Palantir Co-founder Joe Lonsdale on weaponizing the judicial system against Trump, Musk

Right now we're joined by Joe Lonsdale.

He's co-founder of Plantir along with Peter Thiel and others and founder and general partner of the firm 8VC. And Joe also co-wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial talking about the dangers that could go along with the $400 million judgment against, plus judgment against Donald Trump and his civil case in New York simply because they don't like his politics. Joe, welcome back. Thanks, Brian.

Good to be on. So Joe, what prompted you and Jeb Bush to get together on that? Jeb's an old friend.

He's a businessman, I respect, a governor, I respect. And, you know, a lot of us, you know, I know Jeb has not always been a huge fan of Donald Trump, but a lot of us are just outraged at how much weaponization we're seeing in our government across the board. You know, this has really started a long time ago with the Labor Department having a palantir when Peter Thiel spoke up for Trump, you know, and then we're seeing the friend Elon Musk get attacked and we're seeing Donald Trump get attacked unfairly. And, you know, that's not how America is supposed to work. So Jeb might not love Trump, but as a friend, you know, I was talking to him about it and he agrees that we can't allow this weaponization of our government. It's not right.

And it's important for people, even if you don't love the person they're attacking, to speak up and say that's wrong. That's not how America works. Kevin O'Leary was the first one to step up and say, look, no one's going to do business in New York now. And now if a bank wants to do business with Trump, they know they're going to get unbelievable scrutiny or an insurer, unbelievable scrutiny. And what people don't understand, it doesn't end with Trump. Maybe it just started with Trump.

And what they did is start looking at and try to find a problem. There were no complaints from banks or no complaint from insurers. There were no complaints that people didn't get paid. In fact, everybody got paid back, but they went after them.

They said you weren't telling, you weren't approaching these loans and you weren't being truthful with your applications. And now they charge him $450 million as he waits for an appeal. Who's got $450 million laying around? Yeah, I mean, I was wondering, the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution says you're not supposed to have excessive fines. It seems to me like that is clearly an excessive fine as well. The whole thing is clearly ridiculous. And, you know, it's not how America is supposed to work. I love this country. I'm building a lot in this country and I'm still very optimistic on America. But the way we keep this working is we don't want to be like the third world.

We don't want to have these crazy people hunting people for for bullshit reasons. How was Peter Thiel pursued? Peter Thiel? Well, you know, yeah, so, so, so, you know, Peter and I were co-founders of the panel up here and, and, you know, all of a sudden when he spoke at the Republican convention for Trump, you know, in his very famous speech, he said, he said, he said, I'm proud to be a Republican. I'm proud to be gay, proud to be American.

And I thought it was a pretty cool thing to do on the floor of the RNC for Trump. And, you know, you know, right afterwards, it was less than two months afterwards, the Labor Department sued the panel here and said, we're not hiring enough Asians, which is pretty funny because I think the company is like 25% Asian in Silicon Valley. And by the way, we're not allowed to hire Chinese citizens for the DOD stuff we're doing. So it was clearly just, it was sort of like a mafia type tactic where it's like, you know what, you do something we don't like, we're going to give you trouble. And this is, this is how the government works now. The regulatory state has a massive amount of power.

It's unchecked. It's unaccountable. And when people speak up, it finds ways to harass you. There's activists who do that.

It's terrible. And then you turn out with Elon Musk. Now, he's in the crosshairs of the government, even though he's built the number one electric car in the country. You would think he'd be the darling, but because of Twitter and what he's done and what he exposed, now he's in the crosshairs.

What price is he paying? You know, it's, I mean, Elon's been really courageous. I think he's one of the most important men in America. We'd be losing to China on so many things with space as well, and defense with space.

We didn't have SpaceX. It's just extraordinary what he's accomplished. And I mean, you get standing ovations, right, when you go in front of people in the army and whatnot. But you basically have every, you basically have every regulatory apparatus weaponized against him. The DOJ is going after him. The FCC is going after him. The FCC, you know, there's all these launches delayed for months for total BS reasons of critical national security things with SpaceX because they, fish and wildlife, you know, people, cat ladies want to harass them.

I mean, the whole thing is just, it's just really terrible. So for you personally, you're not just sitting on the sidelines looking to max out your money, you're also helping with defense. And when it came to Ukraine, you took action. So what could you tell us about what you've done and what you've discovered and how you've helped them hold off the Russians? Yeah, you know, well, I started Palantir 20 years ago.

