Latest / Core Memory / Anduril and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together - EP 18 Palmer Luckey

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Anduril and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together - EP 18 Palmer Luckey · Core Memory

0:00
SPEAKER_00: I got like a soundboard.
0:01
SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, that's great.
0:06
SPEAKER_03: You ever seen all the old major league gaming style videos people do?
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Like from the video game replay?
0:15
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: I'll show you afterwards.
0:20
SPEAKER_03: I'll show you afterwards.
0:20
SPEAKER_03: But air horns are a staple of that entire genre of video.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: I was excited to have the soundboard.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: I thought...
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Well,
0:35
SPEAKER_00: and this felt like an emergency podcast,
0:39
SPEAKER_00: so I was going to use that noise for the first time.
0:41
If you're going to do an emergency,
0:44
you want to pull up all the old Air Raid siren sounds.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: I know.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a good one, though.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: I need to download...
0:51
the extras somewhere you know came with it you know uh cold war
0:55
era air raid siren
0:56
was my wake-up alarm for many years as a teenager are you
1:00
familiar with the whole
1:01
air raid siren community no there's a lot of people who
1:04
actually collect and
1:05
SPEAKER_03: restore old air raid sirens so
1:07
SPEAKER_03: For a time, they were in every American town.
1:10
So every town had one,
1:11
and then they were slowly decommissioned over time.
1:13
SPEAKER_03: They shifted over to more electronic systems.
1:15
But a lot of these old sirens,
1:16
they were actually engine-driven,
1:18
if you can believe that.
1:19
SPEAKER_03: They weren't electrical at all.
1:20
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:20
And so you'd have a big Chrysler or a big Ford engine hooked up
1:24
to this siren mechanism.
1:26
SPEAKER_03: You would either have a static air raid siren mounted on a roof,
1:29
and people could usually get them for free if they would just
1:31
remove them.
1:32
SPEAKER_03: Or you'd have them on trailers.
1:33
SPEAKER_03: So there's a whole niche community now of people who collect Chrysler,
1:37
SPEAKER_03: Ford,
1:37
SPEAKER_03: and GM-powered air raid sirens and run them at events.
1:41
SPEAKER_03: They get together and all run them together.
1:43
SPEAKER_03: I've pondered getting into that universe myself, but I'm too busy.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: How do you... I mean, you know something about everything.
1:51
SPEAKER_03: Like,
1:51
SPEAKER_03: when did you...
1:52
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:52
I got in the Air Raid sirens because I was interested in
1:55
extreme high-power audio.
1:57
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, all the speaker is is moving air.
2:01
SPEAKER_03: And it turns out that the way that we've done it with very high fidelity,
2:05
SPEAKER_03: using electrical impulses to move a coil back and forth,
2:08
SPEAKER_03: to move a cone back and forth...
2:09
SPEAKER_03: That's actually a pretty limited way to do things.
2:11
SPEAKER_03: And so I then got into people who are building rotary vane subwoofers,
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SPEAKER_03: basically imagine like a helicopter rotor,
2:19
SPEAKER_03: but instead of being designed to lift something and move thrust around,
2:22
it's just designed to move enormous amounts of air at a certain
2:25
frequency to give
2:26
SPEAKER_03: you tons of bass.
2:27
And that was when I found out about the principles of some of
2:28
these old air raid sirens.
2:30
SPEAKER_03: It's actually very, very related.
2:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:32
SPEAKER_03: And so it turns out if you want to turn energy into sound,
2:36
SPEAKER_03: you probably do it mechanically,
2:38
SPEAKER_03: not electrically.
2:39
SPEAKER_03: And so that was, I ended up learning a lot about...
2:43
SPEAKER_03: aerate sirens in the researching of extreme high-powered audio.
2:47
The thing I was specifically interested in was building counter
2:49
UAS systems for this.
2:50
So I wanted to build a system that could shake the inertial
2:55
measurement unit of a
2:56
SPEAKER_03: drone at its own resonant frequency so as to make it stop working.
3:01
SPEAKER_03: And so the idea is with really loud sounds at just the right frequency,
3:05
you could actually knock drones out of the sky by disabling
3:07
their stability
3:07
SPEAKER_03: control.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: And
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SPEAKER_03: It's since become a actually pretty well-developed technique.
3:13
And the limitations are well understood,
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but people are doing it for real now.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: All right.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: So this was an anderald day.
3:19
SPEAKER_03: Oh, no.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: It was even pre-anderald.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:21
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
3:22
there was a bunch of stuff I was thinking about and working on
3:24
even pre-anderald
3:25
SPEAKER_03: that was related to defense.
3:27
SPEAKER_03: I never built any of this stuff, but I was just fascinated.
3:30
It was very clear that drones were going to be a threat even
3:33
when I was just a kid.
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SPEAKER_03: Like,
3:34
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
3:34
I remember reading some of the very first articles about
3:39
quadcopters before there
3:40
SPEAKER_03: weren't any commercial quadcopters.
3:42
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I remember when the Parrot AR drone came out.
3:44
SPEAKER_03: That was, I believe, the first commercial quadcopter.
3:47
SPEAKER_03: I remember that.
3:47
SPEAKER_03: And I mean, I was following that very, very closely.
3:50
SPEAKER_03: I strongly believed in the quadcopter architecture.
3:53
SPEAKER_03: The moment that they became commercial,
3:55
SPEAKER_03: it was clear that this was going to be a massive threat vector.
3:57
I remember chatting in the Mod Retro chat room with me and all
4:00
my other teenage buddies.
