The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2394 - Palmer Luckey

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe.

00:00:04.000 Logan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night!

00:00:09.000 All day.

00:00:12.000 Um I haven't done the ball, but I have done those knee chairs.

00:00:18.000 Okay.

00:00:18.000 They're a little annoying.

00:00:20.000 What about standing desks?

00:00:21.000 You have a standing desk fan.

00:00:23.000 No.

00:00:24.000 I when I use them, I usually have lower back, gets gets gets kind of sore, just standing there.

00:00:24.000 Yeah.

00:00:29.000 I feel like some part of you should be relaxed.

00:00:32.000 And if you're standing, you're gonna want to lean on something to have a conversation, especially.

00:00:36.000 Because I know some people do podcasts standing up, like a standing up table.

00:00:40.000 I'm like, okay.

00:00:41.000 That's crazy.

00:00:42.000 I I have a buddy of mine who's doing a pro have you ever seen the the float tanks where you float in the salt water.

00:00:48.000 No, we have one here.

00:00:49.000 Oh, no, no way.

00:00:50.000 So I know someone who is building a rig with a waterproof keyboard, waterproof mouse, and a VR headset so that they can have a float computing rig, and they want to just they want to they want to program while they're floating in space.

00:00:50.000 Yeah.

00:01:04.000 Wow.

00:01:05.000 He hasn't he hasn't gotten all the way there yet.

00:01:07.000 The hardest part has actually been the mouse.

00:01:08.000 There's lots of waterproof keyboards for various industrial applications, like you know, they so you don't get metal shavings in a oil in them.

00:01:15.000 But mice, it's actually it's actually harder.

00:01:17.000 But that makes sense because there's a roll well, it's a laser now.

00:01:20.000 It used to be an actual ball.

00:01:21.000 That would have been really hard days.

00:01:22.000 Yeah, the optic at this point I don't think it's that hard.

00:01:25.000 I think he he's been he's been screwing around with just taking a normal one and then uh wrapping it in in in saran wrap.

00:01:32.000 But you know, that that's kind of splash proof, but not not immersion proof.

00:01:35.000 Is he actually underwater with the setup?

00:01:38.000 Yeah, so that because if you're taking your hands up out of the water, you're gonna one, it's uncomfortable.

00:01:42.000 So they're on floating like this and the keyboard of the underwater.

00:01:47.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:01:48.000 So you're you're floating at neutral position, basically.

00:01:50.000 And just to code, he wants to code like that.

00:01:52.000 He wants to code.

00:01:53.000 I think it's a super weirdo.

00:01:55.000 I I I want to do it for VR gaming.

00:01:58.000 I think that'd be really interesting.

00:02:01.000 If you can't 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, you know, your your vision and the and the sound, I feel like would be very interesting experience.

00:02:13.000 So I'm uh I I'm begging off a s uh an hour in it for from from him when he gets it done, but I have I'm I'm looking forward to that.

00:02:20.000 I would let you use ours to try it out, but we just had a problem with one of our pumps broke.

00:02:24.000 So it's oh that's a bummer.

00:02:26.000 Yeah, it flooded everything with salt water.

00:02:28.000 It's it's weird.

00:02:30.000 There it's a weird experience.

00:02:31.000 Have you done it?

00:02:32.000 I have actually never done it.

00:02:33.000 I'm so fascinated by it, and I've actually booked a session at some of those like float tank companies several times, and then every single time my schedule is intervened and it turns out that I've not been able to do it.

00:02:44.000 So you should get one for your place.

00:02:46.000 Maybe I should.

00:02:47.000 I should probably try it first, right?

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:49.000 Or is it it's just so good I should have it.

00:02:52.000 Yeah, it's very relaxing too, and it's really good for thinking.

00:02:52.000 Yeah, you'll love it.

00:02:56.000 Like if you have a thought and you're just like fucking around with it in your head, you're like, I don't know what do this.

00:03:00.000 You're in there, you have zero distractions.

00:03:02.000 It's like your m your mind has more computational power that's available.

00:03:07.000 Because even though you don't think about it, like right now we're in these chairs, you're your butt's touching the chair, your feet are on the floor, your hands on the table, your clothes are on your body.

00:03:16.000 There's all these different things that your body is recognizing as input.

00:03:20.000 When you take those away, you're it's like if you're having a conversation, there's a bunch of people right beside you with a jackhammer.

00:03:20.000 Sure.

00:03:26.000 You're like, this is too distracting.

00:03:28.000 Let's go over here.

00:03:29.000 And you go to where in the park, it's nice and peaceful.

00:03:32.000 Now you can have a conversation, it's so much easier.

00:03:34.000 Well, you don't realize that like regular everyday life, just establishing the the the distance between the walls and thinking about all the data.

00:03:42.000 All that stuff is your brain is computing this.

00:03:45.000 Yep.

00:03:46.000 In the silence of the float tank, there's none of that.

00:03:49.000 And you don't feel the water because it's the same temperature as your skin.

00:03:52.000 That's right.

00:03:53.000 So you just laden, so it's isotonic.

00:03:55.000 It's not exactly.

00:03:56.000 You feel like you're flying.

00:03:58.000 That's so cool.

00:03:59.000 Yeah, I I've done a lot of reading on it, and I'm super interested in that in in the science of it.

00:04:04.000 But I've never actually managed to get into a float tank, which is really embarrassing.

00:04:07.000 I mean, uh, you'd think that a billionaire would have the resources to get into a bucket of salt water.

00:04:12.000 Yeah, you should have somebody make you one.

00:04:14.000 Have a have a build you one at your place.

00:04:16.000 Oh, that'd be cool.

00:04:17.000 Maybe get one made out of wood instead of like the plastic.

00:04:20.000 You want metal.

00:04:21.000 Mine is mine looks like a giant meat locker.

00:04:23.000 That's what it looks like.

00:04:25.000 Um but the guy who made it for me was like a mad genius.

00:04:28.000 He died, unfortunately.

00:04:30.000 He was a mad genius who also didn't believe in medicine.

00:04:33.000 And I think he did he die a hepatitis?

00:04:35.000 I don't know.

00:04:36.000 I think he died of hepatitis.

00:04:36.000 I don't know.

00:04:38.000 Well, you'll have to show it to me so that I can check it out.

00:04:40.000 It's dope. 0.55

00:04:41.000 Um but it's it would definitely be at some point in time the best way to disconnect from your natural environment.

00:04:41.000 Yeah.

00:04:50.000 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 the environment around like you drop into it.

00:05:01.000 That would be the perfect environment to do it in salt water.

00:05:03.000 Yeah.

00:05:04.000 Well, I mean, that's been my that was always my dream in the in the old and you know, my first company was Oculus.

00:05:09.000 And so like that was my dream was to just fully feel like you were inside of the video game completely.

00:05:15.000 Forget about it.

00:05:16.000 How old were you when you started working there?

00:05:18.000 So I started building virtual reality headset prototypes when I was 14 or 15.

00:05:24.000 And then I I built the first prototype of what I'd call the Oculus Rift at 16, and then I'd formally turn it into a company when I was 18, launched the product when I was 19, uh, and then sold the company a few years later to Facebook for a few billion dollars.

00:05:40.000 So it was kind of a it was kind of a crazy arc for me.

00:05:42.000 I did like that was like you know that would that was I was putting myself through school.

00:05:46.000 Did you work with Carmac?

00:05:47.000 Yeah.

00:05:48.000 So well, Carmac was So uh John Carmack was one of my heroes growing up.

00:05:53.000 Love that dude.

00:05:54.000 And it was one of these crazy things where the universe kind of brought us together.

00:05:58.000 I was working on my VR technology and nobody was paying attention to VR back then.

00:06:02.000 It was a kind of a crazy person thing.

00:06:04.000 Nobody was paying attention to what I was doing.

00:06:05.000 But I was posting about it on this internet forum.

00:06:07.000 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.

00:06:17.000 And so I gave him a bunch of input on why he couldn't do it, why it was a large impossible project, and because I had been trying to do the same thing.

00:06:25.000 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?

00:06:30.000 Said, Well, I'm not really selling these yet, but uh I'm I'd be happy to lend it to you for free.

00:06:35.000 And so I sent it to him.

00:06:36.000 He ended up writing a review and posting it on his blog and said it was uh the best VR experience the world has ever seen.

00:06:43.000 He introduced me to Sony, they tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab.

00:06:48.000 I turned them down, they doubled the offer, I turned that down.

00:06:51.000 Um then so j 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.

00:06:58.000 Where everyone was like, oh, if John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important.

00:07:01.000 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.

00:07:08.000 So we got then I then I had the the the incredible opportunity to work with one of my childhood heroes as my CTO.

00:07:16.000 What year was that?

00:07:16.000 That was 2012.

00:07:18.000 Okay, he came on the podcast I think 2016, and you brought one.

00:07:22.000 Yeah.

00:07:23.000 So yeah, he joined in 2013.

00:07:27.000 So some I think it was June of 2013.

00:07:29.000 So about a year after I started Oculus is when he joined his CTO.

00:07:34.000 Well, he showed us um and he was doing whatever the one is where you I guess you have drumsticks.

00:07:39.000 Is that what you have?

00:07:40.000 And you're whacking stuff as it comes out of the sky.

00:07:42.000 He showed us that.

00:07:43.000 And like what it workout is.

00:07:47.000 He's a huge beatsaber fan.

00:07:48.000 Oh, he was going nuts.

00:07:49.000 And he was doing it really fast.

00:07:51.000 I was like, Oh no, this is nuts.

00:07:52.000 It's actually it's like it is good fitness, it is good coordination training.

00:07:56.000 Yeah.

00:07:57.000 It really like Beatsaber was great because it really busted this myth that VR was this like, you know, totally inactive, be a fat, lazy slob thing. 0.61

00:08:07.000 VR gaming, at least as it exists today, takes a lot more caloric expenditure than any other type of gaming.

00:08:13.000 I mean, like and like even more than like other motion games.

00:08:16.000 Like remember we bowling and we sports, like that's like one movement every once in a while.

00:08:20.000 Like beat saber is a full body workout.

00:08:22.000 What's really impressive is the boxing games.

00:08:25.000 The boxing games are a really good workout.

00:08:27.000 You could play, I think one of them was Creed by a company called Servios.

00:08:30.000 I don't remember what the name was.

00:08:32.000 We had a couple different ones at the old studio in LA.

00:08:35.000 And you I'd work out with it.

00:08:37.000 I'd put it on and you know, you do a round with these virtual boxers, and you really get a workout in.

00:08:43.000 Your feet hurt, like you're like, wow, I'm I'm utilizing a lot of movement here.

00:08:47.000 Yep.

00:08:48.000 You know, the the the company that did a few of those boxing games, it's this LA studio called Servios, and the two co-founders of that were actually guys who worked with me in the Army research lab that I worked in before starting Oculus.

00:09:00.000 So it's it's one of those teeny tiny worlds.

00:09:02.000 There were there were so few of us that really believed in VR in those days.

00:09:05.000 Aaron Powell Is there a VR that like a professional boxer could use?

00:09:10.000 Like could you get VR to the point where you could program it with AI?

00:09:14.000 So you could take like the movement of like a sugar ray Leonard or something like that and actually program it into the machine.

00:09:21.000 So I'd go first.

00:09:22.000 It's not just something you could do, it's being done.

00:09:24.000 There are boxers who are using this technology. 0.98

00:09:27.000 Um I know uh 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.

00:09:27.000 Really?

00:09:38.000 Wow.

00:09:38.000 That's right.

00:09:39.000 Well, m my thought was that you could actually emulate an opponent.

00:09:44.000 So like say if you were supposed to fight Canelo Alvarez.

00:09:46.000 Well, we have a this database of all Canelo Alvarez's performances.

00:09:50.000 Yep.

00:09:51.000 And training footage.

00:09:52.000 So you could calculate what his normal exchanges are, what his opening moves are, how he how he sets the hook up off the jab, he feints the right hand.

00:10:02.000 Give me crazy deja vu.

00:10:03.000 Let me send you let me show you the text message that I was just doing with Logan Paul last night.

00:10:08.000 Um I said it's time to have robots fighting people.

00:10:15.000 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.

00:10:24.000 Like we were talking through like no, this was less VR.

00:10:27.000 Well, are you are you even following some of the robot fighting league stuff?

00:10:30.000 I mean the rope.

00:10:30.000 So that's controlled by VR.

00:10:32.000 You put on a VR headset, you put on a motion capture suit, you teleoperate a robot.

00:10:36.000 One of the things I've been talking with Logan about is the idea of having where you have one teleoperated robot versus uh actual human.

00:10:44.000 But then what we were talking about is this idea of having the robot learn from like you're saying, learning from footage of you of not just the greats, but even yourself.

00:10:52.000 So that it can be basically ex 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.

00:11:01.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:11:01.000 The other thing I was thinking about what a robot could do if you programmed it cor correctly, it would have a really accurate sense of distance, so it would be able to touch you instead of hurt you.

00:11:12.000 It could pull its punches.

00:11:13.000 Yes.

00:11:14.000 That's a good idea.

00:11:15.000 The best sparring partners.

00:11:16.000 Someone who can so the mechanics of it are all the same, but you don't have the follow through about the same.

00:11:21.000 It would have more control, probably even than a person, right?

00:11:25.000 So it's like you think of the precise movements that surgical robots are able to do.

00:11:29.000 Absolutely.

00:11:30.000 Um I mean, you could do this.

00:11:34.000 The main thing that robots have is they have just such fast reaction time.

00:11:37.000 And so you could put sensors in like a glove.

00:11:40.000 You could have it where the moment that it hits, or even a ranging sensor, where I mean it could stop a millimeter away from you.

00:11:46.000 So yeah, I mean Yeah, you could you could totally do that.

00:11:51.000 Is this something that someone's working out with?

00:11:53.000 This is a robot fightly again in San Francisco.

00:11:56.000 Yeah, so actually, so actually this is this is a buddy of mine who's been working in VR for a really really long time.

00:12:00.000 So it's again, what a tiny, what a tiny world of weird wackos. 1.00

00:12:04.000 Um but yeah, six Liv has been working on uh which is his real name, by the way.

00:12:09.000 Um he's been working on VR stuff for the past 15 years, and he recently got into doing this this this robot robot combat sports league.

00:12:19.000 So that's that's they're doing a big US versus China fight in December if you want me to get you tickets.

00:12:24.000 I can I can make it happen.

00:12:25.000 I could pull some strings.

00:12:26.000 Where is it?

00:12:26.000 Where's it taking place?

00:12:28.000 I think it's gonna be in San Francisco.

00:12:30.000 That's funny.

00:12:31.000 I try to stay out of San Francisco.

00:12:32.000 I also don't really want to watch robots fight.

00:12:36.000 No.

00:12:36.000 I I don't mind watching them on TV, but did you you ever uh you ever see you ever read manga or or anime about fighting?

00:12:44.000 No.

00:12:45.000 One of so I'm I'm I'm I gotta admit, I'm less of a fighting guy, more of an anime manga guy, but I love some of the just ridiculous inventions that then make you think if there might be something there.

00:12:56.000 So like Fist of the North Star, there's a move that a guy learns, and uh it's it's like a I forget forget the name of it, but it's like a double punch.

00:13:04.000 So what you do is you fold your fingers and you punch the guy and then like his skin recoils and delivers the full hit, and then you fold your fingers in.

00:13:14.000 So you hit fold your fingers and then punch again.

00:13:17.000 And it's like one punch, but it's a double punch.

00:13:19.000 And then one of the culmination of his training is where his master shows him that there's actually a final step.

00:13:24.000 You can see where this is going.

00:13:25.000 It's a triple punch.

00:13:26.000 So you punch him like this, and then like this, and then like this.

00:13:30.000 And mostly that stuff is nonsense and never gonna work with a person, but it makes me wonder if a robot could do it.

00:13:37.000 Well, you would need momentum, right?

00:13:39.000 I mean, if it's generating force, your force would be stopped with the first blow to be able to generate additional momentum in a short distance would be very difficult.

00:13:48.000 Trevor Burrus For a person.

00:13:49.000 What I'm thinking is a robot would allow you to do this.

00:13:56.000 So your first one would carry all your inertia through.

00:13:56.000 Exactly.

00:13:59.000 And then you could you get a second one.

00:14:00.000 Because you would agree probably have.

00:14:05.000 Aaron Powell But what if you could do the most power in the first shot and then another follow-up shot anyway.

00:14:10.000 Yeah.

00:14:10.000 Or like you hit him and it throws him back a bit, and then the moment you know the distance it creates, look, I'm not a fighting expert.

00:14:16.000 I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a computer kid.

00:14:18.000 Trevor Burrus The thing the what bothers me about it is the human body's inherently flawed.

00:14:23.000 It's not a good design.

00:14:24.000 And it's not a good design for fighting.

00:14:25.000 So if I was going to design something to fight something, I would never design it after a human.

00:14:30.000 I would use an animal or something more destructive.

00:14:33.000 I wouldn't use something so vulnerable.

00:14:35.000 Or something with like shitty mechanics.

00:14:36.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, it ends up looking like a battle bot, probably.

00:14:38.000 You know, something heavily shielded and armored and that's got a big spike on an arm.

00:14:42.000 It would be like that.

00:14:43.000 That's what you would have for a robot to fight.

00:14:45.000 Because a human is just too goofy.

00:14:47.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I mean, that's why the stuff that I make for the Department of Defense, or I guess now the Department of War, none of it looks like a human.

00:14:53.000 I mean, we're making robots for fighting, and they all have very hyper-specialized forms.

00:14:58.000 And some of them look a bit like sharks or a bit like birds, but generally, yeah, you're right.

00:15:03.000 The human form is not the one that you would actually base a terminator off.

00:15:06.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:15:07.000 It's terrible.

00:15:07.000 No.

00:15:08.000 It's a terrible form.

00:15:09.000 Although I would say one of my I I don't I don't think James Cameron ever really explored this in Terminator, but my my personal kind of like uh like uh head cannon theory would be that the reason that Skynet made the terminators in to a humanoid form is because maybe there is really some hope in that it there's something of of humanity left in it.

00:15:28.000 You know, what like if it was truly a merciless killing machine with no uh affiliation with humanity, why would it make its agents uh you know so so uniformly human-shaped?

00:15:40.000 Uh but that's just that's just something I paused from time to time.

00:15:44.000 Well sneak around.

00:15:46.000 The later ones truly were for deception.

00:15:48.000 But if you look at a lot of the flashes into the future, they don't have meat-shielded terminators.

00:15:52.000 There's lots of like T-Series uh humanoid combat robots that are just walking around as bare metal skeletons.

00:15:59.000 And so I f I I feel like that it it's some it's almost like an admission that the AI does see itself in the in the in the mind of it uh it sees itself as a creation of man, it sees itself in the in the eyes of man.

00:16:12.000 That's what's really creepy, right?

00:16:12.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:16:14.000 Because that's in the Bible.

00:16:15.000 God created man in his image.

00:16:16.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:16:17.000 That's exactly what I was thinking.

00:16:18.000 It's like it's it's very much like it realizes it was created in man's image and and derives some sort of satisfaction or value from that.

00:16:25.000 I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's interesting.

00:16:28.000 And that's how life eventually does create artificial life.

00:16:32.000 Well, I mean, you're familiar with all like you know, the like all the all the theories around uh you know like uh humanity being like planted here by a new and and like that that 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 beneath the Trevor Burrus.

00:16:54.000 Uh recent discovery of an asteroid where they picked apart whether it's the the crucial amino acids for life or some sort of genetic material.

00:17:04.000 Trevor Burrus You're talking about the the NASA release that there were strong indication like bio signs that are that are compatible with with what we would expect from life.

00:17:13.000 Yes.

00:17:14.000 There was and then I think they're recently, right?

00:17:16.000 was recently, although they walked it back pretty quickly.

00:17:19.000 There was kind of an initial release that said that we found that they're strongly aligned with being biological signals.

00:17:19.000 Oh, did they?

00:17:28.000 And then they re kind of reach back, they said, well, maybe not.

00:17:31.000 Do you see?

00:17:32.000 I haven't dug into that one as deep as others.

00:17:34.000 I've just been too busy really lately.

00:17:35.000 And that you're right, this is like very recent news.

00:17:37.000 Aaron Powell I always wonder if someone got overenthusiastic or if someone said, hey, yeah, why don't you shut the fuck up?

00:17:44.000 You know, like we're trying to slow this whole release of alien technology, alien life, slow it down.

00:17:54.000 Aaron Powell Well, the good news the good news in this case is I think even in the most optimistic sense, an optimist meaning I hope they find life.

00:18:02.000 I think it's gonna end up being, you know, some microbes.

00:18:04.000 It's not whatever they saw was not consistent with, you know, oh dude, it's a it's a person in the rock.

00:18:09.000 Right.

00:18:09.000 Which is of course what we all want.

00:18:10.000 We want leave people or you know, little green men or something something like that. 1.00

00:18:15.000 That's probably gonna be pretty far away.

00:18:17.000 It probably is.

00:18:18.000 And it seems I mean, you know my experience on this front is largely from a military angle and looking at a lot of the footage that's coming out and and and and a lot of the sensor feeds that have come out.

00:18:29.000 And the thing that what we like what we really need even more than discovering microbes, like these flying objects.

00:18:35.000 Yeah.

00:18:36.000 The problem is that most of them, and I'm not saying all of them, most of them, they we're only capturing them on let's say one sensor, like a camera is seeing it, or a radar is seeing it.

00:18:45.000 It's very rare to get both of those totally different types of sensors looking at at the same time.

00:18:50.000 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?

00:18:56.000 Like it's at people are actively trying to trick it.

00:18:58.000 You can make radars see things that aren't there.

00:19:00.000 You can make cameras see things that aren't there if you're really smart about how you interact with them.

00:19:03.000 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.

00:19:11.000 Now you saw the recent one with the hellfire that was fired.

00:19:14.000 And it appears to have broken broken up but then kept moving.

00:19:18.000 Yeah.

00:19:18.000 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.

00:19:26.000 Is that definite real footage?

00:19:29.000 I mean, I believe it's been verified.

00:19:33.000 I am probably not in a position where I should say if I know if it's been verified.

00:19:37.000 Verified, but I'll tell you this.

00:19:38.000 I believe the footage is real.

00:19:39.000 Let's run through perplexity and ask.

00:19:42.000 What do you mean by verified though?

00:19:43.000 Just ask if it has been verified that this is legitimate footage from the military of whatever they thought it was gonna be and a hellfire missile hits it.

00:19:53.000 I do believe that one of the one of the members of the unidentified aerial phenomenon committees in Congress introduced it into a hearing.

00:20:01.000 It came from a hearing.

00:20:01.000 That's where it came from.

00:20:02.000 Yeah.

00:20:02.000 So who uh released it?

00:20:05.000 Oh, okay.

00:20:06.000 Which guy released it?

00:20:07.000 Uh one I want to speak out.

00:20:12.000 You saw the phenomenon?

00:20:14.000 Fantastic.

00:20:14.000 Yes.

00:20:15.000 It's really good.

00:20:16.000 You know, the guy who did it is doing a follow-up.

00:20:18.000 What's he doing?

00:20:18.000 Have you heard about this?

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00:21:31.000 You know, I probably shouldn't say too much more, but uh there's there's there's there's a there's a follow-up to it that's coming that's even more than a lot of people.

00:21:36.000 Wait a minute.

00:21:36.000 Is it phenomenal wasn't the phenomenon Jane Fox?

00:21:38.000 James Fox?

00:21:39.000 Was it James Fox?

00:21:40.000 Was the phenomenon?

00:21:41.000 It was in the again.

00:21:43.000 James Fox, was that the phenomenon?

00:21:45.000 Do you have it the age of disclosure?

00:21:46.000 He had moment of con he had moment of contact.

00:21:49.000 He had the the Vargine that's the Virginia one.

00:21:52.000 And then didn't he have the phenomenon too?

00:21:56.000 Somebody did it.

00:21:57.000 I saw it.

00:21:58.000 Why did I think it was Fox?

00:22:00.000 Yeah.

