Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies
Why America’s Systems Are Failing | Joe Lonsdale Speaks at the All-In Summit
📺 Subscribe for more Joe Lonsdale Clips: / @joelonsdaleclips
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.
Follow Joe on Twitter: https://x.com/jtlonsdale
You can find his writings here: https://blog.joelonsdale.com/
About Joseph Lonsdale
Joe Lonsdale, the 8VC founding partner and Palantir co-founder, has been a frequent commentator on the ongoing AI and industrial revolution, which he has described as compressing decades of progress into a few years. He has expressed strong support for the upcoming SpaceX IPO, arguing that the company is a critical part of the AI wave and that making shares available to retail investors is a smart move. Lonsdale has also discussed his investments in SpaceX and Anthropic, and has stated that he believes the government should not take direct positions in AI companies, though he supports including such companies in broad market indices. He has been critical of proposed AI regulations, warning that a government review process could become politicized, and has advocated for a limited, targeted national approach to AI rules. Lonsdale has also been active in discussing government fraud and defense technology. He stated that Palantir is working with the Small Business Administration and other agencies to identify fraud, and he has called for replacing leadership in some federal departments. In the defense sector, he highlighted his firm's investment in Terra Industries, a Nigerian defense startup founded by two young Nigerian men, which he described as building a defense prime for Africa to help protect persecuted Christian communities. Lonsdale has also promoted the work of Saronic, a company building weaponized vessels in Austin, Texas, and has argued that the U.S. needs to take the best and brightest to improve its manufacturing and defense capabilities.
Transcript (10 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
J
Joseph Lonsdale0:00
I'm generally an American optimist, but I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's broken right now that we know how to fix, but we aren't. And you know, talking to these guys, especially hearing from Elon and everyone today, it's just so exciting what our civilization is going towards, what it could be doing. But if you talk to a lot of our smartest friends, you look at guys like Dalio or Bridgewater and others, you know, they see America in decline. They see decadence. They see decay. And I think there's a lot of important questions we're facing right now, like why do these happen to a civilization? Why? Why? When there's so many exciting things going on that we know can make a really great future for our kids and grandkids and for humanity, why is this stuff breaking? And I want to tell you a little story.
I have a policy group in Austin and we follow the homeless population there. We were going along with a middle-aged Mexican gentleman who had just lost his job and he went into the homeless center. He's really struggling and he says, 'I really want to try to find a job. I want some job training.' And the person working there, she says, 'Sir, you deserve a home.' And he said, 'Yeah, that's great, but can I get some training?' And she said, 'You don't need to worry about that. You need to worry about getting a home for people just like you and what you deserve.'
I want to back up about the situation in Austin because we're seeing this all over the country right now. In 2018, the mayor of Austin went to San Francisco and LA and he was asking them for advice on what to do for homelessness. There wasn't really homelessness downtown. It's funny. There's actually a reason he asked them for advice. It's a special interest thing where there's actually hundreds of millions of funding that goes to these groups in SF and LA that work on this, to all of their friends and to all the people with their politics. It's a huge money spigot for politicians. They're very powerful in those other cities, and Austin didn't have that money spigot and he wanted it. You know what they told him? I heard this from both sides. He said, 'You have to show people that capitalism doesn't work. You got to put it in their faces, and then you'll get funding.' He went back to Austin and he brought all the camps downtown. Homeless death spiked, homeless trafficking spiked, sex trafficking spiked, drugs spiked, but the funding went way up for him and his friends. They got massive new funding, unaccountable sources of money for these people. Then they start deploying the answers, which is the housing first strategy. By the way, this is not just a right versus left thing. Housing first was first deployed under W. Bush. So this is a general strategy. You guys probably know in LA they spend $800,000 per new home trying to solve this problem. There's 7,000 nonprofits right now funded by HUD around our country with the same philosophy. The philosophy is no pay for performance, no transparency, no accountability, just build the homes.
When I first heard about this a decade ago, I thought, 'Wow, that makes sense. There's 5,000 homeless people. Let's build 5,000 homes.' It turns out that there's still about a couple percent of our society that really don't have a home, but they're living on the edge on people's couches, with other family, with friends. So the actual demand for homes, it turns out maybe it's about 6 million, 10 million. It's effectively infinite. There's infinite demand for homes in our society. And who do you think gets these homes when we build them? So this guy we're following, a few hundred people with my philanthropy group and our team goes back in with him and he gets in line. He's been living between a camp that they help him set up in downtown and in a relative's house, but he's saying he's living outside in camp. He goes back and he just missed getting a home and he's frustrated. They're explaining the points to him and he says, 'Wait a second. So you're saying that if I was on drugs, I'd qualify for a home?' And they said, 'Well, we don't like to say it that way, but that's true.' And he says, 'You're saying if I committed a crime, I'd qualify for a home.' And they're like, 'Well, yeah, but we don't like to say it that way, but that's true. That would have given you enough points to qualify for a home.'