4:01
SPEAKER_03: And maybe this is not a smart thing to say on a podcast,
4:04
but I remember having a discussion with everybody that started
4:07
with the prompt,
4:08
SPEAKER_03: how would you kill the president of the United States?
4:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
4:12
SPEAKER_03: And I knew what I would do.
4:15
SPEAKER_03: I would use drones.
4:16
SPEAKER_03: And you start to think, what are the countermeasures you could do?
4:20
SPEAKER_03: We're talking about,
4:21
SPEAKER_03: could you build air jets,
4:24
like compressed air tanks around the perimeter of a stage to
4:27
deflect them?
4:28
Could you build blast shields that pop up from a stage to
4:31
protect the president?
4:32
SPEAKER_03: Well, wait a second.
4:32
Turns out that protecting a president on a stage is not the
4:36
extent of the problem.
4:37
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of other times where he's in motion or unprotected.
4:41
And even at the time,
4:43
I knew that that was going to be a nearly impossible problem.
4:46
And it's a miracle we haven't seen large-scale drone attacks in
4:51
the United States.
4:53
SPEAKER_03: We're very lucky that killers are mostly very mimetic.
4:58
SPEAKER_03: They're mostly not original.
4:59
SPEAKER_03: They mostly just copy what's got attention before.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:02
SPEAKER_03: I mean, the guy who did... I'm not lionizing him.
5:05
SPEAKER_03: I want to be clear.
5:06
I'm not one of those guys who thinks we should put bombers on
5:08
the cover of Rolling
5:09
SPEAKER_03: Stone,
5:10
SPEAKER_03: like the Boston bomber.
5:11
SPEAKER_03: But...
5:12
SPEAKER_03: Like the guy who did the Virginia Tech Massacre,
5:16
SPEAKER_03: he was doing something that had not been done before at the time.
5:21
And then you had all these people who copied him because of the
5:23
attention that it brought.
5:25
SPEAKER_03: And you saw a similar thing with serial killers earlier in the century.
5:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
5:31
SPEAKER_03: where you see this huge explosion of serial killings,
5:35
SPEAKER_03: and then it dropped off as it went out of fashion.
5:37
And so my theory here is that the same way you saw serial
5:40
killings go in and then
5:41
SPEAKER_03: out of fashion,
5:42
SPEAKER_03: so too will mass shootings,
5:43
SPEAKER_03: and so eventually will probably drone attacks.
5:46
SPEAKER_03: So I'm trying to get ahead of that.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: All right,
6:02
SPEAKER_00: well,
6:02
SPEAKER_00: this podcast has already begun,
6:03
SPEAKER_00: and I have not done any sort of formal intro,
6:07
SPEAKER_00: so we'll do it.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: So we have Palmer Lucky.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: I feel like you don't...
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Need a big introduction, but somehow.
6:13
SPEAKER_03: No, I'm Palmer Luckey.
6:14
I am the founder of Andrel Industries,
6:16
which is a defense product company.
6:18
Previously,
6:19
I started a company called Oculus VR,
6:21
which I sold to Facebook.
6:23
SPEAKER_03: Prior to that,
6:24
I started a internet forum called Mod Retro for pairing the
6:28
best of vintage game
6:29
SPEAKER_03: consoles with modern technology.
6:31
And it's still around today in a side project forum of selling
6:34
Game Boy knockoffs.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Have one.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: We have one at our house.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: My wife is playing Tetris on it and
6:38
SPEAKER_00: all the time.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: She's got a lovely pink one.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Colors are amazing.
6:42
SPEAKER_03: Getting to do a new version of Tetris was so cool.
6:45
SPEAKER_03: It's one of those things where you never grow up thinking,
6:47
SPEAKER_03: I will get to be the director of a Tetris game.
6:50
SPEAKER_03: And then you do.
6:52
SPEAKER_03: And I mean, it's pretty fun.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm going to ask you questions about that.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: And even just in your...
7:00
Introducing yourself,
7:01
we're going to get to where these worlds now collide.
7:05
Super quick,
7:06
before we go a little further,
7:08
just tiny housekeeping that I have to do.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: This episode made possible by the good people at E1 Ventures.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: E1 Ventures, serving your venture capital needs.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, E1 Ventures.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: I think they are actually an annual investor.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: Through an SPV or directly?
7:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't have that kind of information.
7:28
SPEAKER_03: You don't have that already?
7:29
SPEAKER_03: No.
7:30
SPEAKER_03: Oh, man.
7:30
SPEAKER_03: See, this is the difference between you and me.
7:33
SPEAKER_03: I've learned,
7:34
SPEAKER_03: maybe not perfectly,
7:35
but I've learned how to keep investors happy having had to
7:38
raise billions of
7:39
SPEAKER_03: dollars in venture capital over my career.
7:41
SPEAKER_03: Now, you got to have that stuff on speed dial.
7:44
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: All right.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, I will dig in.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: I will dig in.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Just real quick.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: So we have a lot of ground to cover.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for coming.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: First guest in our near first studio.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
7:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm not in the Bay Area too often.
7:55
SPEAKER_03: I come up here on April 1st every year, but beyond that, not too often.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I want to get to what brought you here.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: However, I do have a question.
8:03
So like on the games,
8:05
I mean,
8:06
you go to that level,
8:07
you're actually helping...
8:09
SPEAKER_03: design the games and... In most cases, no.
