Joe Lonsdale

Anyone who was going to be against Islamists, anyone who was kind of built in to stop that. And so those people were all eliminated. The people in the army who were against Islamists were all eliminated. So for the first time, all of Ataturk's protections are gone. So now you have this very Islamist leader who's very pro-Islamist, and he just, with his forces,

conquered Syria because of what's going on in the Middle East for Islamists. He also now is wiping out, reportedly, huge numbers of Kurds. You can go look online. I think a lot more Kurds have died in the last month than people in Gaza have died this entire last year. And you're not hearing protests about it, I guess, because there's no Jews involved, but it's crazy.

They're just killing off the Kurds. And by the way, a lot of the Kurds were close allies with a lot of my friends in the special forces who had to deal with stuff over there. They were our friends. And they don't have a country, which I think they should. A lot of their territory is inside of Turkey, a lot of it's inside of Iraq, a lot of it's inside of Syria. And they're the Islamist enemy.

The Islamists don't want these guys to have their own country. And so he's wiping a bunch of them out. And I'm very scared what Turkey does next. Turkey has nuclear weapons, because it's in NATO. It's a wild card. Are they going to go after and help the Islamists take out the Jordanian king? I don't know. But there's lots of really scary things. So I think Iran's on the run.

We need to finish off the whole story with Iran, but now there's this other Islamist threat there that's a wild card that we're going to be dealing with and figuring out. That's pretty scary to me.

You know, China has a bunch of advanced new technology in all sorts of areas, whether it's hypersonics, whether it's massive numbers of submarines, whether it's all sorts of new projects they're working on that I'm sure I don't even know about. all sorts of things. They're trying to copy SpaceX. Thank God we have SpaceX, and they don't, but they're trying to copy it.

I don't know if you've seen the videos, it blows up when they try, but they're going to get there eventually, probably. Elon's really smart, and we have a really great program, but eventually they catch up and they do things in space, which scares me. What am I scared by? I'm scared by the space stuff, to tell you the truth.

It's very funny, everyone's like, don't weaponize space, don't weaponize space. And I agree, I don't want there to be wars in space, it would screw up a lot of stuff for the world. At the same time, if someone else weaponizes space and we don't, we're kind of screwed. I have no insight into what's going on in space.

So I don't have any clearances around this, and so I might piss people off talking about it, but I'm not clear, so I'm just going to go ahead and tell you a few things. But the number one thing I'd say, there's a natural network effect in space where it's very cheap. For the cost of one aircraft carrier,

you can put up probably 150,000 things up there that you can accurately drop on people within one meter. And they're much, much cheaper than missiles. And if someone does that and no one else does it, then the person who has that first, you can never launch a rocket again because it's very easy to see if a rocket's being launched and you can just take it out.

So there's a network effect that really scares me that if there was going to be a war, whoever conquers and has stuff up there first that's really good could probably stop the other guy from getting stuff up there. I don't want stuff exploding in space, but it's just such a powerful thing to own for any future battle. We need to be thinking about it. I think some people are thinking about it.

I'm not sure our budget reflects that we're thinking about it enough. By the way, this is why a lot of us were usually in favor of Space Force behind the scenes and really glad that President Trump started that. It's obvious you need Space Force. We're talking about how warfare changes. The space thing is a scary angle.

That's a big one. I mean, the other thing in general is that, that I guess I'm most afraid of, is that China has about 200 times our shipbuilding capacity, if you want to say. And I think you probably talked about this before.

In World War II, you get these, like, I have this cool painting at my house in Montana, our ski house, of these American ships hunting down a German warship and taking it out. But we needed multiple ships to do it because the German battleships were actually better than ours, I think. Now, America...

battleships, destroyer, we don't have battleships anymore, but American destroyers, everything else, they're way more advanced than Chinese. But, you know, if someone has 200 times your capacity, that's really scary because eventually they have a bunch of them hunted down, right? And so the question is, what the heck do we do? We need to get our capacity up.

So my friends and I started this company, Saronic. We're going to hopefully build 500 ships in Austin next year, working with a bunch of the admirals, a bunch of the best people in the Navy.

We're teaching them how to use AI to have swarms of these weaponized vessels and how they can work together with the fleet and how we could eventually have thousands of these in any kind of mission or battle scenario. Because that's really what you want, because for the cost of one big ship, By the way, all of our shipyards are delayed. They're all behind. It's pathetic.

They're all run by administrators of turbulent relations. So this Navy is just way behind and broken. So we need to have an alternate path to help create thousands of these ships that have turned the bad guys.

Yeah, but we really don't want there to be war in space because it may be the case that you start just blowing up certain things. They figure out how to get missiles or whatever and to blow up certain things. And then you have lots of junk up there and then it's just a giant mess. I think Starlink's really good for the world. I don't know if anyone destroys that shit.

That's what we were just talking about. Exactly. The reason this is so important, man, is that there's no interfaces right now for controlling one-to-many that actually work, right? So if you ever play StarCraft or Warcraft when you're a kid, right? Oh, yeah. And so there needs to be modern AI-enabled versions of this. One of my...