00:22:00.000 Yeah, Fox has been on here a few times.

00:22:00.000 It is Fox.

00:22:03.000 He's got that crazy one about the Virginia Brazil sighting.

00:22:06.000 Do you know about that one?

00:22:08.000 Like the whole town saw this thing.

00:22:08.000 That one's nuts.

00:22:10.000 It crashed in the in the 90s.

00:22:12.000 And they have like a statue of this thing, like as you're entering into the city.

00:22:15.000 Yeah.

00:22:16.000 And supposedly, this is the crazy story.

00:22:19.000 There was a a wounded alien.

00:22:21.000 One of the police officers carried this wounded alien in the back of a car.

00:22:26.000 They brought it to a hospital.

00:22:27.000 There's records of them bringing this to the hospital.

00:22:29.000 The hospital said, we can't handle this.

00:22:31.000 We have no cap take it to a different hospital.

00:22:34.000 So they took it to another hospital.

00:22:35.000 Yep.

00:22:36.000 Then the guy who carried the thing gets a severe bacterial infection that's unresponsive to antibiotics and dies.

00:22:45.000 Whoa.

00:22:46.000 Yeah.

00:22:46.000 Young, healthy, you know, fighting age man gets this weird infection after handling this creature.

00:22:53.000 Multiple witnesses say they saw another one of them.

00:22:56.000 There was like a couple of them.

00:22:58.000 One of them was injured that they picked up, and then there was another one that was there.

00:23:01.000 And then many people in the town said that they saw another craft come by to retrieve those aliens.

00:23:09.000 It's a really nice story because it's the same stories told independently by a bunch of people.

00:23:16.000 You know, I've kind of got my retirement figured out.

00:23:19.000 Um I have for a while.

00:23:21.000 You just retire right now if you wanted to.

00:23:22.000 I mean I could.

00:23:23.000 It's just I what I'm doing, I think is important.

00:23:25.000 You know, so I I I gotta I gotta see my mission through.

00:23:27.000 Like I'm the government is we've been spending way too much money on defense, not getting nearly enough for it.

00:23:33.000 So I started Andrew with the goal of saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

00:23:37.000 I need to I need to see that through.

00:23:38.000 But we're gonna get to someday is uh see th there's a handful of these government groups that are going around looking into things like what you're talking about.

00:23:46.000 You know, like that they they look into the the strange phenomenon.

00:23:49.000 Right.

00:23:50.000 Um those groups do exist, and I've tracked down a few of them.

00:23:53.000 The problem is that they're not taken seriously, they're not well funded, and uh you know they they're they're they're subject to all the same normal rules as an average government employee.

00:24:03.000 Like their their problems are not finding weird things, it's stuff like getting approval to buy plane tickets to go somewhere and you know, getting approval to stay there for two nights versus versus one night.

00:24:13.000 Really?

00:24:13.000 Oh, it look it's just the it's the typical government bureaucracy where they have to make every penny count.

00:24:17.000 They only have so much money.

00:24:18.000 Anyway, one of my dreams is I'm gonna at some point when I'm retired, I'm gonna go get deputized by the government, go get my federal badge, and uh I'll be the I'll I'll be the government's uh uh privately funded X Files and I'll just fly around, I'll fly around my own plane, I'll have my own team, we'll bring our own sensors, our own computers.

00:24:35.000 Oh man, if only we could bring in this expert, but he's on the other side of the world to say bring him in, bring him in, send the send the send the plane.

00:24:45.000 Yes, yes, yes, sir, he'll be here in twelve hours.

00:24:47.000 You know, like I I feel like there's enough and not even just aliens.

00:24:51.000 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.

00:24:59.000 It seems like a very good idea.

00:25:01.000 Did you see the age of disclosure?

00:25:02.000 Did you see the documentary?

00:25:03.000 Age of disclosure.

00:25:04.000 No, I haven't seen that.

00:25:05.000 It's a new one.

00:25:06.000 And it it it it has a hypothesis, it has a theory of why there hasn't been disclosure, and a lot of it has to do with the legal implications.

00:25:16.000 Because too many people have been misappropriating funds if this is real.

00:25:21.000 Sure.

00:25:21.000 So if this is real like if there's recovered alien crash objects, if those have been parceled out to private company.

00:25:27.000 Exactly.

00:25:27.000 That's exactly the dilemma.

00:25:29.000 So say if, let's say, just to make up a name, Lockheed Martin gets it, sure.

00:25:33.000 And they have this back engineered craft that they're working on, but then Raytheon doesn't get it.

00:25:39.000 Raytheon should be able to sue the government.

00:25:41.000 Like, why'd you do that?

00:25:42.000 Is an unfair competitive advantage.

00:25:44.000 Also, the people that are in charge of the projects, there's all this money that they have to lie to Congress about.

00:25:52.000 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.

00:25:59.000 One of the things that they're proposing is amnesty.

00:26:01.000 Just give like blanket amnesty, tell us what the fuck you know, let's go.

00:26:06.000 But then they're not going to be able to do that.

00:26:06.000 And I still have a limited time amnesty, or you say and and the AMC only applies to what is disclosed in this amnesty.

00:26:13.000 It doesn't apply beyond that.

00:26:14.000 But also, if it's government, you know there's a lot of fraud and waste.

00:26:17.000 Sure.

00:26:18.000 So even if the if these guys are just monkeying around with billions of dollars, there's a little yacht here, a little vacation here, little Cayman Islands there.

00:26:26.000 You know, like so stuff is probably it's probably real ugly.

00:26:29.000 Right.

00:26:30.000 Which is and they've been doing this for if it's real, they've been doing this for decades.

00:26:33.000 Yep.

00:26:34.000 With no oversight.

00:26:35.000 Yep.

00:26:36.000 So they probably are they're a little wild.

00:26:38.000 I mean they're a little feral by now.

00:26:39.000 I mean, it's just across the board, our country's been spending so much money on what is supposed to be for national security, but in in re in reality, it's a lot of it has nothing to do with that.

00:26:50.000 And so that was why I got into that was why I got into the defense space.

00:26:54.000 Well, isn't that with everything though, right?

00:26:55.000 It's like that's how it is with charities as well.

00:26:57.000 It's it's with everything, but it's a question of of uh how you can apply apply targeted pressure as a private individual, right?

00:27:04.000 So yeah, like charities.

00:27:05.000 There's a lot of lot of graft going on.

00:27:07.000 But what can I really do to stop that at each of these charities, right?

00:27:10.000 Like no there's there's no one charity that kind of dominates, right?

00:27:13.000 It's it's it's a it's a thousand, it's a thousand grains of rice.

00:27:17.000 Um whereas the Department of Defense is one giant entity with a trillion dollar a year budget.

00:27:24.000 And so it's much easier.

00:27:25.000 Like if you wanted to s you call it like say if a hundred billion dollars a year for taxpayers, you kind of have to go after the big concentrated chunks.

00:27:33.000 Like you might be able to do that going after like health care problems, maybe education problems, definitely going after Department of Defense problems.

00:27:41.000 And I know a lot more about how to build good technology than I do about health care.

00:27:46.000 And so um, like if these if these were all private companies, they would never survive the way they're running.

00:27:52.000 Correct.

00:27:53.000 Well, I mean, yeah, these government agencies, they when they make mistakes, they don't go out of business.

00:27:58.000 And in fact, they can make bad mistakes over and over and over again and still remain in business.

00:28:04.000 Uh you it's I do think I I think we're turning a corner with some of this.

00:28:08.000 Did you see um the new Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll's uh AUSA talk yesterday?

00:28:14.000 No, I did not.

00:28:15.000 Oh man, it's it might be worth pulling it up.

00:28:17.000 He he pulls up this piece, um, this piece of hardware, and he's like, hey, like this little thing, like 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.

00:28:31.000 And so that's what we're gonna be doing now.

00:28:33.000 Like and he like he killed the joint light tactical vehicle program.

00:28:37.000 He killed this new kind of boondoggle of a robotic can robotic tank pro program where it was gonna be millions of dollars for these robot tanks that were gonna get blown up by $300 drones.

00:28:47.000 And so he I mean, he that 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.

00:29:00.000 It's very rare.

00:29:01.000 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.

00:29:12.000 Uh I I'm I'm I'm actually pretty optimistic about this across the services.

00:29:17.000 I think like pe peep people are fed up.

00:29:19.000 There's Do you think Doge sort of started that ball moving and then?

00:29:22.000 I think it did.

00:29:24.000 That direction is sort of momentum is headed on its side, right?

00:29:27.000 I I think the you know the doge thing was interesting because it wasn't even the technique so much.

00:29:32.000 Like the techniques where they kind of went into the data on like USAID and looked through all of this stuff and like like basically where the data science of it is what allowed them to find the graft.

00:29:42.000 That doesn't really apply to finding the problems in DOD because it's it's just so much more deeply buried.

00:29:48.000 But it kind of gave people permission to go look at these things.

00:29:51.000 Like it gave people permission to even say, I believe there is billions of dollars in waste in my department.

00:29:58.000 I'm gonna do something about it.

00:30:00.000 I don't think people felt like they had like psychic permission to do that five years ago.

00:30:04.000 Aaron Ross Powell Oh, wow.

00:30:05.000 That's interesting.

00:30:06.000 Well, I mean let's go to like kind of like So you just didn't want the boat for the Trevor Burrus.

00:30:09.000 Well, I mean let's go to like the height of and you know, not even making it political, just timeline-wise.

00:30:13.000 Go to the like the middle of the Biden administration.

00:30:15.000 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.

00:30:25.000 We are taking money from taxpayers and using it on absurd nonsense.

00:30:31.000 That would never happen five years ago.

00:30:33.000 And I think the Doge stuff gave people permission to come out and say that and and and and for them to be seen not as you know crazy, but as just being honest about the truth.

00:30:42.000 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're getting we are getting screwed this, that way, and the other, uh I I think that's a that's a really that's a really good development.

00:30:56.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:30:56.000 Well, it also seems like it's a really shitty way to compete with other countries that operate very efficiently, like they're they're private companies.

00:31:04.000 Correct.

00:31:05.000 Like other countries like China, the government fully embedded in private companies and the private companies are competing in the market.

00:31:11.000 Civil military fusion.

00:31:12.000 Right.

00:31:13.000 Well, it and there's it's e it goes even beyond that.

00:31:15.000 We're like you know, central planning has downsides, but it does have upsides.

00:31:18.000 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.

00:31:26.000 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 you know, we're gonna give you another shot and try this again.

00:31:37.000 They just they just they just they just imprison them for treason and or kill them.

00:31:42.000 I'm not saying that's what we should do exactly.

00:31:45.000 But I think that there's a scale to all of these things.

00:31:47.000 On the scale of, you know, give them another shot versus shoot them in the head for treason.

00:31:52.000 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.

00:31:58.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:31:59.000 Would that be the like if you ideally would it be that all this national security stuff was handled by a private company?

00:32:05.000 Would that be like ideal in terms of efficiency, in terms of technological innovation, implementing ideas?

00:32:13.000 I think that look, like private.

00:32:15.000 I'm not suggesting that.

00:32:16.000 I'm just saying like there's problems with running a government.

00:32:20.000 I mean, look, I've got a strong I've got a strong opinion here.

00:32:22.000 I think that what you want, it's not a private company.

00:32:25.000 It needs to be done by competing entities, right?

00:32:28.000 And so if it's private, and and at least one of them has to be private.

00:32:32.000 So like I don't even really mind the government doing something if they're not being favored.

00:32:36.000 In other words, if there's some government office that is competing with multiple private sector companies.

00:32:42.000 Exactly.

00:32:42.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:32:43.000 Although that's a little unfair in the I don't know how deep by the way, I'm very deep on this.

00:32:46.000 Like I don't understand why we give the USPS a monopoly on normal mail.

00:32:51.000 Uh are you familiar with this whole bit?

00:32:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:32:53.000 That's a little weird.

00:32:53.000 Yeah.

00:32:54.000 It's like we would never think.

00:32:57.000 I didn't know that.

00:32:58.000 Yeah, if you buy have baby chicks, they send them through the regular mail, but they won't send them UPS.

00:33:03.000 Aaron Powell That's so interesting.

00:33:04.000 Well, it's the same thing with uh firearms.

00:33:06.000 You can only send them USPS.

00:33:07.000 You can't send them.

00:33:08.000 So like I don't know why we've given a private company a monopoly.

00:33:11.000 Like if there was a private company that had the same monopoly that the USPS does, and they were using it to send you a hundred pounds of junk mail to every American every year, there's no way they would survive.

00:33:22.000 Like they they would be regulated out of existence.

00:33:24.000 But you know, it's a lot what you really want is competition.

00:33:27.000 You want organizations, private or public, that when they trip and fall, they skin their own knees instead of getting bailed out by taxpayers.

00:33:35.000 You want them to you live in fear, be highly competitive.

00:33:38.000 Um by the way, this is their audits, by the way.

00:33:41.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:33:41.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:42.000 And and and they have to survive an auditing process, they have to be accountable to uh you know whether it's a board or to you know some some committee.

00:33:49.000 And the problem is right now we don't have a lot of that.

00:33:51.000 I will say though, you asked, should you know, should should these national security programs be in the hands of private companies?

00:33:57.000 I think that's true for the development of the technology.

00:34:00.000 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.

00:34:10.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:34:10.000 Of course.

00:34:11.000 I get I get people all the time who come to me, usually people who are more skeptical of government.

00:34:17.000 Um yet they say, Palmer, aren't there countries you would commit to never building for?

00:34:23.000 You know, uh like would you just build for whoever gives you money?

00:34:26.000 And I say, well, I'll look I I my job is to do what the government tells me.

00:34:29.000 They're the you know, the they're the ones who decide who we're gonna work war or not. 0.91

00:34:32.000 They say, how could you do that?

00:34:34.000 How could you work with this country or that country?

00:34:36.000 How could you build this type of system or that type of system?

00:34:38.000 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?

00:34:47.000 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.

00:34:55.000 You can't elect my competitor.

00:34:57.000 And so I a lot of people who normally are skeptical of the government and government power and overreach, suddenly they they they look to the private sector for, you know, oh like the private sector is gonna regulate this.

00:35:07.000 To me, that's the most like cyberpunk dystopian thing either.

00:35:10.000 Imagine like me and a bunch of weapons executives sitting in a room and be like, so which countries are on the green list this year?

00:35:16.000 Hmm, I don't know.

00:35:17.000 I was thinking we could sell some missile defense to those guys, and I think we should sell some offensive weapons to those guys like, no, that that has to be that has to be the government unless you just don't believe in democracy at all.

00:35:27.000 Right?

00:35:27.000 Like if you if you believe that the system if they that we cannot elect officials that are accountable, then that's a different thing.

00:35:34.000 But I I'm not that black pilled.

00:35:35.000 I think I'm not that black-pilled either, but I'm getting there.

00:35:38.000 I'm not I'm I'm look, I sometimes I see it too.

00:35:41.000 I mean, I think that what it is is you inevitably when you have a pendulum, sometimes it will swing too far.

00:35:46.000 And I but I think the good news it can correct.

00:35:48.000 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.

00:35:57.000 I think never would have happened had people really known the truth behind a lot of those actions.

00:36:00.000 But in the end, we did have the ability to hold them accountable.

00:36:03.000 Now the real problem is that people didn't hold them accountable.

00:36:06.000 Like there's a lot of people today where uh they don't they're not really that worked up about some of these people in government who lied to us.

00:36:12.000 But I I would say that's a fault of the American people, not of the democratic process.

00:36:16.000 It just means people don't care about that issue as much, which I think they should care more.

00:36:20.000 But I think they're also not that informed, like universally.

00:36:24.000 Now is it is that because they don't want to be or because they can't be.

00:36:27.000 It's difficult.

00:36:28.000 Because most people don't have time.

00:36:30.000 I think that's that's a big part of it.

00:36:32.000 That does make it hard.

00:36:33.000 But I mean, I I I think that you know, not not 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.

00:36:33.000 That does make it hard.

00:36:46.000 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.

00:36:53.000 They can't just go out and burn everybody in the government or nobody will ever talk to them.

00:36:56.000 Right.

00:36:57.000 You've taken a lot of these stories and put them into a format where the guy who's busy, he's uh you know, he's in his truck, he's on his way to the work site, can actually become informed on these issues.

00:37:05.000 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 I there were no good technology journalists and I was good at technology, figured I was gonna uh be beat all these guys and be a better technology journalist.

00:37:18.000 That's interesting.

00:37:18.000 In the end, I ended up dropping out of school and starting Oculus instead.

00:37:22.000 But uh that worked out.

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00:38:34.000 Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash J R E. That's better H E L P dot com slash J R E. But yeah, I I I mean I think you would agree it is getting easier to become educated on these things. 1.00

00:38:51.000 Like what would you have done?

00:38:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:38:53.000 It is an America, but it's a little disconcerting.

00:38:55.000 Like when you see the way they're handling things in Europe.

00:38:58.000 Like it's getting really weird in the UK, 12,000 arrests this year for social media posts about immigration and now they want everybody to have a digital.

00:38:58.000 Oh, sure.

00:39:07.000 Yeah.

00:39:07.000 It's getting really weird.

00:39:09.000 And you know, the as the arrests for uh posting uh disturbing or offensive content.

00:39:16.000 Yes.

00:39:16.000 Or annoying.

00:39:17.000 Could I share a little story of Sure.

00:39:20.000 Um this has been so funny watching watching this in the in the UK because I the first thing I ever did that anyone cared about was called Mod Retro.

00:39:30.000 So it was this internet forum for people modifying game consoles, making making making portable versions of vint of old game consoles, upgrading modern game consoles.

00:39:39.000 Anyway, when we started the site, it was me and a few other people who were kind of running it.

00:39:43.000 I was the founder and there were a few other co-administrators.

00:39:46.000 And one of them was this British guy who went by the online handle of bacteria.

00:39:50.000 And I won't say his real name because it doesn't matter.

00:39:52.000 Um but he he was a British guy.

00:39:53.000 He worked in um he worked in uh very, very low-level British government.

00:39:58.000 So like not a higher up at all.

00:40:00.000 But he worked in a government, government agency, government office.

00:40:04.000 And um he was always I think of all the people on this forum, which was mostly like teenagers and college students.

00:40:10.000 He was kind of like the older guy.

00:40:11.000 And he says, Oh, we need to be kind about what we say.

00:40:14.000 You know, that we we shouldn't say anything that is bad.

00:40:16.000 And he was always pushing that our rules should say it's that it was against our rules to offend anybody.

00:40:21.000 And you shouldn't be able to say anything uh that was that was that was too offensive.

00:40:24.000 And uh you we mostly just made fun of him, aha, he's the old British man, you know.

00:40:28.000 Uh and but what's interesting is he ended up eventually leaving the site because he thought people were being too mean to each other.

00:40:33.000 And he started his own competing website, and the rule number one was uh no content that make that may make any member feel demeaned, uncomfortable, or insulted.

00:40:43.000 We're like, well, I mean, they and you know we're we're we're all making fun of that.

00:40:47.000 We were making our own little you know image macros and memes about it.

00:40:50.000 Like we actually made some fake ads for his website and put them on Facebook and it said, come join the uh you know the bacteria's website.

00:40:57.000 Nobody will say anything to you that might offend or displease you.

00:41:01.000 Um but what's it what's interesting is as all this UK stuff is has has come around, I've remembered these kind of like long-forgotten childhood memories.

00:41:08.000 Like I was like 13 or 14 at the time.

00:41:10.000 And I think it really is partly a cultural reflection for them.

00:41:14.000 Like there are a lot of people in the UK who genuinely think it's good to police this stuff.

00:41:19.000 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.

00:41:25.000 And of course, you have people who are protesting against that.

00:41:27.000 But I think that also their surveillance state, you know, where there's cameras everywhere.

00:41:31.000 It's actually a reflection of different cultural norms.

00:41:33.000 And so uh the 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 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.

00:41:45.000 They feel like it should be.

00:41:47.000 Maybe perhaps some of some of them do, but I think it's so overwhelmingly.

00:41:51.000 Oh, it's moving towards tyranny.

00:41:53.000 I think it's the majority.

00:41:54.000 That's the crazy you think the majority of people want it that way.

00:41:57.000 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.

00:42:07.000 Wow, really?

00:42:08.000 That that is that has been my experience.

00:42:09.000 Now there are people who disagree, of course.

00:42:11.000 And like I would say maybe it's a growing group.

00:42:13.000 Uh they're they're a highly visible group, they're protesting.

00:42:16.000 But I I if if I had to bet, they're most people don't care.

00:42:20.000 Most people in the UK just don't care about it one way or the other.

00:42:22.000 And I think the group of people who are on the side of the control is larger than the people who are on not on the side.

00:42:28.000 By the way, similar thing in China.

00:42:29.000 Um, people talk about Chinese censorship on things like you know, Tiananmen Square, and that's actually the majority Chinese opinion, too.

00:42:36.000 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?

00:42:41.000 The typical and I I know lots of people in China, they say that's an irrelevant issue from 30 or 40 years ago.

00:42:48.000 It doesn't matter.

00:42:49.000 Anyone who's trying to make every discussion about Tiana Men Square is just a troublemaker.

00:42:53.000 And I don't care if they're shut down.

00:42:55.000 I'm glad that they're not clogging the comments.

00:42:56.000 And I'm glad those people are being are being pushed out of of the conversation.

00:43:00.000 And like that's actually a pretty normal opinion.

00:43:02.000 Don't cause trouble needlessly.

00:43:04.000 Now, these same people might say, I have strong opinions about the COVID lockdown information lockdown in China.

00:43:09.000 Like they might say, I don't like that the Chinese government is locking down on you know, locking us in our apartments.

00:43:14.000 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.

00:43:22.000 They just say, ah, that Joe Rogan.

00:43:23.000 He's a troublemaker.

00:43:24.000 Why is he bringing up all these problems from the past?

00:43:26.000 It's irrelevant.

00:43:29.000 Why are we allowing this guy to take up our public spaces?

00:43:31.000 Like if you're public protesting in public space, they're not here.

00:43:34.000 You've probably seen protesters you didn't agree with.

00:43:36.000 And you say, you know, I'm glad they're I'm glad they're doing something they believe in it.

00:43:41.000 Maybe not those, but true grassroots.

00:43:43.000 You know, the guys who scribble their own.

00:43:45.000 Look, it's important.

00:43:48.000 People in China see that and they say, look at those look at those troublemakers ruining my beautiful public space. 1.00

00:43:52.000 So it's a very interesting cultural value difference.

00:43:54.000 Well, they also don't have any perception of the ability to change the government.

00:43:58.000 That's right.

00:43:59.000 There's no party in power.

00:43:59.000 That's right.

00:44:02.000 I think we can push them out.

00:44:04.000 I think nope.

00:44:04.000 Yep.

00:44:05.000 You ain't you ain't fixing shit. 0.88

00:44:06.000 So put your nose down, get to work.

00:44:08.000 I wonder if that really is the difference.

00:44:10.000 I mean, in Europe.

00:44:11.000 Well, in Europe they see they kind of resign themselves to the fact that they're not participating.

00:44:11.000 It has to be.

00:44:15.000 Yep.

00:44:16.000 You know, it's not a good idea.

00:44:17.000 It's a lot easier to be apolitical when it's a feudal exercise.

00:44:20.000 It's like, what are you gonna do?

00:44:21.000 Stop being a troublemaker.

00:44:22.000 Of course, you know, part of this it comes down to an attitude.

00:44:24.000 I mean, you you're probably familiar with the numbers in the American Revolution.

00:44:27.000 Only about three percent of America supported the revolution.

00:44:29.000 It was it was a it was a really niche movement of very dedicated, motivated people.

00:44:35.000 And so um the best way to probably stop that 3% from existing in China is to convince them that it's feudal and to kind of fuel that cynicism almost. 0.78

00:44:45.000 Well, that's you see this in Russia too.

00:44:47.000 I mean, military dictatorships.

00:44:48.000 So same deal.

00:44:50.000 One of the conclusions I've come to, you know, I I I work in the weapons industry, and I've seen a lot of cool stuff.

