Palmer Luckey contrasts VR’s immersive potential—like float-tank coding and AI-powered robotic sparring partners—with China’s cost-efficient military-civilian fusion, warning of a likely 2027 invasion of Taiwan. He critiques U.S. defense delays, advocating for a "world gun store" approach over policing conflicts, while dismissing foreign adversaries as sources of unexplained drone/UAP anomalies, proposing interdimensional or uplifted intelligence theories instead. Luckey’s AR Eagle Eye helmet, cutting soldier load by 10 lbs with ceramic batteries and obstacle-seeing tech, proves his focus on efficiency over corporate trends like subscriptions and "dark patterns." His career—from Oculus prototypes to Air Force AI jets—raises questions about progress, simulation theory, and whether humanity’s designs reflect deeper cosmic influences. [Automatically generated summary]
If you can't simulate the experience of your body being in the game, at least to forget that your body exists and have the only thing you're viewing be your vision and the sound, I feel like would be a very interesting experience.
So I'm begging off an hour from him when he gets it done.
Like if you have a thought and you're just fucking around with it in your head, you're like, I don't know what to do with this.
You're in there.
You have zero distractions.
It's like your mind has more computational power that's available because even though you don't think about it, like right now we're in these chairs.
Your butt's touching the chair.
Your feet are on the floor.
Your hands on the table.
Your clothes are on your body.
There's all these different things that your body is recognizing as input.
When you take those away, it's like if you're having a conversation, there's a bunch of people right beside you with a jackhammer.
You're like, this is too distracting.
Let's go over here.
And you go to where in the park, it's nice and peaceful.
Now you can have a conversation.
It's so much easier.
Well, you don't realize that like regular everyday life, just establishing the distance between the walls and thinking about all the data, all that stuff is, your brain is computing this.
I've done a lot of reading on it, and I'm super interested in the science of it, but I've never actually managed to get into a float tank, which is really embarrassing.
I mean, you'd think that a billionaire would have the resources to get into a bucket of salt water.
But it would definitely be at some point in time, the best way to disconnect from your natural environment.
If they do come up with some sort of haptic feedback, that's like, or whether it's some sort of a neural interface that completely changes, you know, the environment, right?
Like, like you drop into it.
That would be the perfect environment to do it in salt water.
So I started building virtual reality headset prototypes when I was 14 or 15.
And then I built the first prototype of what I call the Oculus Rift at 16.
And then I formally turned it into a company when I was 18, launched the product when I was 19, and then sold the company a few years later to Facebook for a few billion dollars.
So it was kind of, it was kind of a crazy arc for me.
I did.
That was like, that was, I was putting myself through school.
And it was one of these crazy things where the universe kind of brought us together.
I was working on my VR technology, and nobody was paying attention to VR back then.
It was a kind of a crazy person thing.
Nobody was paying attention to what I was doing, but I was posting about it on this internet forum.
And then John Carmack started posting on that same forum asking for help modifying his own Sony head-mounted display that he had bought to reduce the latency.
And so I gave him a bunch of input on why he couldn't do it, why it was a impossible project, because I had been trying to do the same thing.
And then he ended up seeing the work I was doing on the Oculus Rift.
And he said, hey, Palmer, can I buy one of these from you?
I said, well, I'm not really selling these yet, but I'd be happy to lend it to you for free.
And so I sent it to him.
He ended up writing a review and posting it on his blog and said it was the best VR experience the world has ever seen.
He introduced me to Sony.
They tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab.
I turned them down.
They doubled the offer.
I turned that down.
And then so John was kind of the guy who got me like really, he's kind of the first guy who got any public attention for me where everyone was like, oh, if John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important.
And then if you could believe it, two years later, after I started Oculus and started selling these, he actually left id Software and became the CTO of Oculus.
So we got, then I, then I had the incredible opportunity to work with one of my childhood heroes as my CTO.
Is there a VR that like a professional boxer could use?
Like, could you get VR to the point where you could program it with AI so you could take the movement of like a Sugar Ray Leonard or something like that and actually program it into the machine?
So like I know I know Logan Paul and Jake Paul and have talked with them a lot about using virtual reality and how they're using it to do combat training.
Let me show you the text message that I was just doing with Logan Paul last night.
I said, it's time to have robots fighting people.
My dream is that you can have robots perfectly tuned to match your own current physical capability and progressively ramp up against yourself over time or against the greats.
Like we were talking through, like, no, this was less VR.
Well, are you even following some of the robot fighting league stuff?
So that's controlled by VR.
You put on a VR headset, you put on a motion capture suit, you teleoperate a robot.
One of the things I've been talking with Logan about is the idea of having where you have one teleoperated robot versus an actual human.
But then what we were talking about is this idea of having the robot learn from, like you're saying, learning from footage of not just the greats, but even yourself.
So that it can be basically, you could fight against your style, your exact level of strength.
And then, of course, you want to fight against the greats and see just how far you have to go and just get the shit kicked out of you.
Although I would say, one of my, I don't, I don't think James Cameron ever really explored this in Terminator, but my personal kind of like a head cannon theory would be that the reason that Skynet made the Terminators into a humanoid form is because maybe there is really some hope in that there's something of humanity left in it.
If it was truly a merciless killing machine with no affiliation with humanity, why would it make its agents so uniformly human-shaped?
But that's just something I want from time to time.
Well, I mean, you're familiar with all like, you know, the, like, all the, all the theories around, you know, like humanity being like planted here by a news.
And like, that's, that's always interesting because, you know, you could imagine a world where, yeah, it is this cycle of things that look kind of like humans were on top of us, and maybe eventually there will be things that look like humans being aware of.
Wasn't there some weird discovery, a recent discovery of an asteroid where they picked apart whether it's the crucial amino acids for life or some sort of genetic material.
You're talking about the NASA release that there were strong indicators, like bio signs that are that are compatible with what we would expect from life.
I always wonder if someone got overenthusiastic or if someone's like, hey, yeah, why don't you shut the fuck up?
You know, like we're trying to slow this whole release of alien technology, alien life, slow it down to keep society together so we have a stock market.
And it seems, I mean, my experience on this front is largely from a military angle and looking at a lot of the footage that's coming out and a lot of the sensor feeds that have come out.
And the thing that what we really need even more than discovering microbes, like these flying objects, the problem is that most of them, and I'm not saying all of them, most of them, we're only capturing on, let's say, one sensor, like a camera is seeing it or a radar is seeing it.
It's very rare to get both of those totally different types of sensors looking at it at the same time.
It's relatively easy to imagine a world where a sensor would have an error or an artifact or even that's being actively spoofed, right?
People are actively trying to trick it.
You can make radars see things that aren't there.
You can make cameras see things that aren't there if you're really smart about how you interact with them.
It's very hard to make something that makes a radar and a camera see something that isn't there in a way that perfectly aligns with what is there.
Now, you saw the recent one with the hellfire that was fired and it appears to have broken up but then kept moving.
That's interesting because now you have something that's on a camera and you sent another thing with a seeker and it got there and it blew up.
Just ask if it has been verified that this is legitimate footage from the military of whatever they thought it was going to be and a hellfire missile hits it.
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You know, so I gotta, I gotta see my mission through.
Like, the government is, we've been spending way too much money on defense, not getting nearly enough for it.
So I started Andrew with the goal of saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
I need to see that through.
But what I'll get to someday is, see, there's a handful of these government groups that are going around looking into things like what you're talking about.
You know, like they look into the strange phenomenon.
Right.
Those groups do exist, and I've tracked down a few of them.
The problem is that they're not taken seriously.
They're not well-funded.
And they're subject to all the same normal rules as an average government employee.
Like their problems are not finding weird things.
It's stuff like getting approval to buy plane tickets to go somewhere and getting approval to stay there for two nights versus one night.
Oh, look, it's just the typical government bureaucracy where they have to make every penny count.
They only have so much money.
Anyway, one of my dreams is I'm going to, at some point, when I'm retired, I'm going to go get deputized by the government and go get my federal badge.
And I'll be the government's privately funded X-Files.
And I'll just fly around.
I'll fly around on my own plane.
I'll have my own team.
We'll bring our own sensors, our own computers.
Oh, man.
If only we could bring in this expert, but he's on the other side of the world.
In general, there's enough weird stuff going on that it doesn't seem like a stretch to have somebody or something that really stays on top of that stuff.
And they have this back-engineered craft that they're working on, but then Raytheon doesn't get it.
Raytheon should be able to sue the government.
Like, why'd you do that?
Is an unfair competitive advantage.
Also, the people that are in charge of the projects, there's all this money that they have to lie to Congress about.
And so in this documentary, one of the things that they're proposing, guys like Lou Elizondo, and like, what is the path to sanity with all this stuff?
One of the things that they're proposing is amnesty.
It's with everything, but it's a question of how you can apply targeted pressure as a private individual, right?
So yeah, like charities.
There's a lot of graft going on.
But what can I really do to stop that at each of these charities, right?
Like there's no one charity that kind of dominates, right?
It's a thousand grains of rice.
Whereas the Department of Defense is one giant entity with a trillion dollar a year budget.
And so it's much easier.
Like if you wanted to call it like save $100 billion a year for taxpayers, you kind of have to go after the big concentrated chunks.
Like you might be able to do that going after like healthcare problems, maybe education problems, definitely going after Department of Defense problems.
And I know a lot more about how to build good technology than I do about healthcare.
He pulls up this piece, this piece of hardware, and he's like, hey, this little thing, it costs this insane amount of money.
And we were able to make it in our own lab, just 3D print it for like $10.
And so that's what we're going to be doing now.
And he killed the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program.
He killed this new kind of boondoggle of a robotic tank program where it was going to be millions of dollars for these robot tanks that were going to get blown up by $300 drones.
And so he, I mean, there's just kind of been like no rules, just going and axing all of the dumb stuff that doesn't make sense and then taking a knife to these companies that have been charging way too much money, which is very different from the past.
It's very rare.
It has been a long time since you saw a secretary-level official being willing to publicly contraindicate defense companies and say, you're screwing over taxpayers and it ends here.
I'm actually pretty optimistic about this across the services.
I think the Doge thing was interesting because it wasn't even the technique so much.
Like the techniques where they kind of went into the data on like USAID and looked through all of this stuff and like basically where the data science of it is what allowed them to find the graft.
That doesn't really apply to finding the problems in DOD because it's just so much more deeply buried.
But it kind of gave people permission to go look at these things.
Like it gave people permission to even say, I believe there is billions of dollars in waste in my department.
I'm going to do something about it.
I don't think people felt like they had.
like psychic permission to do that five years ago.
Well, I mean, let's go to like the height of, and you're not even making it political, just timeline-wise.
Go to the middle of the Biden administration.
Could you imagine any official in that area, like secretary or chair or anybody coming out and saying, my department is wasting billions of dollars.
We are taking money from taxpayers and using it on absurd nonsense.
That would never happen five years ago.
And I think the Doge stuff gave people permission to come out and say that and for them to be seen not as crazy, but as just being honest about the truth.
So when you see like the Secretary of the Army come out and say, we are wasting billions of dollars on total bullshit and we are getting screwed this, that way, and the other, I think that's a really good development.
We're like, you know, central planning has downsides, but it does have upsides.
And one of the interesting things there is also like there are some people who are being accused of corruption because they just want to kill them and get them out of the way for political reasons.
There's other people who are actually corrupt and they're going in.
