Don't Listen to the Skeptics, Ai Will Change Your Life for the Better | Joe Lonsdale

Summary

The Rubin Report: Joe Lonsdale on AI Optimism, Tech's Future, and Fixing America

Episode: "Don't Listen to the Skeptics, AI Will Change Your Life for the Better"
Host: Dave Rubin
Guest: Joe Lonsdale
Date: May 9, 2026

---

Episode Overview

Dave Rubin sits down for a lively, wide-ranging conversation with entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir, founder of 8VC, and chairman at University of Austin), to unpack the technological revolution underway in America, the positive impact of AI, the cultural crisis around productivity and work, the "mind viruses" holding society back, and practical ideas for revitalizing our cities and institutions. The tone is energetic and at times irreverent, but grounded in optimism about technology’s ability to create wealth and solve national problems.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The New Industrial Revolution: AI's Power for Progress

[00:37], [05:13], [06:10]

• Joe Lonsdale likens the current wave of AI innovation to a new industrial revolution, emphasizing that historic waves of productivity growth have made average Americans twice as wealthy in a single generation.
  • “We’re in the early innings very clearly of an industrial revolution. We’re seeing massive new job creation. We’re seeing lots of growth so far. You can see that you’re making every person more valuable.” (Joe, 00:37)
  • “Productivity is finally going way up again, which by the way, that’s the only way we all get wealthier — you do more with less. Right? Productivity growth.” (Joe, 05:24)
• AI isn’t just about automation — it's curing diseases, cutting healthcare costs, optimizing business, and creating new work.
  • “Thanks to what’s happening in AI… We can make healthcare so much better and so much cheaper. Like so much cheaper, like less than half costs where everyone does better.” (Joe, 01:49)

2. Cultural Attitudes: The ‘Mind Virus’ of Envy

[07:13], [08:38]

• Lonsdale identifies “envy” as the primary cultural threat: both left and (to some extent) the right are falling into a “crab bucket” mentality, focusing on tearing down success instead of aspiring to it.
  • “The mind virus out there is based on envy… This is a natural human instinct that’s being completely weaponized…” (Joe, 07:13)
  • Example: Dave jokes about Joe’s home basketball court, but frames it as something to aspire to, not resent.
  • Joe stresses the need for leaders and educators to exemplify the value of achievement and to reject anti-success cultural patterns.

3. Dignity of Work and Tech Anxiety

[09:18], [09:37], [10:40]

• Lonsdale rebuts the fear that AI and robots will “take all our jobs,” framing labor displacement as a recurring cycle that ultimately leads to new, often better, jobs and wealth.
  • “If we didn’t destroy those jobs [from past revolutions], we would all be a lot poorer… If you want everyone to have jobs, we’d ban farm tools and we would not have time most of us to be doing podcasts — we’d instead be farming.” (Joe, 11:04)
• Current job shortages show tech is enhancing, not killing, opportunity, with 7 million unfilled vocational jobs.
  • “So far it’s definitely not been true. You can see that you’re making every person more valuable… There’s lots of ways you can get a job right now if you’re willing to work. I think our culture has a problem, people are not willing to work.” (Joe, 09:37)
• Dave and Joe agree the “dystopian” narrative is tired and overblown.

4. Government, AI, and Fraud: Palantir’s Role

[14:07], [15:18], [16:19], [19:21]

• Joe breaks down Palantir’s mission as a civil liberties–minded data platform, originally developed to combat fraud at PayPal, then adapted for government anti-terror and anti-fraud work.
  • “Palantir was founded as a civil libertarian company… It was a way to enforce the law and to make sure you’re only allowed to see what you’re allowed to see… More sophisticated technology actually enforces civil liberties.” (Joe, 16:19)
  • Palantir helps defense and government agencies use AI to integrate and analyze massive datasets, preventing terrorism and uncovering fraud, but also ensures oversight (“watch the watchers”).
  • Commercial applications are now dominant, such as vastly accelerating airplane design and supply chain optimization (22:02).

5. Concrete Examples: Healthcare and Fraud Detection

[01:49], [20:09], [40:55]

• Lonsdale highlights how Palantir and AI can track and expose systemic healthcare fraud, particularly in Medicaid entitlements, which is a chief source of government spending and debt.
• AI is also unlocking new therapies, from peptides to gene editing, with longevity breakthroughs moving far faster than expected.
  • “There’s these new treatments… that make [rats] live 30% longer but look like they’re young until they die, which is pretty good.” (Joe, 42:06)
• On healthcare markets: “We cannot break America’s for-profit healthcare… But you have to make it truly a market-based system which it’s not. It’s crony, it’s broken.” (Joe, 40:43)

6. Building Better Cities and Red State Challenges

[32:43], [34:05]

• Joe pushes for cities—even in red states—to become functional, safe centers of civilization, not just places for conservatives to “point and laugh.”
  • “We need our cities to be functional centers of our civilization… Republicans prefer just to point at the city and laugh at it… But these are the centers of our civilization.” (Joe, 32:43)
• Homelessness example: After moving to Austin, Lonsdale helped pass a measure banning encampments. Still, he learned that effective laws need real enforcement and incentives (e.g., property tax rebates for reporting illegal camps, [35:31]).
• Dave and Joe reflect on how regressive policy and special-interest “mindset” damage places like California and New York, while Florida and Texas surge from an influx of builders and investors.

7. Education Revolution and University of Austin

[24:31], [25:12]

• Joe details the founding ethos of the University of Austin: rigorous, entrepreneurial, and classically-minded students opting in to a new, non-conformist institution.
  • “You have to have really high scores to go there, and you have to be the sort of person that’s opting in to go to a new university… By default, you’re surrounded by awesome entrepreneurs.” (Joe, 25:12)
• Emphasizes hands-on engineering and the need for educational reform everywhere.

