In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we talk about how to get a good night's rest, how to relax in a chair, and why you should get a float tank to program while floating in the ocean.
00:00:50.000So 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.
00:01:05.000He hasn't he hasn't gotten all the way there yet.
00:01:07.000The hardest part has actually been the mouse.
00:01:08.000There'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.
00:02:01.000If 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.
00:02:13.000So 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.
00:02:20.000I would let you use ours to try it out, but we just had a problem with one of our pumps broke.
00:02:33.000I'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.
00:02:56.000Like 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.
00:03:00.000You're in there, you have zero distractions.
00:03:02.000It's like your m your mind has more computational power that's available.
00:03:07.000Because 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.
00:03:16.000There's all these different things that your body is recognizing as input.
00:03:20.000When 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.
00:03:29.000And you go to where in the park, it's nice and peaceful.
00:03:32.000Now you can have a conversation, it's so much easier.
00:03:34.000Well, you don't realize that like regular everyday life, just establishing the the the distance between the walls and thinking about all the data.
00:03:42.000All that stuff is your brain is computing this.
00:04:50.000If 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.
00:05:01.000That would be the perfect environment to do it in salt water.
00:05:16.000How old were you when you started working there?
00:05:18.000So I started building virtual reality headset prototypes when I was 14 or 15.
00:05:24.000And 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.
00:05:40.000So it was kind of a it was kind of a crazy arc for me.
00:05:42.000I did like that was like you know that would that was I was putting myself through school.
00:05:54.000And it was one of these crazy things where the universe kind of brought us together.
00:05:58.000I was working on my VR technology and nobody was paying attention to VR back then.
00:06:02.000It was a kind of a crazy person thing.
00:06:04.000Nobody was paying attention to what I was doing.
00:06:05.000But I was posting about it on this internet forum.
00:06:07.000And 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.
00:06:17.000And 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.
00:06:25.000And 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?
00:06:30.000Said, Well, I'm not really selling these yet, but uh I'm I'd be happy to lend it to you for free.
00:06:36.000He 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.
00:06:43.000He introduced me to Sony, they tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab.
00:06:48.000I turned them down, they doubled the offer, I turned that down.
00:06:51.000Um 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.
00:06:58.000Where everyone was like, oh, if John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important.
00:07:01.000And 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.
00:07:08.000So we got then I then I had the the the incredible opportunity to work with one of my childhood heroes as my CTO.
00:07:57.000It 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.
00:08:07.000VR gaming, at least as it exists today, takes a lot more caloric expenditure than any other type of gaming.
00:08:13.000I mean, like and like even more than like other motion games.
00:08:16.000Like remember we bowling and we sports, like that's like one movement every once in a while.
00:08:20.000Like beat saber is a full body workout.
00:08:22.000What's really impressive is the boxing games.
00:08:25.000The boxing games are a really good workout.
00:08:27.000You could play, I think one of them was Creed by a company called Servios.
00:08:48.000You 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.
00:09:00.000So it's it's one of those teeny tiny worlds.
00:09:02.000There were there were so few of us that really believed in VR in those days.
00:09:05.000Aaron Powell Is there a VR that like a professional boxer could use?
00:09:10.000Like could you get VR to the point where you could program it with AI?
00:09:14.000So you could take like the movement of like a sugar ray Leonard or something like that and actually program it into the machine.
00:09:22.000It's not just something you could do, it's being done.
00:09:24.000There are boxers who are using this technology.
00:09:27.000Um 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.
00:09:52.000So 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.
00:10:03.000Let me send you let me show you the text message that I was just doing with Logan Paul last night.
00:10:08.000Um I said it's time to have robots fighting people.
00:10:15.000My 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.
00:10:24.000Like we were talking through like no, this was less VR.
00:10:27.000Well, are you are you even following some of the robot fighting league stuff?
00:10:32.000You put on a VR headset, you put on a motion capture suit, you teleoperate a robot.
00:10:36.000One 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.
00:10:44.000But 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.
00:10:52.000So 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.
00:11:01.000The 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.
00:12:45.000One 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.
00:12:56.000So 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.
00:13:04.000So 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.
00:13:14.000So you hit fold your fingers and then punch again.
00:13:17.000And it's like one punch, but it's a double punch.
00:13:19.000And then one of the culmination of his training is where his master shows him that there's actually a final step.
00:13:39.000I 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.
00:14:47.000Trevor 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.
00:14:53.000I mean, we're making robots for fighting, and they all have very hyper-specialized forms.
00:14:58.000And some of them look a bit like sharks or a bit like birds, but generally, yeah, you're right.
00:15:03.000The human form is not the one that you would actually base a terminator off.
00:15:09.000Although 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.
00:15:28.000You 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?
00:15:40.000Uh but that's just that's just something I paused from time to time.
00:15:46.000The later ones truly were for deception.
00:15:48.000But if you look at a lot of the flashes into the future, they don't have meat-shielded terminators.
00:15:52.000There's lots of like T-Series uh humanoid combat robots that are just walking around as bare metal skeletons.
00:15:59.000And 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.
00:16:18.000It'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.
00:16:25.000I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's interesting.
00:16:28.000And that's how life eventually does create artificial life.
00:16:32.000Well, 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.
00:16:54.000Uh 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.
00:17:04.000Trevor 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.
00:17:32.000I haven't dug into that one as deep as others.
00:17:34.000I've just been too busy really lately.
00:17:35.000And that you're right, this is like very recent news.
00:17:37.000Aaron Powell I always wonder if someone got overenthusiastic or if someone said, hey, yeah, why don't you shut the fuck up?
00:17:44.000You know, like we're trying to slow this whole release of alien technology, alien life, slow it down.
00:17:54.000Aaron 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.
00:18:02.000I think it's gonna end up being, you know, some microbes.
00:18:04.000It's not whatever they saw was not consistent with, you know, oh dude, it's a it's a person in the rock.
00:18:18.000And 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.
00:18:29.000And the thing that what we like what we really need even more than discovering microbes, like these flying objects.
00:18:36.000The 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.
00:18:45.000It's very rare to get both of those totally different types of sensors looking at at the same time.
00:18:50.000It'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?
00:18:56.000Like it's at people are actively trying to trick it.
00:18:58.000You can make radars see things that aren't there.
00:19:00.000You can make cameras see things that aren't there if you're really smart about how you interact with them.
00:19:03.000It'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.
00:19:11.000Now you saw the recent one with the hellfire that was fired.
00:19:14.000And it appears to have broken broken up but then kept moving.
00:19:18.000That'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.
00:19:43.000Just 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.
00:19:53.000I do believe that one of the one of the members of the unidentified aerial phenomenon committees in Congress introduced it into a hearing.
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00:21:31.000You 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.
00:23:38.000But 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.
00:23:46.000You know, like that they they look into the the strange phenomenon.
00:23:50.000Um those groups do exist, and I've tracked down a few of them.
00:23:53.000The 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.
00:24:03.000Like 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.
00:24:18.000Anyway, 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.
00:24:35.000Oh 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.
00:24:45.000Yes, yes, yes, sir, he'll be here in twelve hours.
00:24:47.000You know, like I I feel like there's enough and not even just aliens.
00:24:51.000In 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.
00:25:06.000And 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.
00:25:16.000Because too many people have been misappropriating funds if this is real.
00:25:44.000Also, the people that are in charge of the projects, there's all this money that they have to lie to Congress about.
00:25:52.000And 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.
00:25:59.000One of the things that they're proposing is amnesty.
00:26:01.000Just give like blanket amnesty, tell us what the fuck you know, let's go.
00:26:06.000But then they're not going to be able to do that.
00:26:06.000And I still have a limited time amnesty, or you say and and the AMC only applies to what is disclosed in this amnesty.
00:26:18.000So 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.
00:26:26.000You know, like so stuff is probably it's probably real ugly.
00:26:39.000I 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.
00:26:50.000And so that was why I got into that was why I got into the defense space.
00:26:54.000Well, isn't that with everything though, right?
00:26:55.000It's like that's how it is with charities as well.
00:26:57.000It'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?
00:27:25.000Like 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.
00:27:33.000Like you might be able to do that going after like health care problems, maybe education problems, definitely going after Department of Defense problems.
00:27:41.000And I know a lot more about how to build good technology than I do about health care.
00:27:46.000And so um, like if these if these were all private companies, they would never survive the way they're running.
00:28:15.000Oh man, it's it might be worth pulling it up.
00:28:17.000He 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.
00:28:31.000And so that's what we're gonna be doing now.
00:28:33.000Like and he like he killed the joint light tactical vehicle program.
00:28:37.000He 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.
00:28:47.000And 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.
00:29:01.000It 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.
00:29:12.000Uh I I'm I'm I'm actually pretty optimistic about this across the services.
00:29:17.000I think like pe peep people are fed up.
00:29:19.000There's Do you think Doge sort of started that ball moving and then?
00:29:24.000That direction is sort of momentum is headed on its side, right?