8:13
SPEAKER_03: In this particular case,
8:14
SPEAKER_03: for people who don't know,
8:15
SPEAKER_03: Mod Retro,
8:16
SPEAKER_03: it was started as an internet forum by me and a couple of my buddies,
8:21
SPEAKER_03: like Chris Dykes,
8:21
SPEAKER_03: when we were teenagers.
8:23
And we were modifying vintage game consoles,
8:28
building them into portables.
8:31
SPEAKER_03: The hobby was called portabilizing.
8:34
SPEAKER_03: So imagine taking a Nintendo 64,
8:35
SPEAKER_03: turning it into a handheld,
8:37
SPEAKER_03: using modern batteries,
8:38
SPEAKER_03: modern displays.
8:39
SPEAKER_03: And we also did a lot of Game Boy modification,
8:41
SPEAKER_03: making custom Game Boys,
8:42
SPEAKER_03: upgrading the displays.
8:43
SPEAKER_03: I was the first person to ever LED backlight a Game Boy.
8:46
I believe I was also the first person to do an aftermarket Game
8:49
Boy Pocket
8:50
SPEAKER_03: backlight using electroluminescent panels.
8:53
Nintendo did that on the Game Boy Lite,
8:54
but I made a retrofit kit for that.
8:57
SPEAKER_03: Anyway,
8:57
fast forward to the present where I have a whole bunch of money
8:59
in this project
9:00
SPEAKER_03: I've been working on for over a decade,
9:02
which is a kind of money is no object version of the Nintendo
9:05
Game Boy Color.
9:06
What would it look like if it was,
9:07
you know,
9:08
kind of an heirloom tribute to the Game Boy Color?
9:12
SPEAKER_03: And so it has a magnesium aluminum alloy shell.
9:16
SPEAKER_03: a lab-grown sapphire screen window instead of plastic.
9:19
SPEAKER_03: As far as I know,
9:19
it's the largest single piece of sapphire in any consumer
9:23
product that's ever
9:24
SPEAKER_03: shipped.
9:25
Way bigger than,
9:25
let's say,
9:26
like a sapphire crystal used in a Rolex watch.
9:29
SPEAKER_03: And it came bundled with a new version of Tetris,
9:32
which was created and produced by Mod Retro under license from
9:35
the Tetris company.
9:37
SPEAKER_03: And that was really interesting because we got to meet Hank and Alexei,
9:40
SPEAKER_03: the developer,
9:41
and the guy who brought Tetris to the West worked directly with
9:46
them to build
9:46
something that was compliant with the rules of what a Tetris
9:49
game should be,
9:50
SPEAKER_03: how it should work.
9:51
SPEAKER_03: I've been a Tetris fan my whole life.
9:52
SPEAKER_03: And so normally do I get involved in the games for the Chromatic?
9:56
SPEAKER_03: Not usually,
9:57
SPEAKER_03: but in this case,
9:58
SPEAKER_03: it was bundled with every single mod retro chromatic,
10:01
just like Nintendo bundled Tetris with all the Game Boys that
10:04
were sold in North
10:04
SPEAKER_03: America.
10:05
SPEAKER_03: And so that's one that you really, really got to get right.
10:08
SPEAKER_03: And I had a lot of opinions.
10:09
And so there,
10:10
of course,
10:10
there's a whole team of people who are making sure to get it
10:12
right.
10:12
SPEAKER_03: And I don't even deserve the majority of the credit.
10:15
SPEAKER_03: But still,
10:15
to even be in a position of directing something like that is
10:19
something you don't
10:20
SPEAKER_03: expect as a kid.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's cool.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: And not to do like a huge mod retro ad,
10:25
SPEAKER_00: or I didn't plan on doing this,
10:26
SPEAKER_00: but man,
10:27
SPEAKER_00: when you hold it in your hands...
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, I had a Game Boy that I played into oblivion.
10:34
And yeah,
10:35
when you hold your device,
10:36
I mean,
10:37
that thing is like well built.
10:39
SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's well built, well engineered.
10:41
SPEAKER_03: And then we did a lot of other crazy stuff that made no financial sense.
10:44
SPEAKER_03: Like the display is a fully custom display, very, very low pixel density.
10:49
SPEAKER_03: So 160 by 144, just like the original Game Boy.
10:53
We even had to make custom color filters for the LCD so that it
10:58
had the same
10:59
SPEAKER_03: incorrect RGB color profile as the Game Boy Color had back in the 90s.
11:04
And it's because we wanted to perfectly replicate the,
11:08
you know,
11:08
it's not really true.
11:09
we're not trying to replicate what it was actually like to play
11:11
a Game Boy.
11:12
We're trying to replicate what you remember feeling like
11:15
playing that Game Boy.
11:16
And so people often will play their old Game Boy and they don't
11:18
realize how dim the
11:20
SPEAKER_03: display is and just how gimp the experience is or how cheap it feels.
11:25
SPEAKER_03: Because that's not what they felt when they were a kid.
11:27
SPEAKER_03: It was the most expensive thing they owned, probably.
11:30
It was a treasure to be prized and it was like nothing you'd
11:34
ever seen before.
11:35
SPEAKER_03: So we have to try to copy...
11:38
SPEAKER_03: and recreate that feeling you had playing it.
11:41
And I think it's maybe a little bit like vinyl or
11:44
Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
11:45
SPEAKER_03: You're not trying to capture the truth.
11:48
SPEAKER_03: You're trying to capture an ideal.
11:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:50
SPEAKER_03: Well, I think you pulled it off.
11:52
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
11:53
SPEAKER_03: And for people who are interested, you cannot buy one.
11:57
They're completely...