8. Practical Advice for Young Investors & Builders

[43:43], [44:09]

• “My first thing I tell you is your time’s worth a hell of a lot more than your money. Use the money you have to free up more of your time to learn AI, to try to practice building something, to take risks... learning and taking risks.” (Joe, 43:43)
• Be cautious, use ETFs for safety, invest only what you can afford to lose, and always think about the leverage of time and learning.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Progress vs Pessimism:
  • “I’m a world-weary optimist. I watch your videos all the time. You’re an optimist.” (Dave Rubin, 05:13)
• On Culture of Envy:
  • “This envy is a sin. It’s the crab mentality to pull down the cloud that’s trying to climb out of the bucket. This is why one of the main reasons why the third world’s broken. We should not be bringing it back in our society.” (Joe, 07:13)
• On Civil Liberties and AI Oversight:
  • “More sophisticated technology actually enforces civil liberties, which people don’t get.” (Joe, 16:19)
• On Productive Societies:
  • “If we didn’t destroy those jobs, we would all be a lot poorer.” (Joe, 11:04)
• On Practical Optimism:
  • “Things are just going to be growing again. … We’re going to start building things again. It’s going to be great. I mean, I think it just breaks the woke.” (Joe, 23:13)

---

Timestamps for Core Segments

• 00:37 — Joe sets the tone: industrial revolution, AI optimism
• 05:13 — Productivity growth, optimism about tech’s impact
• 07:13 — Cultural “mind viruses” and the value of aspiration
• 09:37 — The “dignity of work” & why AI improves, not destroys, job opportunities
• 14:07 — Palantir’s founding story and mission
• 16:19 — Civil libertarian roots of Palantir, audit trails, “watch the watchers”
• 19:21 — Real-world use: targeting terrorists, finding fraud in entitlements
• 22:02 — Commercial AI breakthroughs (Joby Aviation, faster design cycles)
• 24:31 — Fixing education: University of Austin model
• 32:43 — The fate of blue cities and the need for pro-active red-state city reform
• 35:31 — Homelessness policy experiments in Austin, new accountability ideas
• 43:43 — Joe’s investment and personal development advice

---

Closing Thoughts

This episode is a lively call to reject cynicism about technology and national decline, and instead embrace America's legacy of building, striving, and leading in innovation. Lonsdale urges listeners: defend progress, tackle regulatory sclerosis, refuse cultural defeatism, and use AI — not just as a tool for efficiency but as a lever for a better future.

Final advice:
“Your time’s worth a hell of a lot more than your money. … The most important thing first of all is learning and taking risks.” (Joe, 43:43)

---

This summary covered the core material, omitted all advertisement and promo sections, and highlighted actionable ideas, key cultural critiques, and practical optimism for tech-driven progress.

Transcript

[Podcast Advertiser]

Most people overpay for car insurance not because they're careless, but because switching feels like too much hassle. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jeri could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit Jerry AI Libsyn today. That's J E R R Y AI Libsyn.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I'm no designer, but I know my brand inside and out. And I know a generic looking website when I see one. Wix Harmony has blown me away. It's a website builder that lets me switch back and forth between using AI and hands on editing tools so I can create a website exactly the way I pictured it. I even get a personal AI agent that's an expert in web design and helps me out. Try it out for [e-mail] Harmony that's wix.com Harmony I think we're in the early innings very clearly of an industrial revolution. We're seeing massive new job creation. We're seeing lots of growth so far. You can see that you're making every person more valuable. Right now we have 7 million unfilled vocational jobs in this country. Everyone always complains online like of course people are angry, they're losing their jobs like a unemployment slow. But there's lots of ways you can get a job right now if you're willing to work. I think our culture as a problem people not willing to work doesn't have a culture. People who can't fire work is different. I think we have to understand what an industrial revolution is and what productivity growth means. So if you look at America about every 90 years we've destroyed about half the jobs. But you know what, if we didn't destroy those jobs, we would all be a lot poorer. Right? You always tell people if you want everyone to have jobs, we ban farm tools and we would not have time most of us to be on doing podcasts, we would instead be farming.

[Dave Rubin]

So what do you think that does to us as humans?

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's obvious thanks to what's happening in AI, both on the new therapies to cure diseases and on how you run healthcare administration and services. We can make healthcare so much better and so much cheaper. Like so much cheaper, like less than half costs where everyone does better. But what's the Most money in government, it's health care, entitlements. That's by far the most money in government. So of course, they started hooking up some of like, you know, Medicare, Medicaid to the NGOs. And then I think we have to make watch all the data at the NGOs really carefully with using SEC, treasury, see the data at CMS for like what they said they're supposed to be doing. You're going to find tons of fraud there. All this stuff that would have been like the 2000s, 2040s, 2050s. It's all being accelerated into the next few years.

[Dave Rubin]

All right, Palantir guy, AVC guy, University of Austin guy. On financial news shows Guy all the time. What else? Lonsdale, before we begin, Joe Lonsdale, as

[Joe Lonsdale]

I pour tequila, I'm excited to try your tequila, Dave. Only my coolest friends have tequila. I hear this. This is very good. We also have a policy institute in 20 states, this ISRO institute, but yes, those, you know, and this, it was very big for Palantir. You saw yesterday, we think, you know, I don't know if you saw the net income of the company this quarter is higher than the revenue was a year ago. So it's growing so fast that it actually, it's like net income gap, net income was higher than revenue a year ago. It's crushing it.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, in that case, at some point, I'm not going to start the conversation with this. I am going to ask you once again exactly what Palantir does, because you get a lot of different answers. And then we can compare. We can compare your answer in this. Sit down to when we did this about a year ago in that chair, and we'll see if they match up. But first, cheers, my friend. Welcome back. And you, I think I can call you a Rubin report vet. Better now because you've been. You've been.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Third time.

[Dave Rubin]

At least the third time.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So let's see.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's very good. I like it.

[Dave Rubin]

Come on. And once you let that breathe a little bit, like, it's, it's just the best co you've ever had. And I was on the first time I really talked about the process and everything publicly was on your podcast at your place.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Can you get this, like at the grocery store or something?

[Dave Rubin]

We're, we're at some stores in Florida right now. We're mostly selling online and.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But that's a lot you can buy online because you couldn't use to buy us online a few years ago.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, one of the Things Maybe I can get some sage wisdom from you. One of the things I'm trying to figure out is do you just go totally new school and direct to consumer online and yeah, you gotta wait two or three days but you're gonna get your tequila. Or do you break into this sort of quasi mafia run business that's old school and you gotta pour a ton of money just to get on the shelf and everything else. And that's, that's what I'm challenged with.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean I'd find some distributors and let them get them to invest alongside you.

[Dave Rubin]

Man.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I make friends, man. It's like I only knew some investors,

[Dave Rubin]

some who've invested in other things that I've done, who I might be sitting with right now.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You gotta figure it out as a tough business. Cause you gotta like go bar to and stuff. I've had a bunch of friends.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

But this is really good. So. Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

Well we will see. But this is not about tequila. What we're going to talk about today,

[Joe Lonsdale]

we're going to talk.

[Dave Rubin]

What I really want to focus with you is some of the positivity around tech in the future. Because one of the things that I'm seeing in the last, let's say since the beginning of the year has been just sort of a negativity around everything, even from people on the right. Like the left has a certain grievance thing that everyone knows the right used to not have that. And there's a weird thing happening right now that I think there's a tech negativity which the left definitely has. Bernie's constantly railing against AI and all that. But I'm, I would say I'm a world weary optimist. I watch your videos all the time. You're an optimist.