00:29:27.000I I think the you know the doge thing was interesting because it wasn't even the technique so much.
00:29:32.000Like 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.
00:29:42.000That doesn't really apply to finding the problems in DOD because it's it's just so much more deeply buried.
00:29:48.000But it kind of gave people permission to go look at these things.
00:29:51.000Like it gave people permission to even say, I believe there is billions of dollars in waste in my department.
00:30:06.000Well, I mean let's go to like kind of like So you just didn't want the boat for the Trevor Burrus.
00:30:09.000Well, I mean let's go to like the height of and you know, not even making it political, just timeline-wise.
00:30:13.000Go to the like the middle of the Biden administration.
00:30:15.000Could you imagine any official in that area, like secretary or chair or anybody coming out and saying, my department is wasting billions of dollars.
00:30:25.000We are taking money from taxpayers and using it on absurd nonsense.
00:30:31.000That would never happen five years ago.
00:30:33.000And 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.
00:30:42.000So 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.
00:30:56.000Well, 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.
00:31:13.000Well, it and there's it's e it goes even beyond that.
00:31:15.000We're like you know, central planning has downsides, but it does have upsides.
00:31:18.000And 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.
00:31:26.000There'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.
00:31:37.000They just they just they just they just imprison them for treason and or kill them.
00:31:42.000I'm not saying that's what we should do exactly.
00:31:45.000But I think that there's a scale to all of these things.
00:31:47.000On the scale of, you know, give them another shot versus shoot them in the head for treason.
00:31:52.000We could probably move in that direction without going all of the way, and it would probably be healthy for our country's national security.
00:33:08.000So like I don't know why we've given a private company a monopoly.
00:33:11.000Like 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.
00:33:22.000Like they they would be regulated out of existence.
00:33:24.000But you know, it's a lot what you really want is competition.
00:33:27.000You want organizations, private or public, that when they trip and fall, they skin their own knees instead of getting bailed out by taxpayers.
00:33:35.000You want them to you live in fear, be highly competitive.
00:33:38.000Um by the way, this is their audits, by the way.
00:33:42.000And 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.
00:33:49.000And the problem is right now we don't have a lot of that.
00:33:51.000I will say though, you asked, should you know, should should these national security programs be in the hands of private companies?
00:33:57.000I think that's true for the development of the technology.
00:34:00.000However, 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.
00:34:34.000How could you work with this country or that country?
00:34:36.000How could you build this type of system or that type of system?
00:34:38.000And 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?
00:34:47.000Like 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.
00:34:57.000And 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.
00:35:07.000To me, that's the most like cyberpunk dystopian thing either.
00:35:10.000Imagine 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?
00:35:17.000I 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.
00:35:35.000I think I'm not that black-pilled either, but I'm getting there.
00:35:38.000I'm not I'm I'm look, I sometimes I see it too.
00:35:41.000I mean, I think that what it is is you inevitably when you have a pendulum, sometimes it will swing too far.
00:35:46.000And I but I think the good news it can correct.
00:35:48.000I 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.
00:35:57.000I think never would have happened had people really known the truth behind a lot of those actions.
00:36:00.000But in the end, we did have the ability to hold them accountable.
00:36:03.000Now the real problem is that people didn't hold them accountable.
00:36:06.000Like 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.
00:36:12.000But I I would say that's a fault of the American people, not of the democratic process.
00:36:16.000It just means people don't care about that issue as much, which I think they should care more.
00:36:20.000But I think they're also not that informed, like universally.
00:36:24.000Now is it is that because they don't want to be or because they can't be.
00:36:33.000But 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.
00:36:46.000Stories 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.
00:36:53.000They can't just go out and burn everybody in the government or nobody will ever talk to them.
00:36:57.000You'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.
00:37:05.000And 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.
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00:38:34.000Our 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.
00:38:53.000It is an America, but it's a little disconcerting.
00:38:55.000Like when you see the way they're handling things in Europe.
00:38:58.000Like 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.
00:39:20.000Um 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.
00:39:30.000So 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.
00:39:39.000Anyway, when we started the site, it was me and a few other people who were kind of running it.
00:39:43.000I was the founder and there were a few other co-administrators.
00:39:46.000And one of them was this British guy who went by the online handle of bacteria.
00:39:50.000And I won't say his real name because it doesn't matter.
00:40:11.000And he says, Oh, we need to be kind about what we say.
00:40:14.000You know, that we we shouldn't say anything that is bad.
00:40:16.000And he was always pushing that our rules should say it's that it was against our rules to offend anybody.
00:40:21.000And you shouldn't be able to say anything uh that was that was that was too offensive.
00:40:24.000And uh you we mostly just made fun of him, aha, he's the old British man, you know.
00:40:28.000Uh and but what's interesting is he ended up eventually leaving the site because he thought people were being too mean to each other.
00:40:33.000And 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.
00:40:43.000We're like, well, I mean, they and you know we're we're we're all making fun of that.
00:40:47.000We were making our own little you know image macros and memes about it.
00:40:50.000Like 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.
00:40:57.000Nobody will say anything to you that might offend or displease you.
00:41:01.000Um 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.
00:41:10.000And I think it really is partly a cultural reflection for them.
00:41:14.000Like there are a lot of people in the UK who genuinely think it's good to police this stuff.
00:41:19.000They 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.
00:41:25.000And of course, you have people who are protesting against that.
00:41:27.000But I think that also their surveillance state, you know, where there's cameras everywhere.
00:41:31.000It's actually a reflection of different cultural norms.
00:41:33.000And 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.
00:41:54.000That's the crazy you think the majority of people want it that way.
00:41:57.000I 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.
00:43:04.000Now, these same people might say, I have strong opinions about the COVID lockdown information lockdown in China.
00:43:09.000Like they might say, I don't like that the Chinese government is locking down on you know, locking us in our apartments.
00:43:14.000But 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.
00:44:22.000Of course, you know, part of this it comes down to an attitude.
00:44:24.000I mean, you you're probably familiar with the numbers in the American Revolution.
00:44:27.000Only about three percent of America supported the revolution.
00:44:29.000It was it was a it was a really niche movement of very dedicated, motivated people.
00:44:35.000And 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.
00:44:45.000Well, that's you see this in Russia too.
00:45:34.000A lot of the Russians who went to fight in Ukraine in the early days, I think the truth is out now.
00:45:39.000But 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.
00:45:49.000And 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.
00:45:59.000Um and people in Russia really believed that.
00:46:02.000Like the guys who are fighting on the front lines, the guys who are flying tanks and helicopters, they believed it.
00:46:07.000When 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.
00:46:14.000It 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.
00:46:21.000Like I they showed me videos of them wearing polo shirts, shooting down the helicopter in their parking lot.
00:46:29.000So the the the pilots the pilots kind of go bag, you know, this bag with all of his emergency and survival gear in it.
00:46:36.000It 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.
00:46:53.000This guy thought that he was gonna be s he thought the women were gonna be all over him.
00:46:57.000They were gonna he was gonna need 50 condoms for the post-war celebration.
00:47:11.000And 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.
00:47:38.000I don't know if everybody had 50, but they brought condoms.
00:47:40.000Well, uh a lot of guys had condoms and a lot of people brought their dress uniforms.
00:47:45.000They 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.
00:48:57.000So Desert Storm, we were like, we're the fuck shit.
00:49:00.000We're just gonna roll in and kick everybody's ass.
00:49:02.000And it happened so quickly with so minimal casualties.
00:49:05.000And my grandpa, he wasn't military, but he was he was a United Airlines pilot for 45 years.
00:49:10.000And he was part of the civilian support element for Desert Storm.
00:49:13.000So 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.
00:49:21.000I mean, they were they were flying like you know, crazy 24-hour shifts getting people in and out.
00:49:27.000Um but I mean, like, I remember my grandpa.
00:49:29.000He you know, He came out of that saying, man, nobody can stop us.
00:49:34.000I mean, we are just we are unstoppable.
00:49:36.000If we want to go in and do something, we just go get it done.
00:51:10.000And 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.
00:51:22.000Not 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.
00:51:31.000They pulled the trunk out of it even, or maybe maybe it's just way smaller.
00:51:35.000And in China, that's what people want.
00:51:36.000So like their best selling Mercedes Benz, even American brands like Buick, we have these cars that are made to be driven in.
00:51:43.000So 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.
00:51:56.000Like i in America, rich people they want to drive.
00:52:03.000And even our SUVs, people generally want that sports car like feel.
00:52:08.000And so I I guess I will push back only on the champagne glass thing, because I've seen people saying this a lot.
00:52:13.000Believe 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.
00:52:24.000In China, they're much cars like that are much more problems.
00:52:27.000Cars 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.
00:52:58.000And and also remember that their wages are so much lower that it's much more accessible.
00:53:02.000It'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.
00:53:14.000It'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.
00:53:21.000If you don't have a driver, people are like, what the hell is going on?
00:53:23.000Like you're you're an eccentric if you are a rich guy who drives himself around.
00:53:54.000That seems kind of crazy because Japanese cars are ubiquitous.