And when people are wasting money, they're not going and saying, oh, well, you kind of wasted a few billion dollars, but we're going to give you another shot and try this again.
They just, they just imprison them for treason and or kill them.
I'm not saying that's what we should do exactly, but I think that there's a scale to all of these things.
I'll have scale of give them another shot versus shoot them in the head for treason.
We could probably move in that direction without going all of the way.
And it would probably be healthy for our country's national security.
So I don't know why we've given a private company a monopoly.
If there was a private company that had the same monopoly that the USPS does, and they were using it to send 100 pounds of junk mail to every American every year, there's no way they would survive.
They would be regulated out of existence.
What you really want is competition.
You want organizations, private or public, that when they trip and fall, they skin their own knees instead of getting bailed out by taxpayers.
You want them to live in fear, be highly competitive.
They have to be accountable to whether it's a board or to some committee.
And the problem is right now, we don't have a lot of that.
I will say, though, you asked, should these national security programs be in the hands of private companies?
I think that's true for the development of the technology.
However, it can never, ever be in the hands of private companies when it comes to the actual national security policy of what we are building or who we are building it for or where it should go.
I get people all the time who come to me, usually people who are more skeptical of government.
And yet they say, Palmer, aren't there countries you would commit to never building for?
Like, would you just build for whoever gives you money?
And I say, well, look, my job is to do what the government tells me.
They're the ones who decide who we're going to work war or not.
They say, How could you do that?
How could you work with this country or that country?
How could you build this type of system or that type of system?
And my point to them is: do you want to live in a corporatocracy where big tech CEOs get to decide the de facto foreign policy and military policy of the United States?
Like, you should, if I were in a position to make those decisions, something's gone very wrong in this country because you can't vote me out.
You can't elect my competitor.
And so, a lot of people who normally are skeptical of the government and government power and overreach suddenly they look to the private sector for, you know, oh, like the private sector is going to regulate this.
To me, that's the most like cyberpunk dystopian thing either.
Imagine like me and a bunch of weapons executives sitting in a room be like, so which countries are on the green list this year?
I don't know.
I was thinking we could sell some missile defense to those guys, and I think we should sell some offensive weapons.
Those guys are like, no, that has to be, that has to be the government, unless you just don't believe in democracy at all, right?
Like, if you, if you believe that the system, if that we cannot elect officials that are accountable, then that's a different thing.
I mean, I think that what it is, is inevitably when you have a pendulum, sometimes it will swing too far.
And I, but I think the good news it can correct.
I mean, like, look at a lot of our misadventures in the Middle East as a really good example where there were a lot of things, like the government caused a lot of things to happen.
I think never would have happened had people really known the truth behind a lot of those actions.
But in the end, we did have the ability to hold them accountable.
Now, the real problem is that people didn't hold them accountable.
Like, there's a lot of people today where they're not really that worked up about some of these people in government who lied to us.
But I would say that's a fault of the American people, not of the democratic process.
It just means people don't care about that issue as much, which I think they should care more.
But I mean, I think that, you know, not to butter you up, but this is one of the things where shows like yours have made a huge difference, where they've been able to take things that are pretty complex for a person to figure out from first principles.
Stories that they would never read about in establishment media, like let's say the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, is dependent on continued access to the U.S. government.
They can't just go out and burn everybody in the government or nobody will ever talk to them.
You've taken a lot of these stories and put them into a format where the guy who's busy, he's, you know, he's in his truck, he's on his way to the work site, can actually become informed on these issues.
And as someone who is a journalism major, I've been so happy to see that shift because I wanted to be a journalist because there were no good technology journalists and I was good at technology.
Figured I was going to beat all these guys and be a better technology journalist.
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This has been so funny watching this in the UK because so I the first thing I ever did that anyone cared about was called mod retro.
So it was this internet forum for people modifying game consoles, making portable versions of old game consoles, upgrading modern game consoles.
Anyway, when we started the site, it was me and a few other people who were kind of running it.
I was the founder and there were a few other co-administrators.
And one of them was this British guy who went by the online handle of bacteria.
And I won't say his real name because it doesn't matter.
But he was a British guy.
He worked in, he worked in very, very low-level British government.
So like not a higher up at all.
But he worked in a government agency, government office.
And he was always, I think of all the people on this forum, which was mostly like teenagers and college students.
He was kind of like the older guy.
And he says, oh, we need to be kind about what we say.
You know, that we shouldn't say anything that is bad.
And he was always pushing that our rules should say that it was against our rules to offend anybody.
And you shouldn't be able to say anything that was too offensive.
And we mostly just made fun of him.
Aha, he's the old British man.
But what's interesting is he ended up eventually leaving the site because he thought people were being too mean to each other.
And he started his own competing website.
And the rule number one was no content that may make any member feel demeaned, uncomfortable, or insulted.
We're like, well, I mean, we're all making fun of that.
We were making our own little image macros and memes about it.
We actually made some fake ads for his website and put them on Facebook.
And it said, come join Bacteria's website.
Nobody will say anything to you that might offend or displease you.
But what's interesting is as all this UK stuff has come around, I've remembered these kind of like long-forgotten childhood memories.
I was like 13 or 14 at the time.
And I think it really is partly a cultural reflection for them.
Like there are a lot of people in the UK who genuinely think it's good to police this stuff.
They don't want people to be able to go out and just cause a ruckus, you know, to say things that are insulting in the streets.
And of course, you have people who are protesting against that.
But I think also their surveillance state, you know, where there's cameras everywhere.
It's actually a reflection of different cultural norms.
And so the one good thing about what's going on in the UK is I don't think it would ever come over to America very easily because culturally, you know, we're not walking around feeling like it's like, we don't, we don't feel like it's a crime to insult people.
I think that the majority of people in the UK have no problem with people who post spicy memes getting a visit from the local constabulary.
Wow.
That has been my experience.
Now, there are people who disagree, of course.
And I would say maybe it's a growing group.
They're a highly visible group.
They're protesting.
But if I had to bet, most people don't care.
Most people in the UK just don't care about it one way or the other.
And I think the group of people who are on the side of the control is larger than the people who are not on the side.
By the way, similar thing in China.
People talk about Chinese censorship on things like Tiananmen Square.
And that's actually the majority Chinese opinion too.
If you talk to most Chinese people and you say, well, what do you think about the fact that they're censoring all this discussion?
The typical, and I know lots of people in China, they say, that's an irrelevant issue from 30 or 40 years ago.
It doesn't matter.
Anyone who's trying to make every discussion about Tiananmen Square is just a troublemaker.
And I don't care if they're shut down.
I'm glad that they're not clogging the comments.
And I'm glad those people are being pushed out of the conversation.
And like, that's actually a pretty normal opinion.
Don't don't cause trouble needlessly.
Now, these same people might say, I have strong opinions about the COVID lockdown information lockdown in China.
Like they might say, I don't like that the Chinese government is locking down on, you know, locking us in our apartments.
But when it comes to discussion of political issues, China in general, they think that people who bring this up, like you, would just be a troublemaker.
They just say, ah, that Joe Rogan.
He's a troublemaker.
Why is he bringing up all these problems from the past?
It's irrelevant.
Why are we allowing this guy to take up our public spaces?
Like, if you're protesting in public space, they're not here.
You've probably seen protesters you didn't agree with.
And you said, you know, I'm glad they're doing something they believe in.
One of the conclusions I've come to, you know, I work in the weapons industry and I've seen a lot of cool stuff.
I've seen stuff that the U.S. is making, that I'm making.
I'm familiar with a lot of the weapon systems that Russia and China have in fielding or in progress.
Some of the stuff that China and Russia are doing, I mean, it says sci-fi is what the United States is doing.
But I've come to the conclusion that their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone.
It's their ability to control people's minds through the media, through propaganda, through kind of state pressure.
They convince them to believe things about the world that weren't true, that aren't true.
And then they're basically making people willing to fight for causes that don't really exist.
Like a good example of this is Ukraine.
A lot of the Russians who went to fight in Ukraine in the early days, I think the truth is out now, but when they were first invading, they were told that the people of Ukraine want to be liberated.
You're going to be a hero.
You're going to go over there.
Like they desperately want Russia to save them and reunify them.
And it's just this, you know, Kyiv-led, you know, cabal funded by the West that's barely holding on to the country and keeping and staying in power.
And people in Russia really believed that.
Like the guys who were fighting on the front lines, the guys who were flying tanks and helicopters, they believed it.
When I went to Ukraine during the war, one of the things that I got to see was there was this helicopter wreck.
It was an attack helicopter that was trying to seize an airfield of a private aerospace company.
And the guys actually shot it down themselves.
Like they showed me videos of them wearing polo shirts, shooting down the helicopter in their parking lot.
I mean, it's like crazy shit.
So the pilots, the pilot's kind of go bag, you know, this bag with all of his emergency and survival gear in it, it had three or four days of water, three or four days of food, another flight uniform, his dress uniform with dress shoes, because they were told they were going to be, they said this is going to be a five-day military operation.
There's going to be parades.
So dress uniform and then 50 condoms.
This guy thought that he was going to be, he thought the women were going to be all over him.
They were going to, he was going to need 50 condoms for the post-war celebration.
And to me, that speaks to how brainwashed this guy was.
And remember, helicopter pilots aren't like the dumb grunt dragging.
I mean, he's probably one of the more highly educated people.
And they convinced him that the people of Ukraine wanted him to liberate them and that they were going to be so happy to see him that he was going to need his dress uniform and 50 condoms.
Now, of course, that's totally divorced from reality.
Like, whatever you, however you feel about the politics of Ukraine and Russia and America, because they're all tightly intermingled, that's clearly not reality.
And so what I worry about is like the easy one is if China invades Taiwan, they're going to come up with a similar story.
They're going to trick their people into thinking, oh, Taiwan wants to be reunified.
You're fighting for the better cause.
But then your really spooky thing is, what happens when our media pulls the same stunt?
I would argue that what we did in the Middle East was driven by really not that different, right?
I mean, a lot of the justification for going over there and doing this nation building.
I mean, we were told all these stories.
Oh, they want, they don't want, they want to get out from under the Taliban.
They don't want to have these tribal rule.
They do want democracy.
And in reality, we were kind of sold a bill of goods.
It just wasn't true.
So it's easy to make fun of the Russian with his 50 condoms, but we're not really that much better.
And my grandpa, he wasn't military, but he was a United Airlines pilot for 45 years.
And he was part of the civilian support element for Desert Storm.
So he actually has a letter from the Secretary of the Air Force that they sent to all of the commercial pilots who were bringing troops and equipment back and forth for a few days.
I mean, they were flying like crazy 24-hour shifts getting people in and out.
But I mean, like, I remember my grandpa.
He came out of that saying, man, nobody can stop us.
I mean, we are just, we are unstoppable.
If we want to go in and do something, we just go get it done.
And so, for example, Tesla has a China exclusive model of the Model S, which has teeny, tiny little front driver and passenger seats.
And then it has two seats in the rear with extremely long leg room.
Not like three in a row, but like just two giant chairs.
And they kind of cram the driver way forward to create this gigantic path.
I think it doesn't even have a trunk.
That's right.
They pulled the trunk out of it even, or maybe it's just way smaller.
And in China, that's what people want.
So like they're best selling Mercedes-Benz, even American brands like Buick, we have these cars that are made to be driven in.
So as a result, their most luxurious, most expensive cars have suspension that is designed to absorb all of the bumps, be extremely smooth, because you're riding in the back.