I'm very proud of it. I'm not running it today, but, but listen, they're, the most important, there's different types of weapons that are important for defense. Some of the most important weapons are the best intelligence tools and technologies to let you see what's going on.

And so, you know, Palantir's, you know, been deployed in Ukraine early on and we're at the cover story in time earlier. And, you know, you help figure out where the, where the Russian Ford generals and corporals are. You help figure out, you know, what they're doing.

You help, you help map it out and you help target them. And, and, you know, having those kinds of technologies is really critical in warfare these days. And if, you know, at Palantir, it's companies like Androl as well, which my friends started after Palantir, which are providing a lot of technologies for anti-drone and for all sorts of other kinds of new, new ways to target the bad guys.

And it turns out that if you want to stay ahead in warfare, you need to have your best and brightest engineers kind of working on the front lines and, and, and helping out, you know, with the US, which is what we're doing. Tell us about Palantir, how you decided it, and you're not running it now, but what it was designed to do? You know, you know, Palantir, Palantir really came out of, came out of that lava we learned in Silicon Valley in the, you know, in the first, first tech wave. And it turned out there's companies like PayPal, you know, so Elon Musk, computer tail, each started competing companies. They emerged to become PayPal. And at PayPal, we had the Chinese and Russian mafia trying to steal all sorts of money from us.

We were losing millions of dollars a month. Our competitors went bankrupt, Steve Mafi online, and we figured out how to build all these investigative tools to stop them. And, and, and, you know, we had to teach the FBI and the secret service how to, how to rescue people and how to get, you know, find them after we found them. And we got to know the guys and it turned out that the tools in DC were way behind. And then 9-11 happened. And after 9-11, the government spent billions of dollars on stuff that was way behind Silicon Valley. And this was, this was a problem because America was under attack and you had incompetent people, you know, basically spending money in the wrong way. So we said, you know what, we better take the best and the brightest from the tech world and re-equip the, you know, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, you know, all the national counterterrorism centers, how to bring data together and how to, how to go after, go after the bad guys. And Palantir partnered with a lot of these groups, partnered with law special forces, and really was critical in helping find and take out thousands of terrorists, which was obviously something we're very proud of. And, you know, helped stop a lot of major attacks as well. Joe Lonsdale's with us, Joe, which could really, in contrast to a lot of Silicon Valley, decided they didn't want to work with the defense department after a while, right?

You're right. And that, that was, you know, we were seeing a very strange people in Silicon Valley to walk through partnering. Why are you guys doing defense intelligence?

Why aren't you just doing social media? And, you know, it got worse, you know, when the woke stuff really started getting crazy in 2013, 14, 15, I remember Google had these key programs. They were trying to help the government and all of a sudden they protested and they said, we're not going to help the government anymore because defense is wrong. And, you know, it was a kind of anti-American thing where Google was, you know, you see it today too with Google. They're pretty woke. They're, they're globalists.

They're not really pro-US since they pulled out. And when they did that, a bunch of my friends and I said, oh, this is not acceptable. We got to jump back in.

That's when you see my friends in Palmer, lucky start the under all three CS, kind of jump back in and start building these companies. Cause we realized, you know, there was no other source of the best and brightest engineers going into this anymore. And so we had to step in. And what about you deciding to go into Ukraine? What did you discover?

How did you help? Well, so, so I wasn't running Palantir by that point. And, and, but you know, it's an important point, Brian. Palantir is a, is an American company. It partners with the American government. The American government's what decides to go into Ukraine. Palantir decides to, if they're going to do something and help something that we're going to do it really well.

And, you know, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you the truth. The first group to actually Palantir, even though it's American, also partners with our allies. I think UK took it in there first cause we do partner with the UK, you know, as America encourages us to.

And, and, and then American others went in as well. And Palantir basically helped map out where the bad guys are, run all the systems. If you know, basically like what are the information systems to learn, how you're going to fight a war, how you're going to decide what's what, you know, what, where your supplies are, how are you going to decide what to attack, what to defend. Like this has to be run through an AI driven system. It takes all the information into account, empowers you to make those decisions.

That's what Palantir is. It's a backbone that kind of runs the efforts. And also we're noticing that warfare has really changed even from when the Ukraine war started. I mean, we're seeing this now, like the, our Pentagon's going to school on how the Ukrainians have innovated from some of the things that we've given them.

It's amazing. You know, the drone part of the warfare is fascinating. You basically create tens of thousands of these really small things and you can use them to target and go really fast.

And they're really hard to block. And you know, there's new technologies. There's a company called EPRIS right now, which is a leading EMP technology in a world that we also built here in the US. And it turns out you can, you can fire microwave radiation to turn off drones miles, you know, miles away and whatnot and protect things.