00:53:57.000Trevor 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.
00:54:41.000Like 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.
00:54:49.000People 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.
00:54:57.000And 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.
00:55:12.000I I how can I blame them for choosing the Chinese one?
00:55:16.000The 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.
00:55:25.000Like, you know why these cars in China are cheap?
00:55:28.000It's because the cost of resource extraction is lower.
00:55:31.000The cost of making steel and aluminum is lower.
00:55:33.000The 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.
00:57:33.000Well, there's tanking the economy, and there's also it isn't actually free.
00:57:36.000So we do need to do a better job on the basics.
00:57:40.000But China is also subsidizing these, right?
00:57:42.000So they're they're they're actually putting money from other industries to prop up these other industries.
00:57:47.000And 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.
00:58:23.000We had them building aircraft, we had them building weapons, we had them building missiles.
00:58:28.000In fact, we even designed those weapons So they could be manufactured by those plants.
00:58:32.000But 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.
00:58:45.000And so we we won because we had all this automotive and other industrial capacity.
00:58:50.000China 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.
00:58:58.000If imagine in America with not like we've lost a lot of manufacturing, you're probably familiar with that.
00:59:04.000I mean, like we we don't make nearly as much as we used to.
00:59:14.000If 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.
00:59:26.000And so that that that's that's China's aim there.
00:59:28.000And it gets back to what you talked about earlier.
00:59:32.000So 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.
00:59:44.000Well, 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.
00:59:57.000So like we make this uh line of cruise missiles, the barrac uh the Barracuda, we make three different Barracuda missiles.
01:00:03.000It has 90% fewer parts than legacy cruise missiles.
01:00:07.000It can be made with 10 tools that all exist in every automotive plant.
01:00:12.000So you could make this missile at mass scale in any GM facility, in any Ford facility.
01:00:18.000And 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?
01:00:31.000And so the United States has been doing better at this.
01:00:34.000I think like the Air Force is doing better, the Navy's doing better, the Army's doing better.
01:00:38.000Like 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.
01:01:15.000Oh man, you you've got to look this up at some point.
01:01:17.000There's some videos that they put out there, and they have this totally robotic line just churning out the city.
01:01:22.000You've seen their shipping ports, it's bananas.
01:01:24.000Oh, it is well, I mean, so China has 300 times more naval shipbuilding capacity than the United States.
01:01:30.000The time that it takes us to build one aircraft carrier, they could build 300.
01:01:35.000Now, 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.
01:01:44.000Um 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.
01:01:53.000One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards.
01:01:58.000Two, they plan on basically uh you know, they're gonna press all of these civilian vessels into service.
01:02:08.000So 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.
01:02:15.000You 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.
01:02:24.000And they're just requiring people to do that.
01:02:26.000And 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.
01:02:38.000And so they're they've they've done a great job integrating in a way the United States is not.
01:02:42.000Do you think that an invasion of Taiwan's imminent?
01:02:48.000So Andrew has an internal policy called China 27.
01:02:52.000The 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.
01:03:08.000But 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.
01:03:23.000Wouldn'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?
01:03:30.000I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons.
01:03:37.000Uh so like Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he's reunified China.
01:03:44.000He's got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age.
01:03:49.000He'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.
01:03:58.000And he's doing that, I think, to help build up his war machine, but it's not sustainable in the long run.
01:04:03.000So I think there's a window where they can do this.
01:04:06.000If you had to ask me, it's more likely that they don't do a full-scale invasion to start.
01:04:11.000It's much more likely that they do something like a blockade.
01:04:13.000So they'll come up with some pretense.
01:04:15.000They'll say, uh, oh Taiwan is exporting goods that say made in Taiwan.
01:04:22.000And our position is that Taiwan is part of China, and therefore they need to pay Chinese taxes on those made in China goods.
01:04:29.000So we're going to blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this.
01:04:33.000And I worry, I worry about them kind of boiling the frog.
01:04:37.000You 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.
01:04:51.000And certainly, like I don't, I think you and I would agree here.
01:04:54.000The US probably should not start uh uh uh you know start World War Three over a blockade of a port, right?
01:05:01.000That that that's a lot of boiling the frog is a great analogy.
01:05:05.000Boiling the frog, I think is what China will do.
01:05:07.000And so what we need to do, and and this is just my opinion, which is definitely biased.
01:05:11.000So 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.
01:05:18.000Uh I I will first say I have plenty of money.
01:05:20.000I sold my first company for billions of dollars.
01:05:22.000I don't need to work, I I could retire, I'm not doing any of this for the money.
01:05:26.000Defense, 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.
01:05:33.000Um but I do a lot of work with Taiwan.
01:05:36.000So 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.
01:05:45.000My opinion is that the United States, we don't want to get into a shooting war ourselves, right?
01:05:51.000The 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.
01:06:00.000We need to say, hey, look, like and and be what what do you need to do to be a good gun store, right?
01:06:06.000You gotta keep stuff in stock, you gotta keep things on the shelves, you need to be reasonably priced.
01:06:11.000You 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.
01:06:23.000And we're gonna tell you exactly how you can use it.
01:06:25.000We're gonna be micromanaging you, and we're gonna be taking responsibility for how you use your gun.
01:06:30.000I mean, that that would that would never work.
01:06:32.000You would never want to work with them.
01:06:33.000You'd say, I'm gonna go to a different store, I'm gonna go buy something.
01:06:35.000And that's what some nations are doing.
01:06:37.000Like 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.
01:07:11.000And 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?
01:07:18.000You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to effect without destroying the entire fleet.
01:07:25.000You want things like missiles and counter missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country.
01:07:29.000Um, but we're 20 billion dollars behind.
01:07:32.000And 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.
01:07:42.000You'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?
01:07:50.000Like we we can't just give them all of our Patriot missiles.
01:07:53.000We 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.
01:08:05.000So I think the best way for the United States to contribute to world stability.
01:08:08.000Again, stop being the world police, start being the world gun store and get serious about it.
01:08:13.000Instead 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.
01:08:20.000We need to say, no, no, no, we're we're gonna give everything you need to fight for your own freedom.
01:08:26.000We'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.
01:08:31.000Because 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.
01:08:41.000I it's just we we we don't have it in us.
01:09:17.000Yeah, that was a good that's what that's that's one of my favorite George Bush Bush isms.
01:09:20.000I 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.
01:09:56.000I 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.
01:10:04.000The the magnitude of it all wears on people.
01:10:53.000One 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.
01:11:08.000They're like, oh, the glorious leader doesn't even need to sleep.
01:11:11.000But with Trump's case, it seems to somehow actually be the case.
01:11:14.000He has he he he got that old man no sleep power without getting all of the downside.
01:11:20.000Well, some people just don't need like Jocko, you know, Jocko Williams.
01:13:29.000And 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.
01:13:36.000I want to see a businessman who's signed both sides of a check before.
01:13:40.000And 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.
01:13:48.000Uh 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.
01:14:01.000I'm like, oh no, you don't you you don't even know.
01:14:03.000I loved his extremist rhetoric going back to two thousand nine.
01:14:06.000Um wasn't it even that extremist then?
01:14:19.000He'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.
01:14:55.000I think this was was his first year in office, so twenty seventeen.
01:14:58.000Or just start it was uh that was twenty seventeen, right?
01:15:01.000Yeah, he was yeah, when he was it when he was inaugurated.
01:15:04.000And 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.
01:15:13.000But the real question is do you believe that either party outside of Trump is going to like do are they gonna do well?
01:15:20.000Like you have you have the Democrats saying there's no magic wand to get growth.
01:15:24.000And 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.
01:15:29.000Uh I but the strongest argument for Trump is that anybody would have been better than what the establishment was pushing.
01:15:36.000For me, one of the big ones was you know, and I I I mean I got in a lot of shit for this.
01:15:41.000I gave nine thousand dollars to a pro-Trump group that ran a single anti-Clinton billboard.
01:15:47.000It was a picture of her face that said too big to jail.
01:15:49.000Um this was right after it had come out that she had been mishandling classified information, running an email server out of her own home.
01:15:56.000You 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?
01:16:08.000I mean, it was just it was it was it was so it was so absurd.
01:16:12.000But for me, one of the red lines was when Hillary and and and you know it's not really Hillary.
01:16:18.000It'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.
01:16:29.000And it's easy to say, oh yeah, I would enforce a no-fly zone.
01:16:38.000That 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.
01:16:45.000Like 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.
01:16:53.000Everyone 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.
01:17:02.000Like, 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.
01:17:16.000Like I we we should not care about almost anything that much.
01:17:20.000And 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.
01:17:28.000So like you you shouldn't say that you shouldn't act on it, and you shouldn't not act on it.
01:17:34.000It's it's it's it's a lose-lose-lose every step of the way.
01:17:42.000And 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.
01:17:47.000It's like, but Trump, you know, I because I I cared out this national security stuff pretty deeply then.
01:17:52.000Uh this was right when I was starting Andrew eight years ago.
