cartels around the world and win?  This week, we go behind the scenes with E...

Can investigative journalism prevail over sensational clickbait? Is it time to give up on San Francisco? Is the First Amendment sufficient to prevent the government from colluding with, or forcing, Big Tech to censor speech? This week, join us for a one-of-a-kind conversation with Mike Solana, Chief Marketing Officer at Founders Fund and Founder of Pirate Wires , one of the fastest-growing and mos...

What is e/acc ( effective accelerationism ) and why is it going viral among tech's elite? Who are the leaders behind this movement and what are their ambitions?  This week, we explore e/acc with one of its pioneers,  Guillaume Verdon  (aka  @BasedBeffJezos ), a theoretical physicist at the cutting edge of quantum computing and AI.  Guillaume worked under Sergey Brin as the quantum deep learning le...

Who should be in charge of the culture of a company? How do you maintain a spirit of innovation as an organization scales? How can executives be transparent about their shortcomings while also improving as leaders? Scott Cook, the founder and former CEO of Intuit, has navigated these challenges himself while mentoring hundreds of other leaders on how to do the same. Scott is a legend of Silicon Va...

In the wake of October 7, the decadence and rot of our legacy universities have been on full display. We've seen feckless leadership from college presidents, moral cowardice from faculty, and, as a result, shocking displays of anti-Semitism unchallenged on campus. It's time to build anew.  That's why we founded the  University of Austin  — America's first new top university in almost a century. An...

The U.S. spends $280 billion annually on healthcare billing!  It's an irrationally complex and outdated system in which most claims are adjudicated manually, resulting in massive inefficiencies and bogus claim rejections. Why is it so broken? How do we fix it? And what would healthcare look like if it functioned properly?  That's what I discuss with Nick Perry and Doug Proctor, co-founder & CEO an...

Secret police groups, illegal bio labs, and large-scale influence operations — China is engaged in these activities inside the United States today. How should we respond? Is economic divorce the answer? And are we destined for conflict, or is there a path toward peace and mutual prosperity? We discuss these pressing issues with Rep. Mike Gallagher, Congressman for Wisconsin's 8th District and Chai...

Ten million students attend community college annually, but only 30% ever graduate!  It's a massive economic loss to students and society.  What if a new model could drastically increase completion rates while maintaining a high-quality education, and leave students with zero debt? That's what Tade Oyerinde is aiming to build with Campus , a new way to conduct community college.  His approach is t...

In the last generation, the U.S. technology sector created many of the most valuable companies in the world. Has Silicon Valley figured out a better way to build and scale a business? How did this cohort of outsiders — “geeks” — create cultures that continually redefine the limits of science and technology? And how can others, especially our government, learn from the very best organizations? Thes...

We've all seen the images — garbage patches twice the size of Texas accumulating in the Pacific Ocean. Yet nothing was being done, despite billions of dollars a year spent on environmental lawyers and bureaucrats. That is until a young engineer from Holland set out to do what bureaucrats couldn't — clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and stem the flow of plastic into the oceans. Boyan Slat is...

Will high interest rates and inflation be the norm for the foreseeable future? Are we living through a 1970s redux? How should investors navigate these uncertain times? We discuss the volatile financial markets with Jacob Miller, co-founder of Opto Investments [an 8VC Build company] and head of its Advisory Practice. Jacob studied economics and classics at the University of Chicago and cut his tee...

Nearly half of all Americans don't have investment accounts.  Financial literacy is the exception, not the norm, in most households.  Is it no wonder that so many young Americans distrust capitalism and misunderstand wealth creation?‍Brad Gerstner is stepping up with a solution: a legislative program called Invest America that would create an investment account seeded with $1,000 from the Treasury...

On the morning of October 7, Roni Eshel was stationed at a military base in Nahal Oz, not far from Gaza. The 19-year-old soldier was serving her second year of service in the Israel Defense Forces when Hamas stormed the base and set fire to the compound. Some soldiers escaped, some were killed, but Roni has not been found. Her family is desperately searching for her and fears the worst. Her uncle...

Bob McGrew is at the epicenter of the AI revolution.  As the VP of Research at OpenAI, he's instrumental in breakthroughs that are reshaping the world, from building GPT models and launching ChatGPT to overseeing the Dall-E project.  How was GPT-4 trained and what will GPT-5 look like? Why does ChatGPT respond with certain biases and how do they correct for that? What breakthrough led Bob to belie...

What's the best optimistic case for AI? Could AI actually save the world? What do the AI doomsayers get wrong?  We dive deep into the AI debate with Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, for a special conversation held during the 2023 University of Austin  Forbidden Courses . We explore Marc's  recent essay  and why he believes AI could improve productivity, reduce...

Over the past two decades, Palantir has prevented a large number of terrorist attacks, deployed the most advanced civil liberties data infrastructure throughout Western countries, and changed the course of history. Today, its technology is most evident on the battlefield in Ukraine, where its software has provided the Ukrainians a devastating advantage over Russian forces.  And now, Palantir is qu...

Eddie Margain quickly ascended the ranks as a Mexican entrepreneur but fled the country when the cartels threatened his family.  How does a nation lose its rule of law and does he see similar trends in America? Why was he inspired to build Austin FC and what did it take to bring the first professional sports team to the capital of Texas? I’m joined by best-selling author Ryan Holiday and we explor...

What are the three most important attributes of a successful salesperson? How do you identify talent capable of withstanding constant rejection? And how do you hire hundreds of salespeople while maintaining mission and culture? Discover how Ben Rubenstein scaled two startups to big exits, and why he believes resumes are largely meaningless for sourcing top sales talent. His first company, Yodle, t...

How did a high school dropout from Argentina build a multi-billion dollar web infrastructure company that supports many of the world's largest companies and brands? This is the story of Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel.  At an early age, Guillermo developed a passion for open-source projects and began building websites and products for clients around the world at only 13 years old. He dropped out of...