11:58
So this is the good news about you doing an ad for it.
11:59
SPEAKER_03: You can't buy one right now.
12:01
SPEAKER_03: Oh, they're sold out?
12:01
SPEAKER_03: They sold out...
12:03
SPEAKER_03: When did they sell out?
12:04
SPEAKER_03: I guess very early this year, maybe very late last year.
12:07
But yeah,
12:08
we started selling first edition chromatics last summer and we
12:14
completely sold out.
12:15
SPEAKER_03: There was way more demand than I thought.
12:16
We've been trying to figure out how to bring them back and do a
12:18
more sustainable version.
12:20
It's tough because we made so many ridiculous product decisions
12:24
and I was losing a
12:25
SPEAKER_03: lot of money on every unit.
12:26
SPEAKER_03: And I can afford to lose money.
12:28
SPEAKER_03: That's not the issue.
12:28
It's just – it feels a little weird when you're shipping tens
12:32
of thousands of units
12:34
SPEAKER_03: of things where you're just shelling out for each person's gift.
12:38
But I guess in a way,
12:40
I bought more Christmas presents last year than most people
12:43
would.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: All right.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, my heart feels pure that I was not just shelling.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: We'll figure it out.
12:50
You could show for us some other time when it comes back into
12:53
stock as a more
12:55
SPEAKER_03: sustainable product.
12:56
SPEAKER_03: But for now, you can't buy one.
12:57
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: All right.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to shift gears to the one reason you're here.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: You just came from Meta.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: Straight here to this office in Palo Alto.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: By the time this podcast comes out,
13:13
SPEAKER_00: press release will have crossed the wire,
13:15
SPEAKER_00: announcing a partnership between Andrel and Meta,
13:19
SPEAKER_00: which,
13:20
SPEAKER_00: just to set some context,
13:21
SPEAKER_00: which I'm sure we'll get into,
13:23
SPEAKER_00: is an unlikely...
13:26
SPEAKER_00: It's an unlikely occurrence if you'd followed history.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: You, Meta, Facebook acquired Oculus VR.
13:35
You,
13:36
I mean,
13:36
I'll let you,
13:37
let me take a crack and then you fix everything.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Sure, we'll do.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: But you, you know, we're...
13:45
thrown out of the company,
13:46
essentially from my read for being a Republican.
13:49
There was a billboard that was put up that was kind of like
13:52
anti-Hillary Clinton in hindsight.
13:54
SPEAKER_03: There was a picture of her face with the caption, too big to jail.
13:58
SPEAKER_03: Right.
13:58
SPEAKER_03: It was very innocuous in this.
14:00
This was in kind of the height of the controversy over her
14:03
handling or mishandling
14:05
SPEAKER_03: of classified documents.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: Right.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: And man, I mean, you were pilloried in the press.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: You got portrayed as this hate demon.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to let you do the version of this,
14:21
but I went back and I read some of the old stories and I read
14:25
Blake Harris's The
14:28
SPEAKER_00: History of the Future.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: Yep, The History of the Future.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: Great book.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: It's a great book.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: He's got about 50 or 60 pages that kind of get in
14:35
SPEAKER_03: And also his style is interesting in that,
14:37
SPEAKER_03: you know,
14:37
SPEAKER_03: his book,
14:38
SPEAKER_03: like his previous books,
14:39
SPEAKER_03: like Console Wars,
14:40
SPEAKER_03: it's based all on actual internal documents.
14:42
So nobody ever says anything in the book that's not directly
14:45
mapped one-to-one with
14:46
SPEAKER_03: an email or a recording or an interview.
14:49
SPEAKER_03: I mean, something that he...
14:50
It's an interesting way of storytelling where you can point to
14:53
any line in it and
14:54
SPEAKER_03: he can say,
14:55
SPEAKER_03: here's,
14:55
SPEAKER_03: you know,
14:56
SPEAKER_03: here's,
14:56
SPEAKER_03: you don't need,
14:57
SPEAKER_03: it's not citations throughout.
14:58
SPEAKER_03: It's just each, each thing is directly based on something.
15:02
SPEAKER_03: It's a very interesting way of telling a story.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Super well researched.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: Also of note, I mean, I don't think he would mind me saying this.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: He's a pretty liberal Democrat sort of guy.
15:12
SPEAKER_03: He's a liberal Jewish Democrat living in New York City.
15:17
SPEAKER_03: So you're not, not generally inclined to go out of his way to be
15:21
SPEAKER_03: unfair to, you know, Facebook or fair to a conservative.
15:28
SPEAKER_03: Correct.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: And when you read his account of what happened and you go back,
15:33
SPEAKER_00: like I remember living through this and it was,
15:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:36
SPEAKER_00: it was a very heated time,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: like kind of Trump hate was,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you can find where that peaks, but it was at a quite...
15:44
SPEAKER_00: high level,
15:46
SPEAKER_00: and you were presented,
15:47
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
15:48
SPEAKER_00: as the demon spawn of hate memes and this evil mastermind.
15:53
When you go back and read the actual- And the evil mastermind
15:55
who got Donald Trump
15:56
SPEAKER_03: elected because I gave $9,000 that ran a single billboard in Cleveland.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Like in hindsight,
16:03
SPEAKER_00: and then also when you look at the book and this other reporting,
16:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
16:06
SPEAKER_00: it's kind of crazy.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, it is crazy.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And then, okay, so-
16:11
SPEAKER_00: You get tossed out of Facebook.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: There's, I think there's, we can get into this or not.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: There's like lawsuits that go on and they,
16:20
I think we're holding some of your acquisition money hostage
16:23
for a period of time.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: And then anyway.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: You had to fight over it.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: And here we are.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Now you guys have partnered.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: First tell us like what this partnership involves.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: And then, and like how in, I mean, this is a crazy story.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: How in the hell this came to happen.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: And for people who aren't even familiar with that,
16:41
SPEAKER_03: the first thing they need to do is,
16:43
SPEAKER_03: I wasn't just fired from Facebook.
