Joe Lonsdale
153 statements across 87 episodes · 60 bullish · 59 bearish · 15 people on the record · first statement Jul 5, 2021 by Palmer Luckey · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Joe Lonsdale's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Joe Lonsdale, oldest first
Jul 5, 2021
Jul 22, 2021 negative
Aug 3, 2021
Sep 3, 2021 positive
Sep 9, 2021 neutral
Lonsdale: Palantir fired a brilliant early employee for disrespecting engineers
“We did that at Palantir too early on. There was someone who was really, really bright, but they weren't really someone who was a team player in the right way, and they weren't respecting the engineers in the right way, so they couldn't fit into the culture.”
Sep 15, 2021 positive
Sep 15, 2021 neutral
Dec 15, 2021 positive
Dec 31, 2021 positive
Dec 31, 2021 negative
Lonsdale: Male Leaders Do Not Need Same Paternity Leave as Women
“Men don't need to heal the same way women do. They don't always need as much time as women off. A great woman leader is just as important to get back to work, but she may need to heal. The man doesn't need to heal. He shouldn't be pretending he needs the same …”
Dec 31, 2021
Lonsdale: Successful People Often Become Too Cautious and Avoid Hard Challenges
“A lot of my friends who are successful, they're just super careful and never do anything hard again. And then everyone lads them for being a successful, nice person. But I think, you know, it's more fun to keep putting yourself out there, keep taking risks, ke…”
Jan 6, 2022 negative
Lonsdale: Education Department officials covered their eyes to avoid Palantir data
“I remember when I was at Palantir, 15 years ago, and we were exploring different ways to help the federal government, and we went into the Department of Education, and we were going to show them something they could do to use data to do a better job, We put so…”
Jan 6, 2022 positive
Jan 14, 2022 positive
Jan 14, 2022
Jan 26, 2022 positive
Koch: Public attacks on our philanthropic network actually attract supporters
“These attacks in many ways help us, because they call attention to what we're doing. So people are interested in finding out, and when they find out they find that what we're doing is the opposite of what we're attacked for. And so it attracts more people to w…”
Feb 3, 2022 bullish
Feb 10, 2022 positive
Lonsdale: Tech Innovators Are Often Brighter Than Most Top Professors
“I believe that a lot of my friends in the innovation world are actually, in many cases, brighter than the vast majority of professors at top schools, and they have very dynamic minds, and they've created lots of huge, amazing things, they're pushing things for…”
Feb 10, 2022 positive
Lonsdale: Many Stanford Computer Science and Bioinformatics Professors Became Billionaires
“People teaching computer science there, the people teaching bioinformatics, A lot of them became billionaires in the last 10 or 20 years, and it's clear, it's because they were amongst the very best in that area, and then they were exposed, and they were able …”
Feb 16, 2022 positive
Lonsdale: Charles Koch's empire required his father's $21 million starting revenue
“Because Charles' father had, there's about twenty-one million revenue when Charles took over the business, and I believe he grew it about 10,000 times, and if, but if he had to start from zero, He might be at maybe a 100th of where, 100th of where he was today…”
Mar 3, 2022
Lonsdale: Palantir tracked supply chains and disrupted slavery in Southeast Asia
“We were involved a lot when I was at Palantir company started 18 years ago, like looking into supply chains and figuring out where slavery was and helping disrupt it. It was amazing. We found slavery in Southeast Asia and places.”
Mar 3, 2022 negative
Apr 27, 2022 bullish
Apr 27, 2022 positive
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Feb 2, 2023 negative
Lonsdale: Media focused exclusively on three controversial tweets out of 3,500
“I know, I mean, even for myself, I think I checked, I have 3500 tweets as of the time we're recording this, and I think there's been like three of them that were controversial, then the media like wrote all the stories about those, nothing else, even though th…”
Mar 15, 2023 positive
Lonsdale: American religious groups are uniting in response to secularization
“We're more allies between our faiths in many ways in America now, where there's a lot of people who don't have faith anymore. It kind of puts us, historically, people would fight over different religions, and it's almost like now we're like more on the same si…”
Mar 15, 2023 negative
Mar 15, 2023 positive
Mar 22, 2023 neutral
Carter invested blindly in ContextLogic and missed the Wish pivot
“And you said you were gonna invest, and you said Troy, you should put some money in. And, you know, I honestly, I had no idea what Peter was talking about. Like, I had, you know, a little inkling, but you trusted him so much, and I trusted you so much, I'm lik…”
Mar 22, 2023 positive
Apr 19, 2023 negative
May 11, 2023 bearish
May 11, 2023 negative
May 24, 2023 negative
Lonsdale: Government expansion incentivizes large corporations to adopt state politics
“When we have areas where the government is growing, is regulating more, is getting more powerful, you see certain corporations start to have the same politics as those people in government. And when you say, oh, these world corporations, what are they doing? B…”
Jun 1, 2023 positive
Lonsdale: 23-year-old tech wizards alone cannot fix complex sectors like healthcare
“It's not all 23 year old tech wizards that are the ones that can build everything we need. There's, we need a good combination of different types of people who have actual different experience, especially for healthcare.”
