Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies
Why the World Needs Palantir | Dave Rubin & Joe Lonsdale
Dave Rubin and Joe Lonsdale discuss the evolution of Palantir, exploring how advanced data analytics protect civil liberties while identifying global threats and government fraud.
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Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur, investor & philanthropist. He has been a part of founding more than a dozen mission-driven companies, including Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Epirus, Resilience Bio, and 8VC.
Timestamps
00:00 Palantir Origins and PayPal DNA
02:06 AI Integration and Hard Problems
02:47 Protecting Civil Liberties
04:29...
About Joseph Lonsdale
Joseph Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and managing partner at 8VC, has been active in media discussing AI, defense technology, and government reform. He described AI as compressing decades of progress into a few years, citing advances in aviation and hydrogen fuel cells as examples. Lonsdale expressed optimism about the U.S. leading in AI and cyber capabilities relative to China, and argued that the current technological wave could help dismantle bureaucratic inefficiencies. He also commented on the SpaceX IPO, calling it a "critical company in the middle of the biggest industrial revolution ever" and supporting retail investor access. Lonsdale has also focused on defense and fraud detection. He discussed 8VC's investment in Terra Industries, a defense startup in Nigeria, and argued that affordable autonomous drones and directed-energy weapons represent the future of warfare. He stated that Palantir's technology is being used to identify government fraud, particularly in healthcare entitlements, and praised efforts by officials like Kelly Loeffler at the SBA. Lonsdale criticized what he described as a "massive grift machine" on the far left and called for more competent leadership in federal agencies.
Transcript (28 segments)
I
Interviewer0:00
All right. So, since you brought up Palantir there, one of the things that you said to me about Palantir last time was that in some ways the success of what Palantir and companies like it accomplishes is that people think we don't need it because there are things that you guys are doing to stop certain levels of terror attacks, and then we don't hear about it. So, everyone's like, 'Oh, everything's fine.' However, under the hood a whole bunch of stuff happened.
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:17
Oh yeah, when you stop a lot of terror attacks...
I
Interviewer0:19
...like that and then we don't hear about it. So, everyone's like, 'Oh, everything's fine.' However, under the hood a whole bunch of stuff happened.
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:25
Oh yeah.
I
Interviewer0:26
So, once again, what is Palantir?
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:30
It feels like two separate tasks.
I
Interviewer0:32
Because you gave me two separate...
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:33
Stopping terror attacks.
I
Interviewer0:34
Yeah.
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:35
Actually, interestingly, the DNA of Palantir came out of the anti-fraud work at PayPal. The Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing massive amounts of money from PayPal. I think it got to like 7 or 8 million a month back when that was a lot of money.
I
Interviewer0:48
It's still... I mean, it's still [laughter] even whatever, even maybe it's an accounting error now, but you know...
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:51
But that used to be enough to destroy all the competitors to PayPal basically, because if you opened it up enough that anyone could send money in still from really easily, then that wouldn't work if you tried to ask them for more information, no one would use it. So, it was a really hard problem and they figured out how to build all these investigative tools at PayPal. I was an intern there. I get no credit for PayPal, but I learned from this area. And then we partnered with my roommate Stephen, who I'm going to see down here in Florida, and Peter Thiel, and then brought Alex, and we built this thing and we applied it after 9/11 to the government. The idea was how do we build platforms that solve the really hard problems to allow you to use all the data the government gathers. It was almost 40 billion dollars a year being spent to gather data then, but they couldn't use the data. They weren't allowed to see things. If they'd had Palantir, it would have been very easy to stop 9/11. That was the whole point. And the goal was to build it to catch all the terrorists.
I
Interviewer1:40
Because in essence you guys are looking at all of the patterns and communications...
J
Joseph Lonsdale1:45
...just allowing people who might not have a computer science degree themselves, who might work for one of the parts of the government. There's like a million analysts in the government in different parts of the CIA, NCTC, FBI, NSA, and the DIA. There's all these places where people's job is to look at data and stop the bad guys. And they didn't have the right tools, they didn't have the right permissions. So, how do you build the best possible technology for them to do that? And it turns out we had to solve a lot of very hard technical problems to do that. And then a lot of problems we solved that built these ontologies and made many information work together, it actually made it so you can apply AI very easily on top of the data. So, Palantir was in a really strong position. You could say it's lucky as well, had a lot of talent, but it was lucky that when AI came along, it was able to then take that and help companies, help governments use this new AI stuff.
I
Interviewer2:30
How do you... I asked Peter the same thing when he sat in the chair, but how do you balance your libertarianish ideas with working with the government when it comes to data and people's privacy?
