

Rob Slaughter
196 posts

@RobCSlaughter
CEO & founder Defense Unicorns 🦄 @usairforce dropout





The Iran strikes make the Anthropic fight and that 5:01pm Fri deadline make a lot more sense The Pentagon wasn’t arguing about hypothetical use cases. They needed unrestricted AI access for an operation they were launching THAT SAME NIGHT Friday: Ban Anthropic. Sign OpenAI. Secure classified AI access. Saturday: Bombs falling on Tehran. Two aircraft carriers. Dozens of strike aircraft. Weeks of military buildup. They weren’t debating the future of AI in warfare. They were fully preparing to use it


From intern to billionaire, leaving California for Texas, homeschooling, mass deportations and feminism, I sat down with @JTLonsdale and Tayler Lonsdale for a wide-ranging conversation. 0:00 – Introduction 1:49 – Journey to Homeschooling 4:11 – Forming a Learning Pod 7:23 – Interning at PayPal 8:30 – Founding Palantir 9:33 – How Joe and Tayler Met 10:54 – Working in China 13:03 – Being an Outspoken GOP Donor 14:21 – Supporting President Trump 15:12 – Speaking Out on X 16:13 – Primary News Sources 16:42 – Creating New Forms of Media 18:00 – Moving Out of California 20:44 – California’s Proposed Billionaire Tax 21:37 – Opinion on Zohran Mamdani 22:25 – Founding Addepar 23:07 – Most Successful Investment 23:49 – Greatest Business Failures 24:15 – The Keys to Success 25:45 – Palmer Luckey 26:53 – Peter Thiel 28:07 – Alex Karp 29:03 – Elon Musk 29:40 – Raising Six Children 31:39 – The Importance of Parenthood 34:05 – Why Today’s Culture Is Anti-Family 37:04 – Opinion on Feminism 37:49 – Creation of the University of Austin (UATX) 40:11 – Left-Wing Political Violence 41:03 – Response to UATX 42:48 – 10-Year Vision for UATX 43:15 – Importance of Value-Laden Education 45:08 – Would You Rather Questions 47:45 – Believable Conspiracy Theory 49:12 – Should Palantir Continue to Work with ICE 50:02 – Opinion on Mass Deportations 50:35 – A Non-Guilty Splurge 52:22 – Workout Routine 52:31 – A Hill Willing to Die On 53:33 – Is Gentle Parenting Good 56:40 – Virtue-Signaling Billionaires 58:36 – Most Luxurious Date 59:06 – What Keeps You Up at Night 59:51 – Supporting Political Causes 1:00:55 – Dream Dinner Party Guests

John: @ssankar told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palantir. They built a piece of software. He goes to deliver it, and the machine that they tried to install it on had like 1MB of RAM or something, and so it just couldn't run the software. @DefenseUnicorns CEO @RobCSlaughter: "In these military systems, if you want to do a software update, you effectively have to update the hardware." "That's why the hardware is so out of date, because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver, didn't deliver. So you're stuck with the legacy system." "That happens two or three times, and before you know it, people are still stuck on Windows 95."



cto started coding the second we got to the gate








Vehemently disagree Having kids is very hard, and starting companies is very hard. Yes it forces tough prioritization and tradeoffs, but that's life. I'm a better leader after kids, and I'm a better Father after starting Anduril. Lean in, just do it!