And it creates terrible mushy road feel for the driver.
In America, rich people, they want to drive and you want to feel the road.
You want that sports car.
And even our SUVs, people generally want that sports car-like feel.
And so I guess I will push back only on the champagne glass thing because I've seen people saying this a lot.
Believe me, there are a handful.
You can buy an American Buick or like or like or or even a Mercedes that is that good, but they're just not very popular here.
In China, cars like that are much more popular.
Cars that feel like shit to drive for the driver and are super mushy and bouncy, but for the guy in the back, his champagne glass doesn't fall over.
And also remember that their wages are so much lower that it's much more accessible.
It's kind of like how you have these countries where like almost anybody who's middle class in like the in like Southeast Asia has a live-in nanny and a live-in housekeeper.
It's a little bit like that, where like if you get to a certain point and that happens pretty fast, you have a driver.
And if you don't have a driver, people are like, what the hell's going on?
Japanese cars are ubiquitous from Japanese brands, but many or most of them are actually the most American car you can buy, I think right now, it's either a Nissan or a Toyota outside of Tesla.
Teslas are made in the U.S., but I think the most, I can't remember, it's either a Nissan or a Toyota is the most American pickup you can buy right now.
Well, and this is the point I was trying to get to is here's the problem.
Let's say you said we're going to make an all-American version of the Chevy and it's 10% more.
People wouldn't buy it.
Like that's when I say that, like people, I think, unfortunately would buy these Chinese cars if they were for sale in the United States.
People can say they want to support the U.S., but at the end of the day, they want to provide the best quality of life for their family.
They have a fiduciary duty to do so.
And so if they need to buy, like, if they have the choice between an American truck or a Chinese truck, a Chinese new TV and a Chinese new computer and a Chinese new HVAC system to replace one and their phone, how can I blame them for choosing the Chinese one?
The only way we can solve this is for the United States to become competitive with China again, which means we need to get our energy costs down.
We need to get our resource extraction costs down.
Like, you know why these cars in China are cheap?
It's not magic.
It's because the cost of resource extraction is lower.
The cost of making steel and aluminum is lower.
The cost of building a factory is lower.
And that's why you're able to buy an awesome car for $10,000 in China.
And here, the cheapest thing you can buy is a shitbox for $17 or $18,000.
Well, there's tanking the economy, and there's also, it isn't actually free.
So we do need to do a better job on the basics, but China is also subsidizing these, right?
So they're actually putting money from other industries to prop up these other industries.
And so even if you let them freely compete, like if you let them go toe-to-toe, China would be thrilled if they could subsidize their way into destroying the American automotive apparatus.
And that manufacturing, some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories.
So we took all of our farm implement factories, you know, like John Deere and Caterpillar.
They were building tanks and guns.
We took all our automotive factories.
We had them building aircraft.
We had them building weapons.
We had them building missiles.
In fact, we even designed those weapons so they could be manufactured by those plants.
Literally the specifics of how thick of a gauge of metal you could bend to a certain radius.
We were limited by the automotive manufacturing machines as to what we could do in aircraft.
And so we won because we had all this automotive and other industrial capacity.
China would love to wipe out the American automotive industry, partly for economic reasons, because it also means we will never be able to fight a war against them.
Imagine in America with not like we've lost a lot of manufacturing.
You're probably familiar with that.
I mean, like, we don't make nearly as much as we used to, but we still make a few things.
We still have some things that we do and cars is one of them.
And we even export those cars.
We're doing okay on cars.
If China could wipe out our industrial capacity entirely, they never need to worry about fighting a war with the U.S. again because they know that we wouldn't be able to get back in the game fast enough to matter.
And so that's China's aim there.
And it gets back to what you talked about earlier.
It's the civil-military fusion.
So this is a, there's a, there's the economic war and the kinetic war that they could win with one move, which is out-competing our automotive industry.
Well, Andrew has to think about this all the time because unlike a lot of these other defense companies that are designing weapons that can only be made by really fancy high-end bespoke factories, we're designing weapons that can be made in existing American industrial capacity.
So like we make this line of cruise missiles, the Barracuda.
We make three different Barracuda missiles.
It has 90% fewer parts than legacy cruise missiles.
It can be made with 10 tools that all exist in every automotive plant.
So you could make this missile at mass scale in any GM facility, in any Ford facility.
And that's really important for us because if you can only make your missiles in this specialized factory that took you 10 years to set up, well, what in the world do you do when you need 100 times more of those missiles made every day?
You're just kind of screwed.
And so the United States has been doing better at this.
I think like the Air Force is doing better.
The Navy is doing better.
The Army is doing better.
The Army has a whole transformation initiative where they want all of their new weapon systems to be highly manufacturable at scale using real industrial capacity and working with private companies from the beginning to make sure that any, they want to make sure that any new system that they are building can be built by the American industrial economy, not only these specialized, specialized aerospace technicians, of which there are just not that many.
Oh, well, I mean, so China has 300 times more naval shipbuilding capacity than the United States.
The time that it takes us to build one aircraft carrier, they could build 300.
Now, they're not building a bunch of aircraft carriers.
They're mostly focusing on other things that are more relevant to what they want to do, which is invade Taiwan.
So amphibious landing craft primarily.
But another thing China does is they actually require many of their commercial vessels that have nothing to do with the military to build to military standards for two reasons.
One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards.
Two, they plan on basically, you know, they're going to press all of these civilian vessels into service.
So they're saying, hey, you have this roll-on, roll-off car ferry that's used for moving cars around, for delivering cars to the United States.
You have to build it to deck plate pressures that allow us to roll a bunch of tanks onto it so that we can then use it to deliver tanks to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland.
And they're just requiring people to do that.
And so even their civilian shipping fleet is actually this kind of military ghost fleet just sitting in the open, pretending to be civilian.
But the moment the shit hits the fan, it becomes part of the war machine.
And so they've done a great job integrating in a way the United States has not.
The idea is that anything we're working on, anything that we are investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan.
And I might be wrong on this, right?
It might be never.
It might be a longer term thing.
But in general, imagine how stupid I'll feel if I spend hundreds of millions of dollars building some new weapon system that I know is not going to come into service until the 2030s, which is what most experts say is outside of the window of when this invasion would happen.
Wouldn't I feel pretty stupid if there's a gigantic fight and I've spent all my money on something that wasn't ready in time?
I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons.
So like Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he's reunified China.
He's got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age.
He's got a lot of economic problems where they're propping up their economy with a lot of kind of fake GDP, fake growth, fake demand, fake construction.
And he's doing that, I think, to help build up his war machine, but it's not sustainable in the long run.
So I think there's a window where they can do this.
If you had to ask me, it's more likely that they don't do a full-scale invasion to start.
It's much more likely that they do something like a blockade.
So they'll come up with some pretense.
They'll say, oh, Taiwan is exporting goods that say made in Taiwan.
And our position is that Taiwan is part of China.
And therefore, they need to pay Chinese taxes on those made in China goods.
So we're going to blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this.
And I worry.
I worry about them kind of boiling the frog.
You know, they blockade one port and then two ports and then the airports.
And then the people of Taiwan are running out of money, running out of food.
But you've boiled the frog enough where there's never a point where Taiwan really wants to fire the first shot and actually start a war.
And certainly, like, I don't, I think you and I would agree here.
The U.S. probably should not start World War III over a blockade of a port, right?
And so what we need to do, and this is just my opinion, which is definitely biased.
So to be clear, just so people know, nobody's going to dig it up and say, but Palmer, Palmer's obviously only saying this because he's got money in the game.
I will first say, I have plenty of money.
I sold my first company for billions of dollars.
I don't need to work.
I could retire.
I'm not doing any of this for the money.
Defense, you make a lot less money for each hour of work you put in than you can make in tech or media or elsewhere.
But I do a lot of work with Taiwan.
So we actually, I just went to Taiwan a few weeks ago to personally deliver a bunch of missiles and weapon systems that are specifically to counter a Chinese invasion.
My opinion is that the United States, we don't want to get into a shooting war ourselves, right?
Like we want to avoid that.
The United States needs to stop being the world police, stop sending our people overseas to die for other countries.
And instead, we need to become the world's gun store.
We need to say, hey, look, what do you need to do to be a good gun store, right?
You got to keep stuff in stock.
You got to keep things on the shelves.
You need to be reasonably priced.
You need to not arbitrarily cut off allies.
Could you imagine if you went to a gun store and they told you, Joe, we're going to sell you this gun, but you can't use it over in that county.
You can only use it in this one.
And we're going to tell you exactly how you can use it.
We're going to be micromanaging you.
And we're going to be taking responsibility for how you use your gun.
I mean, that would never work.
You would never want to work with them.
You'd say, I'm going to go to a different store.
I'm going to go buy something.
And that's what some nations are doing.
Like, they're going to Russia.
They're going to China.
They're going to India and buying systems because we're going in and telling them our weapons are expensive.
They're never in stock.
We never deliver them to you.
And also, we're going to tell you what to do with them if we ever do give you to them.
Like, did you know that Taiwan is $20 billion behind on arms deliveries from the United States?
They have $20 billion in orders that have not been delivered.
These are not things they would maybe like to have.
They need these yesterday.
China could move in tomorrow.
And the thing is, even a blockade, the best way to deter that is for Taiwan to have the things that make them a very prickly porcupine, right?
You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to affect without destroying the entire fleet.
You want things like missiles and counter-missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country.
But we're $20 billion behind.
And I mean, you've seen what's happened with Ukraine where, I mean, like, there's an argument as to how we should arm them.
Separate from that argument, you've probably seen, I mean, we can't even give them what they're asking for, even if we want to give it to them, because we don't have enough to even cover ourselves, right?
Like, we can't just give them all of our Patriot missiles.
We can't give them even purely defensive tools to protect their capital because we don't make enough of them.
So I think the best way for the United States to contribute to world stability, again, stop being the world police.
Start being the world gun store and get serious about it.
Instead of saying, well, it's okay that we kind of are a crappy gun store because we're going to come and save your ass when shit hits the fan.
We need to say, no, no, no, we're going to give everything you need to fight for your own freedom.
Look, you're our friend.
You're our ally.
We'll give you everything you need.
We'll give you support.
We'll give you intelligence, but we're not going to fight your wars for you because I don't think the American people have it in us to go do another two decades of adventures in the Middle East or adventures in Europe or adventures in Asia.
I don't know if you know this, but I was actually one of the true Trump OGs.
I wrote a letter to Donald Trump when I was 15 telling him that he should run for president.
This was when he was considering running against Obama.
Really?
And how old are you now?
I'm 33, just turned 33.
Wow.
So this was a long time ago.
And actually, I not only, luckily, I sent a letter and I posted about it on Facebook, which I'm really happy about.
And I, no, it's probably, no, this wasn't.
No, it wasn't 2015.
No, this was when I was 15.
I'm sorry.
I meant to say when I was 15.
So, I mean, this is way back.
This is like back in like 2009, 2010.
So way before anyone else.
And the best part is I posted about it on Facebook and I said, I think Donald Trump would be a better choice for president than any of these other guys.
I want to see a businessman who's signed both sides of a check before.
And you look at the people who are running kind of the modern parties, arguably the uniparty, and he's clearly not part of that.
And it's so wild when people later, they're like, oh, Palmer, Palmer was an early Trump supporter.
He supported him in 2016 probably because he loved Trump's extremist rhetoric.
