Palantir Co-Founder Reveals What's Actually Destroying America - Joe Lonsdale

Like if you're in a kindergarten, you probably don't want little Joe in the kindergarten going up and telling people hard truths. We don't need that in our kindergarten. I get that, but this is not kindergarten, man.

And we need to stop that form of feminization from being involved in running anything because it is just so dysfunctional. And by the way, that's cancel culture too, is the feminine thing too, right?

Social ostracization. I love women. I have five daughters. I love girls. I want them to be very powerful women. But you don't want that kind of feminine energy being allowed to run how you run society. It's dysfunctional.

It's happening in some areas and not others.

A lot of this again is tied to Marxists and socialists who are actively plotting to take over institutions. I think that's what they've done for the last 60 years. There's the very famous march through the institutions. A lot of people thought this was conspiracy theory when I first heard about it, but it's very clear they've done this very successfully. And you could think of it almost like a virus. In this case, I think the virus has learned to hide itself because anytime it's actually speaking out in too obvious of a way, it starts to get stamped out. So a lot of the people who run all of these conquered institutions haven't changed. The people in charge of the sociology department at Yale and the education school at Stanford are still goddamn socialists who hate businesses and are bad for our civilization, but they've learned not to say certain things. They've learned not to very publicly say we shouldn't have advanced math anymore, which is what the education department at Stanford was doing. They're going around getting rid of advanced math for equity purposes. Getting paid tons of money for it. It's crazy. So here's the problem with the intuition. A lot of people say, 'Oh, I'm not hearing this stuff anymore. It must be gone.' It's not gone. It's going to come out again as soon as they feel like they're safe. But right now they're hiding, and I think it's hiding everywhere. So we shouldn't fool ourselves. We probably live in similar information environments. We all have our own information bubbles. We're seeing things on X where they agree with us. In America our president agrees with us. Probably in the UAE the culture is very similar. I had a bunch of guys from UAE visiting this week. I was teasing a guy about getting into shape and it's like totally okay, nobody cares. Whereas in America you get in big trouble.

You know, there's an idea we talked about for a long time. It's been very clear for a long time that universities have been going this way. If you believe maybe the British Empire wasn't all bad and there were some good things and some bad things, but some stuff was really helpful for the world, you cannot get hired in any history department in a top 100 school right now. If you have a strong view that markets are really powerful things for society and have helped western civilization, you probably could still get into an economics department but probably not a sociology department, probably not an anthropology department. You've got to hide those views if you want to be hired at the top levels of academia. So we've been watching this for a long time and we've all been really busy and things went really crazy with the George Floyd, BLM, and all the woke stuff in 2020. We can go back and look at what people said. Everyone pretends it didn't happen but it was really crazy. It was freaking out of this world. You couldn't even say that people born as men shouldn't be in girls' sports. There's all sorts of crazy stuff. That Tulsi Gabbard guy running for Senate, the craziest things he said back then trying to pretend he didn't do it. And he tries to justify it all with the Bible which makes it all worse. So these things were really crazy and it had gotten to a point where you couldn't ignore anymore how conquered all these places were. Niall Ferguson has been a friend for a long time. He's one of the world's greatest historians. Very thoughtful man who's written tons of books but he also advises people in the real world because he understands the world so well. So a lot of top people in global finance pay for his advice. We've been chatting about this and he got to the point where he was noticing anyone smart or competent couldn't get jobs in history departments anymore. The average IQ has just gone way down because you have to be dumb enough to go along with ideas that are not true. And then Bari Weiss, I've known her for quite a while. I was one of the first big investors in The Free Press. When we first got connected we were both aligned that our civilization needs to rebuild its institutions. You can't just go on the board of Yale and fix it. Yale is done for a generation, but we need a new Yale, we need a new Harvard. She was doing this in the media which I really admire. She had millions of listeners. And so the three of us got together, we had a couple others who were involved, and these things are hard to build but it's gone really well.

I love it. I love it. I want the students and our leaders in our society to have intellectual courage, to have the foundations of the intellectual traditions of the West, and to be able to debate and understand and explain those. But then we also have to have really strong STEM. We're building a STEM building next to Elon's buildings out near Bastrop, next to the Boring Company and SpaceX. We have robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. Right now one of my top former Palantir friends who built Palantir with me is teaching an agent programming course, teaching how to use AI in programming. It's cool, we have all sorts of good stuff out there.