00:44:56.000 I've seen stuff that the US is making, that I'm making.

00:44:59.000 I'm familiar with a lot of the weapon systems that uh Russia and China have in fielding or in progress.

00:45:06.000 Some of the stuff that China and Russia are doing I mean, it's as sci-fi as what the United States is doing.

00:45:11.000 But I've come to the conclusion that their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone.

00:45:16.000 It's their ability to control people's minds through the media, through propaganda, through kind of state pressure.

00:45:23.000 They convinced them to believe things about the world that weren't true that aren't true.

00:45:28.000 And then they're they're basically making people willing to fight for causes that don't really exist.

00:45:32.000 Like good example, this is Ukraine.

00:45:34.000 A lot of the Russians who went to fight in Ukraine in the early days, I think the truth is out now.

00:45:39.000 But when they were first invading, they were told that the people of Ukraine want to be liberated, you're gonna be a hero, you're gonna go over there, like they desperately want Russia to save them and reunify them.

00:45:49.000 And it's it's just this, you know, Kyiv-led, you know, cabal funded by the West with it as a that's barely holding on to the country and and keeping and staying in power.

00:45:59.000 Um and people in Russia really believed that.

00:46:02.000 Like the guys who are fighting on the front lines, the guys who are flying tanks and helicopters, they believed it.

00:46:07.000 When when I went to when I went to Ukraine during the war, uh one of the things that I got to see was uh there was this helicopter wreck.

00:46:14.000 It was an attack helicopter that was trying to seize an airfield of a of a private aerospace company, and the guys actually shot it down themselves.

00:46:21.000 Like I they showed me videos of them wearing polo shirts, shooting down the helicopter in their parking lot.

00:46:26.000 I mean, it's like crazy shit.

00:46:29.000 So the the the pilots the pilots kind of go bag, you know, this bag with all of his emergency and survival gear in it.

00:46:36.000 It had three or four days of water, three or four days of food, another flight uniform, his dress uniform with dress shoes, because he they were told they were gonna be they said this is gonna be a five-day military operation, there's gonna be parades, everyone's so dress uniform and then 50 condoms.

00:46:53.000 This guy thought that he was gonna be s he thought the women were gonna be all over him. 0.72

00:46:57.000 They were gonna he was gonna need 50 condoms for the post-war celebration.

00:47:01.000 Wow.

00:47:02.000 And to me, that speaks to how brainwashed this guy was.

00:47:05.000 And remember, helicopter pilots aren't like the dumb grunt dragging.

00:47:08.000 I mean, he's probably one of the more highly educated people.

00:47:10.000 Right.

00:47:11.000 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 getting his dress uniform and 50 condoms.

00:47:20.000 And there were similar.

00:47:20.000 Wow.

00:47:22.000 Fifty is a lot now.

00:47:23.000 That guy's fucking up a storm.

00:47:24.000 That's crazy.

00:47:25.000 I I will give him a little crazy.

00:47:26.000 If 50 condoms doesn't take up that much space in your bag.

00:47:29.000 But but it's but it's a lot.

00:47:31.000 Yeah.

00:47:31.000 It's a lot.

00:47:32.000 And the this wasn't like the realistic.

00:47:34.000 Well, this wasn't the only guy.

00:47:35.000 Like this was actually pretty common.

00:47:37.000 Everybody had 50 condoms?

00:47:38.000 I don't know if everybody had 50, but they brought condoms.

00:47:40.000 Well, uh a lot of guys had condoms and a lot of people brought their dress uniforms.

00:47:45.000 They thought that there was a they were gonna roll into Kyiv, take over, the people wanted them to be in power, and that they were gonna be marching around town and people say, look, it's our liberators, our saviors.

00:47:54.000 Oh my god.

00:47:54.000 Now, of course, that's totally divorced from reality.

00:47:57.000 Like whatever you however you feel about the politics of Ukraine and Russia and the America, because they're all tightly intermingled.

00:48:03.000 Right.

00:48:04.000 That's clearly not reality.

00:48:05.000 And so what I worry about is like the easy one is if China invades Taiwan, they're gonna come up with a similar story.

00:48:12.000 They're gonna trick their people into thinking, oh, Taiwan wants to be reunified, you're fighting for the better cause.

00:48:17.000 But then your really spooky thing is what happens when our media pulls the same stunt?

00:48:22.000 I would argue that what we did in the Middle East was driven by really not that different, right?

00:48:27.000 I mean, a lot of the justification for going over there and doing this nation building.

00:48:31.000 I mean, we were told all these stories.

00:48:33.000 Oh, they want the they don't want they they want to get out from under the Taliban.

00:48:37.000 They don't want to have these you know tribal rule. 1.00

00:48:40.000 They do want democracy.

00:48:41.000 And in reality, we were kind of sold a bill of goods, just wasn't true.

00:48:44.000 So it's easy to make fun of the Russian with his fifty condoms, but we're not really that much better. 0.95

00:48:50.000 Well, we also had a very distorted sense of what war is in the 20th century and the 21st century because of Desert Storm.

00:48:57.000 Yes.

00:48:57.000 So Desert Storm, we were like, we're the fuck shit.

00:49:00.000 We're just gonna roll in and kick everybody's ass.

00:49:02.000 And it happened so quickly with so minimal casualties.

00:49:05.000 And my grandpa, he wasn't military, but he was he was a United Airlines pilot for 45 years.

00:49:10.000 And he was part of the civilian support element for Desert Storm.

00:49:13.000 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.

00:49:21.000 I mean, they were they were flying like you know, crazy 24-hour shifts getting people in and out.

00:49:27.000 Um but I mean, like, I remember my grandpa.

00:49:29.000 He you know, He came out of that saying, man, nobody can stop us.

00:49:34.000 I mean, we are just we are unstoppable.

00:49:36.000 If we want to go in and do something, we just go get it done.

00:49:39.000 And I mean he he was convinced.

00:49:41.000 Uh you know, I but you're right.

00:49:42.000 I think everybody was convinced by it.

00:49:44.000 That's what everybody thought in the 1990s.

00:49:45.000 They thought that the United States government and the military was so much more powerful.

00:49:49.000 And it probably was.

00:49:50.000 It was.

00:49:51.000 For a while.

00:49:51.000 Relatively speaking.

00:49:52.000 Relatively speaking.

00:49:53.000 For a while.

00:49:54.000 Technology seems to be shifting all that stuff in a very weird place.

00:49:59.000 Yep.

00:50:00.000 And this is where I get concerned with China because they have complete compliance.

00:50:06.000 Yep.

00:50:06.000 Like their government and their private corporations, they're the same.

00:50:10.000 They work together.

00:50:11.000 And the stuff that they're producing in terms of like if you pay attention to their electric cars.

00:50:15.000 Oh yeah.

00:50:16.000 They have a 300 mile an hour car now.

00:50:18.000 Trevor Burrus They're and and and their cars are extremely cheap and they are extremely good.

00:50:24.000 Extremely good.

00:50:25.000 Really nice cars.

00:50:26.000 Crazy technology in terms of like the ability to absorb bumps.

00:50:30.000 You've seen how smooth they are.

00:50:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:50:31.000 They put champagne glasses on them.

00:50:33.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:50:33.000 So one of the I will p that one I will push back a little bit.

00:50:37.000 I've seen the demo you're talking about.

00:50:39.000 There are German and U.S. cars that do that type of thing, but they're not the cars that people want here.

00:50:44.000 So this is this is a whole other interesting cultural battle.

00:50:46.000 What are the cars?

00:50:47.000 So think so it's it's it's this is this is one of my this is such an interesting rabbit hole.

00:50:52.000 So in China, people with money don't drive cars.

00:50:57.000 They're driven.

00:50:58.000 That like that that that is the culture.

00:51:00.000 You don't drive, you are driven.

00:51:02.000 If you have if you have really any money.

00:51:03.000 Of course, there's a few rich guys buying sports cars, but in general, the wealthy in China don't buy cars to drive themselves.

00:51:09.000 That's interesting.

00:51:10.000 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.

00:51:22.000 Not like three in a row, but like just two giant chairs, and they kind of cram the they cram the driver way forward to create this gigantic pac I think it doesn't even have a trunk.

00:51:31.000 They pulled the trunk out of it even, or maybe maybe it's just way smaller.

00:51:31.000 That's right.

00:51:35.000 And in China, that's what people want.

00:51:36.000 So like their best selling Mercedes Benz, even American brands like Buick, we have these cars that are made to be driven in.

00:51:43.000 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 know, riding in the back, and it creates terrible mushy road feel for the driver.

00:51:56.000 Like i in America, rich people they want to drive.

00:52:00.000 And you want to feel the road.

00:52:01.000 You know, you want that sports car.

00:52:03.000 And even our SUVs, people generally want that sports car like feel.

00:52:08.000 And so I I guess I will push back only on the champagne glass thing, because I've seen people saying this a lot.

00:52:13.000 Believe me, there are a handful like that you can buy an American Buick or like or or uh like or or uh or even a Mercedes that is that good, but they're just not very popular here.

00:52:24.000 In China, they're much cars like that are much more problems.

00:52:27.000 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.

00:52:35.000 That's interesting.

00:52:35.000 So when it gets to a certain price point, then it becomes all about the passenger.

00:52:39.000 Well, and and and it's almost it's it's not even when it gets to a certain price point.

00:52:39.000 Exactly.

00:52:43.000 Long before you're buying a hundred thousand dollar car, you're being driven around.

00:52:47.000 Like even if you're even if even if you if you're halfway there, you're being driven around.

00:52:50.000 People ri again, rich people there, they don't drive, they are driven.

00:52:54.000 It's uh it's a it is a cultural thing.

00:52:55.000 It's it's a sign that you've made it as well.

00:52:57.000 Oh.

00:52:58.000 And and also remember that their wages are so much lower that it's much more accessible.

00:53:02.000 It's kind of like how you have these countries where like almost anybody who's middle class uh in like the in like Southeast Asia has a live-in uh uh nanny and a live in housekeeper.

00:53:14.000 It's it's it's a little bit like that, where like if you get to a certain point uh and that happens pretty fast, you have a driver.

00:53:21.000 If you don't have a driver, people are like, what the hell is going on?

00:53:23.000 Like you're you're an eccentric if you are a rich guy who drives himself around.

00:53:27.000 That's weird.

00:53:28.000 It is weird.

00:53:29.000 But they do have sports cars over there.

00:53:30.000 Like the electric sports car that goes 300 miles an hour.

00:53:33.000 They do.

00:53:33.000 And well, I and I would say largely those are export focused.

00:53:37.000 China knows they like the broader markets want this.

00:53:40.000 They sell them in America at all.

00:53:42.000 They don't, but that's largely due to American policy being very protectionist against Chinese cars.

00:53:46.000 The reason that Chinese manufactured cars have not taken over the U.S. is not because Americans don't want them.

00:53:52.000 I and uh by the way.

00:53:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:53:54.000 That seems kind of crazy because Japanese cars are ubiquitous.

00:53:57.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Japanese cars are ubiquitous from Japanese brands, but many or most of them are actually exactly like like uh the most American car you can buy, I think right now, it's either a Nissan or a Toyota outside of Tesla.

00:54:09.000 Like Teslas are made in the US.

00:54:10.000 But I think 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.

00:54:17.000 Wow.

00:54:18.000 And it's because we have a lot of our parts, even for our US-made cars, made in Mexico, made in Canada, or made in Japan.

00:54:23.000 That's such a dirty trick for someone who wants to drive a Chevy because they feel like it's an American brand.

00:54:28.000 I'm buying American.

00:54:30.000 Helping American jobs.

00:54:30.000 I agree.

00:54:31.000 But here, but here's the pro- Well, this is actually, and this is the point I was trying to get to is here's the problem.

00:54:35.000 Let's say you said we're going to make an Americ all-American version of the Chevy, and it's 10% more.

00:54:40.000 People wouldn't buy it.

00:54:41.000 Like that's what when I say that, like people I think, unfortunately, would buy these Chinese cars if they were for sale in the United States.

00:54:49.000 People can say they want to support the US, but at the end of the day, they they they want to provide the best quality of life for their family.

00:54:55.000 They have a fiduciary duty to do so.

00:54:57.000 Yeah.

00:54:57.000 And so if they need to buy, like if it's 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 of the and their phone.

00:55:12.000 I I how can I blame them for choosing the Chinese one? 1.00

00:55:14.000 Right.

00:55:16.000 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.

00:55:25.000 Like, you know why these cars in China are cheap?

00:55:27.000 It's not magic.

00:55:28.000 It's because the cost of resource extraction is lower.

00:55:31.000 The cost of making steel and aluminum is lower.

00:55:33.000 The cost of uh 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 shipbox for 17 or 18 grand.

00:55:43.000 And I mean, like, it's bad.

00:55:44.000 Like, have you ever driven a $17,000 car?

00:55:46.000 What do they have at 17,000?

00:55:48.000 What can you buy?

00:55:49.000 I think you can buy a new Chevy Volt or something.

00:55:51.000 So not not uh so there's the I think you can buy a Chevy Spark, which is actually not an electric car.

00:55:56.000 The bolt, the bolt was an up was an electric platform.

00:55:58.000 So I think you could buy a Chevy Spark.

00:56:00.000 I think you buy Nissan Versa.

00:56:02.000 Those are the two cheapest cars in America right now, I think.

00:56:05.000 Um both of them, I believe you can get them out the door for less than 20,000.

00:56:10.000 And uh look, they're I I'm I'm I'm sorry, Chevy, I'm sorry, Nissan.

00:56:15.000 I like those brands, but these cars are not the stewards of the brand.

00:56:19.000 They're the they're the college student shipboxes. 0.86

00:56:21.000 Just transportation.

00:56:22.000 And then you can buy a car like that in China for three or four thousand dollars.

00:56:25.000 Wow.

00:56:26.000 Three or four grand will get you a car that here is almost twenty grand.

00:56:28.000 And again, it's it's it's not magic.

00:56:30.000 They're not genius.

00:56:32.000 And people also like they they kind of have this uh there's this current attempt to kind of mythologize, like, oh well, they're geniuses.

00:56:37.000 Like they're just so good at it.

00:56:39.000 If we would just do the basics right, we can be competitive.

00:56:42.000 But we but we aren't doing the basics right.

00:56:44.000 We've made energy so competitive and materials fabrication so expensive.

00:56:49.000 I mean, how could we compete?

00:56:50.000 I was watching an interview where I believe it was someone from Ford, one of the engineers from Ford made a visit to China.

00:56:56.000 And it was the CEO of Ford, even better.

00:56:58.000 And he went with he went with his whole engineering team.

00:56:58.000 Yes.

00:57:00.000 Yeah, and was humbled.

00:57:02.000 Just like, oh no.

00:57:02.000 That's right.

00:57:03.000 Well, I think he said when he came back, he said, I wanted to take the SUV I was driving back home with me.

00:57:10.000 I mean, that's like like he said, it's that it's that good.

00:57:12.000 I didn't want to stop driving it.

00:57:14.000 That seems kind of fucked.

00:57:14.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:57:16.000 I mean, that's very anti-competitive of us.

00:57:19.000 You mean that they were locking the Chinese out?

00:57:20.000 It's kind of a bitch ass move. 1.00

00:57:23.000 I look I I so like I lean libertarian and in general I'm a fan of free markets.

00:57:27.000 But the the the the there is something that makes us tricky though.

00:57:31.000 Uh you tank the economy.

00:57:33.000 Well, there's tanking the economy, and there's also it isn't actually free.

00:57:36.000 So we do need to do a better job on the basics.

00:57:40.000 But China is also subsidizing these, right?

00:57:42.000 So they're they're they're actually putting money from other industries to prop up these other industries.

00:57:47.000 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. 0.91

00:57:58.000 Wow.

00:57:59.000 Partly for economic reasons.

00:58:00.000 But there's another reason that I don't know if you've thought of.

00:58:03.000 How did the United States win World War II?

00:58:05.000 Just big, I know that's a big picture question.

00:58:07.000 A lot of it was manufacturing.

00:58:08.000 Exactly.

00:58:09.000 And that manufacturing, some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories.

00:58:14.000 So we took all of our uh farm implement factories, you know, like John Deere and Caterpillar, they were building tanks and guns.

00:58:22.000 We took all our automotive factories.

00:58:23.000 We had them building aircraft, we had them building weapons, we had them building missiles.

00:58:28.000 In fact, we even designed those weapons So they could be manufactured by those plants.

00:58:32.000 But like to the 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.

00:58:45.000 And so we we won because we had all this automotive and other industrial capacity.

00:58:50.000 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. 0.96

00:58:58.000 If imagine in America with not like we've lost a lot of manufacturing, you're probably familiar with that.

00:59:04.000 I mean, like we we don't make nearly as much as we used to.

00:59:06.000 But we still make a few things.

00:59:08.000 We still have some things that we do.

00:59:10.000 And cars is one of them.

00:59:11.000 And we even export those cars.

00:59:12.000 Like we're we're doing okay on cars.

00:59:14.000 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. 0.85

00:59:26.000 And so that that that's that's China's aim there.

00:59:28.000 And it gets back to what you talked about earlier.

00:59:30.000 It's the civil military fusion.

00:59:32.000 So this is a it's 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 our automotive industry.

00:59:41.000 Aaron Ross Powell That's interesting.

00:59:42.000 I never did think of that.

00:59:44.000 Well, and like 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.

00:59:57.000 So like we make this uh line of cruise missiles, the barrac uh the Barracuda, we make three different Barracuda missiles.

01:00:03.000 It has 90% fewer parts than legacy cruise missiles.

01:00:07.000 It can be made with 10 tools that all exist in every automotive plant.

01:00:12.000 So you could make this missile at mass scale in any GM facility, in any Ford facility.

01:00:18.000 And that's really important for us because if you if you can only make your missiles in this specialized factory that took you 10 years to set up, well, what do you what in the world do you do when you need a hundred times more of those missiles made every day?

01:00:29.000 You're just kind of screwed.

01:00:31.000 And so the United States has been doing better at this.

01:00:34.000 I think like the Air Force is doing better, the Navy's doing better, the Army's doing better.

01:00:38.000 Like 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 that they want to make sure that any new system that they are building can be built by the American industrial economy, not you know, not only these specialized, you know, specialized aerospace technicians, of which there are just not that many.

01:01:06.000 That's very smart.

01:01:07.000 How And China does this, by the way.

01:01:09.000 Like this is China China have you seen the automated cruise missile factories that China has?

01:01:14.000 I haven't.

01:01:15.000 Oh man, you you've got to look this up at some point.

01:01:17.000 There's some videos that they put out there, and they have this totally robotic line just churning out the city.

01:01:22.000 You've seen their shipping ports, it's bananas.

01:01:24.000 Oh, it is well, I mean, so China has 300 times more naval shipbuilding capacity than the United States.

01:01:30.000 The time that it takes us to build one aircraft carrier, they could build 300.

01:01:35.000 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.

01:01:41.000 So amphibious landing craft primarily.

01:01:44.000 Um 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.

01:01:53.000 One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards.

01:01:58.000 Two, they plan on basically uh you know, they're gonna press all of these civilian vessels into service.

01:02:08.000 So they're saying, hey, you have this roll-on roll-off uh car ferry that's used for moving cars around for delivering cars to the United States.

01:02:15.000 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 to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland.

01:02:24.000 And they're just requiring people to do that.

01:02:26.000 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.

01:02:38.000 And so they're they've they've done a great job integrating in a way the United States is not.

01:02:42.000 Do you think that an invasion of Taiwan's imminent?

01:02:45.000 It's not imminent, but it's coming.

01:02:48.000 So Andrew has an internal policy called China 27.

01:02:52.000 The idea is that anything we're working on, anything that we're investing in, needs to be built with the assumption That sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan.

01:03:04.000 And I might be wrong on this, right?

01:03:05.000 It might be never.

01:03:06.000 It might be a longer term thing.

01:03:08.000 But in general, like 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.

01:03:23.000 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?

01:03:30.000 I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons.

01:03:37.000 Uh so like Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he's reunified China.

01:03:44.000 He's got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age.

01:03:49.000 He's got a lot of economic problems where they're propping up their their economy with a lot of kind of fake GDP, fake growth, fake demand, fake construction.

01:03:58.000 And he's doing that, I think, to help build up his war machine, but it's not sustainable in the long run.

01:04:03.000 So I think there's a window where they can do this.

01:04:06.000 If you had to ask me, it's more likely that they don't do a full-scale invasion to start.

01:04:11.000 It's much more likely that they do something like a blockade.

01:04:13.000 So they'll come up with some pretense.

01:04:15.000 They'll say, uh, oh Taiwan is exporting goods that say made in Taiwan.

01:04:22.000 And our position is that Taiwan is part of China, and therefore they need to pay Chinese taxes on those made in China goods.

01:04:29.000 So we're going to blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this.

01:04:33.000 And I worry, I worry about them kind of boiling the frog.

01:04:37.000 You know, they 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.

01:04:51.000 And certainly, like I don't, I think you and I would agree here.

01:04:54.000 The US probably should not start uh uh uh you know start World War Three over a blockade of a port, right?

01:05:01.000 Right.

01:05:01.000 That that that's a lot of boiling the frog is a great analogy.

01:05:05.000 Boiling the frog, I think is what China will do. 0.97

01:05:07.000 And so what we need to do, and and this is just my opinion, which is definitely biased.

01:05:11.000 So to be clear, just so people know, nobody's gonna dig it up and say, but Palmer, Palmer's obviously only saying this because he's got money in the game.

01:05:18.000 Uh I I will first say I have plenty of money.

01:05:20.000 I sold my first company for billions of dollars.

01:05:22.000 I don't need to work, I I could retire, I'm not doing any of this for the money.

01:05:26.000 Defense, you you make a lot less money for each hour of work you put in than you can make in in tech or media or elsewhere.

01:05:33.000 Um but I do a lot of work with Taiwan.

01:05:36.000 So we actually j 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.

01:05:45.000 My opinion is that the United States, we don't want to get into a shooting war ourselves, right?

01:05:50.000 Like we want to avoid that.

01:05:51.000 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. 0.84

01:06:00.000 We need to say, hey, look, like and and be what what do you need to do to be a good gun store, right?

01:06:06.000 You gotta keep stuff in stock, you gotta keep things on the shelves, you need to be reasonably priced.

01:06:11.000 You need to not arbitrarily cut off allies and like could you imagine if you went to a gun store and and and they told you, Joe, we're gonna sell you this gun, uh, but you can't use it over in in that county.

01:06:22.000 You can only use it in this one.

01:06:23.000 And we're gonna tell you exactly how you can use it.

01:06:25.000 We're gonna be micromanaging you, and we're gonna be taking responsibility for how you use your gun.

01:06:30.000 I mean, that that would that would never work.

01:06:32.000 You would never want to work with them.

01:06:33.000 You'd say, I'm gonna go to a different store, I'm gonna go buy something.

01:06:35.000 And that's what some nations are doing.

01:06:37.000 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.

01:06:46.000 They're never in stock.

01:06:47.000 We never deliver them to you.

01:06:48.000 And also we're going to tell you what to do with them if we ever do give you to them.

01:06:52.000 Like, did you know that Taiwan is 20 billion dollars behind on arms deliveries from the United States?

01:06:58.000 They have 20 billion dollars in orders that have not been delivered.

01:07:02.000 And they're just, and they de these are not like these are not things they would maybe like to have.

01:07:07.000 They need these yesterday.

01:07:09.000 China could move in tomorrow.

01:07:11.000 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 prick prickly porcupine, right? 0.99

01:07:18.000 You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to effect without destroying the entire fleet.

01:07:25.000 You want things like missiles and counter missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country.

01:07:29.000 Um, but we're 20 billion dollars behind.

01:07:32.000 And yeah, I mean, you've seen what's happened with uh with Ukraine, where I mean, like we there's an argument as to you know how we should arm them.

01:07:41.000 Separate from that argument.

01:07:42.000 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?

01:07:50.000 Like we we can't just give them all of our Patriot missiles.

