Palantir Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale on Trump, Musk, and a New Vision for America

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, we’ve heard a lot of discussion about how Silicon Valley has gone all in for Trump 2.0 compared to the distance the tech bros kept during his first term. And it’s not just Elon Musk. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has made the pilgrimage and the pro-Trump changes to content checking. And now, Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire Silicon Valley investor, tells Walter Isaacson why he thinks so many tech leaders are making this switch.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to the show.

JOE LONSDALE, CO-FOUNDER, PALANTIR AND MANAGING PARTER, 8VC: Thanks. Good to be with you.

ISAACSON: Let’s talk about the big news this past week, which is Mark Zuckerberg deciding that Facebook is no longer going to moderate content. All of Meta is going to move away from that. Tell me — that’s something you’ve been pushing for in terms of free speech. Tell me what you think of that and what the dangers might be.

LONSDALE: You know, we’ve been talking about this for years. It’s been a battle for the last 10 years, Walter. And this is a huge victory for the side of free speech. You know, there’s a big vibe shift with President Trump’s victory, with Elon, he has been pushing really hard on this. You know, there’s been a bunch of us pushing, but he’s obviously the biggest champion, and it’s great. Mark’s basically given it and said, you know what, I was wrong. And, you know, people do not trust my sensors anymore. We’re going to completely redo it. We’re going to follow Elon’s lead. So, this was a big debate in our society. And, you know, it takes a lot of confidence to admit you lost and that what you were doing wasn’t correct. And I have to laud Zuckerberg for that. Obviously, a lot of people are attacking him for only doing it after Trump won, but you know what, he said, this is the will of the people. I’ve lost the debate and I want to be trusted again. And I think that’s a great thing.

ISAACSON: OK. But let’s look at some of the potential downsides. Aren’t there certain things, even say, financial scams or crypto scams or drug scams or something, don’t those have to be weeded out?

LONSDALE: You know, I think there are definitely weird scams, illegal things, bad things people try to do. You definitely want to try to ban those accounts for doing scams. And I think X tries to do that as well. This is a very, very tough game to get right. I don’t think Facebook ever got that fully right. I don’t think X got that fully right. I don’t think other websites have got that fully right. I think everyone’s —

ISAACSON: Well, wait, tell me what you mean with X and Facebook haven’t gotten it fully right.

LONSDALE: I mean, you’re you basically have these very complicated algorithms, right? So, you have billions of posts, probably hundreds of billions of posts, I’m not in charge, it’s a large number, and you have — no matter how many people you have, no matter how many algorithms you have, you’re going to have to make some tradeoffs, right? So, even if you’re saying you’re going to allow free speech, obviously you’re going to have algorithms that — the stop child abuse material, right, no matter who you are, that’s not acceptable, and you have to set these things somewhere. You’re going to try to stop people who are posting spammy stuff all the time. You’re trying to — any account caught doing a scam, you have to turn off. It’s illegal, right? So, you’re still following the law. You’re still doing your very best. So, no matter how — no matter what you’re doing, it’s actually quite a challenge. It’s really fun for us to sit on the sidelines and criticize these guys and say, well, you’re doing this wrong. It’s really hard to be in charge of these platforms and actually get it right. And I’m not — you know, I (INAUDIBLE) what Elon was doing than what Zuck was doing, but I know Zuck pretty well for a long time. And he would get attacked from the left, he would get attacked from the right. It’s a hard thing to get these things right.

ISAACSON: You’ve been a fighter, a crusader against the woke mind virus. First of all, I’d love you to explain exactly what you mean by that. But also, I’ve never seen or rarely seen a pendulum swing as fast as it has against that type of thinking. Do you worry that the pendulum may swing too far in some ways?

LONSDALE: So, you know, Walter, I’m worried that the pendulum is swinging culturally, but that we’re not actually expunging these ideologies that have conquered our institutions. And so, if you go around the country and you see what’s happened, you know, most of our university departments in the liberal arts, whether it’s history or sociology or education or so many other areas, you know, so many of these parts of our government institutions, so many of our NGOs were conquered by this woke mind virus, which is very focused on identity politics. It comes from a form of Marxism. It’s very focused on cancel culture. It’s very much against the U.S. and it is very guilt ridden. It’s very driven by fear.