Jun 1, 2023 positive
Jun 1, 2023 bearish
Lonsdale: US healthcare productivity is declining while costs rise and outcomes stagnate
“Healthcare costs are going up every year. Productivity in this space is declining. It's one of the only places where productivity goes, tends to go down over time, which is crazy. Outcomes seem to be relatively flat.”
Jun 11, 2023 negative
Jun 22, 2023
Jun 22, 2023 neutral
Lonsdale: Elon Musk appeared exhausted and relied on memes to recharge
“I was with, you know, with Elon earlier recently, and he's just, like, exhausted from doing all these things at once, and he's just laughing a lot and talking about memes, and it's just clear, he's just, like, trying to, like, recover somehow from, like, doing…”
Jul 18, 2023 neutral
Jul 18, 2023 negative
Jul 18, 2023 negative
Lonsdale: Technologists must enter government because current leadership is comically bad
“Even though a lot of us disagree, I think it's very important. We do get involved and we do run things is my view. I think our founders will believe that as well, because otherwise things are going to be just very terribly done as we're seeing. It's comically …”
Aug 18, 2023 positive
Aug 18, 2023
Oct 25, 2023
Nov 2, 2023 bearish
Lonsdale abandoned an East Austin development because cash yields six percent
“I was gonna build a bunch of buildings near East Austin, where I was gonna try to make an investment there, and the paper return, we mapped it out, was about 3.8% yield. Money sitting in the bank makes six percent yield. This is what the Fed's doing. They're s…”
Nov 8, 2023
Nov 15, 2023 positive
Lonsdale: Peter Thiel demanded immediate execution over pre-analysis meetings
“Working with Peter Thiel, there'd be times where I want to like
Talk about something we were going to do, or talk about something we should analyze.
He was never interested in that.
He was like, just do it, and then come back to me with it.
It was just this cu…”
Nov 15, 2023 neutral
McAfee: Employees Seek Status by Becoming Gatekeepers in Approval Loops
“One way you get status inside this thing called the company where you spend so many of your waking hours is to be in the loop. And so subconsciously, almost all the time, we humans, we want to be part of the process. We want to be in the loop. We want to be co…”
Nov 23, 2023
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Lonsdale: China censors Hollywood films intended for US audiences
“They tell me there's two different looks that Chinese get for every one of their movies. One look is things where they say before it comes out, if you have to censor these or can't go to China, but the other look is things you have to censor for American audie…”
Nov 30, 2023 positive
Lonsdale: Defense startups are competent while legacy contractors are rotten
“I think there's something about the new crop of these startup defense companies, which are actually, actually competent and actually have our best and brightest. Versus kind of the rotten legacy kind of places that become like a weird distorted version of gove…”
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Lonsdale: Fauci effectively bribed researchers to reject lab-made virus theory
“As far as I could tell, people saw that this was a lab-made virus, they spoke out about it, Fauci gave them a call, they changed their mind in public, then they got a big grant. Like, it's very clear this guy was bribing, as far as I could tell, these research…”
Nov 30, 2023 bearish
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Lonsdale: David Hume's philosophy heavily influenced the creation of Palantir
“You know, when we were building Palantir, one of the biggest impacts on me was David Hume's treatise on human reason about how the brain works, and we're trying to extend the human brain into massive amounts of data, and you really have to go back to first pri…”
Dec 13, 2023 bullish
Lonsdale: Over 100 entrepreneurs have committed to hiring UATX students
“We have over a hundred of my friends who are entrepreneurs, who are innovators, who have said, gosh, I really want to try to hire these students as interns, as full-time people, partner with them on new companies they're building.”