[Joe Lonsdale]

America's crushing.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, so, so can we. Let's start with that. What are some of the positive things that we should see right now in the country and in tech? And then we'll go from there.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. And it does bother me that the right has this weird third worldism that's kind of like coming up on its side too, because we know the left is that way. But it's like partially encroaching into what should be like the pro liberty positive side. Listen, like what, what is working productivity growth is just really getting going. You're seeing it very dramatically in smaller areas that are scaling quickly. So you know, in my view, Kevin Warsh is going to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. I'm very excited about. He's a Friend. And he's going to spend a lot of the time at the bank trying to quantify these things, which I think is very important for us to quantify as a Productivity is finally going way up again, which by the way, that's the only way we all get wealthier is you do more with less. Right. Productivity growth.

[Dave Rubin]

And, and is that purely tech AI?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Is that the AI? I mean, there's lots of other things that are just good in our nation that are working when you deregulate when, when you.

[Dave Rubin]

No, but I mean in terms of

[Joe Lonsdale]

the productivity, it's AI, it's, it's AI. It's, it's, it's, it's applying better ways of doing things, which, I mean, we're in the, I think we're in the early innings very clearly of an industrial revolution. We've been through these before, we've seen what they do. It's just massively good for the average person like you. You can troll people and try to pretend that they're bad. Like, I think our schools will still teach that robber barons were evil and that was an evil period. But if you look like 1870-1900, look at the median American working class person, they're more than twice as wealthy in that one generation, twice as wealthy in real terms. And this is probably going to happen even faster this time. And we're seeing it, we're seeing lots of new job creation, we're seeing lots of growth and I think it's just going to accelerate the next couple.

[Dave Rubin]

So how do we break that paradigm where the mentality around that, that the robber barons were evil, even though, as you pointed out, they were giving all these people jobs and then within a generation their lives changed and that there's going to be a version. I get why I can do all the dystopian thing, we did it last time here. I can do all of the horrible ways that tech and a. And the future can go awry. I'm just not interested in it right now. What I'm interested in is in the positives. But that's what we're going to have to work for.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We need to learn about the mind viruses that are attacking us. So the mind virus out there is based on the most basic thing we've had forever, which is envy. If you look at the third world, look at the world for 10,000 years, primitive societies, you have envy and you try to tear down what's working. And this is a natural human instinct that's being completely weaponized on the left and A little bit now in certain parts of the right as well. And this envy is a sin. And it is. It's the crab mentality to pull down the cloud that's trying to climb out of the bucket. This is why one of the main reasons why the third world's broken. We should not be bringing it back in our society. That's America's proud of success. America's proud. I want you to make tons of money and build a giant basketball court as we were talking about earlier. This is a good thing for all of us.

[Dave Rubin]

This is the best indoor basketball court I have ever seen at someone's home. I am not a jealous person. When I stepped onto your indoor court, I was like, this is what I've gotta have.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So.

[Dave Rubin]

But that. No, but the point is I have something to aspire to. When I said that to you right before we sat down, you said, okay, make it happen. And that's the point. I will make it happen. I'm going to have an indoor basketball court at some point in my life. Yeah, thank you. I will have one. But. All right, so how do we do that, though? I get it. We can message it properly and we have America's 250th birthday coming and I think that'll kind of give a little extra juice to it. But is this education first? Do our politicians need to change? How do you envision the ecosystem around just getting things so that people can see a better future?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, I mean, it is cultural. Right. And it's really important our leaders model this correctly. It's really important our leaders reject this very clearly. I think some people on the right are doing this. I think some people could do a better job of doing it. It's our education system, though, as well. Our education system is teaching all the wrong things. This is one of my obsessions. Thomas Jefferson believed that the single point of public education was to train the populace to be free citizens, to oppose despotism. That was a single point. Today it's the opposite.

[Dave Rubin]

It's literally the opposite.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's literally the opposite. It's literally the far left and the commies are running this and making us guilty and making us pro authoritarian in the system. So it's like this is why school choice is so important. This is why we have to fight for our education system. Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So if we're painting that, if we're trying to paint that positive vision, the easy version, I guess on the other side is, oh, but robots will take our jobs, they will do all of our tasks, and there Will be no meaning left. You hear a lot of this mostly coming from left, but a little bit from the right.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Meaning? Meaning I like arguing dignity of work. This is extremely important to me. Ironic, having the left talking about meaning and dignity of work when they're paying millions of people not to work right now. So that's like, really bad for our culture. I think they've destroyed certain parts of our inner city culture by paying people not to work. So. So I agree with the dignity of work. But, you know, so far it's definitely not been true. So far. You can see that you're making every person more valuable. Right now we have 7 million unfilled vocational jobs in this country. Everyone always complains online, like, of course people are angry. They're losing their jobs. Like A, unemployment slow. B, if you don't have a job, there's lots of really great training programs which make them even better, by the way. We should make them accountable. But there's lots of ways you can get a job right now if you're willing to work. I think our culture has a problem. People are not willing to work. Just not a culture. People that can't find work, that's different.

[Dave Rubin]

Right? So, but what, in terms of the easy version is like, okay, but the Amazon delivery guy is going to be replaced by a robot or a drone and that you're going to go to McDonald's and instead of paying someone $15 an hour, it'll just be a robot. Which that's already happening with iPads and that kind of stuff. Like, so how do you. How do you refute stuff that people are going to kind of see first? Right.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, so, so. So I think. I think we have to understand what an industrial revolution is and what productivity growth means. So if you look at America, about every 90 years, maybe even slightly faster, we've destroyed about half the jobs. Right? And this is a very important point, right? Because like, there's people with last names of Cooper or Smith or Bowyer. That's a cool one.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, I got it. I got it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And.

[Dave Rubin]

And they did cool things.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They did cool things.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And there, by the way, there was hard things. There's a lot of dignity in that work. There was a lot of art in that work. I think it's kind of sad that there's not as many of these really cool Coopers and Boyers around. There's still a people, but there's not the jobs. But you know what? If we didn't destroy those jobs, we would all be a lot poorer. Right? You always tell people if you want everyone to have jobs, we'd bear farm tools and we would not have time, most of us to be on doing podcasts. We would instead be farming. And then you would never get your basketball court right.

[Dave Rubin]

So, so what do you think the relationship between the people that want to lean into all of this and the technologists behind it should be with the into right now?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Because that warning, the following ZipRecruiter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words when you're hiring.

[Podcast Advertiser]

We at ZipRecruiter know you can feel frustrated, forlorn, even, like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, ZipRecruiter figured out how to fix all that. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip with ZipRecruiter you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Fantastic.