ISAACSON: I’ve understood, you know, the vibe shift in terms of the things that you talk about, such as identity politics. And I also weigh that against things that have been a problem in our society, including racism or the headwinds that somebody in New Orleans here, born black in the Ninth Ward faces compared to what you and I do. How do we make sure that we don’t sort of lose a balance here?

LONSDALE: No, 100 percent, Walter. And there was — the truth is that there was an extraordinary racism that hurt a lot of communities. These communities are still damaged from racism that happened, you know — as far as I could tell, I think the racism was much, much, much worse in the past. It doesn’t mean there’s not racism today, but I think it was much worse in the past  And you know, all of us, you know, should see that and should want people to make sure they have opportunity. At the same time, the answer to racism is not more racism. And I think that was a huge mistake our society has made the last 20 years. And I think it’s actually increased a lot of racial animus in our country because we started doing things like DEI and like, otherwise, that actively discriminated against white men, that actively discriminated against people who are successful like Asians and others. And that’s actually, if anything, like, not only has it attacked merit and broken a lot of things, which is terrible. Lots of things with (INAUDIBLE) are very broken, as we see from the fires going on this week in L.A. based on terrible policy, and as we see from all sorts of messes. But it’s also actually created more racism and more problems for people. So, I agree that we need to treat everyone right, and we need to not kind of swing away from helping people, but we do not need to keep doing this racism, because that actually breaks things more.

ISAACSON: Some of your friends in the tech world, obviously most Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and others, are part of this government efficiency, DOGE program. well named I guess. And you’ve been involved with all of these people. What do you think’s going to happen there? And what’s the goal there?

LONSDALE: You know, our government is the least efficient part of our society. There are literally trillions of dollars wasted on things. You constantly see, Walter, when we — you know, tens of billions of dollars for something that never happens with, you know, electric charging infrastructure, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars for a train that basically just pays money to lawyers, but doesn’t actually build much at all. The list goes on and on and on. We — there are so many parts of our society where the cost is going up because government’s involved and it’s crushing the middle class, it’s crushing the working class, and this is unnecessary. We don’t need this waste. And so, what’s going to happen there is they’re going to go in and they’re going to look at this, they’re going to say, like what parts of the bureaucracy are able to be more efficient, what parts of the bureaucracy have not been coming to work at all, frankly, for the last five or six years, or just getting a paycheck while working on the side, which is a lot of people and what things can we cut? And by the way, you know, NGOs, non-government organizations, or nonprofits that get a lot of money from our government, a lot of them are radical ideologues, a lot of them are being paid to teach people to fake asylum. They’re being paid to cause all sorts of messes in our cities. A lot of this stuff needs to be made accountable and it needs to be turned off. And then — so a lot of us are really excited to go in there and actually apply merit, apply logic, just fix a lot of this broken stuff.

ISAACSON: Are you going to be involved?

LONSDALE: I have a lot of my really good friends involved, and I’ve passed them a bunch of ideas, and I’m publishing a bunch of ideas. So — and I’m going to keep having conversations with them. I have a full-time job. Running my venture capital firm, building companies here in the U.S. And we’re starting a new university here. So, I’m quite busy, but I’m really excited to be helping my friends because there’s a lot to fix and I’m really passionate about making government work for everyone. If there’s going to be great cuts in government spending of the order that’s been talked about, it probably is going to have to come some from the Defense Department as well. And you are a co-founder of Palantir which is trying to find both machine learning and new ways to do war fighting. Tell me how you think that’s going to play out. Should we get rid of things like the F-35 plane? Should we have a new version of warfare? And will that save money?

LONSDALE: Yes. So, defense is a huge area that could be a lot more efficient, Walter. A lot — there’s really a battle going on in the background defense, you know, all these legacy companies merged to form what are called the primes in the ’90s and the Cold War ended. And Palantir and SpaceX were the first two companies to break through sort of become new primes since then. It was very difficult the way the laws were set up. We had to be very persistent. There’s now multiple new ones coming up to compete like Anduril, Saronic, Epris (ph), things like that. Just really cool new technology, far more advanced than the old primes. And there’s a huge battle because these little primes have set things up to get paid cost plus. And so, their incentives have been to make things 10 times more expensive than they need to be and then make lots of rules.

ISAACSON: Well, should we just get rid of cost plus contracts?