16:44
SPEAKER_03: Facebook acquired my company.
16:45
SPEAKER_03: So I started Oculus when I was 19 years old.
16:48
SPEAKER_03: And I had been building VR headsets since I was 15 years old.
16:52
SPEAKER_03: And so by the time they fired me, you're talking about a decade.
16:55
You're talking about basically my entire adult life and most of
16:58
my teenage life.
16:59
SPEAKER_03: This is your baby.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: This is your soul.
17:01
SPEAKER_03: Look, I was Oculus and Oculus was me.
17:03
SPEAKER_03: It was everything to me.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: The interesting...
17:08
SPEAKER_03: So what we're doing is teaming up to build the world's best AR,
17:17
SPEAKER_03: VR,
17:18
SPEAKER_03: and in-between systems for the United States government,
17:22
SPEAKER_03: allied government,
17:23
SPEAKER_03: partner governments,
17:24
SPEAKER_03: including military...
17:26
SPEAKER_03: state,
17:27
SPEAKER_03: local law enforcement,
17:29
kind of this entire world that's been hugely underserved by the
17:34
existing XR
17:35
SPEAKER_03: community.
17:36
There's not really a lot of work out there applying these
17:39
technologies,
17:40
which are critical.
17:41
SPEAKER_03: I still strongly believe that immersive computing is the future.
17:45
And there's not really anyone who's bringing that technology
17:48
into the military,
17:50
SPEAKER_03: into our government,
17:51
SPEAKER_03: into the places that often need it most,
17:53
SPEAKER_03: could save the most lives.
17:54
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's just one example.
17:56
Did you know the United States loses more servicemen in
18:00
training than every form of
18:02
SPEAKER_03: combat death combined?
18:05
SPEAKER_03: What would it take to eliminate every form of combat death?
18:08
SPEAKER_03: I mean, hundreds of new technologies.
18:10
SPEAKER_03: It's almost unthinkable.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: What would it take to eliminate most training deaths?
18:15
SPEAKER_03: basically just really good virtual reality simulators.
18:17
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's kind of crazy how low hanging the fruit is.
18:21
And so maybe the way to put this is there's a lot of things in
18:24
Meta that I
18:26
SPEAKER_03: invented,
18:26
SPEAKER_03: that my team invented before they acquired us.
18:29
There's other things that I invented,
18:31
that the team invented while I was at Facebook,
18:34
now Meta.
18:35
SPEAKER_03: And there's a bunch of technology that was invented after I was fired.
18:40
SPEAKER_03: And this partnership is about taking that entire base of technology,
18:45
SPEAKER_03: IP,
18:45
SPEAKER_03: around hardware,
18:46
SPEAKER_03: software,
18:47
SPEAKER_03: in the AI,
18:48
SPEAKER_03: VR,
18:49
SPEAKER_03: AR space,
18:51
SPEAKER_03: and applying it to solving our military's most pressing challenges.
18:54
It's taking a lot of the people who have been working on these
18:57
technologies for...
19:00
consumer applications and adapting their work to solve national
19:04
security problems
19:06
SPEAKER_03: at a very low cost to the taxpayer.
19:08
SPEAKER_03: Like actually thus far,
19:09
SPEAKER_03: all the work we've been doing together very,
19:12
very quietly with Meta over the last year has not been funded
19:16
by taxpayers at all,
19:17
SPEAKER_03: not a single dime.
19:18
SPEAKER_03: It's been entirely privately funded.
19:20
And Meta's put in $60 billion,
19:23
it has put $60 billion into their Reality Labs efforts.
19:27
And I think it's pretty great that the American warfighter is
19:33
going to be able to
19:33
SPEAKER_03: benefit from that investment.
19:35
Okay,
19:35
two questions,
19:36
and then we're for sure diving in back into the history.
19:38
SPEAKER_03: Very specific.
19:39
SPEAKER_03: The first thing we're teaming up to go after is,
19:42
SPEAKER_03: you may know,
19:43
SPEAKER_03: Andrel took over the IVAS contract from Microsoft,
19:47
SPEAKER_03: which was originally built on HoloLens.
19:49
And we're teaming up to build a next generation version of IVAS
19:53
called Eagle Eye.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's what I wanted to get into first.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: So I've written about this when you guys got this IVAS contract.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: That's a whole other thing we should probably unpack.
20:02
SPEAKER_03: It's an unbelievable story all just in there.
20:04
SPEAKER_03: You know, Andrel tried to win IVAS back when it was first kicking off.
20:11
SPEAKER_03: But that was back when Andrel was less than a couple dozen people.
20:15
SPEAKER_03: And we were up against Microsoft and Magic Leap,
20:18
SPEAKER_03: which at the time had the Magic Leap Horizons team,
20:20
SPEAKER_03: which was a very,
20:21
very kind of covert team they were embarrassed of that was
20:24
working on military and
20:25
SPEAKER_03: government applications.
20:26
And in the end,
20:27
Microsoft ended up winning the contract,
20:29
not Andrel,
20:29
which is not surprising.