Oh, always. There's always something like this. Our adversaries want to do things against us. Iran has crazy information plots and China has crazy information plots, but a lot of the problem is when you're too successful, you get soft. This is a theme throughout history. One of my favorite books that princes always used to read in Europe for a thousand years was the Cyropaedia about Cyrus the Great, a really great Persian leader. Ironically I really admire the Persian people and the Persian leaders, even though the current ones are bad guys. I don't think they represent their people very well. I really admire Cyrus and I'm hoping we can get good Persians in charge again. One of the big things he was really good at is eschewing luxury for himself, sleeping outside with the troops. This is a recurring theme in our history: luxury weakens you and softens you and makes you get screwed up. And that's definitely a challenge all of us face and have to be aware of. I'm not saying I'm as tough as my great-grandparents who fought in both world wars. Those guys were tougher than me. I wish I was as tough as them. But we still have to do our best even though we have this luxury that does weaken us. You forget why you're here in the first place and why you've had the success. It always happens.

There's all these frameworks that are pretty useful. One of my favorite historians is Carroll Quigley who wrote The Evolution of Civilizations. He plots the different stages civilizations go through in terms of this mixing of different cultural forces and new ideas and how they expand. What almost always happens is the forces that helped you grow really fast and were necessary to be functional become special interests and then start doing things for themselves, taking things for themselves versus for the growth of the empire as a whole. That always leads to bureaucratic sclerosis and decay, and at the end of the cycle they get invaded and wiped out. First of all you have to look out for those special interests. I think probably the worst types are government unions because we needed government workers and competent government, but then these people only exist for their own sake and they're incompetent. I was just in DC with my friends. There's an agency — I can see which one it is — they have over 5,000 programmers in this department. It's a very big thing for the United States. And they noticed that not very many seem to be doing anything, but they're not allowed to fire them. So they gave a really good retirement offer and 2,000 took it. So now there's over 3,000 left. My friend says, 'I'm not allowed to test them right now, it's against union rules, thanks to Democrats. Can't test them for hiring or firing, but you can test them for a reorg.' So he got the most basic programming test — something anyone in Silicon Valley in their first year would easily pass 100%. He did it himself three times to make sure it was easy. Then he said, 'We're going to test all 3,000 plus people for the most basic skills and see if anyone gets 70% on this thing that is super easy.' How many out of the 3,000 plus do you think? 68. Sixty-eight. And he's not allowed to fire these people. Then there's 40 DevOps people and they want to hire 10 more. He says, 'Why do we need 10 more? I don't even know if I need more than five of you. Let's get on Zoom and each say what we're doing.' He gets them on — there's 40 people on the Zoom. Only three of them would come off mute to say what they were doing. This is the Democratic base in DC. They literally will not speak because they know they're not doing anything. And despite that, he cannot fire them. Then when he tries to fire one of them who's doing really crazy stuff, people in the agency are protecting him and stopping the firing. So our society has much worse special interests. Government unions are probably the worst, and teachers unions are a version of that. But you have other special interests too. Corporations that have changed the law for crony capitalism, blocking others from their business and overcharging us. Healthcare is one of the worst. So we have to talk about them and be willing to fight them. For me, a lot of what I do with the Cicero Institute is we say we need courage from our leaders to identify special interests — corporations working with government in sketchy ways, government unions that are not getting things done, NGOs that are getting funded for hundreds of billions with very little outcomes. You've got to make them accountable. You've got to say, 'If we're paying you this much, we should pay based on outcomes.' Or if we need to fire people who aren't even getting off the Zoom to say what they do. The White House is working very hard on this under the Office of Personnel Management to make it legal again to fire people with a process. It takes courage, it takes hard work, and it takes overcoming unfortunately the politicians that are bought off. A huge part of the Democratic Party is completely bought off and will not ever want to let you fire these people, which is crazy.

To change the law which was made in the 70s by the Democrats for the civil service, you need 60 votes in the Senate. And we don't have 60 votes in the Senate, so we can't actually change the full law. But we are making a bunch of changes, trying to eliminate a bunch of things DC is doing, using executive orders, using what we can within current law, trying to go back to the courts. A lot of the theories are that the Constitution was set up so the executive should be able to get rid of people who are incompetent and not doing things, and the legislature shouldn't be able to stop the president from doing that. So we're going to have to fight this fight in the courts as well. We are having these fights. We are doing it. It's slow. It's hard. It's like a very weird legal battle. It's like Harry Potter where the wizards fight. This is like the legal wizards fighting back and forth. It's not supposed to say that. [laughter] So whatever, man. That's what it is.