LONSDALE: You know, I think there are very, very few areas where it makes sense. I think there’s very, very specific commodity like areas where it may make sense, but for anything innovative, for anything with software, cost plus does not make sense. And of course, it’s more complicated. There’s all sorts of other areas. Like between you and me, there’s bases that are great for the economy of like local rural areas that clearly don’t add to our defense. And so, just like we have entitlements that are a form of welfare, certain parts of military spending, if we’re honest, are a form of welfare. They’re not actually about terrifying our enemies, they’re about doing things to kind of help communities. And I think helping communities is great, but if we’re going to have to cut back, we need to be reasonable, which part of defense is scaring our enemies and is protecting America and which part, you know, has some room maybe to cut, because it’s not actually doing the things defense is supposed to be doing? And these are tough conversations we will have to have at some point.

ISAACSON: You talk about entitlements and that’s sort of the really big hunk of spending.

LONSDALE: It’s 3.8 — yes. 3.8 trillion of the 6.5 trillion is the entitlements.

ISAACSON: And so, can that be cut significantly without hurting people?

LONSDALE: You know, there’s probably about $300 billion, so the 3.8 trillion, like 0.3 of that trillion is probably fraud. There’s a massive, massive amount of scams in Medicare and Medicaid. There’s huge numbers of Chinese spy rings and other kinds of groups claiming things. There’s Mexican cartels involved in this as well. There’s all sorts of people illegally getting money for things. There’s people who were found to be dead for years. Their kids are getting the money. I mean — and we have not applied anti-fraud. Like in business, Walter, whether when we were at PayPal, all sorts of other companies in Silicon Valley have gotten really, really good understanding how fraud works and how clever people are to steal money. The government hasn’t applied anything. Ten years ago, I talked to President Obama about this and he agreed with me. He wanted to do it. His staff blocked it because they thought it would look bad if we spent time, you know, showing off how much fraud there is. And so, this fraud’s only grown. So, yes, we could definitely cut a huge amount of fraud if we let us, and I hope we can do it this time.

ISAACSON: But fraud, even at best, is $300 billion, and you’ll, you know, chip away at it. Is there something more fundamental about entitlements that you think should be cut?

LONSDALE: You know, on the margin, there’s things I think everyone agrees with. I’m not sure that millionaires should be getting unemployment insurance. If I were to lose my job I — you know, I’ll make it, you don’t need to give me unemployment insurance, which right now you would, and — that’s kind of actually cost us a lot of money per year. There’s a lot of silly marginal things like that tied to entitlements that are easy to fix along with a fraud. In terms of the bigger cuts, you know, there’s so many other areas right now where I think we could save half a trillion to a trillion dollars that I think this administration is — President Trump has said he’s going to focus on areas other than court entitlements to fix right now. And so, that’s what we’re going to do, and our job is to follow the president.

ISAACSON: What about taking out regulations? To what extent — let’s take healthcare, for example. To what extent could you have a significant impact with deregulation?

LONSDALE: Yes, the healthcare and regulation is one of my favorite areas. I’m glad you asked. You know, I think everyone agrees you want to have enough rules to protect people. You don’t want some kind of crazy wild west here. At the same time, what happens in the regulatory state, Walter, is these things just agglomerate over time, where there’s tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of rules. And you know who lobbies for the rules? It’s the giant companies. It’s UnitedHealthcare. It’s the health systems who don’t want competition. And so, right now in America, we have all sorts of new technologies. For example, if someone has diabetes, there’s a really good chance they get diabetic retinopathy, which makes them go blind. And it turns out, you know, we have a company that — with A.I. plus a nurse in any rural area could check that and could stop you from going blind. But there’s all sorts of rules stopping people from paying for it because it’s A.I., stopping people from paying for it if a doctor’s not present, and that makes it way more expensive. And so, there’s that times 10,000 where health care ends up just getting much more expensive because of all these captured Crony rules, and there’s tens of thousands of those. And so, yes, I’m really excited to force that, to open it up, to let people compete with health systems in ways they don’t want competition. But if we don’t do that, the cost is going to keep going up. So, yes, this is a huge issue for our country.

ISAACSON: Palantir has been at the forefront of using technology and machine learning for everything from military uses, government uses, intelligence uses. I’m — I was always struck by the fact that you all named it Palantir, out of “Lord of the Rings.”