20:31
SPEAKER_03: But in the end,
20:32
we ended up cutting a deal with Microsoft where they're going
20:35
to continue to do AI
20:36
SPEAKER_03: cloud services work on IVAS.
20:38
SPEAKER_03: But we were taking over
20:40
SPEAKER_03: kind of the core architecture and hardware element of it.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
20:43
I don't know where to begin because there's all these things
20:45
need unpacking.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: Just one note on that.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
20:47
SPEAKER_00: that contract,
20:48
SPEAKER_00: I know it came in different tranches,
20:50
SPEAKER_00: but ultimately it was around $20 billion.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: About $22 billion appropriated by Congress.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: And I'll say it,
20:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether you'd want to or not,
20:59
SPEAKER_00: but Microsoft kind of screwed the pooch on this contract.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: It was about to maybe even get whacked because it had taken so long.
21:07
So this is essentially to build the thing we see in movies that
21:11
soldiers have.
21:13
SPEAKER_03: It's the thing that everyone's always wanted.
21:16
SPEAKER_03: And people have called them different things.
21:17
SPEAKER_03: They've called them Call of Duty goggles.
21:19
SPEAKER_03: They've called it, you know, the helmet from Halo.
21:21
It goes all the way back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel
21:25
Starship Troopers.
21:25
The idea of mobile infantry that's equipped with heads-up
21:28
displays that are doing
21:29
SPEAKER_03: ballistics calculations and thermal vision and night vision.
21:32
These are old ideas that have only very recently become really
21:36
technologically viable.
21:37
SPEAKER_03: And so, yeah, that's what I've asked is the idea is to give...
21:42
SPEAKER_03: war fighters,
21:43
SPEAKER_03: superhuman vision,
21:44
SPEAKER_03: superhuman perception,
21:45
SPEAKER_03: superhuman hearing,
21:46
and allow them to communicate with each other and large teams
21:49
of autonomous systems
21:51
SPEAKER_00: in a totally seamless way.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: And again, I'll say this so you don't have to, but maybe you will.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, so Microsoft had won this around their HoloLens technology.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: People can go on the internet and find stories about...
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Soldiers vomiting, having headaches from this technology.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't keeping up.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: So Andrel takes over this contract,
22:10
SPEAKER_00: which is in and of itself,
22:13
SPEAKER_00: like,
22:13
SPEAKER_00: amazing because these things don't happen.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: You don't have $20 billion contracts move from one company to another.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: And then it keeps it alive.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, the military funding was already there to do this.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: And now you're saying that over... Okay, now you're combining forces.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: So you're going to bring...
22:31
SPEAKER_00: Andrews,
22:32
SPEAKER_00: defense,
22:32
SPEAKER_00: technology,
22:33
SPEAKER_00: expertise,
22:34
SPEAKER_00: lattice software,
22:35
SPEAKER_00: things like that,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: and combine this with Facebook's.
22:37
SPEAKER_03: And a lot of our own hardware, too.
22:39
SPEAKER_03: You know, we've done a lot of stuff.
22:40
SPEAKER_03: So Eagle Eye is a fully, it's not just a head-mounted display.
22:46
SPEAKER_03: It's a fully integrated ballistic shell with hearing protection,
22:50
SPEAKER_03: vision protection,
22:51
SPEAKER_03: head protection,
22:52
SPEAKER_03: onboard compute,
22:53
SPEAKER_03: onboard networking,
22:54
SPEAKER_03: you know,
22:54
SPEAKER_03: radios.
22:58
and also vision augmentation systems,
23:00
sensor systems that enhance your perception.
23:03
And what we're doing is working with Meta to take the building
23:05
blocks that they've
23:06
SPEAKER_03: invested enormous amounts of money and expertise in,
23:10
SPEAKER_03: and we're able to use those building blocks
23:12
SPEAKER_03: in Eagle Eye without having to recreate them from scratch ourselves.
23:16
There's things that Andrew probably could do if we were willing
23:18
to put billions of
23:20
SPEAKER_03: dollars of taxpayer money into it.
23:23
I think we could convince the army to give us a lot of money to
23:26
recreate these things.
23:26
SPEAKER_03: But why would you do that when they've already been made?
23:29
SPEAKER_03: Why spend five years doing something
23:32
SPEAKER_03: when it's already been done in the consumer sector.
23:34
SPEAKER_03: Now,
23:34
you wouldn't see a company like Meta going in to do something
23:37
like this on their
23:38
own because they don't want to build necessarily all up
23:41
integrated military
23:42
SPEAKER_03: products.
23:42
SPEAKER_03: They're not going to build a ballistic shell,
23:43
SPEAKER_03: ear protection,
23:44
SPEAKER_03: eye protection,
23:45
SPEAKER_03: military-grade networking,
23:46
SPEAKER_03: top secret rated secure communications channels.
23:49
There's a lot of things you need to be really good at on the
23:51
hardware and the
23:52
SPEAKER_03: software side and the government relations side.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: nothing of the sales side to be able to do that.
23:57
But they do have a lot of intellectual property and building
24:01
blocks that they've
24:02
built that are just as useful on the battlefield as they are on
24:06
the head of any
24:06
SPEAKER_03: consumer.
24:07
And you're saying you guys have been working on this in secret
24:10
for a year?
24:12
SPEAKER_03: Maybe not quite a year, but approaching a year.
24:15
SPEAKER_03: We've been going back and forth.
24:18
SPEAKER_03: Actually,
24:19
SPEAKER_03: The genesis of it is kind of wild.
24:22
SPEAKER_03: Did you read that tablet magazine?