What happens here if you try to bait this system, these 7,000 groups around the country? You're screamed at as a racist. You're screamed at with ad hominem attacks. There's three things. One, there's not the intellectual humility to see that there may be other answers. They may be correct. Two, there's no respect for the dignity of everyone in these conversations. If you disagree, you are a bad person. And three, there's no passion for the truth. These people are not trying to pursue the truth. These people already have the truth and they're giving it to you as dogma. This is true of pretty much every one of these broken areas in our society. There's a lot of them right now. When you have 50 training programs that we spend a lot of money on in the federal government, they're not accountable. They don't tend to work. They're very broken. There's no transparency. There's no competition. There's no debate either for it or against it. And you're a bad person if you're against it.
There are vocational schools around the country. Texas vocational schools were really underperforming seven years ago. What we did is we ended up changing them so that the schools were only going to be funded based on the salaries of the students coming out. If you tie it to graduation rates it doesn't work because they can graduate everyone. We tied it to the salaries coming out. We got the salaries coming out to go up 117%. Just by putting in that accountability. But most of the country doesn't do that. Most of the country has vocational schools where people go, very low graduation rates, they fail. We're not going to go into the K-12 issues you guys know about, but one fact most people don't know is the education inequality in this country is far greater than the wealth inequality, far greater. There's an infinite formula production thing crisis right now. There's really basic policy mistakes around that. The way we run our prisons, our probation and parole, there's all sorts of ways to run them much better. We're not doing it though.
I'll give you one other example because Elon was speaking today. Austin infrastructure. I'm very excited about his Boring Company. In Austin we passed a $6 billion, $7 billion plan to build a really small amount of infrastructure. It's already ballooning to a cost of $12 billion for less than half the original money. For $3 billion you could do over 100 times as many tunnels in terms of what they're building right now, with more stations. So basically for a tiny fraction of the cost. Again, I go and talk to the city and talk to the guys. There's no intellectual humility. They don't respect your dignity. Elon's a bad guy. We don't like Elon, whatever, because they're some kind of extreme version. They're not interested in the truth. They're really not. They're just interested in doing it their way.
So kind of come back to this. What's going on in our society? Where is this coming from? What causes that decay and decline? I think the more important question is what actually works, like why is our society functional? I think you have to take it back to the Enlightenment. If you look at the exponential growth that's happened that's created the wealth that all of us enjoy, it really happened over the last few centuries post-Enlightenment. You had a society that really cared about pursuit of the truth, really cared about competition of ideas. You need the virtues for this to work, the classical virtues that we talk about in our civilization: justice, wisdom, temperance, courage. You need the courage to actually fight for the truth. A long time ago you tended to have religious dogma, which could be some form of virtue signaling, some form of keeping out outsiders. And then you had separately debate and substance. And debate and substance generally lost to religious dogma. What was unique about the Enlightenment, what was unique about our university system which we created, was the liberal universities were a place to have debates where substance could actually win against dogma and against people who disagree. You actually had to disagree civilly and you actually had to pursue truth. You had to have the intellectual humility to know that you don't have all the answers. You had to respect the dignity of people who were debating and you had to fight for a passion for the truth.
What's happened instead is that most of our universities have been conquered by dogma and by religion that they no longer have these things. So once again, we have the idea of heretics and blasphemy. We don't use those words, but that's what we're facing right now. If you disagree with people, you're a heretic and you're committing blasphemy. If you speak against all sorts of these things you're not supposed to speak against. If you say that DEI is actually causing problems, if you say that here's why ESG is wrong, that's blasphemous. You're not allowed to attack these days. You're in trouble. You're told not to speak against it again or else you're fired. This has been written about in lots of corporations right now. This happens to all sorts of people. This is happening first and foremost on our campuses. What's happened is this zero-sum, historically illiterate, intolerant virtue signaling religion has completely taken over and is silencing people. Our founders were quite fond of heretics. I don't know if people realize that, but that was kind of the equivalent debate 300 years ago to this woke religion. Benjamin Franklin said, 'I think all heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of courage or they wouldn't venture their heresy, and they cannot afford to be deficient in other virtues due to the numerous enemies they provoke.'
So thinking about what's going on here, all of us need to go back and think about where we don't have enough humility to try to learn more, where we are not respecting people who disagree and actually engaging them and debating them as opposed to calling them names, running them off. Frankly, I think we should also remember it's actually really good to be offended. It's the opposite of safe spaces. There's this weird cultural thing with the millennial generation. I guess I'm barely part of it, unfortunately. Where you're supposed to protect people from being offended. You're supposed to protect them from blasphemy. I think it has to be the opposite. If our civilization is not going to decline, I think we actually have to go out of our way to learn that when we're offended. We have to be stronger. It doesn't mean you're somehow elevated as a victim if you're offended. That's your problem if you're offended and you need to stop and think about it. We need to use that to advance our civilization.