[Podcast Advertiser]

So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com Zip to try ZipRecruiter for free. Don't forget that ZipRecruiter.com Zip Zip. Finally, that's ZipRecruiter.com Zip.

[Dave Rubin]

That seems to be a big one.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, and this gets really complicated. I think government should be smaller in general because whenever you give government power, it gets captured. Now there's exceptions. We need defense to be functional. If you're going through an industrial revolution and it completely changes what's possible in defense, then we have to be investing a lot in that right now to stay ahead of the bad guys. Because there are bad guys in the world. This is the tough thing about being a libertarian. If you're like very pro liberty. Right. I don't know if I'm a libertarian, but I'm very pro liberty.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And I want government to be small, but I also want to like crush the Islamists and the commies, which means we have to invest in it. So you need some relationship to build and invest, which we're obviously doing. Defense side, you need some relationship to teach the fda, for example, how to use AI to approve all the new therapies that are coming from this industrial revolution. You need some relationship to right now Palantir is helping them find fraud across the board, working with sba, with Kelly Leffler, and with usda, with Secretary Rollins and all these really talented leaders. And we're finding tons of fraud, and that's important for us to help them. But in general, I'd say you want the government to be smaller and not to be involved in most of these things.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. So. All right, so since you brought up Palantir there. So 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.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, yeah. When you stop lots of terror and

[Dave Rubin]

things 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.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So. So once again, what is Palantir?

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's like two separate. It feels like two separate talks because you gave me.

[Dave Rubin]

You gave me stopping terror attack and then fraud.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. You know, actually, actually, interestingly, the DNA of Palantir came out of the anti fraud work at PayPal. Right. So 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. Right.

[Dave Rubin]

Still, I mean, it's still even whatever. Even. Maybe it's an accounting error now, but,

[Joe Lonsdale]

you know, but that used to be enough. Destroyed all the competitors to PayPal, basically. Because if you opened it up enough that anyone could send. Can send money in steelfriend really easily, then it wouldn't work. And if you try to ask them for enough information, no one wanted to use it. So it was this really hard problem and 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 Stefan, who I'm seeing down here in Florida, and Peter Thiel and brought Alex. And we built this thing and we applied it after 911 to the government. And 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 a year was being spent to gather data then, but they couldn't use the data. They weren't allowed to see things. Like, if they'd had palance here, it would have been very easy to stop 911. That was the whole point. And then, and then the goal was to build it to catch all the

[Dave Rubin]

terrorists because in essence, you guys are looking at all of the patterns and

[Joe Lonsdale]

communication and you're also just allowing people who might not have a computer science degree themselves, who might work for the. One of the parts of the government. There's like a million analysts in the government in different parts. The CIA and NCTC and FBI and NSA and the dia. Right. There's always 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 the problems we solved that kind of built these ontologies and like made the 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.

[Dave Rubin]

How do you, I asked Peter the same thing when he sat in that chair, but how do you balance your, your libertarian ish ideas with that? You're working with the government when it comes to data and you know, people's private.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So, so, so, so I think a lot of people don't realize that Palantir was founded as a civil libertarian company. Right. So 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 track, 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, a way to enforce the law and to make sure you're only allowed to see what you're allowed to see. And you know, the law changes. Palantir changes what you could see. But that was, you see what I'm saying? Like, more sophisticated technology actually enforces civil liberties, which people don't get this. We actually had a civil liberties group at the company that we launched in like 2006, 2007. And we were explaining like, here's how we're going to make it so you can catch the bad guys and follow the law and stop letting people break the law.

[Dave Rubin]

Do you ever worry that it could just grow so big that ultimately no one will know who's watching the watchers? You know?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, the way that kids companies set

[Dave Rubin]

up a Star Trek episode, and I'm not a Star Trek guy, but the

[Joe Lonsdale]

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. Right? So the whole point is it makes it much, much easier to see what everyone in the CIA, and you're part of the CIA that you have access to is doing if you're the leader and then for the leaders, then see that. So I mean, there's no perfect solution in the world. But when technology is smarter and better and more innovative, it actually does help help secure these things. It's an analogy. For example, 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. Right. So there's just all these ways in which technology is just like making a more efficient solution for what is enforcing civil liberties.

[Dave Rubin]

Can you mention one or two of the things that you guys have done on the security side in, in the last year? You had something to do with the Maduro raid, right?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, is that sort of.

[Dave Rubin]

I think it's kind of.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I found the company 23 years ago, I haven't been running it for a long time. And you know, Palantir, I think one thing that it's public that Palantir is doing is this is like Palantir has run a lot of the targeting systems for the US government for a very long time and it's helping deploy AI through there. So 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 and whatnot 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 like Israel hacked all of the cameras to watch what's going on in like 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 kind of give a sense of who people are and what they're doing. You could 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.

[Podcast Advertiser]

All.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I call them bad guys. They are bad guys. This is where they're all meeting.

[Dave Rubin]

They're not great people, usually.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They're really bad guys.

[Dave Rubin]

They're really, really bad people. Everyone's afraid to say bad guys now, but there are bad guys, good guys. Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

People in the west just don't understand how bad these guys are. 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 sponsor trying to give starlings to help the counter, you know, the revolutionary movement inside there. But it's. And they're just doing horrible things. But. Yes, so, so, so, so, so Palantir is public. Was. Used to take all the data and help. Now, it's not like Palantir is making the final decision. Like, there's people making decisions. I get all these trolls online. Like, you killed a girl's school. Like. No, Palantir and Anthropic together helped get all the data. Helped. Now, there might have been some case where there was a mistake made, where there was a fake radar. And this is what the Palestinianism sort of thing, where they get you to attack innocence, which is terrible. Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So, all right, so now that's the military side of this thing. Can you give me an example of how it's used, sort of on the fraud side of things? Things.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's analogous. That was the original DNA. Right. Is you get all the data together and you figure out what's going on. So, you know, I think 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 the IRS and Treasury about what the NGOs reporting, and then see what the SNAP data set you're supposed to be giving based on what the NGOs are doing, and then see if it matches and see if it's legit or not. One I'm really excited about right now is hopefully doing that with like CMS with Medicaid. Because a lot of the Democrats hooked up all these NGOs to get the most, the most money in the, in the country is in health care entitlements. And so they, and so, you know, they hooked up hundreds of 100 billion plus to their NGOs to their friends. Right? We saw this. This is public. The California Democratic leaders got $20 billion for their green NGOs. You know, Georgia, Stacey Abrams got what, $2 billion to give out free appliances to inner city. The whole thing's a joke, right? It's all just like money laundering to their friends. And so, and they got addicted to this money from the, from the Obama administration. That's when they first started doing this. And, and so now you say, so 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 start hooking up some of like, you know, Medicare, Medicaid to the NGOs. And then I think we have to make watch all the data at the NGOs really carefully with using SEC treasury, see the data at CMS for like what they said they were supposed to be doing. You're going to find tons of fraud there.