24:24
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
24:24
SPEAKER_03: Our article about Andrel and me?
24:26
This was the first time I...
24:28
Previously,
24:29
you and Zach and Boz,
24:32
who's what,
24:32
the CTO?
24:33
SPEAKER_00: CTO of Meta.
24:34
You guys weren't on the friendliest terms out in the social
24:39
networking spheres.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden in this tablet piece, which was...
24:43
SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: And I see, I think it was, weren't they both in there?
24:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: Talking about you?
24:49
SPEAKER_03: Certainly Zuck was.
24:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
24:51
SPEAKER_03: But the guy who wrote the tablet article reached out to Meta and said,
24:55
SPEAKER_03: hey,
24:56
SPEAKER_03: you know,
24:57
SPEAKER_03: I'm reporting in my piece that Palmer was fired for political reasons.
25:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
25:02
SPEAKER_03: And I've done a lot of digging on this.
25:04
SPEAKER_03: It's very clearly true.
25:05
SPEAKER_03: It's very clearly the case.
25:07
SPEAKER_03: I don't think I'm being sensationalist here.
25:08
I've seen all the documentation,
25:11
and I just wanted to know if you have a comment.
25:13
SPEAKER_03: Here's what I'm going to say, and do you have a comment on that?
25:16
SPEAKER_03: And I think he expected to hear back from some PR flunky,
25:20
and instead he actually got a response from Mark Zuckerberg
25:22
himself saying,
25:22
SPEAKER_03: Palmer's a great American,
25:24
SPEAKER_03: Andrel's a great company,
25:25
and I'm really glad that they're doing things to protect our
25:28
national security.
25:28
SPEAKER_03: And
25:31
SPEAKER_03: That kicked off,
25:32
SPEAKER_03: we ended up reconnecting,
25:35
SPEAKER_03: talking about some of the problems that are going on with America,
25:39
SPEAKER_03: some of the inefficiencies that exist for just terrible reasons,
25:45
SPEAKER_03: how there are people who are dying because of...
25:49
SPEAKER_03: They're dying needlessly.
25:50
People who are dying needlessly because of barriers between our
25:53
technology industry
25:55
SPEAKER_03: and our national security community.
25:57
And we ended up deciding that this was something that we needed
26:02
to work on together.
26:03
SPEAKER_03: Meta's been doing a lot more on the national security front.
26:06
SPEAKER_03: They've been doing a lot more work with the government.
26:07
Do you remember last year they announced that they were
26:10
partnering with a bunch of
26:11
different companies and government agencies around use of LAMA
26:14
and open source AI
26:16
SPEAKER_03: in general?
26:16
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:17
talking about the importance of open source AI for government
26:19
applications,
26:20
SPEAKER_03: particularly national security.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Silicon Valley found its defense religion.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, it's apparently okay for you to be a Republican.
26:28
SPEAKER_03: Some people have come to the other side of this and said,
26:32
SPEAKER_03: Palmer,
26:33
SPEAKER_03: how can you forgive these people?
26:35
SPEAKER_03: And I think you've got to remember a few things.
26:37
SPEAKER_03: One...
26:39
Meta is a very different company than it was nine years ago
26:43
when they fired me.
26:44
SPEAKER_03: I don't mean in tenor or tone.
26:46
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's literally different people.
26:49
SPEAKER_03: A company is comprised of the people that are inside of it.
26:51
SPEAKER_03: Mark isn't the one who fired me directly.
26:53
SPEAKER_03: It was the people under him.
26:55
SPEAKER_03: Look,
26:56
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying he didn't approve it,
26:57
SPEAKER_03: but when your people that you task with making decisions come up and say,
27:01
SPEAKER_03: this is what we've decided we have to do.
27:02
SPEAKER_03: There's no other way out of this huge PR and internal problem.
27:06
SPEAKER_03: Our employees are insane,
27:09
radical leftists who are going to quit en masse if we don't get
27:12
rid of Paul.
27:12
SPEAKER_03: We're like...
27:13
SPEAKER_03: what are you really going to do?
27:14
SPEAKER_03: Do you trust the people that you've hired?
27:17
SPEAKER_03: Or do you override them?
27:20
SPEAKER_03: And you can override people, but only to some extent.
27:22
SPEAKER_03: You kind of have to trust people.
27:24
My point is,
27:25
though,
27:25
the people who conspired to oust me,
27:27
they're not even there anymore.
27:28
SPEAKER_03: Some of them left of their own accord, and others were fired.
27:31
SPEAKER_03: And so when every single person that conspired to get rid of me
27:34
has been run out of the company,
27:36
what is there really left to be truly angry at?
27:39
SPEAKER_03: Am I angry at Facebook,
27:42
SPEAKER_03: LLC,
27:43
SPEAKER_03: a Delaware corporation,
27:46
SPEAKER_03: or am I mad at specific individuals who may have wronged me?
27:50
SPEAKER_03: The other side here is,
27:54
Politically,
27:54
I think people forget that the intent of politics should be
27:58
persuasion.
27:59
SPEAKER_03: It's not warfare.
28:00
SPEAKER_03: It's debate.
28:01
SPEAKER_03: And so if people end up coming to your side,
28:05
SPEAKER_03: you shouldn't shove them back and say,
28:07
SPEAKER_03: hey,
28:08
SPEAKER_03: fuck off.
28:09
SPEAKER_03: You had different beliefs 10 years ago.
28:11
SPEAKER_03: You should say, come on in.
28:12
SPEAKER_03: The tent's big, and I'm happy to have you.