01:07:53.000 We c we can't give them we can't give them even purely defensive tools to protect their capital because we don't make enough of them, we don't have enough of them, they're too expensive.

01:08:02.000 That that's that's crazy to me.

01:08:03.000 That is crazy.

01:08:04.000 It is crazy.

01:08:05.000 So I think the best way for the United States to contribute to world stability.

01:08:08.000 Again, stop being the world police, start being the world gun store and get serious about it. 0.69

01:08:13.000 Instead of instead of saying, well, it's okay that we kind of are a crappy gun store because we're gonna come and save your ass when shit hits the fan.

01:08:20.000 We need to say, no, no, no, we're we're gonna give everything you need to fight for your own freedom.

01:08:24.000 Look, you're our friend, you're our ally.

01:08:26.000 We'll give you everything you need, we'll give you support, we'll give you intelligence, but we're not gonna fight your wars for you.

01:08:31.000 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.

01:08:41.000 I it's just we we we don't have it in us.

01:08:44.000 Well, we're too informed now, too.

01:08:47.000 Here's that too.

01:08:47.000 Yeah, the internet fucked all that game up.

01:08:49.000 Oh, and I mean, arguably Vietnam, right?

01:08:51.000 I mean, this it's I mean Vietnam, I think was the war that changed everything there because you had I mean you had war on TV.

01:08:57.000 You could see what was really happening.

01:08:59.000 And we now know with the benefit of hindsight that it was all a false flag that got us into it in the first place.

01:09:04.000 So it was I don't trust you anymore.

01:09:06.000 You know, so you don't you remember what George Bush said?

01:09:09.000 Uh he said, fool me once, shame on you.

01:09:13.000 Fool me twice, can't get fooled again.

01:09:16.000 I remember that.

01:09:17.000 Yeah, that was a good that's what that's that's one of my favorite George Bush Bush isms.

01:09:20.000 I I hear the th I the theory I've heard is that uh he realized he was about to say, shame on me on camera, and then the press would have obviously said George Bush admits he got fooled, quote, shame on me.

01:09:33.000 Uh button.

01:09:34.000 I think he just forgot it.

01:09:36.000 Maybe there's that one.

01:09:37.000 I I think I think Bush was a pretty I think he was a sharper guy.

01:09:37.000 I don't know.

01:09:40.000 I think he was maybe not well spoken, right?

01:09:42.000 But I think he's actually pretty sharp.

01:09:43.000 I think he just stumbled on his words.

01:09:44.000 Well what's stunning is you ever see his speeches when he was running for governor of Texas.

01:09:49.000 I have not actually gone back and looked at this.

01:09:51.000 Really.

01:09:51.000 Smooth as butter.

01:09:52.000 Smooth as butter, super articulate, you know, different guy.

01:09:56.000 It's weird.

01:09:56.000 I think it gets to a certain point with the pressure and the chaos and being the president and all the the madness of the cameras in your face.

01:10:04.000 The the magnitude of it all wears on people.

01:10:07.000 Which is why they get so old.

01:10:09.000 Well, I mean, there's the I mean, yeah, well, and even you know the pictures of Obama, you've seen them.

01:10:12.000 You know, he looks like a college student on his first inauguration.

01:10:16.000 Eight years later, he looks like he's fifty years older.

01:10:18.000 Yeah.

01:10:19.000 It's just the pressure.

01:10:19.000 It's nuts.

01:10:20.000 The only one who's ever handled it is Trump.

01:10:23.000 Trump looks younger.

01:10:24.000 It it really is it really is astounding how that's worked out.

01:10:28.000 He's a freak.

01:10:29.000 He's a genuine freak.

01:10:30.000 Like there's no one like that guy.

01:10:31.000 Which is the only reason why he survived all the shit they tried to put him through.

01:10:35.000 It's the same reason why he can go through being president and it doesn't freak him out.

01:10:39.000 Oh, yeah, like I think he's it you you it's like the the Bruce Banner Hulk thing, you know, that's my secret.

01:10:43.000 I'm always angry.

01:10:44.000 Right, right, right.

01:10:45.000 I think what it's it's it's it's that's how it was for Trump.

01:10:47.000 Trump was already living at the red line, non-stop, you know, getting like what, like four hours of sleep.

01:10:52.000 Yeah.

01:10:53.000 One of the funny things about the sleep thing is that uh I have it personally on good authority from a lot of people that it is true, and nobody really disputes it, except from time to time, people like people say the same thing about like Kim Jong-un.

01:11:08.000 They're like, oh, the glorious leader doesn't even need to sleep.

01:11:11.000 But with Trump's case, it seems to somehow actually be the case.

01:11:14.000 He has he he he got that old man no sleep power without getting all of the downside.

01:11:20.000 Well, some people just don't need like Jocko, you know, Jocko Williams.

01:11:23.000 Yeah.

01:11:24.000 He sleeps four hours a night.

01:11:25.000 Really?

01:11:25.000 It's the same same same thing.

01:11:26.000 He works out like an animal.

01:11:27.000 That's so interesting.

01:11:28.000 It's just genetic, I think.

01:11:30.000 I think there's I think actually Huberman is identified what what is the actual genetic component of it.

01:11:36.000 But there's a some particular type of people that don't need I'm not one of them, man.

01:11:40.000 I'm not either I need seven.

01:11:42.000 I like six.

01:11:43.000 Yeah.

01:11:44.000 If I I could tolerate six, eight is uh oh, I'm so good today.

01:11:48.000 But if I can if I get less than six, I'm a mess.

01:11:51.000 Yeah.

01:11:52.000 I'm I I need I need my sleep.

01:11:53.000 Significantly dumber.

01:11:54.000 Like I if you've ever listened to a podcast and I'm stumbling, guaranteed I'm working on four.

01:11:59.000 Oh yeah?

01:12:00.000 I'm working on less than I wanted to because I got to bed at around two and then I was up at six thirty.

01:12:00.000 Yeah.

01:12:05.000 But I can do that from there's a lot going on.

01:12:09.000 I'm not worried at all.

01:12:10.000 The good news is it's the first day, right?

01:12:13.000 The first day of misleep, you're okay, you're pulling on your reserves.

01:12:16.000 And then and the second and the third day, then you start to get destroyed, at least for me.

01:12:16.000 Right.

01:12:19.000 Uh-huh.

01:12:20.000 Me too.

01:12:21.000 But then when I get behind, my wife gives me a hard time because I'll I uh I'll do what I call a mega sleep. 1.00

01:12:26.000 And I will I will sleep.

01:12:27.000 If I get way behind, I'll sleep for 10, 11 hours straight.

01:12:31.000 And then that that that usually returns.

01:12:31.000 Perfect.

01:12:33.000 It's a renewable resource.

01:12:34.000 That's the beautiful thing about sleep.

01:12:35.000 I wonder what would happen if Trump slept for eleven hours.

01:12:38.000 Would it be like the most incredible version of Trump we've ever seen, or would it throw him off?

01:12:42.000 He's I mean, he's set in his ways.

01:12:45.000 You're not gonna change anything about that guy now, especially at 80 years old.

01:12:48.000 That's probably true.

01:12:49.000 I don't know if you know this, but uh I was actually one of the true Trump OGs.

01:12:55.000 I wrote a letter to Donald Trump when I was fifteen telling him that he should run for president.

01:13:00.000 This is when he was considering running against Obama.

01:13:02.000 Really?

01:13:03.000 Um just turned 33.

01:13:07.000 Wow.

01:13:08.000 Um this was a long time ago.

01:13:09.000 And actually, I not only luckily I sent a letter and I posted about it on Facebook, which I'm really happy about.

01:13:15.000 And I uh no way, no, this wasn't I know not it wasn't twenty fifteen.

01:13:18.000 No, this was when I was fifteen.

01:13:19.000 I'm sorry.

01:13:20.000 I meant to say when I was fifteen.

01:13:22.000 Right.

01:13:22.000 So I mean this is this is way back.

01:13:24.000 This is like back in like two thousand nine, two thousand ten.

01:13:28.000 So way before anyone else.

01:13:29.000 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.

01:13:36.000 I want to see a businessman who's signed both sides of a check before.

01:13:40.000 And you know, you look at the people who are running kind of the you know, the the modern parties, arguably the uniparty, and he's clearly not part of that.

01:13:48.000 Uh and uh it was so it was so it was it's so wild when people later they're like, Oh, Palmer you know, Palmer was an early Trump supporter, you know, he supported him in 2016 because he probably because he loved Trump's, you know, uh extremist rhetoric.

01:14:01.000 I'm like, oh no, you don't you you don't even know.

01:14:03.000 I loved his extremist rhetoric going back to two thousand nine.

01:14:06.000 Um wasn't it even that extremist then?

01:14:08.000 It wasn't then.

01:14:09.000 That's the key thing we played.

01:14:10.000 He's been so c you've I mean you've probably seen these interviews from the 80s where he says, we're getting riffed off on trade.

01:14:15.000 Yeah, it's ridiculous.

01:14:18.000 That's right.

01:14:18.000 Exactly.

01:14:19.000 He's saying the exact same words and today they say, Oh, it's it's it you remember when he was running and he was um he was saying we were gonna have over three percent GDP growth.

01:14:29.000 And Obama said there's no magic wand.

01:14:32.000 There's like you can't there's no magic wand you can wave that gets you to three point to three percent.

01:14:36.000 And then Trump said uh in in one of his speeches, he says, they told me not to say this, and they told me I can't.

01:14:42.000 He said it's gonna be three percent.

01:14:43.000 And they told me not to say this, but it's actually gonna be a more a lot more.

01:14:47.000 And of course it ended up being far in excess of three.

01:14:50.000 I think it was like four and a half percent GDP increase that year.

01:14:54.000 And it's what year was this?

01:14:55.000 I think this was was his first year in office, so twenty seventeen.

01:14:58.000 Or just start it was uh that was twenty seventeen, right?

01:15:01.000 Yeah, he was yeah, when he was it when he was inaugurated.

01:15:04.000 And uh the it's it's one of those things where like uh the th the the the easiest argument for Trump in those days was just look, you don't have to agree with the guy on everything.

01:15:13.000 But the real question is do you believe that either party outside of Trump is going to like do are they gonna do well?

01:15:20.000 Like you have you have the Democrats saying there's no magic wand to get growth.

01:15:24.000 And you have everyone else attacking Trump and saying, Oh, you know, we can we're just gonna do everything the same way the Republicans have always done it.

01:15:29.000 Uh I but the strongest argument for Trump is that anybody would have been better than what the establishment was pushing.

01:15:35.000 I think that's the best argument.

01:15:36.000 Yeah.

01:15:36.000 For me, one of the big ones was you know, and I I I mean I got in a lot of shit for this.

01:15:41.000 I gave nine thousand dollars to a pro-Trump group that ran a single anti-Clinton billboard.

01:15:47.000 It was a picture of her face that said too big to jail.

01:15:49.000 Um this was right after it had come out that she had been mishandling classified information, running an email server out of her own home.

01:15:56.000 You probably remember the famous phrase where you know they asked her, you know, d are you were you aware uh that your staff was directed to wipe that server?

01:16:04.000 And she said, like with a cloth?

01:16:06.000 Do you remember like with a cloth?

01:16:08.000 I mean, it was just it was it was it was so it was so absurd.

01:16:12.000 But for me, one of the red lines was when Hillary and and and you know it's not really Hillary.

01:16:18.000 It's it's kind of you know the the political machine and of which she is just the face, said that she would enforce a strict no fly zone in Syria. 0.77

01:16:29.000 And it's easy to say, oh yeah, I would enforce a no-fly zone.

01:16:32.000 And that sounds, oh yeah, yeah.

01:16:33.000 You know, keep keep keep keep these these bombers out of the air, keep these fighters out of the air.

01:16:37.000 But what does that really mean?

01:16:38.000 That means that you're saying you're gonna shoot down Russian aircraft if they cross into airspace that doesn't even belong in the United States.

01:16:45.000 Like I mean, that's practically an announcement that you're starting a world war to say I am gonna shoot that is what enforcement of no fly zone is.

01:16:52.000 And it was crazy to me.

01:16:53.000 Everyone says, Oh, you know, it's hilarious, you know, Trump is an isolationist, and Hillary's the only one who has a who understands what we need to do in Syria.

01:17:01.000 I'm like, are you kidding me?

01:17:02.000 Like, I 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. 0.87

01:17:16.000 Like I we we should not care about almost anything that much.

01:17:20.000 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.

01:17:28.000 So like you you shouldn't say that you shouldn't act on it, and you shouldn't not act on it.

01:17:34.000 It's it's it's it's a lose-lose-lose every step of the way.

01:17:38.000 And it's just politics is normal.

01:17:41.000 That's right.

01:17:42.000 And so I I mean, I would explain this to friends of mine and say, guys, well, I mean, you they say, Oh my god, Trump's a warmonger.

01:17:47.000 It's like, but Trump, you know, I because I I cared out this national security stuff pretty deeply then.

01:17:52.000 Uh this was right when I was starting Andrew eight years ago.

01:17:55.000 And so I was like dedicating my career to these national security problems.

01:17:58.000 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.

01:18:12.000 And like, how can you say Trump's a warmonger and then support someone who says we're gonna enforce a no-fly zone in Syria?

01:18:18.000 Uh and I think a lot of people it was just really emotional.

01:18:21.000 It was it was a you can't reason people out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

01:18:24.000 Well, one of the things that rocks people's world is you show them past videos of Hillary from 2008.

01:18:31.000 You remember that video where she was more MAGA than MAGA? 0.96

01:18:31.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:18:34.000 She's talking about the border for the border and like I think I think one of the phrases was we have to send them back. 0.94

01:18:41.000 Yes.

01:18:41.000 Could you imagine?

01:18:42.000 Can you imagine that take we have to send them back?

01:18:44.000 I mean, imagine them back.

01:18:46.000 I mean, this was her position.

01:18:47.000 And it's she sounds like a hard-lined Republican now.

01:18:51.000 I mean, let's another one to bring up is uh is also uh like gay marriage.

01:18:55.000 Oh yeah I mean, I'll tell you my personal view is that the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all.

01:19:00.000 It's actually a very recent invention.

01:19:01.000 I don't know if you've ever dug into this.

01:19:03.000 So state marriage licensure is a very recent development.

01:19:03.000 No.

01:19:07.000 There are people alive today who got married when you were not required to have a marriage license.

01:19:12.000 It was primarily a uh kind of a race-driven thing.

01:19:16.000 States didn't want black men to marry white women, and they got terrified of that in in the civil rights era. 0.99

01:19:23.000 And so they all passed these rules about marriage licensure, many of them prohibiting uh interracial marriage.

01:19:29.000 So basically, marriage licenses were a way to enforce against interracial marriage. 0.51

01:19:35.000 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.

01:19:42.000 And so they wanted to enforce their will on people.

01:19:44.000 So marriage licensure is very recent.

01:19:46.000 My personal opinion is the state has no legitimate authority, constitutional or otherwise, to regulate marriage at all.

01:19:53.000 Like gay marriage is not even a question. 0.93

01:19:55.000 It's like this is a religious, cultural, social ceremony witnessed before and before before your friends and your family.

01:20:02.000 It is not something the state should be they they shouldn't have the right to give you a marriage license, nor to deny you one. 0.98

01:20:08.000 Like why do I like are they getting down how what when did I give the state the ability to uh to say it's illegal for me to get married without their permission?

01:20:17.000 That's that's crazy to me.

01:20:18.000 Anyway, um So Hillary, you might remember, I mean, even in 2008, she was against gay marriage.

01:20:24.000 And she was out there, she says, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

01:20:28.000 So here's someone who I was on the state shouldn't be involved in it at all side.

01:20:33.000 Hillary's on the no, we should use state power to enforce what marriage is between a man and a woman. 1.00

01:20:38.000 And then you have Donald Trump who he's asked about, he said, Do you do you remember his quote on this?

01:20:42.000 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.

01:20:51.000 You've got steak, you've got burgers and different people like different things, and that's okay.

01:20:56.000 I mean, like it was actually the most progressive, yeah, the most progressive view you could ever have.

01:21:01.000 And then so Obama, by the way, same thing.

01:21:03.000 Obama was against gay marriage.

01:21:05.000 Hillary is against gay marriage.

01:21:06.000 And then you fast forward just three short years, and you have people like uh Brendan Ike, the CEO of Mozilla getting uh fired by his board of directors because he supported Prop 8, which said that div uh barriages between a man and a woman in California, which by the way, even then passed in California.

01:21:23.000 So the majority of Californians agreed with him.

01:21:26.000 But I mean, you're right.

01:21:27.000 Like Hillary was Hillary was the thing, the views she had when she was running for president.

01:21:32.000 You're you're right.

01:21:33.000 Today she would be a hardline.

01:21:34.000 Hard line.

01:21:35.000 Certainly, certainly on the cultural side alone.

01:21:38.000 She'd be on the right of Marjorie Taylor Green.

01:21:40.000 No, that's a great point.

01:21:41.000 Marjorie Taylor Green, you're right.

01:21:42.000 She's very pro LGBT.

01:21:45.000 Uh she she certainly is not for intervention in the Middle East.

01:21:49.000 Yoda, you're right.

01:21:49.000 Right.

01:21:50.000 Like, yeah, yeah, and I never thought about it that way.

01:21:52.000 That Marjorie Taylor Green would be far, far left of a Hillary Clinton running again today. 1.00

01:21:58.000 You know, I'm gonna I I I I I I want to tell a story that I've never told publicly.

01:22:03.000 Okay.

01:22:04.000 But I I just I I I and enough time has passed that I should just we're bringing up since we're talking about Hillary.

01:22:10.000 Um when I was in Silicon Valley, uh this is after Facebook bought Oculus.

01:22:17.000 And so I'm up there, and um I was actually pro-immigration uh more than even more than than I am now.

01:22:23.000 So I was I was thinking about supporting this group called forward.us, which was trying to lead to immigration reform in the United States.

01:22:30.000 And I I've since evolved on this issue.

01:22:32.000 I think that immigration can help depress U.S. wages in ways I didn't understand then. 0.99

01:22:36.000 I hadn't observed a lot of the H1B visa abuse that I have now observed, having spent years in the valley.

01:22:41.000 So you cut me a little slack if anyone thinks I shouldn't have worked with forward.us, but I ended up with this invitation to go to an event, a Hillary Clinton event in Silicon Valley.

01:22:51.000 It was very, very hush-hush.

01:22:52.000 No media, nobody was saying anything.

01:22:55.000 Um and this was before she had officially announced she was running.

01:22:57.000 So you're not you know you know, you know when a politician is going to run and everybody knows, but technically they haven't announced it.

01:23:03.000 So um Hillary was gonna come out and she was there with um her her or uh what who John Podesta was her CTO at the time, or was it chief of staff, something like that?

01:23:13.000 One of those.

01:23:14.000 Yeah.

01:23:14.000 So Joe, it was gonna be her and Podesta.

01:23:16.000 At the last second, Hillary ends up bailing. 0.99

01:23:19.000 But I end up going anyway, and I had a couple prepared questions for Hillary.

01:23:23.000 And so it was me and about 15 other billionaires in Silicon Valley who went to this kind of real uh really, really intimate gathering, and they wanted to sell us on why we should support Hillary in this upcoming run when she ran.

01:23:36.000 And um, first of all, I thought it was kind of shitty that she just didn't show up at the last second and like did like like didn't say to basically till we were already on the way.

01:23:44.000 Like, whatever.

01:23:45.000 She had some legitimate health issues, right? 0.79

01:23:47.000 And still does.

01:23:48.000 I she might have in general, but I don't think that was the problem at this point.

01:23:53.000 Um so there there were two issues that I brought up to t to Podesta.

01:23:57.000 And I said, hey, I wanted to ask these of of Hillary. 0.74

01:23:59.000 By the way, I don't I don't note that in this story, I hadn't decided who I was gonna support.

01:24:04.000 So a lot of people think I'm like this hard political guy.

01:24:06.000 I was a VR guy.

01:24:07.000 I was a computer kid.

01:24:08.000 Politics was something I cared about, but like I was reasonable.

01:24:11.000 I could I I I was not, I was not, I had not yet been um what do they call it?

01:24:16.000 Radicalized. 0.75

01:24:17.000 I had not yet been radicalized.

01:24:19.000 It was after they fired me for giving $9,000 to Trump that I got radicalized.

01:24:22.000 But pre-radicalized Palmer.

01:24:24.000 Okay.

01:24:25.000 So I go to this meeting and I had two questions for Hillary. 0.99

01:24:27.000 I said, uh one, uh, in the past, Hillary, you've supported a 55 mile per hour federal speed limit. 0.97

01:24:34.000 You were one of the original proponents.

01:24:37.000 You were one of the people who supported it in the Senate.

01:24:39.000 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 of this of the speed limit. 1.00

01:24:51.000 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.

01:25:00.000 But as you said on the view that uh when you were asked about the speed limit, you said you said that whenever and however we can make it happen, we should have a 55 mile per hour speed limit.

01:25:10.000 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?

01:25:18.000 And uh Podesta said, Oh, we don't want to really have a position on that issue.

01:25:21.000 I said, but like could you make up one right now?

01:25:23.000 Like like most Americans don't want a 55 mile per hour speed limit.

01:25:27.000 I think that was really dumb of Hillary to say she supported One last time.

01:25:31.000 I think it might be why she lost.

01:25:33.000 Can you would you agree that probably it's not a winning issue?

01:25:36.000 And he said, Oh, we can't, we can't take a position on that at this time.

01:25:39.000 Which was crazy to me.

01:25:40.000 Shouldn't that be just so easy to be like, Yeah.

01:25:41.000 Yeah.

01:25:42.000 Like, this is clearly like a thing that it's a it's a fight she lost, you know, half a century ago, and she's still worked up about it.

01:25:49.000 Just give up.

01:25:50.000 People don't want to drive 55.

01:25:51.000 Um you've you remember when Tommy Tommy Hager wrote a song about it.

01:25:54.000 Well, you know, you know, Tom Cruise had a can't drive 55 decal on his motorcycle and top gun.

01:25:59.000 And I mean, like, so like I mean it it is the cultural battle's been been won.

01:26:03.000 Then my second question was hey, uh, we're a bunch of techno bros up here in the valley.

01:26:08.000 We all believe in battery electric hybrid vehicles and and electric vehicles in general.

01:26:13.000 Uh but Hillary's been a huge supporter of uh oh no, it's the other way of-I'm sorry, this has been so long, I haven't thought about this.

01:26:20.000 No, I said Hillary actually was against corn subsidies at one point. 0.99

01:26:24.000 She called them at one point, so you know, like the ethanol blending mandates that were that were making corn at a loss, paid for with taxpayer dollars, and then mandating that it go into gasoline, which hurts car performance.

01:26:34.000 It's it's if it's it's got lots of fuel storage problems, and it's just a waste of money.

01:26:40.000 And there's less energy in it, too.

01:26:41.000 So you get actually worse mileage.

01:26:43.000 Um anyway.

01:26:45.000 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.

01:26:57.000 Is she does she still believe that?

01:26:59.000 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? 1.00

01:27:09.000 And I said, Oh, well, we we don't have a position on that at this time.

01:27:11.000 I said, I just gotta press you there.

01:27:14.000 You don't have a position, or you don't want to tell us the answer.

01:27:17.000 Because we none of us here think that the future is biofuels.

01:27:21.000 It's it's a it's a failed experiment.

01:27:23.000 It's a failed mandate.

01:27:24.000 Hillary used to agree. 1.00

01:27:25.000 Is she gonna flip on us?

01:27:26.000 He said, We I I'm honestly genuinely telling you we do not have a position on this time.

01:27:32.000 Not that bad, right?

01:27:33.000 That's not bad.

01:27:34.000 And so three days later, Hillary announces officially she's running, her first ads start running, and what do you think the first series of ads are?

01:27:44.000 It's Hillary in a cornfield talking about how she's going to boost corn subsidies and she's going to lead a clean energy revolution and she's gonna give them so much corn money.