There's good ones. I don't know, man. [laughter] I guess I'm allowed to. It's DC for you. It's terrible. I got to stay out of that place.

Yeah, how things are set up basically — it's structurally set up for two parties unfortunately. Whereas in some other parliamentary systems, multiple parties share power in different ways.

What are a couple examples of main things? Actually, I'm curious.

That's a fascinating one. I'm definitely on your side where I think in the 1970s when we went off the gold standard, there was something that overfinancialized and probably hurt the average person. You can very clearly see that in the data. It probably put too much power into finance. I wasn't born with a finance genius or anything. I've built a lot of things in finance because you can, and I think it's the right thing to do as someone trying to build things in the world. It has been an advantage for some things in the US. I totally agree with you. Changing the Fed is really really hard. I'm not even sure where you'd start. Other than Ron Paul or something. He's the only one who's ever put legislation forward. He knows he can never get it done. I think you need the Fed if you're going to be running deficits, which I don't want to be doing, but if you are, you need it. And you need the Fed if you're going to be fighting wars, which I don't want to fight a lot of, but in some cases like World War II, a really important existential war, you probably need it. But to get rid of that, we've got to get rid of deficits. So the effort there — Ronald Reagan actually tried this in the 80s. If you can get enough states to agree to something, you can create a new constitutional amendment. We need like 37, but you can get to 33, and then there has to be a convention. He only ever got to 31 and then it went back down. Now there's a bunch of guys trying it again. I actually had Governor Sununu here and Governor Stitt from Oklahoma, the old New Hampshire guy, and they're working with DeSantis and the Florida governor. They're trying to get enough signatures to do the balanced budget amendment. The way it would work is if you're in deficit, you can't increase spending the next year — you have to wait until revenue catches up, which would be awesome. So we're back to about 30 states. If we get a few more we could do that. I'm donating to these efforts. It's unfortunate because democracy is a sort of thing where everyone wants to vote for more spending for themselves and their friends. So the way I think about it — I'm big on turning off NGO spending and making it accountable so you can't just waste it. We're getting a lot done. The Cicero Institute by the way got 87 laws passed last year.

So, the Cicero Institute is a policy group that I founded over 10 years ago with my wife's help and a bunch of friends. We have a lot of really smart minds there — people who have run things in government, people who have run things in the private sector who understand how governments work and want to fix them. We're trying to apply the principles and values of our civilization to fix problems. The biggest thing is that nothing government does tends to have any kind of accountability or incentives. It's just a mess. An example I love to give: if you want to fund vocational education to help more people get skills to get jobs — I think it's a very good thing overall, good for people to learn how to make $100,000 a year being an advanced electrician or technical manufacturer. We need to hire more of them for my companies. But the problem is if you just give money as a government to a school, the school could be run by a woke idiot and just not do anything useful. So what you should do is say in Texas we have 27 high-end vocational schools, and we're going to give you money in proportion to your outcomes. And when you choose an outcome, you have to choose something they can't game. If you say graduation rate, they'll just graduate everyone. So our outcomes for this in Texas: we say we're going to look at the average salary coming out of your school, and we'll fund more if it's higher. And then how does the school respond? They say, 'What skills do we teach? What businesses do we partner with?' And guess what — the salaries go way up because they figure it out, because that's their incentive. Everything is like this in government — prison system, probation, parole. What should the incentives be? I don't care if you're on the left or right. You want people who are not going to commit crimes when they come out. You want them to be employed when they come out, not go back to prison. These are good incentives. We should have metrics. We should fund things around this. We should make them compete. We should try to fix the cultures by having rewards for success. Right now that's not how America works in these areas, but we're pushing it that way. We're getting a lot done. And by the way, a ton of Democrats vote for our stuff too because they agree it works. So it's nonpartisan.

Because the far left has the wrong incentives. The moderate left, if it's just a typical smart person who identifies more with some of the values for whatever reason, they'll be like, 'Yeah Joe, I love that stuff, let's do it together.' Whereas the far left is tied to special interests, and special interests in our country are very strongly...