01:17:55.000And so I was like dedicating my career to these national security problems.
01:17:58.000Like, 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.
01:18:12.000And 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?
01:18:18.000Uh and I think a lot of people it was just really emotional.
01:18:21.000It was it was a you can't reason people out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.
01:18:24.000Well, one of the things that rocks people's world is you show them past videos of Hillary from 2008.
01:18:31.000You remember that video where she was more MAGA than MAGA?
01:19:07.000There are people alive today who got married when you were not required to have a marriage license.
01:19:12.000It was primarily a uh kind of a race-driven thing.
01:19:16.000States didn't want black men to marry white women, and they got terrified of that in in the civil rights era.
01:19:23.000And so they all passed these rules about marriage licensure, many of them prohibiting uh interracial marriage.
01:19:29.000So basically, marriage licenses were a way to enforce against interracial marriage.
01:19:35.000Because 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.
01:19:42.000And so they wanted to enforce their will on people.
01:19:46.000My personal opinion is the state has no legitimate authority, constitutional or otherwise, to regulate marriage at all.
01:19:53.000Like gay marriage is not even a question.
01:19:55.000It's like this is a religious, cultural, social ceremony witnessed before and before before your friends and your family.
01:20:02.000It 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.
01:20:08.000Like 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?
01:20:18.000Anyway, um So Hillary, you might remember, I mean, even in 2008, she was against gay marriage.
01:20:24.000And she was out there, she says, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
01:20:28.000So here's someone who I was on the state shouldn't be involved in it at all side.
01:20:33.000Hillary's on the no, we should use state power to enforce what marriage is between a man and a woman.
01:20:38.000And then you have Donald Trump who he's asked about, he said, Do you do you remember his quote on this?
01:20:42.000So 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.
01:20:51.000You've got steak, you've got burgers and different people like different things, and that's okay.
01:20:56.000I mean, like it was actually the most progressive, yeah, the most progressive view you could ever have.
01:21:01.000And then so Obama, by the way, same thing.
01:21:06.000And 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.
01:21:23.000So the majority of Californians agreed with him.
01:22:04.000But 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.
01:22:10.000Um when I was in Silicon Valley, uh this is after Facebook bought Oculus.
01:22:17.000And so I'm up there, and um I was actually pro-immigration uh more than even more than than I am now.
01:22:23.000So I was I was thinking about supporting this group called forward.us, which was trying to lead to immigration reform in the United States.
01:22:30.000And I I've since evolved on this issue.
01:22:32.000I think that immigration can help depress U.S. wages in ways I didn't understand then.
01:22:36.000I hadn't observed a lot of the H1B visa abuse that I have now observed, having spent years in the valley.
01:22:41.000So 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.
01:22:55.000Um and this was before she had officially announced she was running.
01:22:57.000So 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.
01:23:03.000So 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?
01:23:14.000So Joe, it was gonna be her and Podesta.
01:23:16.000At the last second, Hillary ends up bailing.
01:23:19.000But I end up going anyway, and I had a couple prepared questions for Hillary.
01:23:23.000And 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.
01:23:36.000And 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.
01:24:25.000So I go to this meeting and I had two questions for Hillary.
01:24:27.000I said, uh one, uh, in the past, Hillary, you've supported a 55 mile per hour federal speed limit.
01:24:34.000You were one of the original proponents.
01:24:37.000You were one of the people who supported it in the Senate.
01:24:39.000You 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.
01:24:51.000And 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.
01:25:00.000But 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.
01:25:10.000Now, 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?
01:25:18.000And uh Podesta said, Oh, we don't want to really have a position on that issue.
01:25:21.000I said, but like could you make up one right now?
01:25:23.000Like like most Americans don't want a 55 mile per hour speed limit.
01:25:27.000I think that was really dumb of Hillary to say she supported One last time.
01:25:51.000Um you've you remember when Tommy Tommy Hager wrote a song about it.
01:25:54.000Well, you know, you know, Tom Cruise had a can't drive 55 decal on his motorcycle and top gun.
01:25:59.000And I mean, like, so like I mean it it is the cultural battle's been been won.
01:26:03.000Then my second question was hey, uh, we're a bunch of techno bros up here in the valley.
01:26:08.000We all believe in battery electric hybrid vehicles and and electric vehicles in general.
01:26:13.000Uh 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.
01:26:20.000No, I said Hillary actually was against corn subsidies at one point.
01:26:24.000She 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.
01:26:34.000It's it's if it's it's got lots of fuel storage problems, and it's just a waste of money.
01:26:45.000I 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.
01:26:59.000Does 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?
01:27:09.000And I said, Oh, well, we we don't have a position on that at this time.
01:27:34.000And 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?
01:27:44.000It'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.
01:27:53.000And 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.
01:28:06.000And it wasn't I don't support it technologically, but I support it politically, which I think people could have respected.
01:28:31.000I 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.
01:29:59.000I have to admit, he's actually my least favorite founding father, partly because he supported central banking.
01:30:04.000I'm just not really a gigantic fan of it and how it's turned out.
01:30:08.000Uh 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.
01:30:25.000I mean, he literally said immigrants are a poison to our nation.
01:30:28.000I mean, he was he was really against it.
01:30:31.000And which is funny because he was himself an immigrant.
01:30:33.000Um I mean, he was like, you know, blood and soil all the way.
01:30:38.000And 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.
01:30:47.000But one of the other things about Hamilton is that he did not support the First Amendment.
01:30:51.000He actually thought that the government should be able to criminalize uh speech that lied about the government in a critical way.
01:31:00.000Now, 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.
01:31:09.000You 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.
01:31:17.000He 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.
01:31:28.000Because if it's a so-called lie, now they can stop it.
01:31:30.000And so he said we can't give the government the power to do this.
01:31:33.000So Alexander Hamilton was not a fan, and I think that that thread has been there through the history of our government.
01:31:38.000There's always been people from literally before the founding who believed that the state should have a role in influencing the media.
01:31:44.000And 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.
01:31:50.000What 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.
01:32:04.000The 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.
01:32:16.000That'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.
01:32:28.000I think they under I think they understood the impact of the internet before social media.
01:32:32.000So 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.
01:32:47.000And 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.
01:32:56.000I 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.
01:33:31.000So dead internet theory has been around for quite a long time, probably long before the internet was actually dead.
01:33:37.000And 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.
01:33:50.000And 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.
01:34:16.000And I I think that more and more it's becoming true.
01:34:20.000Like 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.
01:34:36.000Well, 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.
01:36:26.000Yeah, but it seems to fit most, but it just seems heavy and restrictive.
01:36:31.000You 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.
01:37:30.000So there's a place called Commando Store.
01:37:32.000Yeah, we're talking about these pants that I have.
01:37:34.000Well, yeah, we're just talking about your tiger stripe, your tiger stripe ranger panties.
01:37:37.000And 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.
01:37:48.000But 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.
01:37:55.000And 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.
01:38:54.000Um I I I I have to admit, like it's certainly a I it they thought it occurred to me.
01:39:00.000Um 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.
01:39:12.000And uh like they built they built like virtual reality uh gaming simulator pods and also weapons.
01:39:22.000Like 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?
01:39:30.000Like 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?
01:39:37.000It's like, I mean, I remember being like seven years old and and and thinking about the stuff.
01:39:42.000Or 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?
01:40:10.000Like, what if I would have had different things put in the world?
01:40:17.000What if um you know what if I uh you know, what if, what if, what if it's like is there a world?
01:40:22.000Is 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?
01:40:32.000Probably look, all those things are interesting, and you're a guy who's into interesting things.
01:40:37.000It's just finding whatever the path is that you think is interesting and just going in that direction.
01:40:43.000You just your direction was kind of established by your interest when you were younger.
01:40:47.000So 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.
01:40:55.000Well, 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.
01:41:33.000So like Brian Singerman is a good example.
01:41:36.000He was a partner at Founders Fund, which was Peter Thiel's investment fund.
01:41:39.000They decided to put one million dollars into Oculus before any other fund was willing to give us money.
01:41:46.000So they were the first institutional money into Oculus VR.
01:41:50.000And then he ended up being our first investor also in Andorrills.
01:41:56.000Like you're talking about like the same people even, like these relationships come back around.
01:42:01.000And then that turns into running a weapons company.
01:42:03.000And then that turns into building more efficient weapons.
01:42:06.000And 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.
01:42:19.000So 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.
01:42:48.000The 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.
01:43:07.000F for fighter, Q for unmanned, and then 44 is the number designation.
01:43:54.000So one of the crazy things about this is that the United States.
01:43:57.000So 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.
01:44:08.000I've got an F-35 flying with five of these things.
01:44:12.000The original name of the program was Loyal Wingman.
01:44:14.000The 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.
01:44:25.000But it's never gonna question my orders.
01:44:27.000It's never going to try to save itself if it means ruining the mission.
01:44:32.000And 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.
01:44:43.000You 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.
01:44:55.000There's another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy, but will probably get you killed in the process.