LONSDALE: Indeed.

ISAACSON: Which is a sort of a protection stone. But as you remember from the book, all of a sudden that can go wrong. The bad guys can get it.

LONSDALE: That’s the warning.

ISAACSON: Are you worried about that?

LONSDALE: That’s the warning built in. You know, Palantir and the book was built 2000 years ago by these like good elves partner with the good humans. And they clean the land of bad guys. And they had a golden age for a very long time. And what happens is eventually a bad guy gets in charge of the Palantir stones. And that causes obviously very serious problems. And that was actually explicitly one of the reasons we built Palantir. It wasn’t just to stop the bad guys, which we did, we have to eliminate thousands of terrorists and we have to prevent huge numbers of attacks. But what we were also trying to do is build into Palantir the audit trails and the frameworks to protect civil liberties and to create no matter who uses it, people can go back and see how it was used. The people at the top and watch the watchers  And you know what, there’s no perfect solution for humanity with power, Walter. If you figure it out, you let me know because, you know, by creating power for the good guys and trying to make it watch as much as possible, trying to let everyone know what the rules are, that’s the best we could do. And it has done a lot of good. And all of us have to be wary of the power of government.

ISAACSON: One of the big differences between the first Trump term and this upcoming Trump term is that this time around, there’s a whole lot of tech innovators, people like your friends and even yourself, who are going to be involved in it. How do you think that’s going to make this upcoming term different than the first term? And what guardrails should there be with around all these ideas?

LONSDALE: You know, Walter, it’s funny because I think there’s a lot of different ways of seeing things in the technology world. But to be maybe a little bit obnoxious for a second, the people who are building these technology companies in our generation, these are the most courageous people in our generation. These are the boldest people in our generation. These are people who are comfortable taking risks, putting themselves out there, in some cases failing and failing before they succeeded. And that’s a really important and healthy thing to have in leadership. When you have things as broken as they are in our government, when you have regularly tens of billions of dollars lit on fire, when you massive failures in the Secret Service, massive failures in terms of what the FBI and others were focusing on, when you have, you know, terrorists being let in on our borders because things are being run so badly, you need bold people, you need competent people who are willing to change things aggressively. And so, you know, this is a really important time to go in and fix and change things. And I mean, we have some great leaders going in who have run big companies, who do know how to put boundaries in place and do know how to, you know, make things work. And I’m really excited to see them there.

ISAACSON: Well, as you know, Elon Musk talks about being a nation of risk takers, and that we have too many referees now, and not enough risk takers.

LONSDALE: That’s great.

ISAACSON: But on the other hand, you know, he feels you need some guardrails.

LONSDALE: Of course.

ISAACSON: Are there going to be enough guardrails in the second Trump term?

LONSDALE: Of course. And, you know, listen, America is a great nation because of its frontier mindset, Walter. America has always had a frontier, whether the frontier is the west, whether frontier is outer space. But that mindset of being able to try things and do things that fail is really important. And you always have a balance between entrepreneurship and guardrails. You know, when I first did one of my first companies, I was on a call, I think it was American Express at the time with the late CEO. And there were I think 22 lawyers on the call and I was just blown away. Like that’s what happens when something gets to be too big. You get 22 lawyers to get anything done. And it’s comical, but it’s how it works. And you know, there probably shouldn’t be zero lawyers. There probably should be a few of them checking things over, but you probably don’t want 22. And he’s right, there’s way too many referees. Does that mean we get rid of everything and just go crazy? No. But, you know, Elon — maybe Elon and I are 21. I wouldn’t trust me at 21 doing this and running the country. I wouldn’t trust him either 21 because you’re so entrepreneurial. You’re on the extreme. You’re like, screw all the bureaucrats, screw all the lawyers. I don’t want anything. But, you know, if you’ve built companies and you’ve run them for — and you’re in — you’re older and you’ve experienced this, it’s a balance you want to have. You want to have some people who are checking things, you want to have some really strong entrepreneurial energy. And right now, our government just entirely lost in entrepreneurial side. It’s entirely the team of the thousands of lawyers and we need to balance that out. And so, this is a great direction we’re going right now.

ISAACSON: Joe Lonsdale, thank you for joining us.

LONSDALE: Thank you, Walter.