I'm like, oh, no, you don't even know.
I loved his extremist rhetoric going back to 2009.
I think this was his first year in office, so 2017.
Or to start.
That was 2017, right?
Yeah.
He was inaugurated.
And it's one of those things where the easiest argument for Trump in those days was just, look, you don't have to agree with the guy on everything.
But the real question is, do you believe that either party outside of Trump is going to, like, are they going to do well?
Like, you have, you have the Democrats saying there's no magic wand to get growth.
And you have everyone else attacking Trump and saying, oh, you know, we're just going to do everything the same way the Republicans have always done it.
The strongest argument for Trump is that anybody would have been better than what the establishment was pushing.
For me, one of the big ones was, you know, and I mean, I got a lot of shit for this.
I gave $9,000 to a pro-Trump group that ran a single anti-Clinton billboard.
It was a picture of her face that said, too big to jail.
And this was right after it had come out that she had been mishandling classified information, running an email server out of her own home.
You probably remember the famous phrase where they asked her, were you aware that your staff was directed to wipe that server?
And she said, like with a cloth?
Do you remember like with a cloth?
I mean, it was just, it was, it was so, it was so absurd.
But for me, one of the red lines was when Hillary and it's not really Hillary.
It's, it's kind of, you know, the political machine of which she is just the face said that she would enforce a strict no-fly zone in Syria.
And it's easy to say, oh, yeah, I would enforce a no-fly zone.
And that sounds, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, keep these bombers out of the air, keep these fighters out of here.
But what does that really mean?
That means that you're saying you're going to shoot down Russian aircraft if they cross into airspace that doesn't even belong in the United States.
Like, I mean, it's practically an announcement that you're starting a world war to say, I am going to shoot.
That is what enforcement of no-fly zone is.
And it was crazy to me.
Everyone says, oh, you know, it's Hillary, you know, Trump is an isolationist and Hillary is the only one who has a, who understands what we need to do in Syria.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
Like, I'm not, without even taking a position on what we are doing in Syria or we're doing in Syria, I know better than to commit that we are going to shoot down Russian aircraft because they decide to fly in Syrian airspace.
Like, we should not care about almost anything that much.
And by the way, if we didn't do it, that's almost as bad because now we've drawn a red line in the sand and we've let them cross it and we've shown that we're not actually serious.
So like you, you shouldn't say that.
You shouldn't act on it and you shouldn't not act on it.
And so I mean, I would explain this to friends of mine and say, guys, I mean, they say, oh my God, Trump's a warmonger.
It's like, but Trump, you know, because I cared about this national security stuff pretty deeply then.
This was right when I was starting Andrew eight years ago.
And so I was like dedicating my career to these national security problems.
Like, guys, how can Trump be the warmonger when he's the guy saying we need to stop fighting these wars, get out of these other countries, get our boots back in the U.S. and not get in a fight with Russia, China, or any other country that we don't have to get into?
And like, how can you say Trump's a warmonger and then support someone who says we're going to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria?
And I think a lot of people, it was just really emotional.
You can't reason people out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.
So state marriage licensure is a very recent development.
There are people alive today who got married when you were not required of a marriage license.
It was primarily a kind of a race-driven thing.
States didn't want black men to marry white women, and they got terrified of that in the civil rights era.
And so they all passed these rules about marriage licensure, many of them prohibiting interracial marriage.
So basically, marriage licenses were a way to enforce against interracial marriage.
Because if marriage was a purely religious thing where you could just go to a pastor, get married, sign it in a Bible, the state had no power over it.
And so they wanted to enforce their will on people.
So marriage licensure is very recent.
My personal opinion is the state has no legitimate authority, constitutional or otherwise, to regulate marriage at all.
Like gay marriage is not even a question.
This is a religious, cultural, social ceremony witnessed before your friends and your family.
It is not something the state should be, they shouldn't have the right to give you a marriage license nor to deny you one.
Like why do I like, are they getting done?
When did I give the state the ability to say it's illegal for me to get married without their permission?
That's crazy.
Anyway, so Hillary, you might remember, I mean, even in 2008, she was against gay marriage.
And she was out there.
She says, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
So here's someone who, like, I was on the state shouldn't be involved in it at all side.
Hillary's on the, no, we should use state power to enforce what marriage is between a man and a woman.
And then you have Donald Trump, who he's asked about, he said, do you remember his quote on this?
So, I mean, he had been to gay weddings.
He had gay friends.
And he was asked about it.
And he said, well, look, marriage, okay, it's like a restaurant.
You've got steak.
You've got burgers and different people like different things.
And that's okay.
I mean, like, it was actually the most progressive, the most progressive view you could ever have.
And then, so Obama, by the way, same thing.
Obama was against gay marriage.
Hillary was against gay marriage.
And then you fast forward just three short years and you have people like Brendan Ike, the CEO of Mozilla, getting fired by his board of directors because he supported Prop 8, which said that marriage is between a man and a woman in California, which by the way, even then passed in California.
So the majority of Californians agreed with him.
But I mean, you're right.
Like Hillary was, Hillary was the thing, the views she had when she was running for president.
And I had a couple of prepared questions for Hillary.
And so it was me and about 15 other billionaires in Silicon Valley who went to this kind of real, really, really intimate gathering.
And they wanted to sell us on why we should support Hillary in this upcoming run when she ran.
And first of all, I thought it was kind of shitty that she just didn't show up at the last second and like didn't say to basically until we were already on the way.
So I go to this meeting and I had two questions for Hillary.
I said, one, in the past, Hillary, you've supported a 55 mile per hour federal speed limit.
You were one of the original proponents.
You were one of the people who supported it in the Senate.
You wrote an open letter with a lot of other wives of politicians saying that the blood would run red with the streets would run red with the blood of children if we got rid of this of this of this speed limit.
And then in 2008, when you last ran for president, you said on, I think it was The View, actually, which is, it's so funny because the View has turned into like almost a parody of itself.
But you said on The View that when you were asked about the speed limit, you said that whenever and however we can make it happen, we should have a 55 mile per hour speed limit.
Now, given that you've never driven a car in the last 20 years, have you reconsidered this rule or would you be supporting this as a campaign?
And Podesta said, oh, we don't really have a position on that issue.
I said, but like, could you make up one right now?
Like, like most Americans don't want a 55 mile per hour speed limit.
I think that was really dumb of Hillary to say she supported one last time.
I think it might be why she lost.
Can you, would you agree that probably it's not a winning issue?
And he said, oh, we can't, we can't take a position on that at this time, which was crazy to me.
Shouldn't that be just so easy to be like, yeah, like this is clearly like a thing that's a fight she lost, you know, half a century ago and she's still worked up about it.
Well, you know, you know, Tom Cruise had a can't drive 55 decal on his motorcycle in Top Gun.
And I mean, like, it's like, I mean, the cultural battle's been won.
Then my second question was, hey, we're a bunch of techno bros up here in the Valley.
We all believe in battery electric hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles in general.
But Hillary's been a huge supporter of, oh, no, no, it was the other way.
I'm sorry.
This has been so long.
I haven't thought about this.
No, I said, Hillary actually was against corn subsidies at one point.
She called them at one point.
These are, you know, like the ethanol blending mandates.
They were making corn at a loss, paid for with taxpayer dollars, and then mandating that it go into gasoline, which hurts car performance.
It's got lots of fuel storage problems, and it's just a waste of money.
And there's less energy in it too.
So you get actually worse mileage.
Anyway, I said, hey, in the past, Hillary has come out and she wrote this open letter that called ethanol blending mandates the quote most astonishingly anti-consumer mandate in the history of the American government is she does she still believe that does she want money to go away from you know biofuels and more towards actual cutting edge technology or is she going to support corn subsidies to win votes in Iowa and Podesta says oh well we don't have a position on that at this time I said I just got to press you there you
Don't have a position or you don't want to tell us the answer.
Because none of us here think that the future is biofuels.
It's a failed experiment.
It's a failed mandate.
Hillary used to agree.
Is she going to flip on us?
He said, I'm honestly, genuinely telling you, we do not have a position on this.
You know, one of the reasons everyone loves Alexander Hamilton.
He's really popular founding father.
I have to admit, he's actually my least favorite founding father, partly because he supported central banking.
I'm just not really a gigantic fan of it and how it's turned out.
But interesting, by the way, he was also very anti-immigrant, which is so funny because look up the interview with the directors of Hamilton, the musical, when they were asked, why did you make Hamilton and the musical super pro-immigrant when in reality, he was very, I mean, very anti-immigrant.
I mean, he literally said, immigrants are a poison to our nation.
I mean, he was, he was really against it, which is funny because he was himself an immigrant.
And I mean, he was like, you know, blood and soil all the way.
I mean, he was, he was really into it.
And their answer was, we wanted to represent Hamilton as we think he would have existed in the climate of today, not with the information he had at the time.
But one of the other things about Hamilton is that he did not support the First Amendment.
He actually thought that the government should be able to criminalize speech that lied about the government in a critical way.
Now, to be clear, he didn't think they should be able to regulate everything.
But his point was, if someone's lying about the government or what it's doing or its authority, we have to be able to stop that.
You actually had a counterpoint in people like Benjamin Franklin, who of course had done like letters pretending to be the king of Prussia and lots of satirical stuff pretending to be the king of England.
He said, no, you can't.
Because if you say that we can't make up lies about the government, then the government just needs to make anything that's critical about them a lie.
Because if it's a so-called lie, now they can stop it.
And so he said, we can't give the government the power to do this.
So Alexander Hamilton was not a fan.
And I think that that thread has been there through the history of our government.
There's always been people from literally before the founding who believed that the state should have a role in influencing the media.
And like, I mean, you're familiar with all of like the stuff that came out post-JFK about the media influence operations.
What was it, like 55 or 60 different media assets were activated for the JFK messaging campaign in national media?
And so I guess getting back to your question of when did they get into social media, I think it was probably continuous the whole time.
The moment that it was of any importance, the moment that it was being paid attention to, I'm certain that the people who were running these media influence operations immediately jumped into that new sphere.
Before social media, though, I wonder if they were preparing for something like that or if it started to happen and they didn't recognize what an impact it was going to happen.
I was watching a particular political debate on YouTube, and occasionally when I see something that's very contentious, I'm like, let me go to the comments and see what it is.
And it was all bots.
It was wild.
You know, the real obvious bunch of zeros and numbers after a name, John, six zeros, 92.
So dead internet theory has been around for quite a long time, probably long before the internet was actually dead.
And it's this theory that over time, there will be increasing amounts of literal robotic content, and then also kind of like astroturfed fake content, you know, like one guy running 100 accounts.
And the theory is that eventually there will be almost no real human back and forth on the internet, that it's actually kind of just propaganda and counter propaganda playing out on a stage for our benefit by moneyed interests, whether it's corporations, the government, foreign adversaries.
And, you know, there might be a few people in the mix, but it's primarily going to be just robots arguing with each other.
And I think that more and more it's becoming true.
Like that FBI analyst that when Elon was in the middle of buying Twitter, who looked at all the different bots and, you know, they were trying to say it was 5%.
Well, yeah, we're just talking about your Tiger Stripe, your Tiger Stripe Ranger panties.
And Commando Store is doing these reproductions of vintage gear, like Vietnam era, U.S. gear, Russian gear, using modern materials, but old camo prints.
And they're super authentic.
But the problem is a lot of this actual gear, it's all mildewed.
It's destroyed.