J
Joseph Lonsdale2:42
So, I think a lot of people don't realize that Palantir was founded as a civil libertarian company. Palantir was replacing systems that were just taking all the data and letting anyone access whatever they wanted. So, if you say without Palantir, what was there before us, it was these systems without tracking. They weren't tracking things, didn't have audit trails, couldn't watch the watchers, didn't have really clear rules about who's allowed to see what, weren't enforcing the law. And Palantir was a way to bring everything in to enforce the law and to make sure you're only allowed to see what you're allowed to see. And the law changes, Palantir changes what you can see. More sophisticated technology actually enforces civil liberties. People don't get this. We actually had a civil liberties group in the company that we launched in like 2006, 2007. And we were explaining how we're going to make it so you can catch the bad guys and follow the law and stop people who break the law.
I
Interviewer3:31
Do you ever worry that it could just grow so big that ultimately no one will know who's watching the watchers?
J
Joseph Lonsdale3:37
Well, the way the company's set up, like a Star Trek episode. I'm not a Star Trek guy, but the way the company's set up is it has full audit trails for who did what. And the point is that you have to have these things that can't be deleted, that are kept somewhere that other senior people can see to watch what people were doing. It makes it much easier to see what everyone in the CIA and your part of the CIA that you have access to is doing if you're the leader. And then the leaders can see that. There's no perfect solution in the world, but when technology is smarter and better and more innovative, it actually does help secure these things. As an analogy, in the regulatory state, technology helps get rid of a lot of really dumb stuff. It makes it more transparent. It makes it harder for regulators to do corrupt things. There's all these ways in which technology is making a more efficient solution for enforcing liberties.
I
Interviewer4:22
Can you mention one or two of the things that you guys have done on the security side in the last year? You had something to do with the Maduro raid, right?
J
Joseph Lonsdale4:30
So, I founded the company 23 years ago. I haven't been running it for a long time. But Palantir, I think one thing that's public that Palantir is doing is that Palantir has run a lot of the targeting systems for the US government for a very long time. And it's helping to play AI through there. I think it's public that Anthropic was deployed via Palantir. Palantir has all the frameworks and all the tools and all the ontology and stuff. And then the LLM underneath powering it was Anthropic. And that combination was able to help people iterate and figure out what's going on. So, just imagine, I can't give you the exact, but imagine Israel hacked all of the cameras to watch what's going on in Tehran or something. And then they also broke into maybe companies doing logistics. And they have all the data for what shipped where. And maybe they have other sources of data as well to give a sense of who people are and what they're doing. You can bring all of that data in, use Palantir's ontology, use Anthropic, and then help figure out, 'Oh, wait a second. Based on everything going here, this is clearly a missile storage facility that's 300 miles outside of Tehran. Wait a second. Based on this, this is probably where these bad guys are all meeting. This is where they're all doing bad things usually.
I
Interviewer5:38
They're really bad guys.
J
Joseph Lonsdale5:39
They're really bad people in the world. Everyone's afraid to say bad guys now, but there are bad guys and good guys.
I
Interviewer5:43
People in the West don't understand how bad these guys are.
J
Joseph Lonsdale5:45
Yeah. They just executed another guy who's like a father of twins for owning a Starlink, which I feel very guilty about because a lot of my friends and I sponsored trying to give Starlinks to help with the counter-revolution movement inside there. But they're still doing horrible things. So, Palantir was used to take all the data and help. Now, it's not like Palantir's making the final decision. There are people making decisions. I got all these trolls online like you killed a girl's school. No, Palantir and Anduril together helped get all the data. There might have been some case where there was a mistake made where there was a fake radar that is the Palestinianism sort of thing where they get you to attack innocents, which is terrible.
I
Interviewer6:22
Yeah. So, that's the military side of the thing. Can you give me an example of how it's used on the fraud side of things?
J
Joseph Lonsdale6:32
Yeah, it's analogous. That was the original DNA. You get all the data together and you figure out what's going on. The FDA, there's lots of SNAP benefits they give out, and there's all sorts of things they're working with, and then some of the data might go through NGOs, and then the NGO data might be in Treasury. So, you need to have something that hooks up and talks to IRS and Treasury about what the NGO is reporting, and then see what the SNAP data sets you're supposed to be giving based on the NGO you're doing, and then see if it matches and if it's legit or not. One I'm really excited about right now is hopefully doing that with CMS with Medicaid, because a lot of the Democrats hooked up all these NGOs to...
I
Interviewer7:07
Right.
J
Joseph Lonsdale7:08
The most money in the country is in medical healthcare entitlements. So, they hooked up hundreds of billions plus to their NGOs to their friends. We saw this. The California Democratic leaders got twenty billion dollars for their green NGOs. Stacey Abrams got what, two billion dollars to give out free appliances to inner city... This whole thing is a joke. This is all just money laundering to their friends. And they got addicted to this money from the Obama administration. That's when they first started doing this. And so now you say you're addicted to the money. They want as much as possible. What's the most money in government? It's healthcare entitlements. That's by far the most money in government. So, of course, they started hooking up some of Medicare Medicaid to the NGOs. And then, I think we have to watch all the data at the NGOs really carefully with the Secretary of Treasury. See the data at CMS for what they said they were supposed to be doing. You're going to find tons of fraud there.