01:45:04.000We don't teach those generally, or if we do, it's in the context of don't do this.
01:45:08.000All of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI-powered fighter jets.
01:45:12.000I can now have it doing things that are so risky that a human pilot would never try even try the maneuver.
01:45:18.000Because 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.
01:45:27.000Imagine 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.
01:45:40.000You'll make that trade every every day.
01:45:42.000You'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.
01:45:54.000And so autonomy, it really changes the game on this stuff.
01:45:58.000It's not it's not it's not an incremental change in tactics, it's a complete revolution.
01:46:03.000What do you think that New Jersey shit was all about?
01:46:06.000Like the unidentified era of the era phenomenon?
01:46:09.000Well, 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.
01:46:32.000I think that there was something really weird that was going on.
01:46:35.000I think briefly there was something that was really unexplained.
01:46:39.000And 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.
01:46:55.000It'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.
01:47:04.000Like it was it was it was kind of this crazy media circus.
01:47:07.000I 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.
01:47:16.000I I think that's probably accurate because a lot of it was in Austin as well.
01:47:19.000It was like these enthusiasts were getting their drones out everywhere.
01:47:25.000Well, in a have you have you heard have you heard the um oh what do they call it?
01:47:32.000There's a theory that someone's come up with that I can't I forget what it is.
01:47:35.000It's it's like it's like it's like uh proliferation masking or something.
01:47:39.000Have 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.
01:47:53.000I don't really believe it because I actually have met with the people who kind of invented modern quadcopters and flight controllers.
01:47:59.000Like 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.
01:48:10.000Imagine that you're an alien, you're regularly operating around military bases, nuclear infrastructure.
01:48:15.000Wouldn'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?
01:48:31.000Because these same activities in like the 50s and the 60s, there was nothing like that, right?
01:48:37.000Like 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?
01:48:47.000And today it's so easy to say, oh, it's it's just some drones.
01:48:51.000Um so unfortunately it's a lot harder to know what's real.
01:48:54.000And 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.
01:49:02.000Be 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.
01:49:13.000I feel like you could really find some interesting stuff.
01:49:15.000What when you say that something weird was happening in New Jersey?
01:49:20.000What do you when do you what are you saying?
01:49:23.000So something that was observable by some sensors and not by other sensors.
01:49:28.000And that's really the common thread between a lot of these things.
01:49:31.000Like 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.
01:49:38.000Or something well, they'll see it on radar, but they can't pick it up on other sensors.
01:49:42.000And 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.
01:49:50.000Like, how does something move so quickly and not have any skin heating?
01:49:54.000Why isn't it white hot if it's moving that fast to the air?
01:49:57.000How can it change direction so quickly without the airframe tearing apart?
01:50:01.000And I I look, I don't know what this stuff is.
01:50:04.000When you say but weird, like what was observed?
01:50:08.000So 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.
01:50:17.000There should not have been anything that was able to endure for that long in that area with those characteristics.
01:50:22.000Like th this little tiny drones that can not show up on radar and that can you know kind of hide in place like that.
01:50:29.000They don't have hours and hours and hours of endurance, right?
01:50:32.000They're the they fly for 25, 30 minutes tops.
01:50:35.000And then also they typically would need to be launched by something, you know, right close to there.
01:50:38.000And 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.
01:50:48.000Um it's not the weirdest thing that that people have seen, though.
01:50:52.000Like the the the hellfire thing recently with the missile.
01:50:55.000That was some of that was some of the weirdest stuff that I've seen.
01:50:57.000That's so weird because it got hit and it just shook it off and kept moving.
01:51:01.000And it's almost and it looks almost like there were like pieces that's like somehow reconstituted.
01:51:15.000Um I don't think that it is a foreign adversary.
01:51:19.000Like, I don't buy into the idea that the Chinese or the Russians have have secretly figured this out.
01:51:24.000Uh but then the question is, okay, well, what is that what does that leave?
01:51:27.000And 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.
01:51:35.000Like, 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?
01:51:45.000Like 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.
01:51:52.000Like, I know this sounds like weirdo mumbo jumbo, but you just it it seems like something like that even would be more likely.
01:51:58.000Uh did you ever read uh Michael Michael uh Michael uh Michael Critchin's novel Um The Sphere?
01:52:10.000So there was a movie, it was not nearly as good as the book.
01:52:12.000So 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.
01:52:37.000And 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.
01:52:47.000So they by this, they basically figure out it must have been there for about three or four thousand years, uh this spaceship.
01:52:53.000And so the Navy is going and they're trying to figure out what it is.
01:52:57.000They 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.
01:53:06.000They 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.
01:53:16.000And then the the big reveal of like the first arc of the book is they scrape off the coral, they look at the door.
01:53:25.000But then they look next to the door and there's a marking.
01:53:27.000And what does the marking say on this 3,000-year-old spaceship?
01:53:32.000United States Navy and an American flag.
01:53:36.000And you know, the what's what's interesting is they never actually fully explain it.
01:53:41.000But 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.
01:54:01.000Maybe the United States is actually a purpose reconstitution of the branding and social structures of some long lost society from 500 million years ago.
01:54:11.000I'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.
01:54:20.000That 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.
01:54:34.000Why is uh space travel harder to believe than time travel?
01:54:38.000It's mostly all of the it's you know it's dimension travel.
01:54:41.000So dimensional travel, like that that's totally believable.
01:54:43.000It'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.
01:54:55.000It's just it's a m it's a matter of uh we haven't observed anything that could do that.
01:54:59.000We haven't seen any synthetic material that could that.
01:55:01.000We just haven't seen any natural phenomena that could be.
01:55:03.000But if you just go back 200 years ago, a cell phone's impossible.
01:55:07.000But the difference here is that we're able to see millions of years of history of the universe coming into us, right?
01:55:12.000We 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.
01:55:20.000And there's a lot of markers that you would expect to see that would line up with what how we understand intelligent life.
01:55:28.000And 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.
01:55:38.000Like there are these theories as to why this is the case.
01:55:41.000And 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.
01:55:48.000He thought it was really stupid for us to try and make first contact.
01:55:52.000Uh his point was not just that it's probably a bad idea in general.
01:55:57.000His point was the fact that we haven't observed it from anyone else suggests a lot of danger in doing so.
01:56:05.000Like you what it could mean that nobody's doing it.
01:56:08.000It could mean that anyone who does it gets wiped out.
01:56:10.000Uh you know, if if you stand up, you get knocked down.
01:56:13.000And 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.
01:56:21.000That's not to say there isn't life out there in the universe.
01:56:25.000But for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be life that's capable of inter-solar system or intergalactic travel.
01:56:32.000Aaron 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.
01:56:43.000Aaron Powell In that case, and so what this is one of my favorite favorite favorite theories about this.
01:56:50.000There'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.
01:57:15.000Like 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.
01:57:22.000Again, I'm not saying it's impossible.
01:57:23.000I'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.
01:57:39.000I I put all those at higher likelihood than they came from Andromeda and now they're flying around our military bases.
01:57:45.000Aaron Powell Did you see that guy, representative uh what's his name?
01:58:03.000One of them is one of them is very near me.
01:58:04.000It's the it's the Channel Islands corridor.
01:58:07.000I 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.
01:58:33.000And 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.
01:58:48.000I 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.
01:58:56.000He didn't include anybody who was anonymous because his point was if it's anonymous, you could just claim I made it up.
01:59:00.000It has to be a real person who stands behind it.
01:59:02.000And he said, You'll notice that across about 50 years of stories I've collected, that there's extraordinary commonality between these stories.
01:59:09.000People 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.
01:59:18.000And that that when you see a one off, it's hard to draw a conclusion.
01:59:23.000When you see a pattern that comes a lot.
01:59:26.000So 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.
01:59:37.000Um 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.
01:59:57.000Lots of noise, lots of splash, but not like destroying themselves.
02:00:01.000And then similarly, objects coming out of the water in the same way.
02:00:05.000And so they all describe these very, very uh steep approach paths.
02:00:10.000So 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.
02:00:26.000Really, 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.
02:00:53.000And 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.
02:01:02.000But yeah, that that that that particular area I've dug into because it's only about uh 20 miles away from my house.
02:01:07.000So the weird one is the breakaway civilization thing.
02:01:46.000So 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.
02:01:56.000There's still really bizarre stuff that was happening in ancient civilizations that is common between civilizations.
02:02:05.000It doesn't really make sense when you think about it conventionally.
02:02:08.000Well, 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.
02:02:26.000And it shows stars, it shows this portal and gate, and this is it's written multiple times.
02:02:33.000And they're trying to figure out well, what is this trying to say?
02:02:36.000What 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?
02:02:47.000I 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.
02:03:48.000But 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.
02:04:00.000You know, could there be interesting leads that are buried in cultures that are not human?
02:04:06.000Well, we were talking about that before that you're working on interspecies communication.
02:04:11.000So this hasn't actually officially launched yet.
02:04:13.000Hopefully they won't mind me talking about it.