The thread is all crusty and busting apart.
And so if you actually want to be authentic, like the guys in the Vietnamese jungle did not look like they were wearing old, crappy, busted apart gear.
Their gear was fresh.
And so if you want to look just like they did, you actually have to buy newly manufactured gear.
But I'll send you some links.
They have a lot of really cool Tiger Stripe stuff that's very, very cool and authentic.
And so I have to admit, it's certainly the thought that occurred to me.
Like one of my favorite anime characters was an anti-hero named Seto Kaiba who ran a weapons company that was also a virtual reality company.
And like they built, they built like virtual reality gaming simulator pods and also weapons.
And so it's really weird.
Like you start to ponder, are you really making decisions with free will or are you actually just like enacting the programming of when you're a kid?
Like, it's hard to really know, but like when people are like, oh, but, you know, Palmer, how'd you get into this stuff?
It's like, I mean, I remember being like seven years old and thinking about the stuff.
Or like you watch you watch like Power.
Like I was, I grew up watching Power Rangers when I was a really little kid, you know, reruns of the first season of Power Rangers.
And the character I most identified was like the techno wizard of the group Billy, who was building like flying cars and upgrading their robot suits.
And I don't know.
It's really weird when you end up as an adult just doing exactly what you were fascinated with when you're a kid because what you're fascinated with when you're a kid is really, it's just, it's a function of what's put in front of you, right?
Like, like, what if I would have had different things put if you lived in Montana?
What if, um, you know, what if I, uh, you know, what if, what if, what if?
Like, is there a world where is there a world like I grew up in Nashville and I would have inevitably been a musician and like almost without even being able to choose it, even if I went in one direction when I've ended up coming back to it.
It's just finding whatever the path is that you think is interesting and just going in that direction.
You just, your direction was kind of established by your interest when you were younger.
So it probably seems surreal just in the fact that you've gone so far with it to the point where you're actually making weapons to defend other countries.
Well, that's the crazy thing is I think part of part of the reason it's so wild, my progression, is it only happens if it if it's successful continuously.
And like I like, you know who, you know who funded Anderal when I started it?
Like, yes, me.
I put a lot of my money into it, but it was all of these same investors who had invested in Oculus.
I mean, literally the same people.
It's like Brian Singerman is a good example.
He was a partner at Founders Fund, which was Peter Thiel's investment fund.
They decided to put $1 million into Oculus before any other fund was willing to give us money.
So they were the first institutional money into Oculus VR.
And then he ended up being our first investor also in Andrew.
So like you're talking about like the same people even, like these relationships come back around.
And then that turns into running a weapons company.
And then that turns into building more efficient weapons.
And then like one of our recent wins, we were competing Andrew with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to build the Air Force's first AI-powered fighter jet.
So the first fighter jet with no human pilot, not limited by human ability.
Instead, limited by the ability of this robot brain making the whole thing go.
And we beat them.
I mean, how crazy is that?
That's what's crazy to me.
Like it's not sitting here crazy like, oh, is it crazy I'm building weapons?
For me, it's crazy.
Like it's not that hard to imagine you end up building guns for the Marines.
But like what's really nothing against the Marines or the people who build guns for them.
I love those guys.
The crazy part to me is that all these things have gone right over and over to the point where I can literally have billions of dollars at my disposal from my investors to build multi-million square foot factories to build act like the Air Force's first AI fighter jet, which is the official designation they just gave it is the FQ-44.
F for fighter, Q for unmanned, and then 44 is the number designation.
So one of the crazy things about this is that the United States...
So the idea is you have a bunch of these for every manned fighter because they're cheaper.
They are more expendable.
You can take more risk with them.
So imagine this.
I've got an F-35 flying with five of these things.
The original name of the program was Loyal Wingman.
The idea is that I have a loyal wingman, does whatever I tell him.
I can talk to it like I would any human, you know, co-co-worker.
And it's going to go in and do what I tell it.
But it's never going to question my orders.
It's never going to try to save itself if it means ruining the mission.
And one of the craziest things about autonomous aircraft is that the United States has spent basically a century figuring out what works in air combat.
I mean, you've seen Top Gun, right?
You know, they have this book of tactics that they need to learn to stay alive, how you measure, how you manage your energy and your altitude and your position so that you destroy the enemy and you don't get destroyed yourself.
There's another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy, but will probably get you killed in the process.
We don't teach those generally, or if we do, it's in the context of don't do this.
All of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI-powered fighter jets.
I can now have it doing things that are so risky that a human pilot would never even try the maneuver.
Because let's say it's a coin flip.
It's a 50-50 chance that you're going to die, but a 100% chance that I'm going to be able to take out the enemy target.
Imagine going after something where I know I am probably going to get shot down at the end of that maneuver, but I definitely take out all of the surface-to-air missile launchers on the shore, which then allow everything else to come in through the gap that you just cleared.
You'll make that trade every day.
You'll trade a cheap AI fighter jet to blow up a bunch of really expensive manned or autonomous systems in the air or on the ground every time if it allows you to accomplish that mission.
And so autonomy, it really changes the game on this stuff.
It's not an incremental change in tactics.
It's a complete revolution.
unidentified
What do you think that New Jersey shit was all about?
Well, what's so interesting about the New Jersey stuff, and you're probably tracking this as well or better than me.
But it is so perfectly aligned with things that we've seen in the past.
Like you're familiar with all the overflights and hovering over nuclear facilities and military bases in the past.
Here's what I think happened.
I think that there was something really weird that was going on.
I think briefly there was something that was really unexplained.
And then what happened unfortunately is everyone found out about it online.
Everybody got their drones, put them in their cars, drove out there to go out and try and fly it.
And then I think that the next three weeks were a bunch of idiots with drones flying in circles looking at each other.
I've seen all these videos.
99% of them, it's pretty obvious that the thing they're looking at is another DGI drone that is also looking at them and saying, oh, dude, oh, shit, there it is.
Like it was kind of this crazy media circus.
I think there was something that was real.
And then very, very quickly it evolved into being just kind of a flash mob social media circus.
Well, you know, have you, have you heard, have you heard the, oh, what do they call it?
There's a theory that someone's come up with.
I forget what it is.
It's like, it's like, it's like proliferation masking or something.
Have you heard the theory that modern drone technology was seeded by aliens so that we would create a bunch of things that would be up in the sky that look kind of like their aircraft so that they would basically act as cover for the real activity.
Have you heard this theory?
I don't really believe it because I actually have met with the people who kind of invented modern quadcopters and flight controllers.
Like the idea is very interesting and it makes me wonder if there might be some truth to it elsewhere in the world.
Like it sure is convenient.
Imagine that you're an alien.
You're regularly operating around military bases, nuclear infrastructure.
Wouldn't it be convenient if there was something else that people could explain away as like, wouldn't it be great if there was something that also darted around and hovered in place and was very quiet and just little tiny flashing lights?
Like, wouldn't that be really convenient as a cover for what you are doing?
Because these same activities in like the 50s and the 60s, there was nothing like that, right?
Like back then, if you said, oh yeah, I saw 100 red lights orbiting around that nuclear facility.
All you could say was, holy shit, what in the world could that be?
And today, it's so easy to say, oh, it's just some drones.
And so unfortunately, it's a lot harder to know what's real.
And I wish I could travel back in time, even just 10 or 20 years to do the moulder and scully thing I talked about earlier.
Be the billionaire, the billionaire James Bond X-Files guy with a badge and a checkbook.
I feel like you could really find some interesting stuff.
So the weird thing that was observed was primarily that there was something there in an area that shouldn't have been and that there shouldn't have been anything.
There should not have been anything that was able to endure for that long in that area with those characteristics.
Like little tiny drones that cannot show up on radar and that can kind of hide in place like that, they don't have hours and hours and hours of endurance, right?
They fly for 25, 30 minutes tops.
And then also they typically would need to be launched by something right close to there.
And the particular area it was in, it would have been really hard to launch from one of the nearby areas, get over the water, get to there, and then stay there as long as it did.
It's not the weirdest thing that people have seen, though.
Like the Hellfire thing recently with the missile.
That was some of the weirdest stuff that I've seen.
So in Sphere, without spoiling the ending, the very beginning of it is you have this researcher who is brought out to this secret naval research facility in the Pacific Ocean because the Navy has discovered a massive object multiple kilometers long lying on top of a shallow, a shallow coral reef on some atoll covered in coral that appears to be a spacecraft, an alien spacecraft.
And they figured out that when it crashed thousands of years ago there, it probably crashed onto an island, which then sea levels rose and then it became covered.
So by this, they basically figure out it must have been there for about three or four thousand years, this spaceship.
And so the Navy is going and they're trying to figure out what it is.
They're scraping coral off this ship.
They bring in this researcher.
And as the researcher is being brought to the site, they discover for the first time what they've been looking for, a door into the air.
They were scraping the croft, looking for some way in through this ultra-tough metallic alloy that had never been observed ever in nature or science.
And then the big reveal of like the first arc of the book is they scrape off the coral, they look at the door, incredible, it's a door.
But then they look next to the door and there's a marking.
And what does the marking say on this 3,000-year-old spaceship?
United States Navy and an American flag.
And, you know, what's interesting is they never actually fully explain it.
But the implication is, and what they believe happened, is that this was a time-traveling craft that somehow went back in time, or alternately, that it's actually from some distant past civilization that traveled forward in time, like maybe went to space, did some exploring and came back.
Maybe the United States is actually a purpose reconstitution of the branding and social structures of some long-lost society from 500 million years ago.
I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening, but I think that that's actually more likely than it being aliens from another galaxy coming to where we are.
It's just that is actually harder for me to believe than something that is of our own little local solar sphere and just really truly bizarre and not being taken seriously.
It's mostly all of the dimensional travel, like that, that's totally believable.
Yeah, specifically the thing I think is least likely is that using normal conventional physics that we understand, it's people coming from another place that's many light years away coming to where we are.
It's just, it's a matter of we haven't observed anything that could do that.
We haven't seen any synthetic material that could do that.
We haven't seen any natural phenomena that could be.
But what do you think of people that talk about some sort of a potential science that eventually gets cracked where it's a gravity drive, like something that folds space-time?
In that case, and so this is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite theories about this.
Like people talk about that.
There's a question, like if you're actually folding space-time or breaking space-time, there's a question as to, are you going to see visitors from another part of your plane of existence that are just using that technology to jump a few miles over to you?
Or are you more likely that that level of technology is one that allows people to come from in completely different planes of existence, different dimensions, different types of universes we don't even begin to understand?
Like if we can prove that we can manipulate space-time like that, to me, that's an indicator that you can do even more than that.
Again, I'm not saying it's impossible.
I'm just, I'm putting my chips on the table as the things that I've seen, I'm more likely to believe that it is time travelers, unknown residents of Earth, people from another dimension, energy signals from another dimension, bleed through of our own past, present, and future.
I put all those at a higher likelihood than they came from Andromeda and now they're flying around our military bases.
So you have basically Catalina Island off the coast of California, and you have a few more channel islands that are stretched out on either end of it.
The things that they were seeing were vehicles that were in the sky and then going into the water at high speed and appearing to like not hitting them and slamming and exploding like you'd expect, but instead, still a huge flash, but just seamlessly transitioning into the water.
Lots of noise, lots of splash, but not like destroying themselves.
And then similarly, objects coming out of the water in the same way.
And so they all describe these very, very steep approach paths.