[Dave Rubin]

Okay, so let's back up for a second. So let's say we get a more peaceful world and we get some of the fraud out and via AI. The mundane tasks that people don't want to do so often are taken care of and they can still find some dignity in work. There's still something they're doing, but we've taken care of most of those things and we're basically feeling safe and we have a more functional government. What do you think that actually looks like as a society? It's almost hard to envision if things really were better.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We just build so many cool things. And by the way, most of Palantir's revenue is commercial now. It's helping companies build things, helping supply chains. I'll give you an example I love separately in Palantir. So Joby Aviation, you're probably following a little bit. It's the electric vertical takeoff and landing.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, it's great.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Trump administration approved 12 states for this year. We're going to be flying people around, testing it. So it's real, it's happening, it's great. It's going forward. These are some of the best airplane designers in the world because this company is so exciting and Joe Bender runs is a whiz. So people there used to do things with a aerospace that took three months to redo an airplane design. Now with AI you're doing it in an afternoon. So I think what a lot of people don't realize. So this, this, this company for example already has flown and tested hydrogen fuel cell powered flight which is like six times more efficient per weight overall if you look at the conversion and the lightness which is, and it's perfectly safe. And so this is, it's just a much better version of, of fuel we're going to use for airplanes. And then they've already test, they've already started testing a way more efficient planes. So if, I mean stepping back, just all this stuff that would have been like the 2000 and 30s, 2000 and 40s, 2000 and 50s, it's all being accelerated into the next few years.

[Dave Rubin]

So what do you think that does to us as humans? And on top of longevity stuff and it just means medical reasons that we're going to live longer and all.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, things are just going to be, it's like things are just going to start growing again. Like for since the 1970s, our planes haven't gotten that much better. It's been annoying. We've kind of been, we've kind of been stuck in this like lawyer dominated like kind of like just sclerotic kind of civilization that's like slowly crumbling and we can't build things. We're going to start building things again. It's going to be great. I mean I think it just breaks the woke. Right. It breaks the law of the left because people are just going to be part of a civilization that's working and they're going to be positive because it's just going to be growing.

[Dave Rubin]

Do you think that cyclical thing, I mean you sort of referenced this but that the cyclical thing is just. It's baked into human society sort of that it gets good and it gets bad and it gets good and it gets bad. Do you think there's like any way around that? Can you really run one that goes for a longer period of time?

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's always going to be some cycles. I think we had a lot of self owns. I think like the fiat currency thing in the early 70s is bad. There's something about how we empowered lawyers that's not necessarily great. There's just all this stuff that seemed to happen in the early 70s that really made the returns go to capital Instead of to labor, which is not what you want. I mean, I have a lot of capital. I like the capital, gets returns. I think it screws up our culture and our society when labor is like. I think when you print too much money. Right. It's like not fair to labor in terms of that. So I think there's all these things we did that were just. That were just kind of broke and made it more bureaucratic starting in the 70s. And I think this new AI wave should allow us to break out of that if we fight really hard and don't let the left take over.

[Dave Rubin]

How is this also going to affect education? Because I know you care an awful lot about education. You're doing the thing with your wife, but also you've been integrally involved in University of Austin and the founding chairman there. Yeah. And I spoke there and it was only a few months after speaking at Oxford, doing an Oxford debate, which is thought of as the world's best debate. And I'm not. Not blowing smoke up your butt. I was so much more impressed with the students that you guys had there than Oxford. It wasn't. It was completely night and day. I mean, 180 opposite. Those kids were so impressive. The question during the Q and A, you remember, it was like they asked some really hard questions and they were poking and prying and sitting with them after. And it was very, very different than what I experienced at Oxford.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We have some. I appreciate that. We have amazing students. University of Austin. And think about it, you have to have really high scores to go there. And you have to be the sort of person that's opting in to go to a new university. Most people are too afraid to do that. So by default, you're surrounded by awesome entrepreneurs who have the courage to go to something new. Now, whenever there's something new, there's gonna be a few weird people. There's gonna be a few things that are off. There's gonna be a bunch of. Just a bunch of geniuses there, though. So I. And it's cool. It's about half stem, half, you know, philosophically minded, you know, kind of literature, classically minded people. And, you know, we're actually just finishing the STEM building next to the boring company in Austin.

[Dave Rubin]

Oh, is that right?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I built this thing out for like robotics, Kegel engineering, and the SpaceX and board company guys are helping us. It's really cool.

[Dave Rubin]

So you're doing something underground.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I assume they're gonna do a tunnel that comes from next door. I'm obsessed with the tunnels. Right now they're way cooler than.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah. What's going on with the tunnels?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I mean, Vegas is opening up.

[Dave Rubin]

It's happening more.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's already open, but a bunch more is opening. The next month or two, you're gonna be able to go from the airport to all your favorite hotels. Yeah, it's. They're crushing it.

[Dave Rubin]

Is it weird that we thought that the future was gonna be all the flying? You know, Peter always says they promise us flying cars.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We got. You know, there's both.

[Dave Rubin]

We got widgets on the phone or something, but like that. We thought it was all gonna be up there and that. But actually, so much of it is

[Joe Lonsdale]

happening underground at scale, it's just El. Right. Like a scale. Tunnels are just much more efficient for everyone. It gets rid of traffic. I'll still be flying the jobies. Yeah, we'll do both. We're gonna do both in Austin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

You're gonna have a couple of those. That's what you're gonna see that. You're gonna fly that thing to your basketball.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's like an Uber, though. You just press the button, it'll come. You can have it, too. It's just. It's just living a red state. If you're in a blue state, that's gonna take longer. I think we'll see the New York digits. Test one. We'll see.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, all right. So let's. Let's dive in on that. So obviously you're in Texas. We're here in Florida now.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

We're watching Cali and New York disintegrate on a million grade. Either one of them better or worse than the other, or do you think they're like. Their sort of level of degradation is common.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's funny.

[Dave Rubin]

You're also a hell of a tequila drinker, my friend.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Oh, this is good.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah. All right. All right.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I am mostly Irish than my father's.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah. Three of these. We'll find out what you really think. Okay, thank you.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know, it's funny, Dave, I used to say about.