Dec 13, 2023 positive
Jan 31, 2024 bullish
Lonsdale: Earth could comfortably support 100 billion people
“I feel like with nuclear energy and things like tunnels around our major cities and stuff to get rid of traffic entirely, cause you can have like arbitrarily, you know, large amounts of going in and out. It seems like there's no reason we couldn't have a hundr…”
Jan 31, 2024
Feb 14, 2024 negative
Feb 14, 2024
Feb 29, 2024 negative
Mar 8, 2024 negative
Lonsdale: Court rulings against Trump and Musk are weaponized persecution
“And we talked about the use of the state's judicial systems to persecute political enemies both of course with Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently with rulings that, you know, even though I looked into them in a lot of detail, they both seem to be BS and to be…”
Mar 15, 2024 positive
Lonsdale: Direct Feedback from Field Users Is Critical for Early-Stage Team Morale
“It was a key early on in the company bringing those people in once we really started to have the impact because people even internally, Tyler, as you probably know, like the first year, four year, five, it was, it's tough getting to the point where we were mak…”
Mar 15, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024 bullish
Apr 25, 2024 positive
Apr 25, 2024 positive
May 2, 2024
May 2, 2024 negative
Lonsdale: Software patents are unnecessary and primarily benefit bad actors
“Probably shouldn't be, there probably should not be software patents, for example, I say this as someone who's built tons of software companies, like, it's probably not necessary, probably just helps bad people, so that's very interesting.”
May 2, 2024 positive
May 16, 2024 negative
Lonsdale: Politico Labeled Event with Keynote by Schumer as MAGA Event
“Literally last week, I was in Washington, D.C., and we had a bunch of people speak on the right, and Trump did a video in, but then a bunch of people spoke on the left, and Schumer gave the keynote of this big event, And the guys at Politico who are on the way…”
May 23, 2024 positive
Lonsdale: University Students Should Experience Microaggressions and Practice Being Offended
“I think all of the kids coming to university should get practice being offended.
I think it's actually healthy for them
to
You know, we call it microaggressions.
I think we should have all of them experience microaggressions.
They need to learn that it's okay …”
May 23, 2024 negative
Lonsdale: Modern therapy makes people weaker rather than teaching strength
“There's something about how therapy works today. I don't know if you've seen Albert Schreier's new book on this, but basically it's like causing this thing to You're basically making them weaker based on how we're dealing with them rather than teaching them to…”
Jul 3, 2024 positive
Langone Evaluates Job Candidates by Observing How They Treat Restaurant Waitstaff
“To this day, Joe, one of the things I love to do if I'm being asked to evaluate somebody for a job at one of the companies, I like to take them to a meal. I love to watch how they interact with a waiter or the busboy.”
Nov 2, 2024 negative
Nov 2, 2024 positive
Lonsdale: Anduril integrated with Saronic in three days versus legacy primes
“So we have this company, Sironic, I think you're also just invested in them, that we helped, I helped build, and it's growing really fast for the Navy, and the people, they asked us to weaponize some of the autonomous vessels, and they, and so we reached out t…”
Nov 2, 2024
Nov 22, 2024 bullish
Lonsdale: Six to eight new primes will drive defense innovation
“I tend to think it's going to end up being six, seven, eight new primes that are like. 80% of the new impact that matters. Not, not the super distributed thing that, but at the same time, it was, you know, we'll probably be buying a bunch of those eventually i…”
Nov 22, 2024 bullish
Nov 29, 2024
Nov 29, 2024
Dec 6, 2024 negative
Dec 6, 2024 neutral
Dec 13, 2024 negative
Lonsdale restricts children's screen time, calling current AI design a drug
“We don't actually use screens very much, because I'm a little bit afraid of the interactions with them, and like what, you know, I see a lot of this AI design as it is right now, as like, it's a form of drug in some sense, right? Because basically it's trying …”
Dec 13, 2024 negative
Lonsdale: Wealthy Founders Try Fixing Society While Lacking Enlightenment Philosophical Grounding
“I'm obsessed with, and it's the biggest frustration for me, because our friends will make a lot of money, and they have no idea about these enlightenment values, and then they try to apply things to fix our society. That are completely missing the wisdom of wh…”
Jan 23, 2025
Jan 23, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Bloomberg was offended by pitching for-profit government tech
“And it's interesting because I tried to tell Michael Bloomberg this at the time, and this is why it's going to be much more impactful, I think, than just paying for money for people in these cities. And he was apparently really offended by this and didn't want…”
Jan 30, 2025 positive
Feb 14, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Regulate virus-building biotech machines, not general AI
“I do a lot in biotech as well, and we have all these new machines that are able to like construct and build
Like, you know, chains of things and build viruses and stuff like they did in China.