01:27:53.000 And I like setting aside the fact that I think biofuel subsidies are dumb, she lost so much trust of people in that room because their ans her answer wasn't, here's why I support them and you know, deal with it.

01:28:06.000 And it wasn't I don't support it technologically, but I support it politically, which I think people could have respected.

01:28:12.000 It was, oh, we don't have a position.

01:28:14.000 They had already paid for the ads, they'd already made the ads.

01:28:14.000 But she did.

01:28:17.000 They were probably sitting on a tape in the TV studio ready to run as we're meeting with her chief of staff.

01:28:23.000 And I honestly I know I said that like the Syria thing was a red line. 0.97

01:28:27.000 That was actually the moment where I decided that I couldn't vote for Hillary. 0.99

01:28:30.000 It wasn't about any particular issue.

01:28:31.000 I was like, it's it's just how how can you vote for someone who's willing to just lie that way to manipulate and she was trying to manipulate me and a bunch of other rich guys, and there were a bunch of other guys in that room who'd said the same thing.

01:28:43.000 We all were in a group chat.

01:28:44.000 We're like, we're not gonna we're not gonna like like by the way, my questions weren't the only ones like this.

01:28:49.000 There were like another dozen questions.

01:28:51.000 Did Podesta answer any of them with like meaningful?

01:28:54.000 He did.

01:28:54.000 He th there were some that they answered meaningfully.

01:28:56.000 Like I'd say actually on the immigration side, there were some real ones. 0.99

01:28:58.000 There were questions about policy for dreamers in particular.

01:29:02.000 And I and like he had he had his talking points.

01:29:04.000 He didn't expect anyone to come out of, you know, to to come off the top rope with 55 mile per hour speed limits.

01:29:10.000 Um but but there were a few other things.

01:29:12.000 I'm trying to remember what were the other ones that I think he misled people on.

01:29:14.000 There was something in there around um there was something around there around content, like like for for social media platforms.

01:29:21.000 You know, Silicon Valley, people care about this stuff.

01:29:23.000 It was like, hey, like do you do do you agree that the government shouldn't be uh uh moderating content, that they shouldn't be censoring.

01:29:29.000 Because this was kind of the very early days of the government interfering with this stuff.

01:29:34.000 It was when did the government first start interfering with social media content?

01:29:38.000 Do you know what their initial issues were?

01:29:41.000 So I don't know the initial issues, but like let's look at this from first principles.

01:29:45.000 Ignoring the social media part, when did the government start intervening in media?

01:29:50.000 I mean From the beginning.

01:29:52.000 From the beginning.

01:29:53.000 Uh you know, one of the reasons people everyone loves Alexander Hamilton.

01:29:57.000 He's really popular founding father.

01:29:59.000 I have to admit, he's actually my least favorite founding father, partly because he supported central banking.

01:30:04.000 I'm just not really a gigantic fan of it and how it's turned out.

01:30:08.000 Uh but interesting and he by the way, he was also very anti-immigrant, which is so funny because go 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.

01:30:25.000 I mean, he literally said immigrants are a poison to our nation.

01:30:28.000 I mean, he was he was really against it.

01:30:31.000 And which is funny because he was himself an immigrant.

01:30:33.000 Um I mean, he was like, you know, blood and soil all the way. 0.99

01:30:36.000 I mean, he was he was really into it.

01:30:38.000 And their answer was, we wanted to represent Hamilton as we think he would have existed in uh the climate of today, not with the information he had at the time.

01:30:45.000 Anyway.

01:30:46.000 They made a fake person.

01:30:47.000 But one of the other things about Hamilton is that he did not support the First Amendment.

01:30:51.000 He actually thought that the government should be able to criminalize uh speech that lied about the government in a critical way.

01:31:00.000 Now, th to be clear, he didn't think you 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.

01:31:09.000 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.

01:31:17.000 He said, No, you can't, you 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 s a lie.

01:31:28.000 Because if it's a so-called lie, now they can stop it.

01:31:30.000 And so he said we can't give the government the power to do this.

01:31:33.000 So Alexander Hamilton was not a fan, and I think that that thread has been there through the history of our government.

01:31:38.000 There's always been people from literally before the founding who believed that the state should have a role in influencing the media.

01:31:44.000 And like, I mean, you're familiar with all of like uh you know the the stuff that came out post-JFK about the media influence operations.

01:31:50.000 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 in social media, I think it was probably continuous the whole time.

01:32:04.000 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.

01:32:15.000 I can't prove it.

01:32:16.000 That's just my I think before social media though, like 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.

01:32:28.000 I think they under I think they understood the impact of the internet before social media.

01:32:32.000 So even before social media, you had people writing blogs, you had people doing you know, but I had you had these bulletin board systems, and it's well known that the CIA was active on early bulletin board systems pushing the government perspective.

01:32:46.000 Of course.

01:32:47.000 And so I I I think that I think they've been continuously involved in every internet platform, even before social media as we call it today now was popular.

01:32:56.000 I was watching a a particular um political debate uh on YouTube, and occasionally when I see something that that's very contentious, I'm like, let me go to the comments and see what it is.

01:33:05.000 And it was all bots.

01:33:07.000 It was wild.

01:33:07.000 You know, the real obvious bunch of zeros and numbers after a name John's.

01:33:13.000 Six zeros, no profile picture or some ridiculous AI generated thing.

01:33:18.000 And then like a very hard-line stance one way or the other, very inflammatory, causing arguments.

01:33:24.000 I was like, this is wild.

01:33:26.000 This is all bots.

01:33:27.000 Well, you're familiar with dead internet theory, right?

01:33:29.000 Yes.

01:33:29.000 Yeah.

01:33:30.000 Explain that to people.

01:33:31.000 So dead internet theory has been around for quite a long time, probably long before the internet was actually dead.

01:33:37.000 And it's this theory that over time there will be increasing amounts of uh literal robotic content, and then also kind of like astroturfed fake content, you know, like one guy running a hundred accounts.

01:33:50.000 And that 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 uh you know, there might be a few people in the mix, but it's primarily going to be uh just robots uh are arguing with each other.

01:34:16.000 And I I think that more and more it's becoming true.

01:34:18.000 I mean, well, it's getting close.

01:34:20.000 Like that FBI analyst that when Elon was in the middle of buying Twitter, who looked at all the different bots and you know what they were trying to say was five percent.

01:34:28.000 He said, No, I think it's eighty.

01:34:30.000 Eighty percent.

01:34:30.000 Yep.

01:34:31.000 So when you're on Twitter and you see people arguing and making points and even posting things.

01:34:35.000 Yep.

01:34:36.000 Well, and there was you might remember there was a time where uh a bunch of the stats for Wikipedia editors came out and it was some like enormous fraction of edits coming out of one location in Arlington, Virginia.

01:34:49.000 It's like, oh wow.

01:34:50.000 Arlington, Virginia, that you know the uh famously the center of academic rigor and excellence.

01:34:56.000 There's supposed to be a lot of people living there who they just really care about making sure Wikipedia is accurate.

01:35:01.000 Odd.

01:35:01.000 Yeah.

01:35:02.000 How odd.

01:35:02.000 Could I take a quick break and get a little bit of water?

01:35:04.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:05.000 Well, there's water right there in front of you.

01:35:07.000 There we go.

01:35:07.000 Thank you.

01:35:07.000 I missed that.

01:35:08.000 That's all you need?

01:35:08.000 Yeah, yeah, it's we have filtered water and I juggle.

01:35:11.000 I need to I need to pause, ladies and gentlemen.

01:35:14.000 We'll be right back.

01:35:15.000 I need to take off my jacket too.

01:35:17.000 It's it's good when you're walking around and there's air moving on it because the copper conducts heat away really well.

01:35:22.000 But just sitting in here, it's actually copper.

01:35:24.000 Yeah, here, check it out.

01:35:26.000 Well, I want to do this on camera.

01:35:27.000 Are we still rolling?

01:35:28.000 Yeah.

01:35:28.000 Oh, look, look, okay.

01:35:29.000 You keep rolling here, you know.

01:35:30.000 That's a copper jacket.

01:35:31.000 It's from this company called Volebox.

01:35:33.000 It's actually made out of copper.

01:35:34.000 It's actually made out of copper.

01:35:35.000 Yeah, it's so heavy.

01:35:36.000 There's yeah, it weighs like four and a half pounds.

01:35:38.000 This is nuts.

01:35:39.000 It's something like 3,000 miles of copper of ultra fine copper threads.

01:35:44.000 Does this protect you from EMF or maybe some of the Russian signals?

01:35:48.000 If you put your phones into that pocket, then no signals go out whatsoever.

01:35:51.000 So it's like a Faraday cage.

01:35:52.000 Yeah, it's a little wearable Faraday cage.

01:35:54.000 So it's actually it's actually got some some some use beyond being cool.

01:35:58.000 But somebody makes these?

01:36:00.000 Yeah, so the company Volabach is really interesting.

01:36:02.000 So they make this song?

01:36:03.000 Yeah, of course.

01:36:04.000 They make a bunch of really cool clothes out of very novel materials, some of them very futuristic.

01:36:09.000 Like they make a jacket out of the material that the Mars Rover parachute was made.

01:36:15.000 So it's like a supersonic parachute material made out of Kevlar.

01:36:18.000 It is pretty weird.

01:36:19.000 Make me feel very restricted.

01:36:21.000 Well, you're also a lot bigger than me.

01:36:23.000 So I'm I'm a little scared of the case.

01:36:25.000 So you can move so though.

01:36:26.000 Yeah, but it seems to fit most, but it just seems heavy and restrictive.

01:36:31.000 You know, it it you you do have to make sure you size it where there's plenty of room to move around inside of it because it does not stretch at all.

01:36:37.000 It's made of tightly wood.

01:36:38.000 So there's a few benefits.

01:36:39.000 Okay.

01:36:40.000 The first is that it looks sweet.

01:36:42.000 Jamie's ordering one right now.

01:36:43.000 Look at him.

01:36:44.000 Um the other is that uh the other is that copper's an anti-macrobial material.

01:36:48.000 So you never get mildew on it, you never get mold.

01:36:51.000 Like like it it magically kills all of that stuff.

01:36:54.000 Um also I mentioned earlier, the pockets are basically a Faraday cage.

01:36:57.000 Right.

01:36:58.000 So if you want like if I want my phone to get calls, I keep it in my pot my my pants pocket.

01:37:02.000 I want to disappear, I think.

01:37:04.000 If there was a jacket that Palmer Lucky was wearing, I would hope it would be this.

01:37:08.000 Like when you showed up in this crazy jacket, I'm like, that's what I would hope for.

01:37:11.000 They've got a new one that's a t-shirt that's made out of carbon nanotubes.

01:37:14.000 So you should check you should check that out.

01:37:16.000 They're working on they're working on some wild next gen stuff.

01:37:19.000 Whoa.

01:37:20.000 Um, give me just a second I just gotta take a I actually just need to take a ment uh a mental a mental break.

01:37:26.000 Yeah, take a break.

01:37:26.000 Is that okay?

01:37:27.000 I'll take a leak.

01:37:28.000 All right, thank you.

01:37:28.000 I appreciate it.

01:37:30.000 So there's a place called Commando Store.

01:37:32.000 Yeah, we're talking about these pants that I have.

01:37:34.000 Well, yeah, we're just talking about your tiger stripe, your tiger stripe ranger panties.

01:37:37.000 And uh commando store is doing these reproductions of vintage gear, like Vietnam era US gear, Russian gear, using modern materials but old camo prints, and they're super authentic.

01:37:48.000 But the problem is a lot of this actual old gear, it's all mildewed, it's destroyed, the thread is all crusty and busting apart.

01:37:54.000 Right.

01:37:55.000 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.

01:38:03.000 Their gear was fresh.

01:38:04.000 And so if you want to look just like they did, you actually have to buy newly manufactured gear.

01:38:08.000 But you I'll I'll I'll uh I'll I'll send you some links.

01:38:11.000 They have a lot of really cool tiger stripe stuff that's very, very cool and authentic.

01:38:15.000 How when you were a kid, did you ever imagine you'd be selling weapons?

01:38:15.000 Nice.

01:38:20.000 Does that ever seem seem surreal to you that you go from being this guy who's really into VR to weapons manufacturing?

01:38:28.000 Aaron Powell It seems a little bit surreal, but only a little bit.

01:38:32.000 Um growing up, I always would be the guy who identified with the guy in the story who was making the tools.

01:38:41.000 So like when I would watch James Bond, I never thought I'm James Bond.

01:38:45.000 It was like, oh, I want to be Q. Like I want to be the guy making the tools.

01:38:49.000 Or Tony Stark.

01:38:50.000 Exactly.

01:38:51.000 Both.

01:38:52.000 Yeah, to and Tony did it all.

01:38:54.000 Um I I I I have to admit, like it's certainly a I it they thought it occurred to me.

01:39:00.000 Um Like one of my favorite anime characters was a character anti-hero named Seto Kaiba who ran a weapons company that was also a virtual reality company.

01:39:12.000 And uh like they built they built like virtual reality uh gaming simulator pods and also weapons.

01:39:20.000 Um and so it's it's really weird.

01:39:22.000 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?

01:39:30.000 Like I I like I it's it's it's hard to really know, but like when people are like, oh but you know, Palmer, how'd you get into this stuff?

01:39:37.000 It's like, I mean, I remember being like seven years old and and and thinking about the stuff.

01:39:42.000 Or like you watch uh 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?

01:40:10.000 Like, what if I would have had different things put in the world?

01:40:13.000 What if you lived in Montana?

01:40:15.000 Yeah, what if I lived in Montana?

01:40:17.000 What if um you know what if I uh you know, what if, what if, what if it's like is there a world?

01:40:22.000 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, would I have ended up coming back to it?

01:40:32.000 Probably look, all those things are interesting, and you're a guy who's into interesting things.

01:40:37.000 It's just finding whatever the path is that you think is interesting and just going in that direction.

01:40:43.000 You just your direction was kind of established by your interest when you were younger.

01:40:47.000 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.

01:40:55.000 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 if it's successful continuously.

01:41:04.000 Right.

01:41:05.000 So like a world where I don't basically figure out how to build good virtual reality technology is one where Oculus doesn't exist.

01:41:14.000 If Oculus doesn't exist, I don't get bought by Facebook.

01:41:16.000 I don't go to Silicon Valley, I don't become kind of one of the leading tech figures in that industry up there.

01:41:22.000 You have to hit every green light.

01:41:23.000 And like I like, you know who you know who funded Anderol when I started it.

01:41:26.000 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.

01:41:32.000 I mean, literally the same people.

01:41:33.000 So like Brian Singerman is a good example.

01:41:36.000 He was a partner at Founders Fund, which was Peter Thiel's investment fund.

01:41:39.000 They decided to put one million dollars into Oculus before any other fund was willing to give us money.

01:41:46.000 So they were the first institutional money into Oculus VR.

01:41:50.000 And then he ended up being our first investor also in Andorrills.

01:41:56.000 Like you're talking about like the same people even, like these relationships come back around.

01:42:01.000 And then that turns into running a weapons company.

01:42:03.000 And then that turns into building more efficient weapons.

01:42:06.000 And then like one of our recent wins, yeah, we were competing Andorl with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to build the Air Force's first AI-powered fighter jet.

01:42:19.000 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.

01:42:29.000 And we beat them.

01:42:31.000 I mean, how crazy is that to like for for for like that that's what's crazy to me.

01:42:35.000 Like, it's not sitting here crazy, like, oh, is it crazy I'm building weapons?

01:42:37.000 For me, it's crazy.

01:42:38.000 Like it's not that hard to imagine.

01:42:40.000 Yeah, you end up building you know guns for you know the Marines.

01:42:43.000 Like, like, but like what's really nothing against the Marines or the people who build guns for them.

01:42:47.000 I love those guys.

01:42:48.000 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.

01:43:07.000 F for fighter, Q for unmanned, and then 44 is the number designation.

01:43:13.000 Whoa.

01:43:13.000 Yeah.

01:43:14.000 That's so that that's the crazy thing.

01:43:15.000 When I lay awake at night, that's what I'm thinking about.

01:43:17.000 It's it's not so much that I am building weapons, it's that we're we're like actually pulling off things that are make a difference.

01:43:23.000 And by the way, AI fighter jets.

01:43:24.000 There it is.

01:43:25.000 So that was that was uh that was uh wind tunnel test.

01:43:25.000 There it is.

01:43:30.000 And you'll notice there's no protrusion for a cockpit.

01:43:33.000 The whole thing so it's a stealth aircraft, low signature, uses the same weapon systems that a real fighter jet uses.

01:43:41.000 That's what it looks like in the front.

01:43:42.000 Yep.

01:43:43.000 So this was uh that that was that was a very early, very, very early propulsion system test.

01:43:47.000 And um one of the crazy things is that what they look like?

01:43:52.000 Yep.

01:43:53.000 Yep.

01:43:54.000 So one of the crazy things about this is that the United States.

01:43:57.000 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.

01:44:07.000 Uh so imagine this.

01:44:08.000 I've got an F-35 flying with five of these things.

01:44:12.000 The original name of the program was Loyal Wingman.

01:44:14.000 The idea is that I have a loyal wingman, does whatever I tell them, I can talk to it like I would any human, you know, co you know, uh, uh, you know, co-worker, and it's gonna go in and do what I tell it.

01:44:25.000 But it's never gonna question my orders.

01:44:27.000 It's never going to try to save itself if it means ruining the mission.

01:44:32.000 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.

01:44:41.000 I mean, you've seen Top Gun, right?

01:44:43.000 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.

01:44:55.000 There's another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy, but will probably get you killed in the process.

01:45:04.000 We don't teach those generally, or if we do, it's in the context of don't do this.

01:45:08.000 All of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI-powered fighter jets.

01:45:12.000 I can now have it doing things that are so risky that a human pilot would never try even try the maneuver.

01:45:18.000 Because let's say it's a coin flip, it's a 50-50 chance that you're gonna die, but a 100% chance that I'm gonna be able to take out the enemy target.

01:45:27.000 Imagine going after something where I know I am probably gonna 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.

01:45:40.000 You'll make that trade every every day.

01:45:42.000 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 or on the ground every time if it allows you to accomplish that mission.

01:45:54.000 And so autonomy, it really changes the game on this stuff.

01:45:58.000 It's not it's not it's not an incremental change in tactics, it's a complete revolution.

01:46:03.000 What do you think that New Jersey shit was all about?

01:46:06.000 Like the unidentified era of the era phenomenon?

01:46:09.000 Well, so what's so interesting about the New Jersey stuff, and you've you know, you're probably tracking this as well or better than me.

01:46:09.000 What was that all about?

01:46:16.000 Um, but it is so perfectly aligned with things that we've seen in the past.

01:46:22.000 Like you're familiar with all like the the the overflights and hovering over nuclear facilities and military bases in the past.

01:46:29.000 Here's here's what I think happened.

01:46:32.000 I think that there was something really weird that was going on.

01:46:35.000 I think briefly there was something that was really unexplained.

01:46:39.000 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.

01:46:53.000 I've seen all these videos.

01:46:55.000 It's pretty obvious that the thing they're looking at is another DJI drone that is also looking at them and saying, oh dude, oh shit, there it is.

01:47:04.000 Like it was it was it was kind of this crazy media circus.

01:47:07.000 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.

01:47:16.000 I I think that's probably accurate because a lot of it was in Austin as well.

01:47:19.000 It was like these enthusiasts were getting their drones out everywhere.

01:47:23.000 And there was like it's drone time.

01:47:23.000 That's right.

01:47:25.000 Well, in a have you have you heard have you heard the um oh what do they call it?

01:47:32.000 There's a theory that someone's come up with that I can't I forget what it is.

01:47:35.000 It's it's like it's like it's like uh proliferation masking or something.

01:47:39.000 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.

01:47:52.000 Have you heard this theory?

01:47:53.000 I don't really believe it because I actually have met with the people who kind of invented modern quadcopters and flight controllers.

01:47:59.000 Like it's it's there's there it it's but the idea is very interesting and it makes me wonder if there might be some truth to it you know elsewhere in the world.

01:48:08.000 Like it sure is convenient.

01:48:10.000 Imagine that you're an alien, you're regularly operating around military bases, nuclear infrastructure.

01:48:15.000 Wouldn't it be convenient if there was something else that you people could explain away as you 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?

01:48:31.000 Because these same activities in like the 50s and the 60s, there was nothing like that, right?

01:48:37.000 Like back then, if you said, Oh yeah, I saw a hundred red lights orbiting around that nuclear facility, you just all you could say was holy shit, what what in the world could that be?

01:48:47.000 And today it's so easy to say, oh, it's it's just some drones.

01:48:51.000 Um so unfortunately it's a lot harder to know what's real.

01:48:51.000 Right.

01:48:54.000 And I I wish I could travel back in time, even just you know, 10 or 20 years to you know, do the the molder and scully thing I talked about earlier.

01:49:02.000 Be the be the be the the the the the be the billionaire uh you know, the billionaire James Bond uh X-Files guy with a with with you know a badge and a badge and uh and a checkbook.

01:49:13.000 I feel like you could really find some interesting stuff.

01:49:15.000 What when you say that something weird was happening in New Jersey?

01:49:20.000 What do you when do you what are you saying?

01:49:23.000 So something that was observable by some sensors and not by other sensors.

01:49:28.000 And that's really the common thread between a lot of these things.

01:49:31.000 Like it'll show up on a on on visual, like a guy sees it with his eyes and he sees it with a thermal sensor, but it isn't showing up on radar.

01:49:38.000 Or something well, they'll see it on radar, but they can't pick it up on other sensors.

01:49:42.000 And of course, there are some things where it's multi-sensor, but in general, when I say something weird, it's not obviously just drawn, or weird and then it's acting in ways we don't expect.

01:49:50.000 Like, how does something move so quickly and not have any skin heating?

01:49:54.000 Why isn't it white hot if it's moving that fast to the air?

01:49:57.000 How can it change direction so quickly without the airframe tearing apart?

01:50:00.000 That's what I mean by weird.

01:50:01.000 And I I look, I don't know what this stuff is.

01:50:04.000 When you say but weird, like what was observed?

01:50:08.000 So the weird thing that was observed was primarily that there was something there in an area that it shouldn't have been, and that there shouldn't have been anything.

01:50:17.000 There should not have been anything that was able to endure for that long in that area with those characteristics.

01:50:22.000 Like th this little tiny drones that can not show up on radar and that can you know kind of hide in place like that.

01:50:29.000 They don't have hours and hours and hours of endurance, right?

01:50:32.000 They're the they fly for 25, 30 minutes tops.

01:50:35.000 And then also they typically would need to be launched by something, you know, right close to there.

01:50:38.000 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.

01:50:48.000 Um it's not the weirdest thing that that people have seen, though.

01:50:52.000 Like the the the hellfire thing recently with the missile.

01:50:55.000 That was some of that was some of the weirdest stuff that I've seen.

01:50:57.000 That's so weird because it got hit and it just shook it off and kept moving.

01:51:01.000 And it's almost and it looks almost like there were like pieces that's like somehow reconstituted.

01:51:04.000 Right, like it took pieces of it.

01:51:07.000 So one of I don't know if you've done uh everyone wants to believe that it's aliens, and like that's what I want to believe.

01:51:14.000 Of course.

01:51:15.000 Um I don't think that it is a foreign adversary.

01:51:19.000 Like, I don't buy into the idea that the Chinese or the Russians have have secretly figured this out.

01:51:24.000 Uh but then the question is, okay, well, what is that what does that leave?

01:51:27.000 And I th I th I I feel like my gut is that it's something that is weirder than anything that anyone has made popular.

01:51:35.000 Like, just as an example, it's literally bleeding in from some parallel dimension, it's an energy signature, and it's co-aligned by accident rather than intent, right?

01:51:45.000 Like it's there because there's something in its parallel universe that is similar to what we're doing, and that's why they're co-aligned.

01:51:52.000 Like, I know this sounds like weirdo mumbo jumbo, but you just it it seems like something like that even would be more likely.

01:51:58.000 Uh did you ever read uh Michael Michael uh Michael uh Michael Critchin's novel Um The Sphere?