So like not coming in like an aircraft landing on the water, but almost like coming out of the sky at these very steep angles and then just smashing into the water in a way you would expect would destroy anything.
But then instead, the vehicles are apparently fine and the water just parts around them as they rocket in.
Really, really bizarre stuff.
And it makes you wonder, could that be related?
The same technology or process that allows the air, because you've seen these systems, they're not creating sonic booms.
You don't see shock waves coming off of them.
And they're not heated by the movement through the air.
They're not really, really high.
I mean, you've heard the stories about the SR-71.
I mean, it would get literally red hot on its leading edges.
Glowing titanium.
But these things are cold.
And so is there some technology that can displace air around you that can also displace water around you is kind of the interesting theory there.
But yeah, that particular area I've dug into because it's only about 20 miles away from my house.
Well, Ben Van Kirkwick, who runs Uncharted X, he was on the podcast recently and he was describing how there's specific hieroglyphs that indicate some sort of a star portal.
Yep.
That that's what the hieroglyphs are saying.
Like this is a stargate and it shows stars.
It shows this portal and gate.
And this is, it's written multiple times.
And they're trying to figure out, well, what does this try to say?
What do you think about the theory that there's other sentient, that the other sentient species of Earth might have better, better lore on this than us?
I don't want to, so this is going to make me sound a bit like a little bit like a nutter, but I'm pretty deep on, we're pretty deep down the rabbit hole.
So people have oral traditions that have passed down pretty well.
But we've also observed that stories can pass down in other sentient species like whales, like dolphins.
They have these whale calls that have been constant for a long time.
They communicate with each other.
One of the theories, and by the way, this is explored in like some of the old Star Trek movies.
They explore this idea that the whales actually had better and more stable oral history than humanity.
And it's not that crazy of an idea.
And so you wonder, for example, if we could understand them, what would they have to say about any of this stuff?
Like maybe they're not smart enough to have anything to say, but do they have anything to say about for like, it may not be obvious.
It may not be, we know about star people who are going through stargates.
But for example, what if there's oral tradition or even genetic programming around, oh, we never go to this area, never go to this place, or never eat the food from this place?
Could there be interesting leads that are buried in cultures that are not human?
So if people aren't familiar, XPRIZE is basically this group that makes these big, significant monetary prizes for teams to compete against each other to do things that seem crazy.
So like there was an XPRIZE for going to going to space on a reusable rocket.
John Carmack was competing for that.
Did you know that?
Yes, I did.
So like, you know, inspired him.
They're doing some cancer XPRIZES.
There's one that's going on right now called the Wildfire XPRIZE, which is basically challenging companies to build a system that can detect wildfires anywhere on the planet in less than a minute from space and then deploy autonomous drones to extinguish them before they get large enough that they turn into a real wildfire.
The idea is like instead of responding to fires once they're too big to control, you're able to stop them in their tracks.
And I mean, just like the Palisades fire created $20 billion in damage, it's actually very cheap to do this relative to the damage that wildfires cause.
Anyway, the XPRIZE guys came to me a while back and we were jamming on a few ideas for their next XPRIZE.
And hopefully they don't mind me saying this, but initially I said you guys should do an uplift XPRIZE.
Even with Uplift, the science fiction concept, it's fallen out of favor.
It was really popular for a while.
There was an uplift trilogy written by, I can't remember the guy's name, but he wrote a whole book about non-human consciousnesses.
In his book, there's like plasma consciousnesses in the sun.
Like you probably heard these crazy ideas of intelligent beings that live in the sun.
But one of it, the main thrust of uplift is taking species that are not sentient and lifting them up to the level of sentience and beyond.
So like, can you take a dog and teach it to talk by genetically modifying it to make it smarter?
Can you take whales and pass them up?
And by the way, the uplift trilogy, they also explored this idea like Star Trek of the whales having an oral tradition that was more stable than humanity's and actually having like a lot of information that was concealed by from man until they uplifted those species.
And I've always thought that was really interesting.
And so I went to XPRIZE and said, I want you guys to an uplift XPRIZE.
First person to modify an animal to be smarter than a person.
And they actually said, that's too crazy.
That's XPRIZE is, you know, XPRIZE is trying to push the future, but for, you know, for a variety of, honestly, quite good reasons.
They said, this is not quite our jam.
But one we are working towards is an interspecies communication XPRIZE.
And it's a prize to, and I think that with modern AI advances, this is going to be a lot more possible to gather large amounts of data, reason about it, and figure out the vocabulary and grammar of these species.
The idea is to, it's the first team that can meet species where they are and communicate with them in a repeatable, verifiable way.
This isn't teaching a dog to say yes when you say, go.
So the idea is the using of AI, if you get to super general intelligence and AI can run all the patterns through some sort of a program and determine what is being expressed.
And most people just don't have the time to keep an African gray properly stimulated.
So they start, they get depressed, they self-harm.
So they're not recommended as a beginner parrot by any means.
Now, Alex was interesting because he had a vocabulary.
He understood grammar.
And he is one of the only, I think the only animal who asked an existential question.
And he actually did it right before he died.
If I remember correctly, like he wasn't just saying, give me food.
He could say, like, tomorrow I want this food.
He could be, but the existential question he asked was, what's happening?
And where am I going?
Which is, and he had never asked those questions before.
They were brand new, formulated questions that he asked very shortly before he passed.
And so there's a lot of, now, here's the other cool part.
He's got a bird brain.
He has a tiny little brain, and yet it has all that capacity.
You've probably heard of people who have lost huge chunks of their brain and they reprogram and they seem to get by.
Parrots like Alex suggest that you can get by with very little brain if it's oriented correctly.
So imagine if I took a species like an African gray and I modified certain elements of its genetic code to cause its brain to be somewhat larger, somewhat more glucose consuming, so it has more energy, and then also to have more folds.
They're very smooth brained.
What if I could have, we know that folded brain tissue and the high density that it creates on the neuronal surface is very good for intelligence.
Like, could you make an African gray that is able to have a normal human level conversation?
Like you know how some animals have more of their nervous system distributed?
Like, you know, octopuses have autonomy in their muscles.
It's actually similar for a lot of animals.
And so one of the reasons I've always found AI so interesting is not just what we can do with AI, but learning how, like building a thinking system from scratch, I'm thinking will help us understand how other systems think.
Like we haven't, there's never been an economic motive to really dig into how to understand how the brain fundamentally works.
I know there's people who are listening who probably think that's crazy.
They say, Palmer, people want to cure brain cancer.
They want to help with Alzheimer's.
There's a difference between preserving brain function and truly understanding how the brain works.
And yes, there's research labs here and there, but Google's never been funding them to the tune of tens of billions, right?
Meta's never been funding them to the tune of hundreds of billions.
AI is the first time that humanity has ever dedicated a huge amount of resources to understanding what thought is, how to make it synthetically, and how to make it better.
And we're going to make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think that understanding how to make synthetic brains via AI is going to teach us how to make parrots like Alex a lot smarter too.
Well, when you start talking about stuff like this and you start talking about genetically engineering an animal to be as intelligent or more intelligent than a human, it brings me to the weirder theory about human evolution.
That's my favorite part about Uplift is that if you can prove that it works, you open up a whole pot, a whole avenue of theories that have been treated as crazy.
Like right now, if you see like what you just said about augmented evolution of humans, it's a crazy person thing, right?
But if we are literally sitting there talking to our dogs and they're like, isn't it going to be like, who could think that's a crazy theory to say, well, I mean, we did it.
The moment that we had technology that was capable, we did it.
Wouldn't probably any species do that?
Like, doesn't that suggest that when you get smart enough, you want to make things somewhat in your own image?
It gets back to Skynet earlier.
If we make animals more into our own image, is it really crazy to think that we are the result of something like that?
And actually, so I'm a religious person.
I'm a Christian.
And I feel like what you see where God was created or man was created in God's image, I feel like it's reflected in our desire to create things in our own image.
And so I think there's a certain beautiful symmetry there.
It's where it's if we're doing it, it's actually easier for people to believe, I think, that it happened to us.
It's easier for people to believe that we have a creator who wanted to create something in his own image when we are doing the same.
Well, also just this sentiment that you were discussing of taking an animal and making it more intelligent.
If we found a planet, let's say we get to a couple thousand years of technological evolution past where we're at now, we can travel to other galaxies and we find primates.
And we're like, well, they're on the way.
They're on the way, but they need like 300 million years before they get to where we are.
Maybe that's something that happens all throughout the universe where these intelligence farmers just drop seeds in various areas, just take animals, manipulate them, turn them into something that's superior and that has a lust for innovation.
Whether it's sports, the athletes of today are better than the athletes of 20 years ago, whether it's computers, whether it's televisions, any kind of technology, music, everything wants to be better than anything before.
And I think it's clearly been an evolutionarily advantageous trait.
Yes.
Societies that foster seeking of novel experiences build stronger cultures, stronger technologies.
And then, by the way, the groups that don't seek novelty end up becoming stagnant.
You could even argue that many of the cultures that remain stagnant, like you kind of saw plateauing happen with, for example, a lot of Native American tribes.
I think that it was a loss of drive for novelty.
And that's not to say that they're a lesser culture, but certainly they were not focused on seeking novel experiences.
What's really fascinating when you think about human beings in particular is that people that lived in those tribes did not want to civilize.
And that the people that were even captured by Indians, a lot of them wanted to stay because they found that to resonate more with being a human being.
Because we had lived so many thousands of years as hunter-gatherers that that resonated with your being.
It seemed more spiritually in tune with being a human being than living in a city and wearing a suit and eating food from a store.
On the one hand, I agree, but then I love, like, I mean, I love that human, the human race is doing a pretty good job of seeking novelty.
If we all hunt, if we all, I mean, maybe it's that, maybe it's that, you know, maybe hunting caribou is what makes us happy, but you still need the guy who wants to go for something else.
You need all types of different human beings and different personality traits and different interests to make this whole experiment of civilization work.
Because I've been thinking about this a lot for a variety of reasons.
And it's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about.
We're talking like novel experiences, new things, like driving towards the future.
There's some people who I feel like look down on nostalgia.
They're like, oh, you're obsessed with the past kind of needlessly.
It's feel good.
I feel like obsessing over the past, I think is healthy in a lot of ways.
And I think it's even good to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses because there's so much that we could learn from the past and should learn from the past.
If we didn't look at things with rose-tinted glasses, my theory is that the new, like, imagine you look at the future possibilities and the past, you know, teachings identically with no favoring.
It feels like you're naturally going to prefer the new thing that hasn't really shown all the downfalls yet.
I guess I'm getting.
I'm a big fan of nostalgia.
I'm a big fan of looking at the parts of the past that worked and then lionizing those and reminding people why they worked.
There's a lot of people who actually say this is fascist now.
If you Google it, you look up nostalgia is fascist.
You will find this is like a cutting edge theory of the last year.
They're saying, oh, all this appeal to, you know, appeal to the 90s, it's pro-fascist because they're trying to make you believe that there was a better time, to believe that going backwards in society is a good thing, as if the 1990s were like some hotbed of injustice and oppression.
I think nostalgia is fun, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past.
I do when it comes to art.
I do when it comes to music and particularly the role of psychedelics in the influence of culture that happened in the 1960s, which I think is the greatest cultural shift of change in recorded history.
The difference in the 50s and the 60s, just this radical change in the way people saw life and how many people were just like exiting normal society.