[Dave Rubin]

That's funny. The Irish is coming out.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Okay. It's definitely coming out. I used to say about. I used to say about New York. York. I used to say about New York that at least your commies let you build. Yeah, right. Which they do. They have. They've like, let them, like. There's, like, kind of pretty left, but they let them build for a long time. This new guy's pretty bad, so I don't know. I don't know where he's going to Go. It could get really worse there. And then you get the wealth tax in California. It's a race to the bottom right now. It's a mess.

[Dave Rubin]

If we were trying to steal Marin, their argument, or if we were just giving them every benefit, which argument would kill the Jews? Well, there's the. Kill the Jews. There's the. Get rid of all the.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I can streamline that for you if you want. I am Jewish.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, yeah. Bring in all the fentanyl people. But you know what I mean? Like, if we were. Well, it just. Everything that Gavin's done that has just pushed all these people out or celebrating that El Elon left, he celebrated, literally. You've got Momi standing outside Ken Griffin's pter, basically saying, this is the place you want to burn down. When the riots begin, like, when they're doing this stuff, what. What do you think their end goal is? Maybe it's not the same for those two guys. I think. I actually think it's like.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think it's different. I think Madame is an Islamist.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's a separate issue. I don't think Gavin necessarily wants to kill the Jews. He just wants their donations and then to shame them because he's, you know. But yeah, I think. You know, it's funny, actually, when Donnie had to, like, thank Ken Griffin, a week later, Ken get another because he

[Dave Rubin]

gave 10 mil to the.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So classy. Ken's such a classy guy. I would not have done that. I would have wanted to get him. But he's very classy guy, you know, I think it's different in both cases. They're both. They're both running. They're politicians. Right. So they're both running. They have more power in their party, and they sense that their party right now has become a third world party, which means you have to show envy. You have to show, like, you have to try to demonize success, and you have to basically signal to your base to support you. So this is what they're doing. They're signaling the envy and the hate to their base. I mean, if you. I'm not even sure how to Steel Man. The third world is him. It's just so bad.

[Dave Rubin]

So not even Steel Man. There's two different versions here. So for the Gavin version, if you've watched well over a million people leave your state, if you've watched the billionaires now all flee, and you still want everyone's money, do you think. I just want to know, like, if he thinks that he's doing good, I guess he really does I mean, the road to hell is paved with good.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I really don't think he does.

[Dave Rubin]

So you think he's just sort of a slave to the party and it doesn't.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Power hungry guy. Like, he might say that I'm playing these power games in order to get power to do good. Like he might actually say it that way, but he's playing these really crazy power games. And the thing about Gavin and Kamala and these other kind of people who've succeeded in California, they've never stood up, up to the special interests. They never stand up to the most powerful groups on their side, which is the government unions and the trial lawyers. These people are just completely in control. And then the government unions include the teachers unions. Right. So they just. I mean, the prison guards union in California has had like 11 raises or something in the last decade. It's just the best paid prison guards in the world because they're a really powerful unit. It's ridiculous. And, you know, a black, you know the data. A black kid in Oakland is like 2.5 times less likely to breathe than a black kid in Louisiana in fourth grade. Yeah. And it's not because Louisiana is a more sophisticated place necessarily than California.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. Because you basically, if you ask the average person, they would say it was the reverse.

[Joe Lonsdale]

They would guess that California is more sophisticated, taking care of the black kids better, because that's what we've all been told. But it's actually the opposite because these people are actually, you know, they don't care about results. The outcomes is not the goal of the Democratic Party in California. The goal of Democratic Party California is to reward the special interests that are going to get you elected because they're completely in control of the state, these guys. There's 2 million people who work for the government in California. If you, if you. Each of these people have to basically give money to the union, which then gives money to the far left. So in California, there's three parties, there's the right, which is anemic, I love Steve Hilton, but you'll see. And then there's the moderate Democrats and there's the far left. And the far left, which is about at least a third gets by default, like several hundred million dollars a year from the government workers required. So it's a mess.

[Dave Rubin]

So that's a very specific. California has created these conditions, the New York version of it, which if you just look at it from the financial standpoint that Wall street is there and that it should have epicenter of the world. And now everyone's Coming down here to Florida, literally within miles of where I

[Joe Lonsdale]

think we might get Apollo. We'll see. We'll see in Texas. Yeah. All right.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, no, but you guys are doing okay too. I'm not, I'm not saying anything bad about Texas, but the. But most of the money seems to be. Is it fair to say that most of the big money is coming to Florida right now?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think that's like the obvious network is Miami, Palm beach, from a lot of the hedge fund guys.

[Dave Rubin]

Okay, so if that's roughly true or even if. Even if it's second, doesn't matter. But let's just say I like how you fight for your state. That's good. I know the feeling.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I'm not wearing the boots. Maybe I should have. I get it.

[Dave Rubin]

What challenges do you think that presents to a place like Florida where obviously we, you know, have no state income tax? We're building, it's safe, blah, blah, blah. But we're, we're getting this massive influx. What challenge challenges do you think it presents to this state? Well, you gotta work and, and to

[Joe Lonsdale]

Texas, you gotta work on your infrastructure. Right? I think, I think, I think the right is always very uncomfortable with infrastructure because it's government, like, tied to government, and you have to, like, do it efficiently and build it out. This is why I love Boring company. We should be building lots more tunnels to get rid of traffic. But there's gonna be infrastructure challenges, gonna be school challenges. There's gonna be be things you got to build. And you know, the biggest difference between Texas and Florida on this stuff is that Texas has a lot more of like a, like a build engineer culture. There's a lot more engineers per capita. There's engineering schools, there's companies that have existed there for 80 years in the chip industry, in the software industry, and a lot more depth. And so I think people, if you're a great investor and for lifestyle, it's. It's like Miami's great if you're a builder like I am, where I'm creating all these companies and you kind of have to go to Austin. But in both cases, we're going to need to fix the infrastructure and scale it up. But this is great for both states. So both states are crushing it.

[Dave Rubin]

Do you think it matters ultimately if Cali and New York just become dystopian, dysfunctional?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, I really, I really don't like it. I. I'll tell you what matters, Dave, is we need. And this is something red states need to fix too, by the way, is we need Our cities to be functional centers of our civilization. Like, we need actually to prove that in the 21st century with the politics we have, that we can make cities great. And this is something Republicans are very afraid of. Republicans prefer just to point at the city and laugh at it. Yeah. But guess what? These are the centers of our civilization. And so the fact that Austin is as dysfunctional in the core of the city council and that we have a DA who's not arresting criminals, that's a problem. And the fact that murder has not gone down there nearly as much after spiking, you know, because this guy is acting incorrectly. And you know what? The state. The state could be fixing these things. So I think. I think, I think it's going to be very hard to fix it in blue cities first. But I think we have to show, sorry, blue states, we're gonna be really hard to fix these things. But I shouldn't have to show in red states. We can fix our cities. We have to create the precedent. And then we have to take that and bring it to these cities on the coast. Because it is important for our civilization, for San Francisco and New York not to be destroyed. There are key parts of our civilization.