Like maybe we should be regulating those.
Like I'm like, so against…”
Feb 21, 2025 positive
Mar 14, 2025 positive
Mar 14, 2025 positive
Lonsdale: Epigenetic modification is the most likely mechanism to reverse human aging
“It seems to me like the thing that's most likely to upend aging for real is some kind of like modification of epigenetic expression and the epigenetic aging process, which were, you know, companies like Altos Labs and the stuff that, you know, Blake Byers and …”
Mar 14, 2025 bullish
Apr 3, 2025 negative
Cotton: European regulation makes building giant tech companies almost unheard of
“Even compared to some of our European friends, you know, their economies are just very sclerotic. And the prospects for someone like a Joe Lonsdale, or as we mentioned earlier, Mark Zuckerberg to rise from nowhere and create a giant company out of nothing is a…”
Apr 3, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Facebook throttled his account for discussing the COVID-19 lab leak
“I actually posted about it myself right when it happened, and my Facebook account at the time, I don't have one anymore, but my Facebook account got throttled for talking about the lab leak because I thought it was the obvious thing, and they censored me on th…”
Apr 17, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Collaborating with federal agencies to target NGO funding networks
“So I think studying SF and studying Austin, Led me to understand the NGO thing, which I then was very helpful with DC, and we actually are working with people running a lot of agencies in DC to go after the NGOs and based on things we've learned in the last se…”
May 17, 2025
Lonsdale: Free online tools leave no excuse for low SAT scores
“It used to be like, 30 years ago is, oh, the SAT is kind of unfair if you're poor because you can't get as good of like a study tutor, but like now there's things to study online that are free that I think it's, I think there's almost no excuse, not just to ha…”
Jun 4, 2025 bullish
Jun 4, 2025
Jun 12, 2025 neutral
Jun 26, 2025 negative
Jun 26, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Commentators lacking historical context are dangerously misleading millions
“He's like, he's a witty guy who was against the socialists, but these guys have no context on the history in general, which, and I think free speech is important, but it's kind of scary for our culture that there's wacky people taking millions of people down a…”
Jun 26, 2025 positive
Jul 3, 2025 bearish
Jul 28, 2025 negative
Jul 28, 2025
Aug 29, 2025 negative
Sep 5, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: H-1B backlash stems from IT body shops, not elite startups
“I think there's a confusion with the argument with a lot of people who aren't in the tech world where there's, I think there's two types of businesses. One type of business is more like yours where it's just like super fast growth. It's clear how this could be…”
Sep 15, 2025 neutral
Sep 15, 2025 negative
Meyer: Media attacks on tech figures are no longer working
“Today it's become almost a badge of honor because of how ridiculous the attacks have become. It's not just Marc Andreessen. It's not just you. It's not just Elon. It's not just the people with names. You know, they'll, they'll attack anyone that they think the…”
Sep 15, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: TechCrunch, Wired, and Scientific American Are Politicized and Attack Entrepreneurs
“You know, a lot of the other magazines, stuff like Wired, Scientific American, Things like TechCrunch, they've really fallen. They've really been captured. They've been politicized. They're no longer interested. They no longer love the entrepreneurs. They just…”
Sep 25, 2025 negative
Lonsdale Says Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Lack Philanthropic Courage
“And this is, I think, a problem with people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and others is there's all these, like public education in America, Bill Gates just acknowledges he wasted, like, billions of dollars because he wouldn't do things to fight against the b…”
Sep 25, 2025
Sep 25, 2025 negative
Oct 3, 2025 negative
Oct 9, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Explicitly illiberal ideologues should not run university departments
“I feel like if someone is clearly illiberal, if they're clearly an Islamist who's trying to conquer for Islam, if they're clearly a communist who's trying to You know, conquer with communism and push that, like, they probably shouldn't be running our departmen…”
Oct 9, 2025 positive
Oct 9, 2025 positive
Oct 9, 2025 positive
Lonsdale: Practical work at PayPal taught more engineering than Stanford CS
“I took computer science at Stanford and I actually, it was very theoretical, which I enjoyed as well. I think you should have some theory, but I actually learned a hell of a lot more from like working at PayPal and working around other kind of engineers and fo…”
Oct 9, 2025 negative
Oct 9, 2025 negative
Lonsdale: Hundreds of UT Austin courses teach students to hate America
“At the same time, I have deep issues that I think when we looked into it last, there were 400 courses that are things like Latinx studies and Chicana feminisms, and you just know there's hundreds of courses there where they're teaching the kids to hate America…”
Dec 11, 2025 positive
Lonsdale: An Arab country deployed AI to cut permitting time to 120 minutes
“Some of actually the Israelis who work with him and some of my friends had built him technology for a whole country that, that would make permitting only take a 120 minutes. And so they're actually making the rule where when you try to get a permit in this cou…”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Lonsdale: Cicero Institute is eliminating degree requirements in multiple states
“One of our big policies in a lot of states in Cicero is we're actually getting rid of the college degree requirement for certain jobs where we care more about the skill than about forcing someone to go, you know, get, necessarily get brainwashed for four years…”
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Dec 30, 2025 positive
Dec 30, 2025 bullish
Jan 9, 2026 positive
Joe Lonsdale co-founded Epirus in 2018 to combat stadium drone threats
“In 2018, when I helped my friends start EPRIS, that's what I was thinking, actually, is what could a crazy terrorist do to, like, attack something in a stadium? And you actually do need just to be able to turn these things off.”