02:04:15.000Um are you familiar with the XPRIZE Foundation?
02:04:17.000They didn't think we were just talking about it.
02:04:19.000So 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.
02:04:28.000So like there was an X Prize for uh going to going to space on a reusable rocket.
02:04:34.000Um John Carmack was competing for that.
02:04:41.000Uh there was they're they're doing some cancer X prizes.
02:04:44.000There'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.
02:05:03.000Instead of responding to fires once they're too big to control, you're able to stop them in their in their tracks.
02:05:08.000And I mean, I mean, just like the Palisades fire created 20 billion dollars in damage.
02:05:13.000It's it's actually very cheap to do this relative to the damage that wildfires cause.
02:05:17.000Anyway, 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.
02:05:28.000And 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.
02:05:37.000It was it was really popular for a while.
02:05:39.000Um 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.
02:05:47.000Like there were in his book, there's like plasma consciousnesses in the sun.
02:05:52.000Like you probably heard these crazy ideas and you know, like intelligent beings that live in the sun.
02:05:56.000But 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.
02:06:06.000So like can you take a dog and teach it to talk by genetically modifying it to make it smarter?
02:06:13.000Can you take whales and and and pass them up?
02:06:16.000And 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.
02:06:30.000And I've always thought that was really interesting.
02:06:32.000And so I went to the X Prize and said, I want you guys to do an uplift X Prize.
02:06:35.000First person to modify an animal to be smarter than a person.
02:06:40.000And uh and they actually said, that's too crazy.
02:06:43.000That'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.
02:06:53.000But one we are working towards is an interspecies communication XPRIZE.
02:06:58.000And 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.
02:07:11.000The 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.
02:07:19.000This isn't teaching a dog to, you know, say yes when you say uh go.
02:07:54.000If 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.
02:08:35.000And I don't mean like we don't know the words, but we know there are words.
02:08:38.000It'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?
02:08:51.000Like they might be in co that this is where the theory of um of acoustic holograms as a primary means of cetacean communication from.
02:10:02.000They need to be intellectually stimulated.
02:10:04.000And most people just don't have the time to keep an African gray uh properly stimulated.
02:10:08.000So they start they they get depressed, they self-harm.
02:10:11.000So that they're not recommended as a beginner parrot by any means.
02:10:15.000Now, 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.
02:10:29.000If I remember Correctly, like he wasn't just saying give me food.
02:10:32.000He could say, like, tomorrow I want this food.
02:10:34.000He could be but he the existential question he asked was what's happening and where am I going?
02:10:41.000Which is uh and he had never asked those questions before.
02:10:44.000They were brand new, formulated questions that he asked very shortly before he passed.
02:10:55.000He has a tiny little brain, and yet it has all that capacity.
02:10:58.000You've probably heard of people who have lost huge chunks of their brain and they reprogram and they seem to get by.
02:11:04.000Parrots like Alex suggests that you can get by with very little brain if it's oriented correctly.
02:11:10.000So 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.
02:11:25.000What 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.
02:11:32.000Like, could you make an African gray that is able to have a normal human-level conversation?
02:11:38.000I think I think it's actually very close to that.
02:12:11.000And 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.
02:12:20.000And also radically less body to control.
02:12:23.000That does and well, and also a lot of like semi-autonomy.
02:12:26.000Like you you know how some animals have more of their nervous system distributed, like you know, octopuses have you know autonomy in their muscles.
02:12:33.000It's actually similar for a lot of animals.
02:12:35.000And 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.
02:12:49.000Like we haven't we we there's never been an economic motive to really dig into how to understand how the brain fundamentally works.
02:12:58.000I I know there's people who are listening who probably think that's crazy.
02:13:01.000They say, Palmer, people want to cure brain cancer, they want to help with Alzheimer's.
02:13:04.000There's a difference between preserving brain function and truly understanding how the brain works.
02:13:09.000And yes, there's research labs here and there, but Google's never been funding them to the tune of tens of billions.
02:13:15.000Meta's never been funding them to the tune of hundreds of billions.
02:13:17.000AI 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.
02:13:29.000And 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.
02:13:40.000Aaron 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.
02:13:53.000That we're a product of accelerated evolution, and that some superior intelligence would do exactly what you're saying.
02:14:01.000That'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.
02:14:13.000Like 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?
02:14:21.000Like 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.
02:14:33.000The moment that we had technology that was capable, we did it.
02:14:37.000Wouldn't probably any species do that?
02:14:39.000Like, doesn't that suggest that when you get smart enough you want to make things somewhat in your own image?
02:14:44.000It gets back to Skynet earlier, you know.
02:14:46.000Like 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?
02:14:53.000And actually, so I'm a religious person.
02:14:55.000Um 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.
02:15:07.000And so I I I think I think there's a certain beautiful symmetry there.
02:15:12.000Uh 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.
02:15:19.000It'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.
02:15:25.000Aaron Powell Well, also just this sentiment that you were discussing of taking an animal and making it more intelligent.
02:15:33.000If 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.
02:15:52.000I mean maybe that's just a seeding process.
02:15:55.000Maybe 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.
02:16:09.000Which is one of the weirder things about us.
02:16:22.000And 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.
02:16:34.000So we're constantly trying to make better stuff.
02:16:36.000I I I wouldn't I would even go beyond it's I think it's not even better.
02:17:02.000You 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.
02:17:09.000I think that it was a loss of uh drive for novelty.
02:17:14.000Like, and that's not to say that they're a lesser culture, but certainly they were not focused on seeking novel experiences.
02:17:20.000Aaron 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.
02:17:30.000And that the people that were even captured by Indians, a lot of them wanted to stay.
02:18:02.000People were not meant to live in the jungles.
02:18:05.000Great Vice piece back when Vice was really interesting.
02:18:09.000It's called Heinmo's Arctic Adventure.
02:18:12.000And 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.
02:18:24.000I think he started working there in the 1970s.
02:18:26.000This guy he didn't even know about 9-11 until way later.
02:18:29.000Someone showed him a picture of what happened.
02:18:32.000He 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.
02:18:42.000And so this nerdy reporter from fucking Williamsburg is hanging out with this guy or wherever he's from.
02:18:48.000And this guy's explaining how this resonates with being a human being.
02:18:59.000On 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.
02:19:06.000Because 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.
02:19:16.000But you also need a singer, you also need a guy who likes us to make be a carpenter.
02:19:20.000You 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.
02:19:29.000Aaron Powell What do you think about nostalgia?
02:19:31.000Because I've been thinking about this a lot for variety of reasons.
02:19:33.000And it's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about.
02:19:35.000We're talking like novel experiences, new things, you know, like like driving towards the future.
02:19:42.000There's some people who I feel like look down on nostalgia, they're like, oh, you're obsessed with the past kind of needlessly.
02:19:48.000I feel like like obsessing over the past, I think is healthy in a lot of ways.
02:19:53.000And 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.
02:20:01.000If 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.
02:20:13.000It feels like you're naturally going to prefer the new thing that hasn't really shown all the downfalls yet.
02:20:18.000I'm I I'm I guess I I'm getting I'm a big fan of nostalgia.
02:20:21.000I'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.
02:20:27.000Um there's a lot of people who actually say this is fascist now.
02:20:34.000If you Google it, you look up nostalgia is fascist.
02:20:37.000You will find this is like this this is like a cutting edge theory of the last year.
02:20:41.000They'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.
02:20:50.000To 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.
02:21:10.000I 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.
02:21:23.000There'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.
02:21:32.000And then how they threw water on that with the passing of the psychedelics act in 1970.
02:21:37.000But I think that it seems like things are going in a different direction.
02:21:40.000So just so you know, I'm straight edge, I don't use any drugs.
02:21:43.000Um I didn't drink alcohol till very recently.
02:21:58.000Um 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.
02:22:07.000I totally understand why everyone's why everyone's having beers on the weekend.
02:22:30.000Um 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?
02:23:05.000It 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.
02:23:27.000It went away in the 1970s, they turn into dog shit.
02:23:29.000Well, 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.
02:23:42.000I 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.
02:23:52.000I've heard that there's some cars that charge you money if you want to use Apple CarPlay.
02:23:57.000Well, 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.
02:24:04.000There's ones they're adding like you can't.
02:24:06.000Just fucking charge me more for your car, don't fuck me.
02:24:09.000Well, some of them are you're paying more, it's paying more to unlock more horsepower.
02:24:12.000It's like you're making the car, it has the parts, and you're not gonna crazy.
02:24:16.000You 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.
02:24:25.000Like there was a time when these things people were making video games.
02:24:29.000They would make a game, you'd buy it, you owned a video game, and like and that was it.
02:24:32.000And they made the best game they could to sell you at a store.
02:24:36.000And these days they're making games and and and all and also a lot of apps into like these subscription experiences.
02:25:19.000Like 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.
02:25:31.000Um 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.
02:25:43.000It was before all the bean counters got in.
02:25:45.000It was before all the regulators got in.
02:25:47.000It was before the people figured out how to turn it into this.