And then how they threw water on that with the passing of the Psychedelics Act in 1970.
I'm completely fascinated with the 1960s in terms of, I'm a huge fan of 1960s automobiles.
What year were you born?
67.
Okay, interesting.
When I was a kid in high school, which is really, I was in high school in the 1980s.
So I went to high school.
First year was 81, which is not that far away from 1970, right?
Like that's 11 years.
Like an 11-year-old car, if you had a 2016 Toyota, it looks exactly like a 2025 Toyota.
There's not much difference at all.
You would have to be like a car nut to notice the difference.
But when I was a kid in 1981, if someone drove by in a 1970 Chevelle, everybody stopped and stared at it like, whoa.
It was like that nostalgia was real because we recognized that something had happened to American manufacturing, particularly in automobile manufacturing, where they just lost the magic.
They had magic in the 1960s, the Corvette, the cars.
Like one of the things that's crazy to me, like, you know, like for you, it's cars because you grew up during that shift as well.
The industry kind of, to your point, lost something.
But like, I grew up with like the Nintendo Game Boy and a lot of these things were like the early, it was kind of like the early days of gaming where it was all these passionate people doing things because they really desperately wanted to.
It was before all the bean counters got in.
It was before all the regulators got in.
It was before the people figured out how to turn it into this.
You used to be able to make a game with a dozen people.
And of course, you could still do that today.
I don't want to romanticize it too much.
But like you could make a best-selling game back then with a dozen people.
And these were all crazy people who could be making more money working in, let's say, like farming or industrial manufacturing.
And instead, they decided to be game programmers.
Today, you'll have game teams that are thousands of people.
And it's all, it's become a very high-paying, high-prestige job.
It's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a totally, it's a totally different universe.
But the thing that's interesting about this is like, I turn it on, that game is instantly going.
Like, there's no ads.
There's no subscriptions.
It doesn't say log in and download the updates.
Let us show you the pre-roll ads.
Now you need to make a user account and put in all your user preferences and give us access to your email and give us access to your social media if you want to have the extra booster packs.
A lot of games, they are heavily incentivizing linking your social media accounts to your game accounts and letting them see your contacts, your friends list.
Well, because they want all that data, they want to know who they can market to.
So like there are these patterns that exist in social media design and app design that steer you down a particular direction.
And so they don't force you to do it.
But the average user, unless they're trying to fight their way out of it, is going to do it.
So for example, I'll be logging into a game.
I've just downloaded Overwatch 2 and it says you need to log in.
You can either go through this extremely convoluted process of creating a new only Overwatch 2 Blizzard account, or you can click the button that says log in with Google or log in with Facebook.
What are 99?
And then you click it, and it says, to do this, you have to give us permission to see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
And look, you and I care about this stuff because I think we're relics who remember when privacy was a thing and when some things are for yourself.
There are people who do it, but most people don't.
And also like the thing is they make it where there's even reasons where you want it to be tied to your social media.
So they want to gather lots of information and get you plugged into their marketing ecosystem.
And they say, oh, if you log in with this social media account, then we can automatically add all of your friends to your in-game friends list.
So you don't have to go and manually invite them.
So it is a convenience feature.
But the thing is they could do that without storing all that data and giving them persistent access to all your social media accounts and seeing everything that you're posting.
Some of these apps, even you give them permission to post on your behalf.
And what they do is like this was a, this was innovated kind of by like the Farmville stuff.
Do you remember Farmville?
And you had to say, the reason it was so viral is when you would do stuff in Farmville, it would literally post on your wall and say, oh, Palmer just did this.
Palmer just visited Joe's farm and helped him do this.
Those tactics have evolved way beyond to make these things very sticky, very addictive.
So look, you can make a fake account.
You can make a burner account.
And there's like 1% of people who will ever think of doing something like that.
And I wouldn't mind so much if it was just about making money.
Like making money is fine.
Like I'm a believer in the free market generally.
I'm a believer in capitalism strongly.
But then the problem is you have this combination of capitalism driven capture efforts combined with people who don't care about making money nearly so much as pushing their particular social ideals.
Like you've probably seen this in Hollywood.
You certainly see it in the games industry where you have people who are joining the industry not because they want to make great games, not even because they want to make money.
And I say like making great games is the best reason.
Making money is an acceptable reason.
It's because they want to bring about greater equity and representation of people that look like them.
And like that's fine to have as a thing in the back of your mind, but there's people who are joining where that is what they want to do.
And anyone who's against it, they're going to berate them.
Anyone in the company who says, I actually think we should make games for our customers, not the people you wish were our customers.
Like, let's make games for the guys who buy our games, not the moms you wish were buying our games.
And people like that are being ejected out of companies.
One of my favorite questions to ask people is starting a company is hard.
You can't, you'll fail most of the time, even when you don't constrain yourself to trying to change the social system.
Like, look, if you could make it where there's, if you could make it where there's all those, like all those moms all get into games and it was free, like that would be great.
But it's not.
It's a trade-off, right?
You have to take resources you would have put on your customer, your real customers, and put it towards them.
One question I ask people is just ideologically is, okay, imagine your job is to build, is to build a corporate building for a company.
And the company, you know exactly who they are.
You know how many men there are.
You know how many women there are.
We don't have to say how many there are.
Like we're not, don't even, don't make it about one gender versus another.
It's just there are lots of men.
There's lots of women.
I won't pick a number.
When you're designing this building, should you have the number of bathrooms that would best serve the actual gender makeup of the company that would allow them to use the bathroom and get back to their desk without waiting in line?
Or would you do anything else?
Like would you pursue a different strategy?
And if it's different, say, what would your strategy be?
And many people say, well, I would build it, you know, perfect 50-50.
And if they say, well, I'm doing that because it's, you know, the easiest way to do it.
I'm like, okay, that's fine.
But if they say, well, I would, you know, I would, I would hope that I would strive.
I want to create an environment where it will, it should eventually be 50% men and 50% women.
I say, okay, so wait, you're going to, you have a company, 90% men, 10% women.
You think the men should have to wait in line five times as long at the bathroom because someday that might make more women want to work at this company?
And it's one of those, it's one of those really interesting dividing questions where it's basically, do you want to solve the problem that allows your business to succeed?
Or are you trying to achieve totally parallel social aims at the expense of the business?
And companies are hiring a lot of people who think about it that way.
They don't see their role as to come in and make the company better or to make a better product for their customer.
They see it as to come in and affect that change, even if it tanks the company of the process.
I think that probably you let, I mean, there's a lot of theories.
I can give you mine.
It was the zero interest rate phenomenon theory.
Are you familiar with this?
The zero interest rate phenomenon?
Zerp, they call it.
Some people call it the zero interest rate period.
So Zerp was this period of time that we've really seen over the last 15 years up until very recently where money was basically free to borrow.
That's where you've seen so much economic growth.
You've seen a lot of it artificially propped up in the tech and the media industry.
I think a lot of like these streaming plays have been propped up by Zerp.
When interest rates are extremely low and money is very cheap to borrow, people will spend tons and tons and tons of money.
The economy appears to be doing very well.
You have the growth that looks good on the stock market.
And so companies don't need to ever tighten their belts.
They can hire and hire and hire.
They can become grossly inefficient.
They can pursue things that don't make money and they're still doing okay.
And so a lot of these companies, their employees were kind of out of control.
You had people coming out of college who believed their job was to change the world by using the money of these corporations.
And the corporations didn't push back on it because they would be accused of being bigots and committing hate crimes.
And they said, you know what?
The stock is going up.
Everything's going well.
We can just keep doing this.
My theory is actually that interest rates going up have been very good for solving this problem.
You've seen a lot of layoffs in the tech industry.
You've seen a lot of layoffs in the media industry.
I think that a lot of those are driven by interest rates rising, money's not free.
And now companies have to actually make what people want.
Did you see, you probably didn't, but did you happen to see the first quarterly earnings call by the new CEO of Warner Brothers who came in a year or two?
He came in a year or two ago, and it was incredible.
He had this speech that was exactly what fans wanted to hear and what investors wanted to hear.
But his employees were furious.
He came on and said, in my tenure, I'm going to pursue something that's a bit novel for Warner Brothers.
Instead of making movies that people don't want to see, I'm going to make movies that people do want to see.
Instead of making movies that don't make money, instead, we will make movies that do make money.
And to do that, we are going to make products that people want, like Batman and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
And that is going to be the core of our market success.
And like, that's what fans want.
They're like, oh my God, this is great.
They're going to stop making these kind of social justice pieces and make us the things that we actually want.
The investors love it because he says they're going to make money.
But the people who are angry were all of the college students who joined thinking that they were going to use billions of dollars from Warner Brothers to make their pet art film projects about various oppressed groups.
And I think that that is happening across the industry.
So I've been working on Headmount Displays for a long time.
I created the Oculus Rift when I was 19 years old, living in a camper trailer in my garage.
And that was really the virtual reality headset that changed the industry, sold that company for billions of dollars.
And now that I'm working in the national security space, I've continued to believe that virtual reality, augmented reality, is going to be a critical part of our military.
So the ability to have night vision, thermal vision, but also the ability to see where all the bad guys are, see where all the good guys are by fusing everyone's view together.
Think of it almost like a hive mind.
If I'm able to see something, you should be able to see it.
If a drone can see it, you should be able to see it.
Even if it's on the other side of a building, you should be able to see it and effectively have x-ray vision.
And I should be able to command and control all these other systems using this heads-up display interface.
None of what I'm saying sounds that crazy, right?
It just sounds like any science fiction film.
These are ideas that have been around for 100 years, but only very recently has it become possible.
So this is a new product that we just announced at the Army's conference yesterday.
We've been working on it for years using our own money.
No taxpayer dollars were used to create it.
It's called Eagle Eye.
And it is an integrated ballistics shell.
So you've got a helmet, you've got hearing protection, you've got thermal sensors, night sensors, signals intelligence sensors that allow you to detect where cell phones are, where radios are, see that in your view.
It even detects where gunshots are, shows them exactly where they're placed and how far they are.
Imagine a guy's coming over a hill and I want to engage him.
So actually, I'm going to pot on the mission shield.
There we go.
So this is a system that allows everybody to basically be operating as one combined hive mind where you can all share a view of the world.
And by the way, this view that I have, it's shared now with all of the robots as well.
So all anything I see, like let's see I see someone inside of a building.
Every drone and every person now sees that person where he is.
It's so crazy that I was born at the right time to actually get to build all this stuff.
Because you know Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author who did Starship Troopers?
Okay.
He was literally writing about these ideas of mobile infantry that's wearing mech suits and ballistics prediction, like helmets that show you the bad guys, give you radar feeds, give you night vision, give you thermal vision, the ability to do ballistics targeting where it calculates where the wind is going to blow you around and where it's going to go.
He was literally writing about this in the 1940s.
I mean, we're talking about almost 100 years ago.
And we happen to be born in the right time.
So, you know, too late to explore the seas, too early to explore the stars, but just in time to build Eagle Eye.
It's like I'm reliving my nights here in the room with you.
Now, I ponder it a lot because, I mean, look, we talked earlier about how I would only be able to pull off these things I pulled off if I continuously succeeded over.
And it does make you think, like, what are the odds of that?
Is it more likely that the world is a simulation or not?
And I think actually it just comes down to it comes down to, I'm a spiritual person.
I believe in the existence of a higher creator, of a higher power.
And I feel like there's actually a lot of similarities between that and believing in simulation theory.
