Joe Lonsdale

Friends is a really impressive video game guy who built Riot Games with League of Legends and stuff. There's tons of really great American talent around there. Part of what we need to be doing is iterating on and practicing on what interfaces work for these things. Right now, if you have a drone, there's five guys flying one drone in the Middle East, which is fine for that project.

It's not going to work for a battle with thousands of these ships. If you have a Hellscape, it needs to be some AI. I still want people in charge, but the AI needs to be augmenting them and helping them, just the same way your troops were in your Warcraft game.

Yeah, so Anduril is the one that Palmer Luckey, who got kicked out of Facebook, and my three-pounder colleagues started. And it's doing the Roadrunner we talked about. It's doing a bunch of other great stuff. It's a really important company. What do you think about Neuralink? I think it's cool. You know what actually is really neat?

There's a bunch of talent for Neuralink's move to Austin, where we are. A lot of their tech talent, people have shifted out of California. A lot of the head people are there. They're making amazing progress. There's probably all sorts of things you can do with Neuralink eventually, with people who are paralyzed, fix that with back pain.

It's a little bit scary if you really get a high bandwidth into your brain, maybe see what's going on. I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know everything about that. Yeah. I mean, does that worry you at all?

Well, I would say I trust Elon and the people working on it, but in general, having companies have access directly into the brains of huge numbers of people, if it spreads to be a thing that lots of people are touching, that is a little bit of a scary kind of concept. Overall, it's really positive. Overall, for the near term, 100%. There's guys, I can't even imagine. I'm claustrophobic.

I don't know about you. I don't like being stuck in a small space. Imagine if you're paralyzed and all you do is blink your eyes. There's guys who are literally getting this thing and suddenly they're able to effectively communicate, play games, do all these things that otherwise they were trapped in their head. It's like a God's gift for for a huge number of people.

So it's like, is it a good thing? 100% it's a good thing. But sure, if we're going to speculate 30 years from now where society can go if we're all plugged into our brains, we got to make sure that crazy things don't happen, obviously.

There's all sorts of these amazing things you could do with this. So I think for people who have issues or are injured, it may even be, like Elon said, at some point for a really bad back pain or something, you could just adjust it and stuff. So there's lots of really, really... I think we're going towards a golden age. It's really positive.

I think whenever there's these positive things, there's always some negative possibilities. And it doesn't mean we should stop doing the positive things, but we should just keep those in mind and do our best to make sure we avoid them.

You know, even at the Stanford Review, there's a version of that that was going on there. It wasn't called wokeness back then. It was political correctness run amok, run out of control. And it wasn't as extreme back then. There were bad things. There were dumb things. But it was always like...

it was always like there's just generally, you can kind of assume there's going to be common sense in charge and things weren't that broken. And I noticed things really started to get crazy, maybe 2014, 2015. It's like something in society snapped and all of a sudden you just had all these like, irrational activists and it wasn't about truth or what was right anymore.

And it was just like everyone had to virtue signal and go along. And if you're not virtue signaling and going along, you're a bad person for saying anything else. And I remember it started getting crazier and crazier. There were these like Black Lives Matter groups, which were clearly like they'd be on TV saying, we are Marxist trained, we're Marxists.

And then my friends who are not Marxists would be like giving them money. And like, guys, these are Marxists. Like they believe in like creating division. That's like part of what you study as a Marxist is how to divide society and how to break things. They hate you as someone who's building things and creating things. They want to take it and give it to everyone else.

And they're like, yeah, Joe, but this is like the thing to do right now. We want to be helpful. And I was just like, I've always argued, it's drove me crazy. Like, why are you giving these people money? This is insane. That was literally their answer?

This is the thing to do right now to promote racial justice. We're just trying to be good citizens and show that we care about black people. What the fuck is that? If you want to steel man something, there have been things in our country from 80 years ago, 60 years ago, that were particularly egregious that should piss everyone off, right?

In World War II, Secretary Knox didn't want any black people fighting in the Navy, and was kind of a dick about it. And there were even some of these heroes, like Dory Miller in 1941 in Pearl Harbor ships. gets attacked, he goes and he saves a bunch of these people carrying him out. Then he's never even trained. He runs up to the anti-aircraft gun and he shoots down four of the Japanese Zeros.

It's total badass. And they still treated him like shit because he was an African-American at a time when people were being treated like shit. So I think there's this generation that's traumatized correctly from how horrible we were. And I think that's still in the psyche. So that's the steel man. Okay, there is something there we should be remembering and pissed off about.

But then the answer is not to do things that divide us further and to spread Marxism. It was very weird. It was very cowardly because everyone kind of knew, yeah, this is kind of wrong. It doesn't really make full sense, but I don't want to think about it. I just want to go along because I don't want to have trouble in my life. And so this is swept through our country.

Yeah. It's just like this anger. It's just like just anger expressed aggressively and righteously. And it was people fanning the flames of that anger and that divisiveness. And it's really sad because I feel like in the 1990s, we'd got to a really good place in our society where it had become much less racist.