02:25:49.000You used to be able to make a game with a dozen people, and of course you could still do that today.
02:25:55.000But 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.
02:26:08.000Today, 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.
02:26:15.000It's just a it's a it's a it's a totally it's a totally different universe.
02:26:18.000And it's also a giant business now, right?
02:26:21.000It's been proven that it's a huge moneymaker.
02:27:41.000Now 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.
02:27:47.000Like it's just access to your social media.
02:27:52.000A 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.
02:28:00.000Well, because they want all that data, they want to know who they can market to.
02:28:03.000They want to see what your demographics are.
02:28:04.000They want to say what is this customer like?
02:28:26.000But the average user, unless they're trying to fight their way out of it, is gonna do it.
02:28:30.000So for example, I'll be logging into a game.
02:28:31.000I've just downloaded Overwatch 2, and it says you need to log in.
02:28:35.000You 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.
02:28:48.000And 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.
02:29:01.000A lot of these kids, they just don't care.
02:29:24.000And 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.
02:29:28.000So they want to gather lots of information and you know, get you plugged into their marketing ecosystem.
02:29:33.000And 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.
02:29:42.000So you don't have to go and manually invite them.
02:29:44.000So they they make it like it is a convenience feature.
02:29:46.000But 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.
02:29:54.000Some of these apps, even you give them permission to post on your behalf.
02:30:04.000And 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.
02:30:12.000Palmer just visited Joe's farm and helped him do this.
02:30:16.000Those tactics have evolved way beyond to make these things very sticky, very addictive.
02:30:22.000So 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.
02:30:29.000And so um so for them it's just about mass.
02:30:33.000And I wouldn't mind so much if it was just about making money.
02:30:37.000Like I'm I'm I'm I'm a believer in the free market generally, I'm a believer in capitalism strongly.
02:30:42.000But 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.
02:30:55.000Like you've you've probably seen this in Hollywood.
02:30:58.000You 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.
02:31:05.000Uh and I say like making great games is the best reason.
02:31:11.000It's because they want to uh you know bring about greater equity and representation of people that look like them.
02:31:18.000And 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.
02:31:27.000Anyone in the company who says, I actually think we should make games for our customers, not the people you wish were our customers.
02:31:33.000Like, let's make games for the guys who buy our games, not the moms you wish were buying our games.
02:31:39.000And people like that are being ejected out of companies.
02:31:42.000It's I mean, it's very politically incorrect.
02:31:57.000They 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.
02:32:15.000And they're like, therefore, we need to build to that market.
02:32:18.000Okay, 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?
02:32:25.000To 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.
02:32:37.000Like, 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.
02:32:44.000Why why don't you want to bring in new audiences?
02:32:46.000Um I saw this when I was in I saw this when I was in Silicon Valley.
02:32:50.000What I called it was uh I said there's too many people who drink Starbucks and not enough who drink Mountain Dew.
02:32:56.000And you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
02:32:58.000Like 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.
02:33:08.000It's captured universities and then it bled out into corporations.
02:33:12.000Aaron Powell One of my one of my favorite questions to ask people is uh you know start starting a company is hard.
02:33:18.000You 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.
02:33:25.000Like, 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.
02:33:36.000You have to take resources you would have put on your customer, your real customers and put it towards them.
02:33:40.000One 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.
02:33:51.000And uh the company, you know exactly who they are.
02:33:53.000You know how many men there are, you know how many women there are.
02:33:55.000We don't have to say how many there are.
02:33:56.000Like, we're not uh don't even don't don't make it about one gender versus another.
02:34:00.000It's just there are lots of men, there's lots of women.
02:34:04.000When 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?
02:34:21.000Like, would you pursue a different strategy?
02:34:23.000And if it's different, it's like what would your strategy be?
02:34:25.000And many people say, well, I would build it, you know, perfect 50-50.
02:34:28.000And 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.
02:34:32.000But 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.
02:34:42.000I say, okay, so wait, you're gonna you you have a company, 90% men, 10% women.
02:34:46.000You 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?
02:34:53.000And 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?
02:35:01.000Or are you trying to achieve totally parallel social aims at the expense of the business?
02:35:08.000And companies are hiring a lot of people who think about it that way.
02:35:11.000They don't see their role as to come in and make the company better or to make a better product for their customer.
02:35:16.000They see it as to come in and affect that change, even if it tanks the company the process.
02:35:37.000The zero interest rate phenomenon, ZERP, they call it.
02:35:39.000Uh or some people call it the zero interest rate period.
02:35:42.000Um 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.
02:35:53.000That's where you've seen so much economic growth.
02:35:55.000You've seen a lot of it artificially propped up in the tech and the media industry.
02:35:59.000I think a lot of like these streaming plays have been propped up by ZERP.
02:36:02.000When interest rates are extremely low and money is very cheap to borrow, people will spend tons and tons of tons of money.
02:36:09.000The economy appears to be doing very well.
02:36:11.000You have the growth that looks good on the stock market.
02:36:13.000And so companies don't need to ever tighten their belts.
02:36:42.000The stock is going up, everything's going well, we can just keep doing this.
02:36:46.000Um my theory is actually that interest rates going up have been very good for solving this problem.
02:36:51.000You've seen a lot of layoffs in the tech industry.
02:36:53.000You've seen a lot of layoffs in the media industry.
02:36:56.000I 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.
02:37:03.000Uh 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?
02:37:12.000He came in a year or two ago, and it was incredible.
02:37:15.000He he he had this speech that was exactly what fans wanted to hear and what investors wanted to hear.
02:37:58.000They're like, oh my God, this is great.
02:38:00.000They're not they're gonna stop making these kind of social justice pieces and make us the things that we actually want.
02:38:05.000The investors love it because he says they're gonna make money.
02:38:07.000But 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.
02:38:21.000And I think that that is happening across the industry.
02:38:23.000And I think I think that's I think that's a good thing.
02:38:36.000So I've been working on Head Mount Displays for a long time.
02:38:40.000I created the Oculus Rift when I was 19 years old, living in a camper trailer in my garage.
02:38:44.000And that was really the virtual reality headset that changed the industry, sold that company for billions of dollars.
02:38:50.000And 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.
02:38:58.000So 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.
02:39:45.000And it is an integrated ballistics shell.
02:39:47.000So 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.
02:40:00.000It even detects where gunshots are, shows them exactly where they're placed and how far they are.
02:40:06.000So this is the this is a recreation of it.
02:40:09.000So this is like, yeah, these this is uh so this is a video feed of what it is like to use the system.
02:40:13.000So I've got the helmet on here, and then what I have is this pair of augmented reality glasses.
02:40:20.000Um basically I can take these glasses and I put them on, these sync with the helmet and with these sensors.
02:40:29.000So 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.
02:40:52.000So here's Ghost X is the drone that's watching.
02:41:21.000So 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.
02:41:32.000And by the way, this view that I have, it's shared now with all of the robots as well.
02:41:38.000So 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.
02:41:47.000It's so crazy that I was born at the right time to actually get to build all this stuff.
02:41:53.000Because you you know Robert Heinland, the science fiction author who did Starship Troopers.
02:41:58.000Um, 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?
02:42:14.000Calculates where the wind is gonna blow you around and and where where it's going to go.
02:42:19.000He was literally writing about this in the 1940s.
02:42:22.000I mean, we're talking about almost a hundred years ago.
02:42:51.000Why why are all these cool things happening for you?
02:42:53.000Aaron Powell It's like I'm reliving my nights here in the room with you.
02:42:56.000Now 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.
02:43:03.000A lot of green lights and over and over again.
02:43:05.000And it does make you think like what are the odds of that?
02:43:07.000Is it is it more likely that the world is a simulation or not?
02:43:10.000And I think actually it just comes down to it comes down to I I'm a spiritual person.
02:43:16.000I believe in the existence of a higher creator of a higher power.
02:43:20.000And I feel like there's actually a lot of similarities between that and believing in simulation theory.
02:43:26.000I mean, like what people people say, oh, it's you know it's it's all a simulation.
02:43:29.000Is that really so different from having a universe that was created by an all-powerful being?
02:43:33.000Like 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.
02:43:47.000They're like, no, I would never believe in you know a sky daddy.
02:43:51.000I 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.
02:44:21.000Unfortunately, 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.
02:44:47.000And 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.
02:44:54.000So 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?
02:44:59.000And you know, it's kind of dangling the way.
02:45:01.000Notice how it's really tightly integrated, like it's not flopping around, right?
02:45:04.000But I can pop it open and now I can hear you directly with my own two ears.
02:45:07.000I 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.
02:45:15.000And you'll notice this is ballistic ear protection.
02:45:18.000So 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.
02:46:02.000This is this one is uh the these are not actually real modules.
02:46:05.000These are based these is a tricky one where we have real modules and show modules.
02:46:11.000The real modules in general, the army doesn't want to have them passed around and people taking pictures of them.
02:46:15.000Like at A USA, there's people walking up taking pictures of everything in the booth.
02:46:19.000They 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.