Feb 17, 2026 negative
Lonsdale: The AGI Singularity Narrative Is Silly and Quasi-Religious
“Like one answer to this, which sounds silly to me is that Nothing really matters. It's just who gets first to like AGI or ASI and the whole world hits like a singularity where there's like this godlike intelligence and everything changes. So that's like the on…”
Feb 27, 2026 bullish
Ross: AI puts new career entrants on equal footing with industry veterans
“And this is the second time in my career where everyone's sort of kind of getting back to equal footing, and so young people who are just getting into their careers just starting are on equal ground with people like me, people like you who have spent 10, 2030 …”
Feb 27, 2026 negative
Feb 27, 2026 bullish
Lonsdale: Cognition will succeed due to its elite Olympiad-level engineering team
“I think I'm pretty bullish on cognition because I think Scott and like these like, 20 other like gold medal, like Olympiad winners, like probably could do something that's very, very valuable despite everyone going after it. But if you don't have 20 other Glob…”
Mar 13, 2026 neutral
Mar 19, 2026
Mar 27, 2026 positive
Lonsdale: Kushner and Gil automated Qatar building permits to just two hours
“My friend, Jared Kushner, who's obviously, you know, been involved in these administrations, he worked with Qatar, with Elad, and they built something where the permits only take, ah, 120 minutes there. So if you want a permit to build something, it'll get bac…”
Apr 9, 2026 negative
Apr 9, 2026 bearish
Apr 17, 2026 positive
Lonsdale: Startups Offer Greater Intellectual Satisfaction Than Academia
“You know, I think this is a really common thing in our society right now, where I think it used to be maybe 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, the smartest people who wanted to pursue the most intellectually demanding and interesting things would stay in acade…”
Apr 24, 2026 negative
Lonsdale: The SEC Investigated My Brother to Target Me
“I have two younger brothers and one of them, there were multiple, Kind of quiet SEC investigations. They never found anything wrong. And I hired the guy used to run the SEC in San Francisco to look into it. What's going on? He said, he came back kind of sheepi…”
Apr 24, 2026 positive
Apr 30, 2026 negative
Lonsdale says Kamala Harris promotes self-interest over public service
“It's more GFK asking what you could do for your country versus I think Kamala this week was telling women that you gotta ask when you, when I'm gonna get mine, which is probably maybe a little different perspective on what we should be telling from our leaders…”
May 8, 2026
Jun 18, 2026 positive
Jun 18, 2026 neutral
Jun 18, 2026 bullish
Lonsdale: Blend trades under 3x revenue despite major AI deployment
“Your market cap is in the range of three hundred fifty million. And so you're literally trading at less than three times last year's revenue. Despite having probably as much AI deployed as anyone in this sector and hopefully gonna accelerate profitably.”
Jul 2, 2026 negative
Lonsdale: People have built conversational AI models that mimic me
“Someone has built these models in me. Have you seen these things? It's really weird, and they send them to me, And it's them having a conversation with me, and it's, like, kind of annoying to listen to yourself already, but it's even more annoying if it's, lik…”
Jul 2, 2026 bullish
Jul 9, 2026 negative
Jul 9, 2026 negative
Lonsdale: Populists will mismanage the AI workforce transition
“What's gonna happen is some crazy populists, both on the right and left, this is like a non-political comment, crazy populists want to manage it because they want the power, and then they're just gonna screw it up, right? And they're gonna steal.”