Joe Lonsdale

So it's really important that we have, Silicon Valley just got so far ahead, and it's really important we take some of that culture and apply it. When I first wrote the check in Neanderthal, it was 2016, I think, I had a bunch of people who we work with in the bio world say, we're not going to work with you anymore if you're doing defense. This is so wrong. You're just evil.

Why would you do this stuff? It's just wrong to do. And a lot of fun just wouldn't even mean it. So it was like a thing you weren't supposed to do. And what's really cool with the bio shift, that's totally changed. You have a lot of the best people going in. It's popular now, which maybe it's too popular now, but that's another problem.

There's a lot of that going on. Listen, Zuckerberg is an interesting case. He is fundamentally, himself, not super political. And he himself... and I'll get a lot of flack for this, but he himself has always had an appreciation for some of the liberty side and some of the conservative side, which is shocking given how his company does things.

But I've sat next to him not that long ago at a wedding or whatever, and he's interested in his kids learning about some of these ideas, like the Tuttle Twins or whatever, these conservative libertarian shows and stuff. I think he's open to different sides. I think the culture inside of Facebook that comes from the universities

is so poisonous and so leftist that I think they get away with things sometimes that they don't even tell him about. So I'm not saying he's like a perfect good guy on this. I think he should be way bolder and hold his company accountable to stop censoring conservatives and stop doing the wrong thing. So I think he's maybe a little bit soft.

Maybe I would say a little bit cowardly sometimes about these things, despite being amazing in other areas. But he himself is not really a driver of that. And what happens is a lot of these guys, maybe I'd say he started off moderate, moderate left, but with an appreciation for both sides. And he'll start like a foundation. It's called the Chancellor Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI.

And what'll happen with these moderate leftists is they're not good at keeping out like the crazy far left. And so his philanthropy org becomes run by these activists. And he's busy with his business. And his wife and him, I guess, don't want fights or whatever. So you get these crazy activists, and they just start doing terrible stuff.

And they're very good at sounding maybe to him like, oh, it's a reasonable thing. It's not actually affecting things. But when you saw it actually change the 2020 election, the way they put the hundreds of millions of dollars to work, my guess is he didn't even understand or might not even still understand how much it would screw things up.

Which is not an excuse for him, but I think that's just the reality of how these orgs evolve with these crazy activists inside of them.

He's not George Soros. He wasn't doing the crazy bad stuff himself. I think in general, Silicon Valley, people who are moderate on the moderate left... have been way too tolerant of letting these crazy activists take over their companies, take over their philanthropies, and break things. If we want to fix our country with this vibe shift, we need these guys to get balls.

We need these guys to have a little more boldness, a little more courage, and they need to come out publicly and excise these parts of their orgs and say, you know what? I was way too tolerant of that. There's 47 people I just fired because they were all found to be doing this crazy stuff, censoring conservatives, turning things down, screwing with them, shadow banning them.

We're not going to let them do that anymore. That's what he needs to do. And he can still be on the moderate left if he wants, but you can't freaking tolerate these crazy activists, man. That's what I would tell him. I haven't caught up with him in a bit.

You got to be really disciplined how you hire. You got to be really fast to fire. And by the way, I've worked with a ton of people who are on the left, on the right. This is not about left versus right. This is about the activists. This is about the crazy kind of woke, like cancel culture, illiberal people. And as soon as you see that, You can't tolerate it.

Do you build culture under your companies? You have to. You have to. You have to have CEOs. You set the tone by how hard the top's working. You set the tone by the values and principles we talk about. One of the values of AVC is patriotism. You have to explicitly have these values and say, this is what we stand for. This is who we are. We're principled optimists. We're patriots.

We're, you know, we're going to fight for the truth. And, you know, you want to live in a world. I think the vibe shift we've been talking about is like a lot of people are comfortable living with lives safely. And I think it's important that a lot of people come over to live with the truth, even if it's dangerous.

Well, I mean, I think the fact that we let China and Russia become such close allies is ridiculous. I think that was a huge strategic mistake. And I think they're not necessarily natural allies. I think that was something where we drove into each other. So that concerns me. I think the biggest concern right now is Turkey. And on top of that, Turkey. Yeah.

So Russia and China, obviously the biggest concern. Iran, obviously. But Turkey is like the biggest kind of wild card going out right now. So Turkey... You know, Ataturk created Turkey as the first really successful secular Muslim country in the modern world. And it was a really big deal. And there's a lot of problems historically with Islamists, today with Islamists.

So he built all these institutions into Turkey to stop the Islamists from taking over because he knew that would always be a threat. And one of the most important institutions was the army to make sure that Islamists did not run it. And that his job was to fight and stop Islamists if they were going to take over society. And Erdogan knew this.

Erdogan, we thought, a lot of us thought, when I was a kid, but I thought he was a moderate when he came in 20 years ago. That's how he ran. But he secretly, like very strongly on the Islamist side. And so in order to make the Islamists win again in Turkey, he had to take out these organizations in society that had been built to stop Islamists.

And so when he did the coup eight years ago, a lot of us believe, a lot of intelligence agencies believe it was purposely tripped off as a coup in order to get all these people to come up. and see who's going to be anti-Islamist and then wipe them out. And so what happened in society is he ended up killing and torturing tens of thousands of people eight years ago when this happened.