[Dave Rubin]

So what do you think in a red state like Texas, you have to do in a blue epicenter like Austin? Cause when, you know, when I was there seeing you guys, I spent a couple days and I saw more homeless people in Austin in 24 hours than I've seen in Florida in all of my years here. But then, as everyone pointed out, everyone said the same thing. It's very controlled and very. In this like kind of four block radius. And then of course, there's amazing areas of wealth and safety and all the

[Joe Lonsdale]

other very safe right outside the city. Even the Corsi is not.

[Dave Rubin]

But your point is that can't.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So I'll tell you what happened. So I move there and a bunch of people. You have to realize it's a virus, right? San Francisco spends a billion dollars order of magnitude per year on his homeless NGOs. And these people went and they moved all the other cities around the country. And they taught them, here's what you have to do. When they moved to Austin, you know what they told the mayor, who was progressive to do? They said, you have to bring the homeless camps downtown. So he got rid of the law saying no camping, and he brought the camps downtown. And I was very offended by this. And when I moved there, I said, no, we're not doing this again. And my friends and I sponsored something we won. Austin's a very left city. But we won 59% of the vote in Austin saying the homeless encampments are illegal. Because you know what? They were causing more murder. They're causing more rape, more sex trafficking, more. Everything was like that. So people voted against them. The state voted against them. But you went there and they're still there. So this is important lessons for me. Me, because I'm the, you know, I'm learning policy here. I'm trying to do this work over the last decade and learning how it works. And it turns out, turns out laws are not like these magical things that everyone follows. It turns out they have to. You can't just like pass a law. Like, people just ignore the law, right? And you could sue them, but that takes a long time. But so here. So here's the next version. What we're going to try to get the red states to do. It's. It's. If there is an illegal encampment, which by definition is illegal, because it's illegal, a person who lives in the city should be able to take a picture, put it on a portal. If it's not fixed, say within two days, then they should get discounts on the property taxes. So you have to have some incentive. You see what I'm saying? Isn't that cool? So guess what? You're gonna do a legal encampment then. Then I'm not gonna pay my full property tax. So you have to, like, the state

[Dave Rubin]

has this power, right? You're empowering the people. You're telling the people, oh, have a little skin in the game.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Give the people the power. Isn't that great?

[Dave Rubin]

You know, I've told this story a million times. I'll do it real quick, but about a year ago, there was a little. We have very few homeless people here. There was a little encampment by my Target Whole Foods area over there. Texted the police chief. I said, please. I said, chief, you may want to take a look at this. That's across the street from my jurisdiction, but I'll text the other guy. I went back, an hour later, it was gone. Now, I didn't get rebate on my taxes or anything, but my point in that is that there are places where

[Joe Lonsdale]

it works, where there's functional, and in some cases it just works. In some cases, you need the incentives in order to force it. And by the way, we're all about helping the homeless people. The way you help them is you make the outcomes accountable. So there's some spend where if you just don't make it accountable. They're just going to keep spending more and more money to bring them there. They're going to give them free stuff to bring them. They're going to give them free drugs, they're going to give, give them free tents. They're going to literally free tents, free drugs, free all sorts of things. And they come there and they abuse people. Or you could do it where you actually paying the drug treatment people. You're paying the people based on recidivism, based on getting them back.

[Dave Rubin]

What do you think we need to do to then get better politicians too? Because it's not just the idea people. One thing that I was thinking about a lot in the last two weeks is that we had the third assassination attempt on Trump. Trump, had they got him, the world, you would certainly not be sitting here right now. We have no idea what the world would be like right now. We have literally, it could have sparked World War iii. Like, we have no idea how crazy everything could, could get and we just don't. Yes, there are, we have, yes, there is a next layer between Rubio and Hegseth and whoever. Like, there's, there's great, there's some good people, but we need, we need that on steroids across the board. What do we do about that?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Well, we need young, we need people who we respect and get involved in politics. And it's tough, man, public life. Like you're doing a version of public life, which is different, of course. And even you get a lot of. No, but I get that we both get attacked for. You're more famous than. You get attacked more. But you know, we're really nasty.

[Dave Rubin]

You want to trade? I'll trade you. The attacks for the basketball court we're getting.

[Joe Lonsdale]

People are really nasty today. I think we should give more. Listen, I strongly disagree with Ro Khanna on a lot of stuff. I feel very betrayed because he came as a moderate Silver Valley and he went to the very far left left. I don't think he deserves to be doxed because I think, I think there

[Dave Rubin]

has to be some completely agree with

[Joe Lonsdale]

that, you know, of course I think there has to be some like, respect for people in public life that's a little better than what we do right now, even if you, like hate the, the things they stand for. And so I think it's very unhealthy what our society is doing there. And listen, I think we should actually be giving more honor to people on both sides who stand up and go into public life. Even again, I, I, I really disagree with a lot of the far left. I think they're going to destroy our civilization. I don't think they should be violently attacked. I think it's really important to have some honor in our Republic for how we treat people. It's really nasty right now.

[Dave Rubin]

I mean, sadly, that seems to be a fundamental difference we have. We don't think they should be attacked. An awful lot of them do think we should be attacked and their leadership doesn't seem willing to say anything about that.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's definitely a problem.

[Dave Rubin]

Okay, so let's say we get some politicians in and they're working and the AI is working and we're feeling good about the future.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So then the neck is. Is the next horizon what Elon's talking about all the time? Like the next, the next thing that you'd be excited for is now.

[Joe Lonsdale]

I love Elon. There's so many more battles.

[Dave Rubin]

Is he jumping? He's jumping 10 battles before.

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, he's thinking way ahead.

[Dave Rubin]

Which you're not going interplanetary next week. You're doing some other things first.

[Joe Lonsdale]

So the most important battle for. There's a lot of battles that I like to get involved in, which is a problem, of course, but the big battle I fought previously in the last 10 years especially was fixing our defense industrial complex. It's not fixed by any means, but it's a hell of a lot better. A ton of people who built with me, a lot of our guys from Palantir built anduril surotics building things better and cheaper. Going to build thousands of these autonomous warships. Chaos is doing $5,000 interceptors versus millions of dollars per drone. So we've made that cheaper and better and functional. And there's so many things happening with Secretary Driscoll in the army even today announcing basically we're going to let people integrate with everything and get rid of all these interests. So we fought this defense battle. It's going right. It's going to work really well. The other really broken cost plus area of our society other than defense, I'd say it's healthy healthcare. And healthcare is probably in some ways like it's at least as important. Obviously defense is important. You want to get conquered. But healthcare is going to make a socialist if they don't fix it. And it's, it's a really cool time right now because it's, it's obvious. Thanks to what's happening in AI, both on the new therapies to cure diseases and on how you run healthcare administration and services, we can make Healthcare so much better and so much cheaper. Like so much cheaper. Like less than half cost where everyone does better. And this is great because this is our main debt in our country, right. The reason we're bankrupt, we usually have $100 trillion, if you actually measure it correctly of entitlement debt is health care. So this one to me is like the final frontier of special interest that we just, we have to have those fights, right.