01:52:06.000 Or was it just sphere?

01:52:07.000 All right, you mind if I spoil sphere for you?

01:52:07.000 No.

01:52:10.000 So there was a movie, it was not nearly as good as the book.

01:52:12.000 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.

01:52:37.000 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.

01:52:47.000 So they by this, they basically figure out it must have been there for about three or four thousand years, uh this spaceship.

01:52:53.000 And so the Navy is going and they're trying to figure out what it is.

01:52:55.000 They're scraping coral off this ship.

01:52:57.000 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.

01:53:06.000 They were scraping the crop, looking for some way in through this ultra tough metallic alloy that had never been observed ever in nature or or or science.

01:53:16.000 And then the the big reveal of like the first arc of the book is they scrape off the coral, they look at the door.

01:53:23.000 Incredible, it's a door.

01:53:25.000 But then they look next to the door and there's a marking.

01:53:27.000 And what does the marking say on this 3,000-year-old spaceship?

01:53:32.000 United States Navy and an American flag.

01:53:36.000 And you know, the what's what's interesting is they never actually fully explain it.

01:53:41.000 But the 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 a some exploring and came back.

01:54:01.000 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.

01:54:11.000 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.

01:54:20.000 That I I'm you know all 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.

01:54:33.000 Why is that harder to believe?

01:54:34.000 Why is uh space travel harder to believe than time travel?

01:54:38.000 It's mostly all of the it's you know it's dimension travel.

01:54:41.000 So dimensional travel, like that that's totally believable.

01:54:43.000 It's it's 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.

01:54:55.000 It's just it's a m it's a matter of uh we haven't observed anything that could do that.

01:54:59.000 We haven't seen any synthetic material that could that.

01:55:01.000 We just haven't seen any natural phenomena that could be.

01:55:03.000 Right.

01:55:03.000 But if you just go back 200 years ago, a cell phone's impossible.

01:55:07.000 But the difference here is that we're able to see millions of years of history of the universe coming into us, right?

01:55:12.000 We we we're observing things that happened hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, millions of years ago from all over our galaxy and other galaxies.

01:55:20.000 And there's a lot of markers that you would expect to see that would line up with what how we understand intelligent life.

01:55:27.000 And we're just not seeing them.

01:55:28.000 And you're familiar with like dark forest theory, you know, maybe, maybe maybe the civilizations that emanate those signals get whacked down before they become a threat to the dominant powers.

01:55:36.000 Maybe everyone's hiding, right?

01:55:38.000 Like there are these theories as to why this is the case.

01:55:41.000 And maybe we're being idiot, you know, you've heard probably the theory about us being idiots for transmitting, like Stephen Hawking was of this opinion.

01:55:48.000 He thought it was really stupid for us to try and make first contact.

01:55:52.000 Uh his point was not just that it's probably a bad idea in general.

01:55:57.000 His point was the fact that we haven't observed it from anyone else suggests a lot of danger in doing so.

01:56:05.000 Like you what it could mean that nobody's doing it.

01:56:08.000 It could mean that anyone who does it gets wiped out.

01:56:10.000 Uh you know, if if you stand up, you get knocked down.

01:56:13.000 And so it's just I I have a hard time believing that it's conventional, conventional thing on another planet that comes to see us.

01:56:21.000 That's not to say there isn't life out there in the universe.

01:56:24.000 I think it's out there.

01:56:25.000 But for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be life that's capable of inter-solar system or intergalactic travel.

01:56:32.000 Aaron Powell, 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.

01:56:43.000 Aaron Powell In that case, and so what this is one of my favorite favorite favorite theories about this.

01:56:47.000 Like people talk about about that.

01:56:50.000 There's a question like if you're actually folding space-time or breaking space-time, uh, 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 you know 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.

01:57:15.000 Like if 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.

01:57:22.000 Again, I'm not saying it's impossible.

01:57:23.000 I'm just I'm I'm I'm 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.

01:57:39.000 I I put all those at higher likelihood than they came from Andromeda and now they're flying around our military bases.

01:57:45.000 Aaron Powell Did you see that guy, representative uh what's his name?

01:57:48.000 Tim Burchett.

01:57:49.000 Is that his name?

01:57:51.000 Was talking about there's five specific areas where these things seem to be emanating from the ocean.

01:57:57.000 I'm I'm generally familiar.

01:58:00.000 I've not I don't remember what those areas are.

01:58:01.000 I know that we're weird.

01:58:03.000 One of them is one of them is very near me.

01:58:04.000 It's the it's the Channel Islands corridor.

01:58:07.000 I tracked down this book that's out of print now called The Unidentified No, it's it's the UFOs and USOs, unidentified um submersible objects of the Santa Catalina Channel.

01:58:07.000 Right.

01:58:19.000 This guy went around.

01:58:21.000 Well, uh in this one area, tons of bizarre activity.

01:58:24.000 This guy went around and he interviewed everybody who had a weird story.

01:58:28.000 And he just basically compiled them.

01:58:30.000 He said, What do you see?

01:58:31.000 Describe it in detail.

01:58:33.000 And he went back, like these are like fishermen had stories from the 80s, and he talked to naval aviators, and he talked to uh you know low local yachtsmen and he talked to all these people, and he points out in his prologue these are all just the stories I've collected.

01:58:48.000 I have not edited these stories, I've not modified these stories, and the people have verified that they are correct, and you you hear they they are all on the record.

01:58:55.000 This is their name.

01:58:56.000 He didn't include anybody who was anonymous because his point was if it's anonymous, you could just claim I made it up.

01:59:00.000 It has to be a real person who stands behind it.

01:59:02.000 And he said, You'll notice that across about 50 years of stories I've collected, that there's extraordinary commonality between these stories.

01:59:09.000 People who have never met have no reason to work together, have no reason to have a common story, and yet they all observe very similar things.

01:59:18.000 And that that when you see a one off, it's hard to draw a conclusion.

01:59:23.000 When you see a pattern that comes a lot.

01:59:26.000 So specifically, the Catal the Santa Catalina Channel, uh, so you have basically Catalina Island off the coast of the of California, and you have a few more channel islands that are stretched out on either end of it.

01:59:37.000 Um 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 like not hitting them and slamming and exploding like you'd expect, but instead, you know, still a huge flash, but just seamlessly transitioning into the water.

01:59:57.000 Lots of noise, lots of splash, but not like destroying themselves.

02:00:01.000 And then similarly, objects coming out of the water in the same way.

02:00:05.000 And so they all describe these very, very uh steep approach paths.

02:00:10.000 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 in instead the vehicles are apparently fine, and the water just parts around them as they rocket in.

02:00:26.000 Really, really bizarre stuff, and it makes you wonder you know, could that be related, the same technology or process that allows the air because like you've seen these systems, they're not creating sonic booms.

02:00:37.000 Right.

02:00:37.000 You don't see shock waves coming off of them, and they're not heated by the movement through the air.

02:00:42.000 They're not they're not really, really high.

02:00:43.000 I mean, you've heard the stories about the SR 71.

02:00:45.000 I mean, it would get literally red hot on its leading edges.

02:00:48.000 You know, the t you know, tight glowing titanium.

02:00:51.000 But these things are cold.

02:00:53.000 And so is there some technology that can displace air around you that can also displace water around you is is is is kind of the interesting theory there.

02:01:02.000 But yeah, that that that that particular area I've dug into because it's only about uh 20 miles away from my house.

02:01:07.000 So the weird one is the breakaway civilization thing.

02:01:11.000 That's the weird one.

02:01:12.000 Because that's the most ridiculous until you start thinking about it.

02:01:16.000 And then you start looking back at past civilizations like ancient Egypt and some of the monolithic destruction around the world. 0.95

02:01:22.000 You've read chariots of the gods.

02:01:23.000 Mm-hmm.

02:01:24.000 I talked to Von Dannekin once.

02:01:25.000 Oh, really?

02:01:26.000 He went to Peter Thiel's house.

02:01:27.000 Uh, and Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein brought me over for lunch.

02:01:30.000 Oh, that must have been so cool.

02:01:31.000 It was so cool to just question him about stuff.

02:01:33.000 What do you think?

02:01:34.000 I I read Chariots of the Gods when I was uh I don't know, probably like seven or even the movie.

02:01:41.000 I didn't even know there was an old ass movie.

02:01:43.000 Well, it's an old ass book.

02:01:44.000 It was in the movie theaters.

02:01:46.000 So the the interesting thing about it is like I I've I've dug into a lot of that as I've gotten older, and yes, there are things in there where like we've now learned that they weren't true, but some of it holds up.

02:01:56.000 There's still really bizarre stuff that was happening in ancient civilizations that is common between civilizations.

02:02:02.000 And it doesn't really make sense.

02:02:05.000 It doesn't really make sense when you think about it conventionally.

02:02:08.000 Well, Ben Van Kirkwick, who uh runs um Uncharted X was on the podcast recently and he was describing how there's specific hieroglyphs that indicate some sort of a star portal.

02:02:21.000 Yep.

02:02:22.000 That that's what the hieroglyphs are saying.

02:02:24.000 Like this is a star gate.

02:02:26.000 And it shows stars, it shows this portal and gate, and this is it's written multiple times.

02:02:33.000 And they're trying to figure out well, what is this trying to say?

02:02:36.000 What do you think about the theory that uh that there's other sentient that's that the other sentient species of Earth might have better better lore on this than us?

02:02:36.000 Like, what is this?

02:02:45.000 Have you heard of this theory?

02:02:46.000 No.

02:02:47.000 I don't want to so this is gonna make me sound a bit like uh a little bit like a nutter, but I'm I'm pretty deep on I'm we're pretty deep down the rabbit hole.

02:02:56.000 We're on better territory right now.

02:02:58.000 So people have oral traditions that have passed down pretty well.

02:03:02.000 But we've also observed that stories can pass down in other sentient species, like whales, like dolphins.

02:03:10.000 They have these whale calls that have been constant for a long time.

02:03:13.000 They're they they communicate with each other.

02:03:15.000 Well one of the theories, and by the way, this was explored in like some of the old Star Trek movies.

02:03:20.000 They explored this idea that the whales actually had better and more stable oral history than humanity.

02:03:26.000 Um it's not that crazy of an idea.

02:03:30.000 Um so you you wonder, for example, uh if we could understand them, what would they have to say about any of this stuff?

02:03:37.000 Like maybe maybe they're not smart enough to have anything to say.

02:03:40.000 But you know, do do they have do they have anything to say about for and like it may not be obvious.

02:03:45.000 It may not be we know about star people who are going through Stargates.

02:03:48.000 Right.

02:03:48.000 But for example, what if there's oral tradition uh or even genetic, you know, programming around, oh, we never go to this area, never go to this place, or never eat the food from this place.

02:04:00.000 You know, could there be interesting leads that are buried in cultures that are not human?

02:04:06.000 Well, we were talking about that before that you're working on interspecies communication.

02:04:10.000 That's right.

02:04:11.000 So this hasn't actually officially launched yet.

02:04:13.000 Hopefully they won't mind me talking about it.

02:04:15.000 Um are you familiar with the XPRIZE Foundation?

02:04:17.000 They didn't think we were just talking about it.

02:04:19.000 So like if you aren't familiar, X Prize is basically this group that makes these big significant monetary prizes for teams to compete against each other to do things that seem crazy.

02:04:28.000 So like there was an X Prize for uh going to going to space on a reusable rocket.

02:04:34.000 Um John Carmack was competing for that.

02:04:36.000 Yes, I did.

02:04:36.000 Did you know that?

02:04:38.000 Um inspired him.

02:04:41.000 Uh there was they're they're doing some cancer X prizes.

02:04:44.000 There's one that's going on right now uh called the Wildfire X Prize, 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.

02:05:03.000 Instead of responding to fires once they're too big to control, you're able to stop them in their in their tracks.

02:05:08.000 And I mean, I mean, just like the Palisades fire created 20 billion dollars in damage.

02:05:13.000 It's it's actually very cheap to do this relative to the damage that wildfires cause.

02:05:17.000 Anyway, the the X Prize guys came to me a while back, and uh we we were we were jamming on uh we were jamming on a few ideas for their next X Prize.

02:05:28.000 And I I hopefully they don't mind me saying this, but initially I said you guys should do an uplift X Prize, even with Uplift, the science fiction concept.

02:05:36.000 No.

02:05:36.000 It's fallen out of favor.

02:05:37.000 It was it was really popular for a while.

02:05:39.000 Um there was an uplift trilogy written by I can't remember the guy's name, but it was he wrote a whole book about non human consciousnesses.

02:05:47.000 Like there were in his book, there's like plasma consciousnesses in the sun.

02:05:52.000 Like you probably heard these crazy ideas and you know, like intelligent beings that live in the sun.

02:05:56.000 But one of it that the main thrust of uplift is taking species that are not sentient and lifting them up to the level of sentience and beyond.

02:06:06.000 So like can you take a dog and teach it to talk by genetically modifying it to make it smarter?

02:06:13.000 Can you take whales and and and pass them up?

02:06:16.000 And by the way, the uplift trilogy, they also explore this idea like Star Trek of the whales having an oral tradition that was more stable than humanities and actually having like a lot of information that was concealed by from man until they uplifted those species.

02:06:30.000 And I've always thought that was really interesting.

02:06:32.000 And so I went to the X Prize and said, I want you guys to do an uplift X Prize.

02:06:35.000 First person to modify an animal to be smarter than a person.

02:06:40.000 And uh and they actually said, that's too crazy.

02:06:43.000 That's a that's X Priz is you know, X Prize is trying to push the future, but for you know, for a variety of honestly, quite good reasons.

02:06:51.000 They said this is not quite our jam.

02:06:53.000 But one we are working towards is an interspecies communication XPRIZE.

02:06:58.000 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.

02:07:11.000 The idea is it it's to it's the first team that can meet species where they are and communicate with them in a repeatable, verifiable way.

02:07:19.000 This isn't teaching a dog to, you know, say yes when you say uh go.

02:07:24.000 Do you want to eat?

02:07:25.000 Exactly.

02:07:26.000 No, this is this is bi-directional communication, objective, verifiable, um, deterministic, predictable.

02:07:34.000 Um it's a really hard one, but I think a good XPRI should be.

02:07:38.000 You shouldn't be picking things that are easy.

02:07:40.000 You're picking things that are they they seem like they're just out of reach and you just need to stretch for it.

02:07:45.000 But there's been talking about the thing.

02:07:46.000 And if we do that, I'm gonna be asking the whales.

02:07:48.000 Whales and dolphins, they have a language, but we don't know what it is.

02:07:51.000 That's right.

02:07:52.000 So the idea is the using of AI.

02:07:54.000 Yeah.

02:07:54.000 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.

02:08:05.000 We've learned some things.

02:08:06.000 Um we've learned how a lot of cetaceans can call names and you know, very very like very, very unique IDs.

02:08:14.000 They have dialects.

02:08:15.000 Yep, they do.

02:08:16.000 Um, but we are so far away from cracking the code, right?

02:08:19.000 Like nuts.

02:08:20.000 I mean, like, isn't it crazy that we can crack basically any cipher, any crypto code?

02:08:25.000 We can we can translate languages basically from scratch if we get a few words.

02:08:32.000 Exactly.

02:08:32.000 And we have no idea how it works.

02:08:35.000 And I don't mean like we don't know the words, but we know there are words.

02:08:38.000 It's like there's weird things where they're like communicating via ultrasound with each other, and we think that like one is emitting and another is receiving and emitting, and then maybe there's information in the phase difference between those two, right?

02:08:51.000 Like they might be in co that this is where the theory of um of acoustic holograms as a primary means of cetacean communication from.

02:08:58.000 I I don't believe in in that anymore.

02:08:59.000 I I think that wasn't quite right.

02:09:01.000 But like differences in phase between simultaneous transmit and receive ultrasonic communication, it seems to be that's part of it.

02:09:09.000 So you can't just like listen for words.

02:09:11.000 You're actually looking for differences in how these waves are interacting, and those are distance dependent, direction dependent.

02:09:18.000 We've got a lot of work cut out for us to understand, to understand animals.

02:09:22.000 That is so wild.

02:09:24.000 You you're familiar with Alex, the African gray parrot?

02:09:26.000 No.

02:09:27.000 Oh, you've got to look into this.

02:09:29.000 I mean, maybe you could even get one of his trainers on the show.

02:09:32.000 So Alex, the African African gray parrots are probably the smartest bird, definitely one of the smartest animals.

02:09:38.000 Right up there with crows or ravens?

02:09:40.000 Smarter.

02:09:41.000 They're very, very smart.

02:09:42.000 They can talk, they can reason.

02:09:44.000 Alex, the parrot was So Alex the Parrot was a uniquely smart African gray parrot. 0.98

02:09:51.000 Um by the way, African Greys are usually not kept in captivity just because they're such a handful. 0.98

02:09:56.000 There we go.

02:09:56.000 That's out.

02:09:57.000 That's that there's there's Alex.

02:09:58.000 They're a handful because they're so intelligent.

02:10:00.000 It it's like dogs that need to be exercised.

02:10:01.000 Oh, they're not.

02:10:02.000 They need to be intellectually stimulated.

02:10:04.000 And most people just don't have the time to keep an African gray uh properly stimulated. 0.99

02:10:08.000 So they start they they get depressed, they self-harm.

02:10:11.000 So that they're not recommended as a beginner parrot by any means.

02:10:15.000 Now, Alex was interesting because he had a he had a vocabulary, he understood grammar, and he is one of the old I think the only animal who asked an existential question, and he actually did it right before he died.

02:10:29.000 If I remember Correctly, like he wasn't just saying give me food.

02:10:32.000 He could say, like, tomorrow I want this food.

02:10:34.000 He could be but he the existential question he asked was what's happening and where am I going?

02:10:41.000 Which is uh and he had never asked those questions before.

02:10:44.000 They were brand new, formulated questions that he asked very shortly before he passed.

02:10:50.000 And so there's a lot of capacity.

02:10:52.000 Now here's the other cool part.

02:10:53.000 He's got a bird brain.

02:10:55.000 He has a tiny little brain, and yet it has all that capacity.

02:10:58.000 You've probably heard of people who have lost huge chunks of their brain and they reprogram and they seem to get by.

02:11:04.000 Parrots like Alex suggests that you can get by with very little brain if it's oriented correctly.

02:11:10.000 So imagine if I took a species like an African gray and I modified certain elements of 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.

02:11:24.000 They're very smooth brained.

02:11:25.000 What if I could have we we know that folded brain tissue and the high density that it creates on the neuronal surface is very good for intelligence.

02:11:32.000 Like, could you make an African gray that is able to have a normal human-level conversation? 0.99

02:11:38.000 I think I think it's actually very close to that.

02:11:40.000 Wow.

02:11:41.000 So this is one of those How many?

02:11:45.000 Can you tell me how many?

02:11:48.000 Very good.

02:11:49.000 What?

02:11:50.000 We keep going.

02:11:50.000 Two.

02:11:52.000 Can you tell me what's different?

02:11:53.000 What's different?

02:11:55.000 Color.

02:11:55.000 Damn it.

02:11:56.000 What number is gray?

02:12:00.000 Don't want to tell me.

02:12:01.000 Well, tell me what number is great and nut.

02:12:04.000 What number is gray?

02:12:07.000 Very good.

02:12:09.000 Good boy.

02:12:10.000 Right.

02:12:10.000 Shit, man.

02:12:11.000 And so I mean, you're looking at intelligence that's on par by all of the traditional metrics with a human toddler, but with radically less brain tissue.

02:12:20.000 And also radically less body to control.

02:12:23.000 That does and well, and also a lot of like semi-autonomy.

02:12:23.000 That's that's true.

02:12:26.000 Like you you know how some animals have more of their nervous system distributed, like you know, octopuses have you know autonomy in their muscles.

02:12:33.000 It's actually similar for a lot of animals.

02:12:35.000 And so one of 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 building a thinking system from scratch, I'm thinking will help us understand how other systems think.

02:12:49.000 Like we haven't we we there's never been an economic motive to really dig into how to understand how the brain fundamentally works.

02:12:58.000 I I know there's people who are listening who probably think that's crazy.

02:13:01.000 They say, Palmer, people want to cure brain cancer, they want to help with Alzheimer's.

02:13:04.000 There's a difference between preserving brain function and truly understanding how the brain works.

02:13:09.000 And yes, there's research labs here and there, but Google's never been funding them to the tune of tens of billions.

02:13:14.000 Right?

02:13:15.000 Meta's never been funding them to the tune of hundreds of billions.

02:13:17.000 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.

02:13:29.000 And we're gonna make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think I think that understanding how to make synthetic brains via AI is gonna teach us how to make parrots like Alex a lot smarter too.

02:13:40.000 Aaron Ross Powell 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 it brings me to the weirder theory about human evolution, sure.

02:13:53.000 That we're a product of accelerated evolution, and that some superior intelligence would do exactly what you're saying.

02:14:01.000 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.

02:14:13.000 Like right now, if you if you see like what you just said about you know uh uh uh uh you know augmented evolution of humans, it's a crazy person thing, right?

02:14:21.000 Like but if we are literally sitting there talking to our dogs, and they're you're like like isn't it gonna be like who could who could think that's a crazy theory to say, well, I mean, we did it.

02:14:33.000 The moment that we had technology that was capable, we did it.

02:14:37.000 Wouldn't probably any species do that?

02:14:39.000 Like, doesn't that suggest that when you get smart enough you want to make things somewhat in your own image?

02:14:44.000 It gets back to Skynet earlier, you know.

02:14:46.000 Like if if we make animals more into our own image, is it really crazy to think that we are the result of something like that?

02:14:46.000 Right.

02:14:53.000 And actually, so I'm a religious person.

02:14:55.000 Um I'm a Christian, and I feel like what you see Where God was created or man was created in God's image, it's I feel like it's reflected in our desire to create things in our own image.

02:15:07.000 And so I I I think I think there's a certain beautiful symmetry there.

02:15:12.000 Uh it's where it's if if we're if we're doing it, it's actually easier for people to believe, I think that it happened to us.

02:15:19.000 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.

02:15:25.000 Aaron Powell Well, also just this sentiment that you were discussing of taking an animal and making it more intelligent.

02:15:33.000 If we found a planet, if let's say we get to you know a couple thousand years of technological evolution past where we're at now, we can travel to other galaxies and we find primates.

02:15:43.000 Yeah.

02:15:44.000 And we're like, well, they're they're on the way.

02:15:46.000 They're on the way, but they need like 300 million years before they get to where we are.

02:15:50.000 We wouldn't want to wait.

02:15:51.000 Why would we wait?

02:15:52.000 I mean maybe that's just a seeding process.

02:15:55.000 Maybe that's something that happens all throughout the universe where these, you know, 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.

02:16:09.000 Which is one of the weirder things about us.

02:16:09.000 Yep.

02:16:11.000 We were talking about this last night at the mothership.

02:16:13.000 We're on the green room.

02:16:14.000 We're talking about like one thing that human beings share in common with everything we do.

02:16:18.000 Everyone's trying to make the best version of everything.

02:16:21.000 Yes.

02:16:22.000 And better versions, 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.

02:16:34.000 So we're constantly trying to make better stuff.

02:16:36.000 I I I wouldn't I would even go beyond it's I think it's not even better.

02:16:39.000 It's that we seek novel things.

02:16:41.000 Yes.

02:16:41.000 And you would like humans are programmed to seek novelty, and I think it's it's clearly been an evolutionarily advantageous trait.

02:16:48.000 Yes.

02:16:49.000 Societies that foster seeking of novel experiences build stronger cultures, stronger technologies.

02:16:57.000 And then by the way, the groups that don't seek novelty end up becoming stagnant.

02:17:01.000 Yes.

02:17:02.000 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.

02:17:09.000 I think that it was a loss of uh drive for novelty.

02:17:14.000 Like, and that's not to say that they're a lesser culture, but certainly they were not focused on seeking novel experiences.