In California it's about a third of the power. In California you've got three parties that are about equal — the Republicans, the moderate Democrats, and then the progressive union left. It's a third, a third, a third. Here it's much smaller. We keep them out of Texas. We ban abortion and stuff, makes them not come here. [laughter] Actually, partially true. But in California, they're a very powerful interest. If you work for the government of California — there's over two million people who do — you have to give money basically to the union, and then that union is just funding things on the far left. So they're automatically each year getting hundreds of millions of dollars to influence society, and they've locked it in. San Francisco — a billion dollars goes to NGOs for homelessness issues. A billion dollars. And who do you think makes all the money? It's like over $100,000 per homeless person. It's crazy. But a lot of that is just funding the far left and their friends. It's like a massive grift apparatus where they all have jobs, they all get a bunch of money, and they all run the get-out-the-vote operations for the far left. That's why it's so hard to fix things — they have just infinite money and people they've funded as their apparatus. I think it's evil, frankly. I think it's this thing you have to destroy. We have to wake up and fight against it. And so there's nothing like that on the right. Everyone likes to say, 'Well Joe, there's equal things on the right and left.' No. The right has things they do that I disagree with that are bad, but there's nothing like this massive grift machine anywhere on the far right. The far left has this super giant massive grift machine with tons of people a part of it. It makes them very powerful.

You know, I think there's a lot of cronyism in all parts of our society. I don't think you can fight all of it at once because I always try to teach my younger friends — I think of myself as a 14-year-old, I just want to pick up the sword and go fight all the bad guys at the same time. But imagine you're the king of a city-state a thousand years ago and there's like 50 city-states around you and 30 of them are really bad. Should you go attack all of them at once, or should you have another strategy? [laughter] Maybe we work with some people, fight the one bad one at a time, get rid of it, then fight the next one. So it's interesting because it's not a good thing for me to go fight all of them at once and talk about all of it at once. I'll give you a couple examples without getting myself in too much trouble. One example: I do think pharma companies — overall it's good, we need for-profit incentives to make therapeutics, but I think some of them are too strong and they lobby to keep their patents too long. They're a big donor to both sides, but especially to the right. And they do things that keep prices too high. So I think we should push back on them. I think it's a dangerous special interest. I think the military-industrial complex, which I've been at war with in a lot of my new things, is a very broken special interest in many cases. Defense spending in general — some of it is really good because it's terrifying our adversaries and deterring war. Some of it is a jobs program. If we have a base in a rural red state that is not doing advanced tech but is employing tons of people, that's not scaring China. That's just spending tons of money for the red state. So there are things like that which politically — I can't even touch that. You've got to figure out which ones are the worst things to go after first. But I think it is our duty to call out our own side, and I think some of that spending is just unnecessary.

I'm very optimistic. I'm very optimistic for a few things. One, I love that I see the principles and the pride of our civilization coming back with a lot of the young generation. I think a lot of people are learning these things again. A lot of people are openly talking about why America is great. You have to be proud of your country and feel a special patriotism in order to sustain these values and bring them to the next generation. I've seen that patriotism go to a really low level and now I really see it coming back. So I love that. I love that we're just completely dominating economically. If you look at the productivity growth we're seeing, the building, there's crazy demand. Anyone who wants a job right now, who is willing to work and be responsible, can get the training to do high-end vocational work and be paid $100, $150,000 a year and just crush it right now. Everyone who wants to can get a job. And by the way, politicians aren't allowed to say this because it really pisses people off. You know, you're supposed to say, 'Oh, it's the Indian guy's fault that you don't have a job' or 'the billionaire's fault.' Especially the billionaire's fault. I've hired tens of thousands of people, but I guess it's my fault too. No. Whenever someone says, 'Oh, people can't get jobs,' ask about their situation. They say, 'Well, I have a job. I'm angry for other people.' Okay, I'd love to talk to someone who can't get a job and let's work through it and figure out what skills they need to learn. I have so many people trying to hire for so many skilled things that we can't find anyone. America's going to crush it economically. We're going to be patriotic. And I'm optimistic that we can embrace our values and go back in the right direction.

Well, we have our podcast, American Optimist, and I have my obnoxious views on Twitter at @JTLonsdale. [laughter] I'm not supposed to call it that. Listen man, I really appreciate you having me on.