[Dave Rubin]

And it also seems to be the one that is the lowest hanging fruit to defang some of the left, right. Because Bernie constantly help Medicare for everyone but they have no idea how to pay for it or how to do it.

[Joe Lonsdale]

And they would destroy innovation in that area by being a socialist, which we do not want America's. Now it's probably unfair that we're paying the most highest drug prices and that we are innovating for everybody. We are innovating for the world.

[Dave Rubin]

World.

[Joe Lonsdale]

We cannot break America's like, like for profit healthcare. The way we have to do it though is you have to make it truly a market based system which is not. It's crony, it's broken.

[Dave Rubin]

So you envision a sort of medical future where it's like Elysium meets Alien and there's going to be a pod, right? Like there will be a pod with robots and you're going to say what's wrong with me? And it's just going to fix it right there, right? Like that. That's kind of what gets us.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Have you seen this new peptide stuff?

[Dave Rubin]

Have you fallen the Peptides? My whole Instagram. I'm not on the peptide. Are you on the Peptides?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Besides, I didn't when I tore my knee hel skiing. Yeah. And it was awesome.

[Dave Rubin]

But stem cell man, we're about the same age.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, yeah, you got it. When you got to do. I will tell you, it's the one area of the country where. Where something is growing faster revenue wise than AI is all the peptides, not just GLP1 by the way.

[Podcast Advertiser]

What?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

So peptides as an industry is growing faster than AI revenue wise.

[Joe Lonsdale]

It's actually the only thing growing faster. And so it used to just be like GLP1 and the related thing things. But if you look at all the other ones like added up, it's actually like it's actually now bigger interest than the GLP1s even. So this is, this is a big. This is a big thing in our country.

[Dave Rubin]

So we're going to change all the tech. We're going to fundamentally change our bodies.

[Joe Lonsdale]

There's Going to be all sorts of new therapies that are even more advanced than peptides coming. But I think peptides is like the big thing the next five years in healthcare on that side of it. And I think people are going to be a lot healthier in their 80s, 90s, hundreds. Like, I don't know, maybe you live to 120, but you live healthily. There's, there's a, there's these new treatments for these rats that they're doing because they test the, test things out on animals and, and, and we figured out how epigenetic aging works and it makes the rat live like 30% longer, but it looks like it's young until it dies, which is pretty good. Whoa.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, that's freaky.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You know how you tell that an old rat is gotten young again? Oh, starts having lots of sex right away.

[Dave Rubin]

So somewhere in a lab somewhere there's a lot of old rabbit rats having sex.

[Joe Lonsdale]

That's your drinking too much.

[Dave Rubin]

You should have one more. This is like when Jordan Peterson used to talk about the rats doing cocaine and everybody would be freaking out. Okay, interesting. Are you involved in that in any way or not?

[Joe Lonsdale]

This actually.

[Dave Rubin]

Should we, should we end the show there? Do you have anything else you want to add? I feel like that seems like the proper.

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, actually. So Altos.

[Dave Rubin]

Ah. Oh, okay.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Labs is Rick Klausner, who's been.

[Dave Rubin]

That was good. That was a heck of a like laugh to. I'll get to something serious. Good.

[Joe Lonsdale]

No, it's good. Rick Klausner has started five or six multi billion dollar bio companies and he started that. He's working on a bunch of cool things, but I think Alto raised a few billion dollars and it's them. And then Blake Byers, who was also a very famous investor in Silicon Valley, has his own company with some of our friends as well that's doing great things. So there's a couple groups that are, that are actually advancing this. It's really cool.

[Dave Rubin]

You know what, I will ask you one final bonus question because I've mentioned before you've invested in a couple things that I've done. I think I've done all right by you and I've said this every time you've been on the show, but the best part is not the money that you've invested, but that you always pick up the phone and you've given us great advice on certain things over the years. So let me ask you this just for anyone that's watching this that just they want to get involved a little bit more. They want to invest a little bit more. They want to do some things with their money that's a little bit different. They get all, at least some level of what we've talked about here in terms of where the future is going and everything else. How would you say to somebody who's like, you know, maybe in their 20s, has a little money, just wants to start doing more interesting things with their money. What would you say to that person?

[Joe Lonsdale]

Yeah, it's interesting. I think I'd say mostly to that person. My first thing I tell you is your time's worth a hell of a lot more than your money. And so using the money that you have to be safe with the money to then free up more of your time to learn AI, to try to practice building something, to try to take risks, that's the most important thing first of all is learning and taking risks. Now if you do really want to invest your money in some ways, first of all, you have to be an accredited investor to invest in funds. So you gotta be really careful about that. But assuming you, you're allowed, right?

[Dave Rubin]

So you're not going to get there overnight. That's. You got to have.

[Joe Lonsdale]

You're going to get there overnight. So it's a public stuff. So I actually think if you're only if you're not accredited, you should be investing to make sure you free up your time and like leave your money in an etf. Like it's fine if you do have extra money. Beyond that, I think you should be very careful at first. You shouldn't put too much of it illiquid. But there are platforms. Zombato Z A N B A T O is something I helped friends start over a decade ago. And there's billions of dollars to go through that to access kind of interesting tech companies, for example, and people. But I think you just gotta be really careful about these things. If you're an outsider, like start with a much smaller amount and learn from your mistakes is what I will tell people. Because this is dangerous if you're just starting to get involved.

[Dave Rubin]

And final question, what would you say to investor like yourself who is drinking great tequila and was like, man, I should probably invest in a tequila cup. What would you say to that guy?

[Joe Lonsdale]

I think we should always back Dave

[Dave Rubin]

and learn from him and communication.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Good seeing you, my man. Good to see you.

[Dave Rubin]

On June 11, the Rubin Report will be live live at the Fillmore Miami beach with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Ben Shapiro, Adam Carolla, Jillian Michaels and little old me. Seats are limited and going fast. So if you've been watching the show and want to experience it live, scan the QR code right over here and grab your tickets. I'll see you there.

[Joe Lonsdale]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, out cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.