02:17:20.000 Aaron Powell What's really fascinating when we think about human beings in particular is that people that lived in those tribes did not want to civilize. 0.97

02:17:30.000 And that the people that were even captured by Indians, a lot of them wanted to stay. 0.77

02:17:35.000 Yep.

02:17:36.000 Because they found that to resonate more with being a human being.

02:17:39.000 Because we had lived so many thousands of years as hunter-gatherers that that resonated with your being.

02:17:48.000 It seemed more spiritually in tune with being a human being than living in a city and wearing a suit and food from a store.

02:17:56.000 Anyone who's ever been on a camping trip understands what you're talking about.

02:18:00.000 Because you can feel you can feel it.

02:18:00.000 But it's imagine that's a good thing.

02:18:02.000 People were not meant to live in the jungles.

02:18:05.000 Great Vice piece back when Vice was really interesting.

02:18:09.000 It's called Heinmo's Arctic Adventure.

02:18:12.000 And it's this guy who uh he lives north of the Arctic Circle or near the Arctic Circle, and he has a cabin up there and he's grandfathered in, and he's been there forever.

02:18:24.000 I think he started working there in the 1970s.

02:18:26.000 This guy he didn't even know about 9-11 until way later.

02:18:29.000 Someone showed him a picture of what happened.

02:18:32.000 He has a television and VHS tapes and a log cabin and powered by a generator, and all he does is hunt caribou and fish, and he's very intelligent.

02:18:42.000 And so this nerdy reporter from fucking Williamsburg is hanging out with this guy or wherever he's from.

02:18:48.000 And this guy's explaining how this resonates with being a human being.

02:18:52.000 Yep.

02:18:53.000 Like this is a much more satisfying way of living, and I think that this is how people are supposed to live.

02:18:58.000 That's so interesting.

02:18:59.000 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.

02:19:06.000 Because that's what drive if we all hunt if we all I mean maybe it's that uh 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.

02:19:16.000 But you also need a singer, you also need a guy who likes us to make be a carpenter.

02:19:20.000 You need it, you need all types of different human beings and different personality traits and different interests to make this whole experiment of civilization work.

02:19:29.000 Aaron Powell What do you think about nostalgia?

02:19:31.000 Because I've been thinking about this a lot for variety of reasons.

02:19:33.000 And it's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about.

02:19:35.000 We're talking like novel experiences, new things, you know, like like driving towards the future.

02:19:42.000 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.

02:19:47.000 It's feel good.

02:19:48.000 I feel like like obsessing over the past, I think is healthy in a lot of ways.

02:19:53.000 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.

02:20:01.000 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.

02:20:13.000 It feels like you're naturally going to prefer the new thing that hasn't really shown all the downfalls yet.

02:20:18.000 I'm I I'm I guess I I'm getting I'm a big fan of nostalgia.

02:20:21.000 I'm a big fan of of looking at the parts of the past that worked and then lionizing those and reminding people why they worked.

02:20:27.000 Um there's a lot of people who actually say this is fascist now.

02:20:30.000 Have you heard of this?

02:20:31.000 The nostalgia fashions?

02:20:33.000 Nostalgia is fascist.

02:20:34.000 If you Google it, you look up nostalgia is fascist.

02:20:37.000 You will find this is like this this is like a cutting edge theory of the last year.

02:20:41.000 They're saying, oh, all this appeal to uh you know appeal to the 90s, it's pro-fascist because they're trying to make you believe that there was a better time.

02:20:50.000 To believe that going backwards in society is is is is a good thing, as if the 1990s were like some like hotbed of injustice and and and oppression.

02:21:00.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

02:21:01.000 That's interesting.

02:21:02.000 I think nostalgia's fun, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past.

02:21:08.000 Um I do when it comes to art.

02:21:10.000 I do when it comes to music and I 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 in recorded history.

02:21:10.000 Yep.

02:21:23.000 There's some the difference in the 50s and the sixties, just this radical change in the way people saw life and how many people were just like exiting normal society.

02:21:32.000 And then how they threw water on that with the passing of the psychedelics act in 1970.

02:21:37.000 But I think that it seems like things are going in a different direction.

02:21:40.000 So just so you know, I'm straight edge, I don't use any drugs.

02:21:43.000 Um I didn't drink alcohol till very recently.

02:21:45.000 I just had my first kid.

02:21:46.000 He's a year old.

02:21:47.000 And you started drinking, yeah.

02:21:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:21:50.000 Like my whole life, no drinking, no nicotine, no caffeine, no alcohol, no drugs.

02:21:54.000 Yeah, I had a kid and I decided it was start time to start drinking.

02:21:57.000 Why is that?

02:21:58.000 Why is that?

02:21:58.000 Um you have uh enough uh you have enough hard hard nights and and hard days taking care of the kid, and you say, you know, I totally get it, man.

02:22:07.000 I totally understand why everyone's why everyone's having beers on the weekend.

02:22:10.000 There's certainly a place for it.

02:22:11.000 There's certainly a place for it.

02:22:12.000 But I'm curious why why why uh why nostalgia and art?

02:22:15.000 I'm not disagreeing, actually.

02:22:16.000 I I think I I mean I showed you earlier earlier on.

02:22:18.000 Well, I'm a I'm uh I'm completely fascinated with the 1960s in terms of uh I'm a huge fan of 1960s automobiles.

02:22:25.000 Yeah, but what year were you born?

02:22:27.000 67.

02:22:28.000 Okay, interesting.

02:22:30.000 Um when I was a kid in high school, in 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?

02:22:42.000 Like that's 11 years.

02:22:43.000 Like an 11-year-old car, if you had uh a 2016 Toyota, it looks exactly like a 2025 Toyota.

02:22:52.000 There's not much difference at all.

02:22:53.000 You would have to be like a car nut to notice the difference.

02:22:57.000 But when I was a kid in 1981, if someone drove by in a 1970 Chevelle, everybody stopped and stared at it, like whoa.

02:23:04.000 Yep.

02:23:05.000 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.

02:23:14.000 Yep.

02:23:14.000 They had magic in the 1960s, the Corvette, the cars were art.

02:23:19.000 Yes.

02:23:19.000 You know, I mean they were engineering, they were art, they were an expression of American culture, and it went away.

02:23:26.000 Yep.

02:23:27.000 It went away in the 1970s, they turn into dog shit.

02:23:29.000 Well, see, this is kind of what I'm talking about, where I said talk about the importance of nostalgia, because like you want to look back at the things that worked, and like I think a lot of these companies, they'd have they they would have you just forget that it ever was works of art that these cars could be this way.

02:23:42.000 I think we need to learn from that and not let them because like now cars are turning into like subscriber-based appliances, get I mean, like that's kind of gross.

02:23:52.000 I've heard that there's some cars that charge you money if you want to use Apple CarPlay.

02:23:56.000 That's right.

02:23:57.000 Well, that's and there's well, there's some that are also charging you to use uh all of your uh your uh your heating and cooling functionality.

02:24:04.000 There's ones they're adding like you can't.

02:24:06.000 Just fucking charge me more for your car, don't fuck me. 0.90

02:24:09.000 Well, some of them are you're paying more, it's paying more to unlock more horsepower.

02:24:12.000 It's like you're making the car, it has the parts, and you're not gonna crazy.

02:24:16.000 You know, a lot of these and and and then a lot of these business approaches are actually coming, I think not from the car industry, they're stealing them from the tech and also the gaming industry.

02:24:25.000 Like there was a time when these things people were making video games.

02:24:29.000 They would make a game, you'd buy it, you owned a video game, and like and that was it.

02:24:32.000 And they made the best game they could to sell you at a store.

02:24:36.000 And these days they're making games and and and all and also a lot of apps into like these subscription experiences.

02:24:43.000 You have to keep paying money.

02:24:44.000 They're making content that's just farmed to keep you hooked on the drip continuously.

02:24:49.000 You don't see these masterpieces the way that you used to.

02:24:52.000 And uh that that's that's something I've been I've been super passionate about.

02:24:57.000 Like, it is gross that they do that.

02:24:59.000 They just hook you in because they know you're hooked already.

02:25:01.000 That's right.

02:25:02.000 And so you're you want the new BMW or whatever the car is.

02:25:05.000 And you know, like, oh, I'll just pay the monthly, who gives a fuck, just one more subscription that comes out of my auto pay.

02:25:12.000 Yeah, I I feel like there needs to be a bit of a concerted pushback from people who remember before we're gone.

02:25:19.000 Yes.

02:25:19.000 Like one of the things that's crazy to me, like you know, and like for you, it's cars, because you know you that that's that's uh you you you grew up you grew up during that shift as well, the industry kind of to your point lost something.

02:25:31.000 Um like I grew up with like the Nintendo Game Boy and a lot of these things were like the ear 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.

02:25:43.000 It was before all the bean counters got in.

02:25:45.000 It was before all the regulators got in.

02:25:47.000 It was before the people figured out how to turn it into this.

02:25:49.000 You used to be able to make a game with a dozen people, and of course you could still do that today.

02:25:53.000 I don't want to romanticize too much.

02:25:55.000 But like you could make a best selling game back then with you know 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.

02:26:08.000 Today, you'll have game teams that are thousands of people, and it's all you know, it's become a very high paying, high prestige job.

02:26:15.000 It's just a it's a it's a it's a totally it's a totally different universe.

02:26:18.000 And it's also a giant business now, right?

02:26:21.000 It's been proven that it's a huge moneymaker.

02:26:24.000 It's purely it's totally financialized now.

02:26:25.000 Right.

02:26:26.000 Like it's it's optimized by the bean counters.

02:26:28.000 How are we gonna make five billion dollars in profit this year?

02:26:31.000 And the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry, right?

02:26:34.000 It is.

02:26:35.000 And it has been even for a while.

02:26:37.000 I think that happened like I want to say it was like six or seven years ago that the move that the games industry.

02:26:42.000 Um I showed you before we we came on.

02:26:45.000 I I have this knockoff of the Nintendo Game Boy that I made.

02:26:48.000 Um I talked about that web forum.

02:26:50.000 I started with the superior game boy.

02:26:52.000 Exactly.

02:26:54.000 So actually, this one is even nicer than the ones that we normally sell.

02:26:58.000 This is my personal Andoral edition one.

02:27:00.000 So this is made with the same alloys we use in our attack drones, and the coding on it is a is a wareproof Cerakote ceramic.

02:27:08.000 It feels like very stern.

02:27:11.000 Also that the screen lens instead of plastic, like on the original Game Boy, it's actually lab-grown sapphire crystal.

02:27:17.000 It's the largest piece of sapphire crystal in any product in his own.

02:27:21.000 And then exactly.

02:27:22.000 But then we we made a new version of Tetris for it.

02:27:25.000 Ah, that's incredible.

02:27:27.000 Whoops.

02:27:28.000 But um But the the thing that's so interesting about this is like I turn it on, the game is instantly going.

02:27:34.000 Like, there's no ads, there's no subscriptions.

02:27:37.000 It doesn't say log in and download the updates.

02:27:39.000 Let us show you the pre-roll ads.

02:27:41.000 Now you need to make your 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.

02:27:47.000 Like it's just access to your social media.

02:27:50.000 Oh, that's a very common thing now.

02:27:52.000 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.

02:28:00.000 Well, because they want all that data, they want to know who they can market to.

02:28:03.000 They want to see what your demographics are.

02:28:04.000 They want to say what is this customer like?

02:28:06.000 How can you opt out?

02:28:08.000 So there are some games that require you to have social media integration.

02:28:12.000 There's other people with dark patterns.

02:28:15.000 So like there, there are these patterns that exist in social media design and app design that steer you down a particular direction.

02:28:15.000 No.

02:28:24.000 And so they don't force you to do it.

02:28:26.000 But the average user, unless they're trying to fight their way out of it, is gonna do it.

02:28:30.000 So for example, I'll be logging into a game.

02:28:31.000 I've just downloaded Overwatch 2, and it says you need to log in.

02:28:35.000 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.

02:28:47.000 Oh, right.

02:28:48.000 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, this.

02:29:01.000 A lot of these kids, they just don't care.

02:29:03.000 They just click it.

02:29:03.000 You talk you talk to the Gen Z kids and it's like, what well, why do you want are you gonna give that away?

02:29:08.000 They say, well, like they they they they don't see value in it.

02:29:11.000 And they grew up with that as the norm.

02:29:13.000 Right.

02:29:13.000 And that's why I say it's important to remember when it wasn't the norm.

02:29:16.000 Do people get dummy accounts so that they can give a dummy account?

02:29:19.000 There are to that.

02:29:20.000 There are people who do it.

02:29:22.000 But most people don't.

02:29:24.000 And also here, like the thing is they make it where there's even reasons where you want it to be tied to your social media.

02:29:28.000 So they want to gather lots of information and you know, get you plugged into their marketing ecosystem.

02:29:33.000 And they say, Oh, if you if you log in with this social media account, then it can we can automatically add all of your friends to your in-game friends list.

02:29:42.000 So you don't have to go and manually invite them.

02:29:44.000 So they they make it like it is a convenience feature.

02:29:46.000 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.

02:29:54.000 Some of these apps, even you give them permission to post on your behalf.

02:29:58.000 Oh.

02:29:58.000 And what what they do is like this was uh this was innovated kind of by like the Farmville stuff.

02:30:03.000 Do you remember Farmville?

02:30:04.000 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.

02:30:12.000 Palmer just visited Joe's farm and helped him do this.

02:30:16.000 Those tactics have evolved way beyond to make these things very sticky, very addictive.

02:30:22.000 So look, you can make a fake account, you can make a burner account, and there's like one percent of people who will ever think of doing something like that.

02:30:29.000 And so um so for them it's just about mass.

02:30:33.000 And I wouldn't mind so much if it was just about making money.

02:30:35.000 Like making money is is fine.

02:30:37.000 Like I'm I'm I'm I'm a believer in the free market generally, I'm a believer in capitalism strongly.

02:30:42.000 But then the problem is you have this combination of capitalism-driven capture efforts compare uh combined with people who don't care about making money nearly so much as pushing their particular social ideals.

02:30:55.000 Like you've you've probably seen this in Hollywood.

02:30:58.000 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.

02:31:05.000 Uh and I say like making great games is the best reason.

02:31:08.000 Making money is an acceptable reason.

02:31:11.000 It's because they want to uh you know bring about greater equity and representation of people that look like them.

02:31:18.000 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 gonna berate them.

02:31:27.000 Anyone in the company who says, I actually think we should make games for our customers, not the people you wish were our customers.

02:31:33.000 Like, let's make games for the guys who buy our games, not the moms you wish were buying our games.

02:31:39.000 And people like that are being ejected out of companies.

02:31:42.000 It's I mean, it's very politically incorrect.

02:31:44.000 There's a question.

02:31:45.000 Well, that's the Bud Light dilemma.

02:31:47.000 It's exactly they tried to make Bud Light for people who don't want Bud Light.

02:31:51.000 It's this and make fun of the Bud Light people.

02:31:53.000 It's the mythical audience.

02:31:55.000 It's a mystical mainstream audience.

02:31:57.000 They they they say they and you know, it's even worse in gaming because they'll say things like, oh, you know, 50% of gamers are are uh you know stay-at-home moms.

02:32:07.000 And you're like, what?

02:32:08.000 That that obviously isn't true.

02:32:09.000 And what it is is it's something like there's a lot of stay-home homes who've played Candy Crush a few times.

02:32:14.000 And like there's a lot of them.

02:32:15.000 And they're like, therefore, we need to build to that market.

02:32:18.000 Okay, like I I don't want to get into a fight over like what a gamer is, but what do you think sounds like a better business plan?

02:32:25.000 To go after the young men, primarily who buy a dozen $50 games a year, or the mom who once spent five dollars on Candy Crush.

02:32:37.000 Like, you know, you and there's because there's kind of and if you and if you say that, if you put it the way I just put it, they're like, that's so sexist of you.

02:32:44.000 Why why don't you want to bring in new audiences?

02:32:46.000 Um I saw this when I was in I saw this when I was in Silicon Valley.

02:32:50.000 What I called it was uh I said there's too many people who drink Starbucks and not enough who drink Mountain Dew.

02:32:56.000 And you know exactly what I mean when I say that.

02:32:58.000 Like it's it's it's just it's uh it's it's been a really bizarre thing to watch in in all of these different in all of these different industries.

02:33:06.000 Aaron Powell Yeah, it's a mind virus.

02:33:08.000 It's captured universities and then it bled out into corporations.

02:33:12.000 Aaron Powell One of my one of my favorite questions to ask people is uh you know start starting a company is hard.

02:33:18.000 You can't you you'll fail most of the time, even when you don't constrain yourself to trying to you know change change the social system.

02:33:25.000 Like, look, if you could if you could make it where uh there's uh 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.

02:33:35.000 It's a trade-off, right?

02:33:36.000 You have to take resources you would have put on your customer, your real customers and put it towards them.

02:33:40.000 One question I ask people is just ideologically is okay, imagine your job is to build uh is to build a uh uh corporate building for a company.

02:33:51.000 And uh the company, you know exactly who they are.

02:33:53.000 You know how many men there are, you know how many women there are. 1.00

02:33:55.000 We don't have to say how many there are.

02:33:56.000 Like, we're not uh don't even don't don't make it about one gender versus another.

02:34:00.000 It's just there are lots of men, there's lots of women. 1.00

02:34:03.000 I won't pick a number.

02:34:04.000 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?

02:34:21.000 Like, would you pursue a different strategy?

02:34:23.000 And if it's different, it's like what would your strategy be?

02:34:25.000 And many people say, well, I would build it, you know, perfect 50-50. 0.83

02:34:28.000 And if they say, well, that I'm doing that because it's you know the easiest way to do it, I'd be like, okay, that's fine.

02:34:32.000 But if they say, well, I would, you know, I would I would hope that I would strive I I want to create an environment where it it will it should eventually be 50% men and 50% women.

02:34:42.000 I say, okay, so wait, you're gonna you you have a company, 90% men, 10% women.

02:34:46.000 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? 1.00

02:34:53.000 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?

02:35:01.000 Or are you trying to achieve totally parallel social aims at the expense of the business?

02:35:08.000 And companies are hiring a lot of people who think about it that way.

02:35:11.000 They don't see their role as to come in and make the company better or to make a better product for their customer.

02:35:16.000 They see it as to come in and affect that change, even if it tanks the company the process.

02:35:20.000 Have you seen How did that happen?

02:35:23.000 Dude, I don't know.

02:35:24.000 Where that's common.

02:35:25.000 I I think that probably you let I mean there's a lot of theories.

02:35:30.000 I can give you mine.

02:35:32.000 It was the zero interest rate phenomenon theory.

02:35:36.000 Are you familiar with this?

02:35:37.000 The zero interest rate phenomenon, ZERP, they call it.

02:35:39.000 Uh or some people call it the zero interest rate period.

02:35:42.000 Um 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.

02:35:53.000 That's where you've seen so much economic growth.

02:35:55.000 You've seen a lot of it artificially propped up in the tech and the media industry.

02:35:59.000 I think a lot of like these streaming plays have been propped up by ZERP.

02:36:02.000 When interest rates are extremely low and money is very cheap to borrow, people will spend tons and tons of tons of money.

02:36:09.000 The economy appears to be doing very well.

02:36:11.000 You have the growth that looks good on the stock market.

02:36:13.000 And so companies don't need to ever tighten their belts.

02:36:15.000 They can hire and higher and higher.

02:36:17.000 They can become grossly inefficient, they can per pursue things that don't make money, and they're still doing okay.

02:36:23.000 And so a lot of these companies, they they they're they're c're their employees were kind of out of control.

02:36:28.000 You had people coming out of college who believe their job was to change the world by using the money of these corporations.

02:36:34.000 And the corporations didn't push back on it because they would be accused of being bigots and committing hate crimes.

02:36:40.000 And they said, you know what?

02:36:42.000 The stock is going up, everything's going well, we can just keep doing this.

02:36:46.000 Um my theory is actually that interest rates going up have been very good for solving this problem.

02:36:51.000 You've seen a lot of layoffs in the tech industry.

02:36:53.000 You've seen a lot of layoffs in the media industry.

02:36:56.000 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.

02:37:03.000 Uh did you see, I 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?

02:37:12.000 He came in a year or two ago, and it was incredible.

02:37:15.000 He he he had this speech that was exactly what fans wanted to hear and what investors wanted to hear.

02:37:23.000 But his employees were furious.

02:37:25.000 He came on and said, in my tenure, I'm going to pursue something that's a bit novel for Warner Brothers.

02:37:32.000 Instead of making movies that people don't want to see, I'm going to make movies that people do want to see.

02:37:39.000 Instead of making movies that don't make money, instead, we will make movies that do make money.

02:37:45.000 And to do that, we are going to make products that people want, like Batman and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

02:37:54.000 And that is going to be the core of our market success.

02:37:57.000 And like that's what fans want.

02:37:58.000 They're like, oh my God, this is great.

02:38:00.000 They're not they're gonna stop making these kind of social justice pieces and make us the things that we actually want.

02:38:05.000 The investors love it because he says they're gonna make money.

02:38:07.000 But the people who are angry were all of the college students who joined thinking that they were gonna use billions of dollars from Warner Brothers to make their pet your pet art film projects about various oppressed groups.

02:38:21.000 And I think that that is happening across the industry.

02:38:23.000 And I think I think that's I think that's a good thing.

02:38:25.000 It's a good adjustment.

02:38:26.000 That makes sense.

02:38:27.000 So speaking of making things.

02:38:30.000 Oh yeah.

02:38:32.000 Bust out the helmet, son.

02:38:33.000 So let me I'm gonna take this off.

02:38:33.000 All right.

02:38:35.000 Okay.

02:38:36.000 So I've been working on Head Mount Displays for a long time.

02:38:40.000 I created the Oculus Rift when I was 19 years old, living in a camper trailer in my garage.

02:38:44.000 And that was really the virtual reality headset that changed the industry, sold that company for billions of dollars.

02:38:50.000 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.

02:38:58.000 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.

02:39:07.000 Think of it almost like a hive mind.

02:39:08.000 If I'm able to see something, you should be able to see it.

02:39:11.000 If a drone can see it, you should be able to see it.

02:39:13.000 Even if it's on the other side of a building, you should be able to see it and effectively have X-ray vision.

02:39:18.000 And I should be able to command and control all these other systems using this heads-up display interface.

02:39:23.000 It's I mean, none none of nothing none of what I'm saying sounds that crazy, right?

02:39:26.000 It just sounds like any science fiction film.

02:39:29.000 These are ideas that have been around for a hundred years, but only very recently has it become possible.

02:39:33.000 So this is a new product that we just announced at the Army's conference yesterday.

02:39:38.000 We've been working on it for years using our own money, no taxpayer dollars were used to create it.

02:39:43.000 Um it's called Eagle Eye.

02:39:45.000 And it is an integrated ballistics shell.

02:39:47.000 So you've got a helmet, um, you've got hearing protection, you've got thermal sensors, night sensors, uh uh signals intelligence sensors that allow you to detect where cell phones are, where radios are, see that in your view.

02:40:00.000 It even detects where gunshots are, shows them exactly where they're placed and how far they are.

02:40:06.000 So this is the this is a recreation of it.

02:40:09.000 So this is like, yeah, these this is uh so this is a video feed of what it is like to use the system.

02:40:13.000 So I've got the helmet on here, and then what I have is this pair of augmented reality glasses.

02:40:20.000 Um basically I can take these glasses and I put them on, these sync with the helmet and with these sensors.

02:40:29.000 So I can, for example, see where my gun is pointing, I can see where every enemy is, I can see where all of my buddies are, I can see so like there's a there's a view that's coming up here where you're gonna notice a drone picks up a guy behind that container over there, and what's gonna happen is when he walks behind that container, I'm able to continue to see where he is and what he's doing.

02:40:52.000 So here's Ghost X is the drone that's watching.

02:40:55.000 So just watch for a moment.

02:40:56.000 So the blue force is my friendlies.

02:40:58.000 So see that little right-hand corner where it sees behind the containers?

02:41:02.000 Uh-huh.

02:41:02.000 They're tracking where the bad guy is, they're tracking where my guys are, and then watch when they go behind the container.