02:46:28.000Um, Yeah, normally you actually when it has a connector in there, you gotta actually jam it in there and it's retained.
02:46:35.000And 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.
02:46:43.000They're doing trials and tests of this literally right now.
02:46:46.000Um but like if you if you look here, it's a basically a spring steel mechanism there.
02:46:51.000And so it's not just strong, it's also flexible.
02:46:54.000So it's it basically it can bend and then snap back.
02:46:57.000And so you it's very, very hard to overbend this, overextend this.
02:47:01.000And if you did, like it's very hard, but if you did, you grab some pliers and you bend it back.
02:47:05.000And notice how that's a replaceable module there.
02:47:07.000I could just unscrew this and replace it with a new part.
02:47:10.000Everything on here, I can repair in the field with a field repair kit as well.
02:47:13.000And 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?
02:47:42.000Imagine 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.
02:47:57.000So it can give me not just enhanced hearing, but directional enhanced hearing.
02:48:01.000I could say, I want to listen to what that guy 100 yards over there is saying.
02:48:04.000I'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.
02:48:10.000Um it's worth noting, like the way this came together is crazy.
02:48:14.000There 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.
02:48:46.000I 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?
02:48:59.000Like peep people I and I think you shouldn't have people who are in love with the military regulating the military, right?
02:49:05.000You know, every everyone, everyone has their role.
02:49:08.000Anyway, uh I never there I never I was very skeptical of their technology.
02:49:14.000That was Microsoft's like consumer virtual reality, augmented reality uh effort.
02:49:19.000Um their AR project was adapting that to the military into this product called Ivas.
02:49:26.000And uh to make a very, very long story short, it had a lot of problems.
02:49:31.000Their early hardware was making people sick.
02:49:34.000It was ha it had lag, the night vision wasn't working well.
02:49:37.000There were soldier evaluation touch points that came out where they were saying, Hey, I'll I'll get killed if I wear this.
02:49:43.000Microsoft 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.
02:49:50.000And 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?
02:49:59.000You guys can keep building, you know, Microsoft applications, cloud computing, the stuff you're good at.
02:50:04.000Let me build the tactical heads-up display hardware.
02:50:07.000And when I first talked to them years ago, they thought I was nuts.
02:50:09.000Like they they was almost like insulted.
02:50:11.000It was like when Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo and they got la literally laughed out of the room.
02:50:16.000Um 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?
02:50:26.000We would actually love to partner with you on this and let you bring your magic to bear on this problem.
02:50:32.000And I'm I'm I'm I try to be a humble guy.
02:50:35.000I don't usually succeed, but I am not humble in this one regard.
02:50:38.000I believe that I am the world's best head-mounted display designer, bar none.
02:50:43.000I took the crown with the Oculus Rift, I think I still hold it.
02:50:46.000And so I was able to kick the program into shape.
02:50:49.000We 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.
02:50:58.000It is the thing that I think is actually gonna end up on the heads of every soldier.
02:51:01.000Here, try try try to take things on, and you'll feel they're a bit heavier than normal glasses.
02:51:06.000But the other thing about them is that they're also ballistic rated glasses.
02:51:09.000So you see in the front and then also on the sides.
02:51:11.000Yeah, so like these can take pieces of frag.
02:51:13.000So 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.
02:51:32.000Um I like that you asked about it, because actually no nobody's even noticed really that it's two pieces.
02:51:37.000So the mission shield is a piece that allows you to reconfigure the glasses for different use cases.
02:51:42.000If you're using this, for example, to like give you automated instructions on how to repair your Humvee, for example.
02:51:49.000I 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.
02:51:58.000But you can also do things like have different types of protection.
02:52:01.000For example, that's not an that that's just a normal ballistic mission shield.
02:52:06.000We have another mission shield that protects you from laser energy weapons.
02:52:09.000So it's actually tuned where now it makes your vision turn.
02:52:13.000I I I I probably shouldn't talk about exactly what color because it allows people to figure out what frequencies we're blocking.
02:52:18.000But there are mission shields that you can put on that will protect you from weapons that we know China has.
02:52:24.000China has a bunch of directed energy laser weapons, some of them for taking out drones, others designed to blind human troops.
02:52:31.000And so we're designing mission shields that protect you from those types of emissions.
02:52:35.000They're designed to blind human troops.
02:52:40.000I 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.
02:52:48.000Now, 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.
02:52:57.000Any system that can temporarily blind people at long range is capable of blinding people permanently at long range.
02:53:06.000It's just that that's the line you walk.
02:53:07.000Like if you want it to work in any fog, you need more power.
02:53:10.000If you want it to work at long ranges, you need more power.
02:53:12.000But like, for example, imagine we deployed a bunch of these glasses and they had the laser filters built in from the start.
02:53:17.000Now imagine that China shifts their laser frequencies 10 nanometers so that it bypasses that filter.
02:53:23.000Imagine if I had to just replace all my AR glasses.
02:53:36.000That mission shield comes off very easy, though.
02:53:38.000So this comes look, I gotta admit, these are primarily for like showing off to the army.
02:53:45.000So it'll somehow another secure into place if an actual it's actually still gonna be magnets.
02:53:50.000It's just going to be a lot more force to remove.
02:53:53.000I'm wondering how much I should get into the movie magic here.
02:53:55.000So look, I'll I'll get a little bit into it.
02:53:59.000I mostly an engineer, I mostly build stuff.
02:54:01.000But 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.
02:54:13.000Like I used to demo the Oculus Rift to thousands of people a year.
02:54:16.000High powered executives, government people, um, yeah, you know, uh uh CEOs of major game companies, people we're trying to hire.
02:54:25.000And you have to develop uh a pattern of how you talk about stuff.
02:54:28.000And you need to be able to go in any direction.
02:54:30.000If somebody says, Well, what about this?
02:54:31.000You need to be able to show them that feature, and you need to be ready for how you show the feature.
02:54:35.000I need to be intimately familiar with every part of it.
02:54:38.000The reason that the magnets are so weak on this is because we show this to people who are weak.
02:54:53.000Imagine 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.
02:55:52.000But 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.
02:56:55.000Oh my god, is I that can't even be right.
02:56:58.000I want to say, I want, I I need to look this up.
02:57:00.000It might be is it 200 million for the Air Force?
02:57:03.000And then I want to say it's 20 billion dollars that the DOD spends on neck injuries.
02:57:08.000What primarily through the thro through the VA, right?
02:57:12.000There's so many neck injuries that occur from spinal compression, people getting their heads whipped around.
02:57:16.000That's why helmets need to be extremely lightweight, tightly integrated, no snag hazards.
02:57:22.000Like 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.
02:57:42.000It 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.
02:57:50.000What's the battery power of something like that?
02:58:33.000So the cool thing about this is it's a combination battery, computer, and ballistic plate.
02:58:40.000And so here's the craziest part about this.
02:58:43.000Normally you would wear a plate, and then you would have to wear a battery and a computer.
02:58:47.000That's how everyone's always done heads-up displays before.
02:58:49.000And I realize that's crazy because you need that space for other stuff, right?
02:58:53.000You want to be carrying ammo, you want to be carrying equipment, you want to be carrying uh grenades or or admin stuff.
02:58:59.000You you you can't use your most valuable real estate to just carry a battery brick.
02:59:04.000So what's in here is a battery technology that is an electrolyte-free solid-state ceramic battery.
02:59:12.000Now, 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.
02:59:24.000But they're pretty good ballistic material.
02:59:27.000And 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.
02:59:35.000You should make your battery part of your ballistic material stack up so that is it the best ballistic material in the world?
03:00:07.000If 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.
03:00:13.000By 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.
03:00:28.000Uh 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.
03:00:35.000Yeah, they're all these guys are already carrying an insane amount of stuff.
03:01:02.000In general, I would recommend using this as your rear plate, not your front plate.
03:01:05.000So 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.
03:01:21.000And if you get shot with a plate, it's possible to take that plate and swap it with a fresh one.
03:01:27.000Um I mean, look, you you're the world's biggest badass if you're able to do that in a fire fight.
03:01:32.000I 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.
03:01:53.000I get to work with I can tell the the just the coolest technology on the bleeding edge of all this.
03:01:57.000And 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.
03:02:05.000But I do this and I get to have end users telling me, Palmer, this is how you saved our units' life.
03:02:11.000Palmer, this is how your technology protected our base.
03:02:14.000Palmer, people would be dead in this particular building if you had not developed the technology that you did.
03:02:20.000That is the most rewarding thing that you can do.
03:02:23.000At least it's the most rewarding thing that I've ever done.
03:02:25.000It's it's it's a it's a it's it's a really cool set of problems.
03:02:29.000And 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.
03:02:36.000And the point I make to them is that this is whether you like it or not, we need some form of weapons, right?
03:02:42.000We're not gonna disarm the entire world.
03:02:44.000There are bad guys out there, we need to have something.
03:02:48.000And 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.
03:02:58.000If 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.
03:03:06.000So that's that's the way that I look at it.