I mean, like, people, people say, oh, it's all a simulation.
Is that really so different from having a universe that was created by an all-powerful being?
Like, it's almost, I often feel like simulation theory is just normal religion wrapped up in a package that a person who claims to be a religious can partake in.
They're like, no, I would never believe in, you know, a sky daddy.
I just believe that we live in a world created by a higher being and that he's watching our every move and learning from it and helping us along the way.
I don't know, man.
You're hitting on a lot of the tenets of major world religions.
I own about 450 guns, huge number of, you know, I own basically everything that anyone's ever fought in.
So ballistic vests, uniforms, boots, gloves, helmets.
I collect that stuff.
And so one of the cool parts about Eagle Eye is I got to bring all my opinions on what things should be and I can just jam them into the product.
So like the cool thing about this is like you've, if you've ever used earriction, normally, you know, it pops up like this and it's kind of dangling in the way.
Notice how it's really tightly integrated.
Like it's not flopping around, but I can pop it open and now I can hear you directly with my own two ears.
I can pop that and clip it back in and I'm able to hear with electronic pass-through and it actually enhances my hearing.
So I can hear certain things better.
And you'll notice this is ballistic ear protection.
So have you ever seen like a high-cut helmet where you can have low-cut helmets where they protect your ears more, high-cut helmets where there's no ballistic protection over your hearing protection?
This is ballistic hearing protection.
So when I put this on, everything is protected with armor, even over the soft tissue in my ears and around my upper neck.
This is a tricky one where we have real modules and show modules.
The real modules, in general, the army doesn't want to have them passed around and people taking pictures of them.
Like at AUSA, there's people walking up taking pictures of everything in the booth.
They don't want you to show off, for example, the size of the aperture of the thermal imager you're using because then they can back reverse how far you can see what level of thermal radiation you can see.
And does it have the same functionality as like Walker game ears where you can amplify outside noises, but then when a loud boom comes off, your ear is projected?
It can cancel out all of the other sound that it knows is coming out of phase with that direction and distance.
And it can give me just the sound there coming from that as best it's can.
So it can give me not just enhanced hearing, but directional enhanced hearing.
I can say, I want to listen to what that guy 100 yards over there is saying.
I'm not promising you'll be able to hear, but you'll be able to hear it a lot better than you would than you would without it.
So it's worth noting, like the way this came together is crazy.
There was a contract to do this, to build an infantry combat heads up display in 2017 and 2018 that was awarded to Microsoft by the United States Army.
It was $22 billion.
$22 billion to develop this technology.
And I actually wanted to compete in that competition back then, but at the time, Andrew was only about two dozen people.
It was a competition between Magic Leap and Microsoft.
Microsoft ended up winning.
I think that's probably good because the guy who was running Magic Leap was not really a fan of the military.
And I think it's dangerous to have, even if you don't, it's fine to not like the military, but you shouldn't have people who don't like the military running the military, right?
And I think you shouldn't have people who are in love with the military regulating the military, right?
You know, everyone has their role.
Anyway, I never, I never, I was very skeptical of their technology.
You remember HoloLens?
That was Microsoft's like consumer virtual reality, augmented reality effort.
Their AR project was adapting that to the military into this product called IBAS.
And to make a very, very long story short, it had a lot of problems.
Their early hardware was making people sick.
It had lag.
The night vision wasn't working well.
There were soldier evaluation touch points that came out where they were saying, hey, I'll get killed if I wear this.
Microsoft invested a lot of money trying to make it better, but eventually they ended up killing even their consumer hall lens division.
They just shut everything down.
And so the crazy part of this whole story is starting a few years ago, I started going to Microsoft and saying, hey, will you guys just give me the IBAS program?
Like, will you just let me take over?
You guys can keep building Microsoft applications, cloud computing, the stuff you're good at.
Let me build the tactical heads-up display hardware.
And when I first talked to them years ago, they thought I was nuts.
Like it was almost like insulted.
It was like when Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo and they got literally laughed out of the room.
And then as time went on, they started to laugh less and less.
And eventually they said, hey, remember how you said you wanted to take over IBAS?
We would actually love to partner with you on this and let you bring your magic to bear on this problem.
And I try to be a humble guy.
I don't usually succeed, but I am not humble in this one regard.
I believe that I am the world's best head-mounted display designer, bar none.
I took the crown with the Oculus Rift.
I think I still hold it.
And so I was able to kick the program into shape.
We built our own hardware and we've built Eagle Eye over the last couple of years.
And it is, it basically solves all the problems that the program had.
It is the thing that I think is actually going to end up on the heads of every soldier.
Here, try taking things on, and you'll feel they're a bit heavier than normal glasses.
But the other thing about them is that they're also ballistic rated glasses.
So you see in the front and then also on the sides.
Yeah, so like these can take pieces of frag.
So if someone's attacking you with a drone and it blows up, this is going to keep those from going into your orbitals, which is a pretty important function for glasses.
So yeah, put the glasses, try putting the glass back on, see if you can pop that off.
You'll notice like that one is actually, yeah, there you go.
Perfect.
So that's a mission shield.
I like that you asked about it because actually nobody's even noticed really that it's two pieces.
So the mission shield is a piece that allows you to reconfigure the glasses for different use cases.
If you're using this, for example, to like give you automated instructions on how to repair your Humvee, for example, I don't need to have that ballistic cover on the front because I don't need that extra.
Like I don't expect that I'm going to have an explosion happen and protect my eyes.
But you can also do things like have different types of protection.
For example, that's just a normal ballistic mission shield.
We have another mission shield that protects you from laser energy weapons.
So it's actually tuned where now it makes your vision turn.
I probably shouldn't talk about exactly what color because it allows people to figure out what frequencies we're blocking.
But there are mission shields that you can put on that will protect you from weapons that we know China has.
China has a bunch of directed energy laser weapons, some of them for taking out drones, others designed to blind human troops.
And so we're designing mission shields that protect you from those types of emissions.
I don't want to be, I don't want to be too, I don't want to be too aggressive here because I'll tell you the United States has weapons that are designed to temporarily blind people as well.
Now, the thing is, temporary blinding is very close to permanent blinding.
And it's a thin line.
It's dependent on the range.
It's dependent on the power level.
Any system that can temporarily blind people at long range is capable of blinding people permanently at long range.
It's just that that's the line you walk.
Like if you want it to work in any fog, you need more power.
If you want it to work at long ranges, you need more power.
But like, for example, imagine we deployed a bunch of these glasses and they had the laser filters built in from the start.
Now imagine that China shifts their laser frequencies 10 nanometers so that it bypasses that filter.
Imagine if I had to just replace all my AR glasses.
That's not acceptable, right?
So everything on this system is totally modular.
So what would happen is if they shifted their laser weapons, we would just give people a new mission shield.
I'm wondering how much I should get into the movie magic here.
So look, I'll get a little bit into it.
I'm mostly an engineer.
I mostly build stuff.
But a big part of what I do is understanding what magicians think when they are drawing attention to things, when they have pattern, when you're going through a demo of something to somebody, like I used to demo the Oculus Rift to thousands of people a year, high-powered executives, government people, CEOs of major game companies, people we were trying to hire.
And you have to develop a pattern of how you talk about stuff.
And you need to be able to go in any direction.
If somebody says, well, what about this?
You need to be able to show them that feature.
You need to be ready for how you show the feature.
I need to be intimately familiar with every part of it.
The reason that the magnets are so weak on this is because we show this to people who are weak.
I'm not kidding.
If you actually have, like, because you're not swapping this like as you're running around, right?
So like in the real one, you can have, you know, where you're like, uh, you know, and it busts off.
There's so many neck injuries that occur from spinal compression, people getting their heads whipped around.
That's why helmets need to be extremely lightweight, tightly integrated, no snag hazards.
Like it's important that you not have, you know, a big giant, you know, bulky thing where I'm going through a doorway and it gets on there and all of a sudden I go at a weird angle and I'm trying to run through a room.
So the cool thing about this is it's a combination, battery, computer, and ballistic plate.
And so, so here's the craziest part about this.
Normally you would wear a plate and then you would have to wear a battery and a computer.
That's how everyone's always done heads-up displays before.
And I realize that's crazy because you need that space for other stuff, right?
You want to be carrying ammo.
You want to be carrying equipment.
You want to be carrying grenades or admin stuff.
You can't use your most valuable real estate to just carry a battery brick.
So what's in here is a battery technology that is an electrolyte-free solid-state ceramic battery.
Now, ceramic batteries are not as high energy density as in terms of like they don't have as much energy per pound as the very, very best, like, let's say car electric batteries.
But they are pretty good ballistic material.
And so what I realized is that you, instead of having the weight of a ballistic plate and then the weight of a battery on top, you should combine those two functions.
You should make your battery part of your ballistic material stack up so that like, is it the best ballistic material in the world?
No.
Is it the best battery material in the world?
No.
But you can have enough of it that it's better than either of those things working separately.
Like if I were to try to make a system that was a normal armor plate and then also this much battery.
So like you notice we actually got all the power actually labeled right here.
So this is 900 watt hour battery.
If we were to have a plate and then a battery, it would be like a plate this big and then like another big battery on top.
By combining the two, I've made it where I've eliminated something like 10 pounds from the soldier's ruck, which is a huge deal because that's weight I can either keep out of his ruck or I can or I could just put more shit into it.
Of course, what all my buddies in the army tell me is, Palmer, don't let them take those 10 pounds and give me 10 pounds more shit.
These guys are already carrying an insane amount of stuff.
So this is only the start.
We're building a bunch of other augments that combine multiple systems into one thing.
Like, in fact, this has also got a bunch of radio hardware in it as well.
So if you can replace a radio and your batteries and your ballistics and your onboard computer all in one thing, that's pretty cool.
In general, I would recommend using this as your rear plate, not your front plate.
So if you've got a rear and a front, the rear is probably the one that you want to put this in because if you do get shot in the plate, you don't want it to, you're more likely to get shot in the front than the back.
And you don't want to get shot and then you lose all of your energy to run all of your sensors and your night vision and everything else.
And if you get shot with a plate, it's possible to take that plate and swap it with a fresh one.
I mean, look, you're the world's biggest badass if you're able to do that in a firefight.
I don't think most people are bad enough to, you know, take a hit right in the chest and then pull out their plate and slap another one in, but it does happen.
And so we're generally recommending that people use this as the rear plate to make it less likely to get shot, but fully capable of operating in front plate service.
I get to work with just the coolest technology on the bleeding edge of all this.
And the best part is that the gains, it's not so much in some people, they see these gains and they get to make money off of it.
But I do this and I get to have end users telling me, Palmer, this is how you saved our unit's life.
Palmer, this is how your technology protected our base.
Palmer, people would be dead in this particular building if you had not developed the technology that you did.
That is the most rewarding thing that you can do.
At least it's the most rewarding thing that I've ever done.
It's a really cool set of problems.
And I highly encourage people who are really smart to look at doing this stuff because some people they say, oh, I don't want to work on weapons.
It's ethically fraught.
And the point I make to them is that this is, whether you like it or not, we need some form of weapons, right?
We're not going to disarm the entire world.
There are bad guys out there.
We need to have something.
And if you are worried about the ethics of weapons, it's actually even more important that you work on them because there's no moral high ground in outsourcing that work to people who are less ethical and less competent than you.
If you think you're a competent person and you think you're an ethical person, you almost have a responsibility to care about these and arguably to work on them.