02:41:09.000 So I can actually see through it and watch.

02:41:12.000 Now they're engaging the guy over there, and he's down.

02:41:14.000 Wow.

02:41:15.000 Imagine a guy's coming over a hill, and I want to engage him.

02:41:18.000 So actually, I'm gonna put on the mission shield.

02:41:20.000 There we go.

02:41:21.000 So um, 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.

02:41:32.000 And by the way, this view that I have, it's shared now with all of the robots as well.

02:41:38.000 So all the 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.

02:41:47.000 It's so crazy that I was born at the right time to actually get to build all this stuff.

02:41:53.000 Because you you know Robert Heinland, the science fiction author who did Starship Troopers.

02:41:57.000 Okay.

02:41:58.000 Um, 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 uh to do ballistics targeting, right?

02:42:14.000 Calculates where the wind is gonna blow you around and and where where it's going to go.

02:42:19.000 He was literally writing about this in the 1940s.

02:42:22.000 I mean, we're talking about almost a hundred years ago.

02:42:24.000 Wow.

02:42:24.000 And we happen to be born in the right time.

02:42:27.000 So, you know, uh too too late too late to explore the the seas, too early to explore the stars, but just in time to build Eagle Eye.

02:42:35.000 You're in the right timeline.

02:42:37.000 I am in the right time.

02:42:38.000 Do you ever feel like it's a simulation because of that?

02:42:40.000 Do you ever feel like you're living in some sort of bizarre simulation?

02:42:44.000 Because otherwise, like why you?

02:42:46.000 Why why live why do you have such a unique existence?

02:42:49.000 Why are you so fortunate?

02:42:51.000 Why why are all these cool things happening for you?

02:42:53.000 Aaron Powell It's like I'm reliving my nights here in the room with you.

02:42:56.000 Now I I ponder it a lot because I mean look, uh we talked earlier about how I would only be able to pull off these things I pulled off if I continue continuously succeeded over the code.

02:43:03.000 A lot of green lights and over and over again.

02:43:05.000 And it does make you think like what are the odds of that?

02:43:07.000 Is it is it more likely that the world is a simulation or not?

02:43:10.000 And I think actually it just comes down to it comes down to I I'm a spiritual person.

02:43:16.000 I believe in the existence of a higher creator of a higher power.

02:43:20.000 And I feel like there's actually a lot of similarities between that and believing in simulation theory.

02:43:26.000 I mean, like what people people say, oh, it's you know it's it's all a simulation.

02:43:29.000 Is that really so different from having a universe that was created by an all-powerful being?

02:43:33.000 Like you can like it's almost I I 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 uh can partake in.

02:43:47.000 They're like, no, I would never believe in you know a sky daddy. 1.00

02:43:51.000 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.

02:43:58.000 I don't know, man.

02:43:59.000 That's uh you're you're you're you're hitting on a lot of the tenets of the city.

02:44:02.000 Well, there's also like what were they trying to write down when they were writing the initial religious texts?

02:44:08.000 Like what were they actually describing?

02:44:10.000 When you're talking about something that's an oral traditionally pop up the There we go. 1.00

02:44:15.000 I can pop out this.

02:44:16.000 Can I put that on?

02:44:17.000 Yes, absolutely.

02:44:18.000 What are you seeing right now?

02:44:19.000 So right now, nothing.

02:44:21.000 Unfortunately, if I'm gonna give you a good demo, we need to go to an area where it's synced up to all the other helmets and we are wearing a night.

02:44:26.000 I want to show you the night.

02:44:27.000 I like how the ears pop out, though.

02:44:28.000 Yeah, so this is this is uh this is my doing.

02:44:31.000 Um so I'm a huge weapons enthusiast.

02:44:33.000 I own about 450 guns, huge number of you know I I own basically everything that anyone's ever fought in.

02:44:41.000 So ballistic vests, uniforms, boots, gloves, helmets.

02:44:45.000 I've just I I collect that stuff.

02:44:47.000 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, jam them into the product.

02:44:54.000 So like the cool thing about this is uh like you've if you've ever used earring protection, normally, you know, it pops up like this, right?

02:44:59.000 And you know, it's kind of dangling the way.

02:45:01.000 Notice how it's really tightly integrated, like it's not flopping around, right?

02:45:04.000 But I can pop it open and now I can hear you directly with my own two ears.

02:45:07.000 I can pop that and clip it back in, and I'm able to hear with electronic pass-through, and it actually uh enhances my hearing, so I can hear certain things better.

02:45:15.000 And you'll notice this is ballistic ear protection.

02:45:18.000 So if you ever seen like a high-cut helmet where you know how 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.

02:45:27.000 This is ballistic hearing protection.

02:45:28.000 So when I put this on, everything is protected with armor, even over the soft tissue in my ears and around my upper neck.

02:45:35.000 Aaron Ross Powell Is there any concern about the hinge or that during combat it would pop open?

02:45:40.000 No, no, this is it's a it's a super robust system.

02:45:42.000 So here I'll actually show you.

02:45:43.000 Um let me pull off.

02:45:45.000 So these are modular sensor pods at the top.

02:45:46.000 They call them wolf ears.

02:45:48.000 Um but I can basically swap these even in the field so I could carry, for example, well, but that seemed too easy to take off.

02:45:54.000 Meg, that's buddy.

02:45:55.000 Right.

02:45:56.000 But I'm saying if if you're in the middle of a scramble and you're here, check this one out.

02:46:00.000 This one has no connector on it.

02:46:02.000 This is this one is uh the these are not actually real modules.

02:46:05.000 These are based these is a tricky one where we have real modules and show modules.

02:46:11.000 The real modules in general, the army doesn't want to have them passed around and people taking pictures of them.

02:46:15.000 Like at A USA, there's people walking up taking pictures of everything in the booth.

02:46:19.000 They don't want you to show off, for example, the size of the aperture of the thermal imagery you're using, because then they can back reverse how far you can see, what level of thermal radiation you can see.

02:46:28.000 Um, Yeah, normally you actually when it has a connector in there, you gotta actually jam it in there and it's retained.

02:46:35.000 And so have you done tests where like people fall down off hills and go for a tumble and so this technology, the the last revision of it is already with the army.

02:46:43.000 They're doing trials and tests of this literally right now.

02:46:46.000 Um but like if you if you look here, it's a basically a spring steel mechanism there.

02:46:51.000 And so it's not just strong, it's also flexible.

02:46:54.000 So it's it basically it can bend and then snap back.

02:46:57.000 And so you it's very, very hard to overbend this, overextend this.

02:47:00.000 Got it.

02:47:01.000 And if you did, like it's very hard, but if you did, you grab some pliers and you bend it back.

02:47:05.000 And notice how that's a replaceable module there.

02:47:07.000 I could just unscrew this and replace it with a new part.

02:47:10.000 Everything on here, I can repair in the field with a field repair kit as well.

02:47:13.000 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 ears protected?

02:47:23.000 Exactly.

02:47:23.000 But it's even better.

02:47:24.000 We're using an array of mics.

02:47:25.000 So those ones do they have two microphones, like the walkers, they typically have one here, one here.

02:47:29.000 What we're doing is a phased array of microphones so that I can actually steer the amplification beam.

02:47:35.000 Like I I could say, hey, like I could I could send an emotional.

02:47:41.000 Well, even crazier.

02:47:42.000 Imagine that I'm looking at a target with this, and I look at that target, 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.

02:47:57.000 So it can give me not just enhanced hearing, but directional enhanced hearing.

02:48:01.000 I could say, I want to listen to what that guy 100 yards over there is saying.

02:48:04.000 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.

02:48:10.000 Um it's worth noting, like the way this came together is crazy.

02:48:14.000 There was a contract to do this to build an infantry combat heads up display uh in 2017 and 2018 that was awarded to Microsoft by the United States Army.

02:48:25.000 It was 22 billion dollars.

02:48:28.000 22 billion dollars to develop this technology.

02:48:32.000 And I actually wanted to compete in that competition back then, but at the time, Android was only about two dozen people.

02:48:38.000 And so it was a competition.

02:48:40.000 Do you remember Magic Leap?

02:48:41.000 The all go around Yeah.

02:48:42.000 It was a competition between Magic Leap and Microsoft.

02:48:45.000 Microsoft ended up winning.

02:48:46.000 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 it's fine to not like the military, but you shouldn't have people who don't like the military running the military, right?

02:48:59.000 Like peep people I and I think you shouldn't have people who are in love with the military regulating the military, right?

02:49:05.000 You know, every everyone, everyone has their role.

02:49:08.000 Anyway, uh I never there I never I was very skeptical of their technology.

02:49:12.000 Uh you remember HoloLens?

02:49:13.000 Mm-hmm.

02:49:14.000 That was Microsoft's like consumer virtual reality, augmented reality uh effort.

02:49:19.000 Um their AR project was adapting that to the military into this product called Ivas.

02:49:26.000 And uh to make a very, very long story short, it had a lot of problems.

02:49:31.000 Their early hardware was making people sick.

02:49:34.000 It was ha it had lag, the night vision wasn't working well.

02:49:37.000 There were soldier evaluation touch points that came out where they were saying, Hey, I'll I'll get killed if I wear this.

02:49:43.000 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.

02:49:50.000 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 IVAS program?

02:49:57.000 Like, will you just let me take over?

02:49:59.000 You guys can keep building, you know, Microsoft applications, cloud computing, the stuff you're good at.

02:50:04.000 Let me build the tactical heads-up display hardware.

02:50:07.000 And when I first talked to them years ago, they thought I was nuts.

02:50:09.000 Like they they was almost like insulted.

02:50:11.000 It was like when Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo and they got la literally laughed out of the room.

02:50:16.000 Um then as time went on, they started to laugh less and less, and eventually they they said, Hey, remember how you said you wanted to take over IVAS?

02:50:26.000 We would actually love to partner with you on this and let you bring your magic to bear on this problem.

02:50:32.000 And I'm I'm I'm I try to be a humble guy.

02:50:35.000 I don't usually succeed, but I am not humble in this one regard.

02:50:38.000 I believe that I am the world's best head-mounted display designer, bar none.

02:50:43.000 I took the crown with the Oculus Rift, I think I still hold it.

02:50:46.000 And so I was able to kick the program into shape.

02:50:49.000 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.

02:50:58.000 It is the thing that I think is actually gonna end up on the heads of every soldier.

02:51:01.000 Here, try try try to take things on, and you'll feel they're a bit heavier than normal glasses.

02:51:06.000 But the other thing about them is that they're also ballistic rated glasses.

02:51:09.000 So you see in the front and then also on the sides.

02:51:11.000 Yeah, so like these can take pieces of frag.

02:51:13.000 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.

02:51:21.000 And yeah, I would say so.

02:51:22.000 And even is this uh outside piece of the side.

02:51:24.000 So yeah, put put put the glass, try putting the glass back on, see if you can pop that off.

02:51:27.000 You'll notice like that one is is actually yeah, there we go.

02:51:30.000 So that's a mission shield.

02:51:30.000 Perfect.

02:51:30.000 This one.

02:51:32.000 Um I like that you asked about it, because actually no nobody's even noticed really that it's two pieces.

02:51:37.000 So the mission shield is a piece that allows you to reconfigure the glasses for different use cases.

02:51:42.000 If you're using this, for example, to like give you automated instructions on how to repair your Humvee, for example.

02:51:49.000 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 gonna have an explosion happen and you protect my eyes.

02:51:58.000 But you can also do things like have different types of protection.

02:52:01.000 For example, that's not an that that's just a normal ballistic mission shield.

02:52:06.000 We have another mission shield that protects you from laser energy weapons.

02:52:09.000 So it's actually tuned where now it makes your vision turn.

02:52:13.000 I I I I probably shouldn't talk about exactly what color because it allows people to figure out what frequencies we're blocking.

02:52:18.000 But there are mission shields that you can put on that will protect you from weapons that we know China has. 0.94

02:52:24.000 China has a bunch of directed energy laser weapons, some of them for taking out drones, others designed to blind human troops.

02:52:31.000 And so we're designing mission shields that protect you from those types of emissions.

02:52:35.000 They're designed to blind human troops.

02:52:38.000 So are they employed from drones?

02:52:40.000 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.

02:52:48.000 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.

02:52:57.000 Any system that can temporarily blind people at long range is capable of blinding people permanently at long range.

02:53:06.000 It's just that that's the line you walk.

02:53:07.000 Like if you want it to work in any fog, you need more power.

02:53:10.000 If you want it to work at long ranges, you need more power.

02:53:12.000 But like, for example, imagine we deployed a bunch of these glasses and they had the laser filters built in from the start.

02:53:17.000 Now imagine that China shifts their laser frequencies 10 nanometers so that it bypasses that filter.

02:53:23.000 Imagine if I had to just replace all my AR glasses.

02:53:26.000 That's not acceptable, right?

02:53:28.000 So everything on this system is totally modular.

02:53:28.000 Right.

02:53:31.000 So what would happen is if they shifted their laser weapons, we would just give people a new mission shield.

02:53:35.000 Now they're all set.

02:53:36.000 That mission shield comes off very easy, though.

02:53:38.000 So this comes look, I gotta admit, these are primarily for like showing off to the army.

02:53:45.000 So it'll somehow another secure into place if an actual it's actually still gonna be magnets.

02:53:50.000 It's just going to be a lot more force to remove.

02:53:53.000 I'm wondering how much I should get into the movie magic here.

02:53:55.000 So look, I'll I'll get a little bit into it.

02:53:59.000 I mostly an engineer, I mostly build stuff.

02:54:01.000 But a big part of what I do is understanding what magicians think when they are drawing attentions things, when they have patter, what you when you're going through a demo of something to somebody.

02:54:13.000 Like I used to demo the Oculus Rift to thousands of people a year.

02:54:16.000 High powered executives, government people, um, yeah, you know, uh uh CEOs of major game companies, people we're trying to hire.

02:54:25.000 And you have to develop uh a pattern of how you talk about stuff.

02:54:28.000 And you need to be able to go in any direction.

02:54:30.000 If somebody says, Well, what about this?

02:54:31.000 You need to be able to show them that feature, and you need to be ready for how you show the feature.

02:54:35.000 I need to be intimately familiar with every part of it.

02:54:38.000 The reason that the magnets are so weak on this is because we show this to people who are weak.

02:54:42.000 I'm I'm I'm not kidding.

02:54:44.000 If you actually have like, because you're not swapping this like as you're running around, right?

02:54:48.000 So like on the real one, you can have you know where you're like, uh, you know, and it busts off.

02:54:52.000 Right.

02:54:53.000 Imagine we're sitting in uh in a demo room, and then you hand this to either a member of the press or even let's say a member of the arm armed forces, and I say, here you go.

02:54:53.000 But imagine this.

02:55:02.000 And your name is Ashley.

02:55:03.000 Right.

02:55:04.000 Take that Ashley. 1.00

02:55:05.000 Pull it off, and you'll uh, uh, uh That's the problem.

02:55:05.000 Okay.

02:55:11.000 And like because you need some decent face.

02:55:12.000 You see those tabs on the end?

02:55:13.000 Uh-huh.

02:55:14.000 So like the protrusions, yeah.

02:55:16.000 That's to make it easier for your fingers to grab when you have way more force.

02:55:19.000 There are people who have really weak fingers, they don't really know how to grab stuff.

02:55:23.000 And then uh it's actually the same thing with it's the same thing.

02:55:26.000 I understand what you're saying.

02:55:27.000 So I'm I'm showing you a little bit of the movie, the movie magic behind behind how we think these here.

02:55:32.000 You if you want to take this, you can put it on.

02:55:33.000 This is an actual weighted helmet.

02:55:35.000 We've developed a bunch of novel technology to make this work.

02:55:38.000 You're oh yeah, it actually fits on you.

02:55:41.000 Oh here, you you're a little wrapped, your your your chin straps wrapped around.

02:55:45.000 Yeah.

02:55:46.000 Just sorry, I I wrapped it around before you even had it.

02:55:48.000 Yep, there you go.

02:55:52.000 But yeah, I mean if you're familiar with walkers, very, very similar to what we do on the hearing enhancement side, it's just a world even beyond that.

02:55:59.000 Is it too tight or you got it?

02:56:01.000 And then this snaps.

02:56:02.000 Oh, yeah.

02:56:03.000 How does this snap?

02:56:04.000 So here, let me I might have to come around.

02:56:06.000 There's a little bit of a trick that you learn it.

02:56:08.000 What it does is it goes in and then you're gonna push it up and back diagonally.

02:56:12.000 There you go.

02:56:12.000 Oh, you did it.

02:56:15.000 That's just how intuitive it is.

02:56:17.000 But uh it's and the cool thing about this is you don't have these like mounts now that are snagging you.

02:56:17.000 Yeah.

02:56:23.000 Here, well, you gotta put on the glasses too.

02:56:24.000 Oh, yeah.

02:56:25.000 There you go.

02:56:25.000 You don't have the mounts that are snagging you.

02:56:27.000 You don't like have you ever you've used night vision?

02:56:31.000 I have.

02:56:32.000 I mean, it's just you know, you have this big giant unicorn horn, this thing pounding on your fest.

02:56:37.000 Also, it's very unbalanced.

02:56:38.000 Uh weight that's out here is torquing your neck continuously.

02:56:41.000 Right.

02:56:41.000 And it's it's it's annoying when you're standing in place.

02:56:45.000 But if you let's say hit a pothole in a Humvee with a big weight on the end of a lever, you destroy your neck.

02:56:52.000 Next to you, I I think it's 20.

02:56:55.000 Oh my god, is I that can't even be right.

02:56:58.000 I want to say, I want, I I need to look this up.

02:57:00.000 It might be is it 200 million for the Air Force?

02:57:03.000 And then I want to say it's 20 billion dollars that the DOD spends on neck injuries.

02:57:08.000 What primarily through the thro through the VA, right?

02:57:12.000 There's so many neck injuries that occur from spinal compression, people getting their heads whipped around.

02:57:16.000 That's why helmets need to be extremely lightweight, tightly integrated, no snag hazards.

02:57:22.000 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, uh at a weird angle, and I'm trying to run through a room.

02:57:31.000 Right.

02:57:32.000 Or like someone's turning and part of their rifle, you know, they're right up on me and it snags on my helmet and pulls me.

02:57:37.000 Like you've probably seen a lot of people put like big battery packs for their night vision on the back here.

02:57:41.000 Same thing.

02:57:42.000 It creates a huge snag as or like you're sliding down something or sliding over an edge, you clear it, and then the back of your head hits that fence and you go boom.

02:57:50.000 What's the battery power of something like that?

02:57:52.000 Okay.

02:57:53.000 So this has a tiny battery pack on it.

02:57:56.000 This has 30 minutes of battery life.

02:57:58.000 So what is the lithium-ion capacity?

02:58:00.000 Is it lithium ion?

02:58:02.000 Like a bat, like a cell phone battery.

02:58:03.000 So the battery on here is actually uh the battery that is in here is basically an emergency reserve.

02:58:09.000 It is not intended to power it most of the time.

02:58:11.000 It is a primary cell chemistry that won't burst into flames.

02:58:15.000 It's basically one time use.

02:58:16.000 So it's like think of it like an emergency battery that runs it when your helmet is disconnected from the main battery.

02:58:21.000 The main battery is this.

02:58:23.000 So you ever use ballistic plates before?

02:58:25.000 Yes.

02:58:26.000 So this is a standard geometry, sappy geometry plate.

02:58:29.000 Um good for rocking.

02:58:32.000 Exactly.

02:58:32.000 Some weight to it.

02:58:33.000 So the cool thing about this is it's a combination battery, computer, and ballistic plate.

02:58:40.000 And so here's the craziest part about this.

02:58:43.000 Normally you would wear a plate, and then you would have to wear a battery and a computer.

02:58:47.000 That's how everyone's always done heads-up displays before.

02:58:49.000 And I realize that's crazy because you need that space for other stuff, right?

02:58:53.000 You want to be carrying ammo, you want to be carrying equipment, you want to be carrying uh grenades or or admin stuff.

02:58:59.000 You you you can't use your most valuable real estate to just carry a battery brick.

02:59:04.000 So what's in here is a battery technology that is an electrolyte-free solid-state ceramic battery.

02:59:12.000 Now, ceramic batteries are not as high energy density as in terms of like they don't have the they don't have as much energy per pound as the very, very best, like let's say car electric batteries.

02:59:24.000 But they're pretty good ballistic material.

02:59:27.000 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.

02:59:35.000 You should make your battery part of your ballistic material stack up so that is it the best ballistic material in the world?

02:59:44.000 No.

02:59:45.000 Is it the best battery material in the world?

02:59:47.000 No.

02:59:49.000 But you can have enough of it that it's better than either of those things working separately.

02:59:54.000 Like if I were to try to make a system that was a normal armor plate and then also this much battery.

03:00:00.000 So, like uh, even though it's weird, we actually got all the power actually labeled right here.

03:00:04.000 So this is 900 watt hour battery.

03:00:07.000 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.

03:00:13.000 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 skeep out of his ruck, yeah, or I can uh or I could just put more shit into it.

03:00:28.000 Uh 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.

03:00:35.000 Yeah, they're all these guys are already carrying an insane amount of stuff.

03:00:38.000 So this is only the start.

03:00:40.000 We're building a bunch of other augments that combine multiple systems into one thing.

03:00:45.000 Um in fact, this has also got a bunch of radio hardware in it as well.

03:00:49.000 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.

03:00:57.000 Uh but I I want to keep keep doing that.

03:01:00.000 Dude, I will know so cool.

03:01:02.000 In general, I would recommend using this as your rear plate, not your front plate.

03:01:05.000 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, uh 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.

03:01:21.000 And if you get shot with a plate, it's possible to take that plate and swap it with a fresh one.

03:01:27.000 Um I mean, look, you you're the world's biggest badass if you're able to do that in a fire fight.

03:01:32.000 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.

03:01:39.000 But it does happen.

03:01:40.000 And so I we're generally recommending that people use this as the rear plate to make it less likely to get shot.

03:01:45.000 But fully capable of operating in flunt front plate service.

03:01:49.000 This is amazing stuff, man.

03:01:51.000 Dude, I really fascinated.

03:01:52.000 I love my job.

03:01:53.000 I get to work with I can tell the the just the coolest technology on the bleeding edge of all this.

03:01:57.000 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.

03:02:05.000 But I do this and I get to have end users telling me, Palmer, this is how you saved our units' life.

03:02:11.000 Palmer, this is how your technology protected our base.

03:02:14.000 Palmer, people would be dead in this particular building if you had not developed the technology that you did.

03:02:20.000 That is the most rewarding thing that you can do.

03:02:23.000 At least it's the most rewarding thing that I've ever done.

03:02:25.000 It's it's it's a it's a it's it's a really cool set of problems.

03:02:29.000 And I I highly encourage people who are really smart to look at doing this stuff because some people they say, Well, I don't want to work on weapons, you know, it's ethically fraught.

03:02:36.000 And the point I make to them is that this is whether you like it or not, we need some form of weapons, right?

03:02:42.000 We're not gonna disarm the entire world.

03:02:44.000 There are bad guys out there, we need to have something.

03:02:48.000 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.

03:02:58.000 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 and arguably to work on them.

03:03:06.000 So that's that's the way that I look at it.

03:03:09.000 Well, it's cool as fuck.

03:03:10.000 I'm glad you're making it, man.

03:03:11.000 And I really enjoyed this conversation.

03:03:13.000 I'm really glad we did this.

03:03:14.000 This is a lot of fun.

03:03:15.000 So much fun.

03:03:16.000 I've I've got to get you out sometime.

03:03:18.000 I would love to to the range, because we've got a test range where we can actually put you in 100%.

03:03:22.000 Give you a rifle, you'll be able to mark targets.

03:03:24.000 Let's fucking go.

03:03:25.000 Let's do it.

03:03:26.000 Let's do it.

03:03:26.000 Thank you very much.

03:03:27.000 It's really fun.

03:03:28.000 Thanks for being here.

03:03:29.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 16, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2394 - Palmer Luckey

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