And, and where, you know, there's all sorts of new kind of back and forth. How do you make small weaponized drones? How do you shoot them down? Iran of course has some very powerful, they're called level three drones or these big Shaheed drones. And they're really hard to stop and we're learning how to stop them without having to waste too much money. Because the problem is right now, Brian, is if you spend $3 million on a Patriot missile to stop one of these things or some other giant thing, and the drone itself only costs, you know, you know, $10,000. That's a huge waste. And so there's, there's all sorts of new warfare techniques going back and forth trying to figure it out.

Because we're spending too much knocking down these Houthi, these Houthi tribesmen are just sending these one-way drones in. Exactly. So, and then we've got to go reload. So you, are you guys working on that now?

Are you playing a role with this? Well, so, so, so we have these new, so EPRIS and, you know, in, in, in, in mythology, EPRIS was the bow of Theseus who started Athens and his bow had infinite arrows. And the reason they call this thing called EPRIS is it fires a blast of energy.

So that's infinite arrows effectively. And so the blast of energy only costs, you know, pennies or dollars compared to spending millions of dollars per missile. So we're trying to teach the government, don't waste a million dollars every time, just have an energy weapon ready and shoot down with the energy weapons much cheaper. It's much more effective if you can get a massive shield, basically hits everything. And so there's, yeah, so, so we are working on that as well. That company EPRIS is doing really good work.

It's where, you know, it's just, just starting to get deployed and some of the things there too. So Joe, when you say directed energy, you mean lasers? You know, lasers is one version of that because really to have a great, have great lasers actually. But in this case, we're doing microwave radiation. It turns out as the most, the second blast of super high energy microwaves. And what that does, it destroys electronics.

So it doesn't actually hurt people. Any one of these things has electronics in it. If you fry the electronics, they fall out of the sky.

That's how that one works. So would I see it? Would I, I mean, would do I see a bullet? I would not even see it? You would not, you would not even, you would not even see it. So if we're gonna, when we show it off, if you look up EPRIS online, you could, should we show it off like as if it's like the energy shield, but you know, you wouldn't really, you wouldn't really, if you just see the device and you wouldn't even know it fired probably.

And, and the thing would just fall out of the sky. It's pretty, pretty cool. How effective has China been in taking some of our technology? We seem to lead and they seem to have. Iran almost instantly had the same level, or close to the same level drones as we had. How are these rest of the world keeping up?

Is this flat out thievery? Well, you know, I, I, they, they do like to try to copy us and we've caught China a lot of times trying to copy us at our companies, but we have pretty good security. I don't think they're, I don't think they're up to speed.

They don't have a palantir at, they don't have what EPRIS has. They have probably stolen a lot of things over the years. But let's be honest, Iran, Iran has probably the third best electrical engineering university in the world. Iran has a lot of smart people. I don't hate the Iranian people.

I hate the Iranian government. Unfortunately, there are enemies right now and their people are really smart. I have to say the same thing for China. China has, you know, the Italian used to only just copy us 20, 30 years ago. But if you look at the innovation, the engineering going on in China, there's a lot of really great engineers.

I desperately hope we can have, we have a different regime in China because the CCP is evil, but it'd be awesome to be able to work with the Chinese people, man, because they are innovating and they are smart and they are going to be a threat if we can't fix that government over there. And finally, let's go full circle. What do you hope comes out of the editorial? What's been the feedback since you wrote it on the Wall Street Journal? You know, it's been really great because a lot of my friends in business who don't like Trump, they agree that for the sake of America, it's not right what's happening. It's kind of like this far left part of the Democratic Party has weaponized the courts. And I think a lot of even the moderate left, you know, a lot of my friends are honest about it, say this is wrong.

This is not what we're supposed to be doing. They're afraid to speak up in public against their own party when they're politicians. But in the business circles, they agree with it. And I'm really hoping to shift the Overton window away because we don't want the right weaponized in the courts either. We want nobody to make force. That's how we spiral towards a third world country. And so it's great to see people step up and say, yeah, even though I don't like this person, this is not how we're supposed to treat them. This is not how America is supposed to work. Joe, you agree that Ukraine needs to be funded, right? I think we need to stop Russia. I think there's a lot of corruption and bad things and waste and that we've been to happen over there. But so I empathize with why people are opposed to it.

But overall, I think we need to stop the bad guys inside the bad guys. Joe Lonsdale, thanks so much. Appreciate what you're doing for the country and for our show. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.