28:14
SPEAKER_03: And I think this isn't just a Facebook thing.
28:17
SPEAKER_03: I think tech generally,
28:18
SPEAKER_03: broadly,
28:19
SPEAKER_03: has realized they do have some obligation to support national security,
28:23
SPEAKER_03: that working with the government is not a terrible thing.
28:26
And it'd be really easy for everybody to just go out there and
28:29
remind everybody of
28:29
SPEAKER_03: what they were saying about me and about...
28:32
the military,
28:33
or even about Trump five,
28:35
six,
28:35
seven,
28:36
eight,
28:36
nine years ago.
28:37
But I think it's probably way more productive for me to just
28:40
accept that I kind of
28:41
SPEAKER_03: won the persuasion argument and just live with that.
28:47
SPEAKER_03: I understand this argument.
28:48
SPEAKER_03: Oh, and you know what?
28:48
SPEAKER_03: Boz apologized too publicly.
28:51
SPEAKER_03: He publicly said that I,
28:53
SPEAKER_03: he said,
28:53
SPEAKER_03: yeah,
28:53
he said the things they've said about me were not true and that
28:56
he had been
28:57
misinformed by people who are no longer with the company and
29:00
that he even said the
29:01
SPEAKER_03: magic words,
29:03
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry.
29:04
SPEAKER_03: It goes a really long way.
29:06
SPEAKER_03: And you're right.
29:07
SPEAKER_03: There had been a lot of back and forth where,
29:09
SPEAKER_03: you know,
29:09
SPEAKER_03: Boz had been saying before,
29:10
SPEAKER_03: Palmer wasn't fired for political reasons.
29:12
SPEAKER_03: Politics had nothing to do with it.
29:13
SPEAKER_03: And I had gone pretty aggro and said, this is ridiculous.
29:16
SPEAKER_03: This is like saying the sky is green.
29:18
SPEAKER_03: Like, even the people who hate me will admit that I was...
29:23
SPEAKER_03: terminated for almost entirely political reasons.
29:25
SPEAKER_03: Even the people who hate me will admit that.
29:28
SPEAKER_03: Let's live in reality here.
29:30
And I think it gets to the problem of large corporations where
29:33
you kind of have to
29:34
SPEAKER_03: delegate some level of thinking.
29:36
And if somebody tells you Palmer was fired for totally
29:39
nonpolitical reasons,
29:41
SPEAKER_03: you have to dig pretty hard to find out that in fact,
29:45
The real problem is that three levels of employees below you
29:48
were all deeply
29:49
SPEAKER_03: partisan and highly biased against a particular outcome.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
29:57
But if you were to go back,
29:58
I don't know,
29:59
three years,
30:00
two and a half years.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: If anyone saw this deal, you'd say no fucking way.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, I think a few things have happened.
30:10
SPEAKER_03: One, we've seen willingness on the part of the U.S.
30:12
SPEAKER_03: government to do new things.
30:14
And I think part of that is things like the IVAS contract going
30:17
from Microsoft to Android.
30:18
SPEAKER_03: That had to be approved by the United States Army.
30:20
SPEAKER_03: And they did.
30:20
SPEAKER_03: They approved it.
30:22
SPEAKER_03: They approved the novation process and it moved over.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: Maybe not to put too fine of a point on it,
30:27
SPEAKER_03: but Trump being in office makes a difference here too.
30:30
SPEAKER_03: There is...
30:31
SPEAKER_03: a willingness to try new things and try to get things done very quickly.
30:37
SPEAKER_03: And I think there's a lot of tech companies...
30:39
SPEAKER_03: It's not that they agree with Trump's politics or his policies,
30:42
SPEAKER_03: but they know that if you had the same people in power...
30:46
SPEAKER_03: that had been in power for the previous four years,
30:49
that there was not going to be room for a tech company to come
30:51
in and actually be
30:52
SPEAKER_03: allowed to make a difference,
30:54
SPEAKER_03: allowed to displace the incumbents with their revolving doors.
31:00
SPEAKER_03: And I think Trump winning has really, even people who...
31:05
SPEAKER_03: completely disagree with Trump on every matter of policy.
31:08
SPEAKER_03: They say,
31:08
SPEAKER_03: you know,
31:09
SPEAKER_03: at the very least though,
31:11
there is a willingness to work with us to do things that would
31:14
not have been
31:15
SPEAKER_03: possible otherwise.
31:16
SPEAKER_03: I think it would have seemed crazy three years ago.
31:19
SPEAKER_03: I think the combination of,
31:21
meta some of their technological bets playing out in a way
31:24
where it made clear that
31:25
SPEAKER_03: some of these multi-billion dollar bets were not follies.
31:28
SPEAKER_03: They were breakthroughs.
31:29
Things like building optical-grade silicon carbide optics that
31:33
achieved heretofore
31:34
SPEAKER_03: impossible levels of field of view and acuity,
31:38
SPEAKER_03: combined with Trump winning,
31:39
SPEAKER_03: combined with Andrel doing well,
31:41
combined with a willingness on the part of the government to do
31:43
things in a new
31:43
SPEAKER_03: way,
31:44
SPEAKER_03: made it where
31:46
SPEAKER_03: Someone like me and someone like Mark,
31:48
SPEAKER_03: two relatively rational actors,
31:51
SPEAKER_03: how could we possibly say we...
31:55
jointly hold the keys to changing the way that the government
32:00
consumes information
32:01
and fights on the battlefield but we're not going to because
32:03
we're pissed at each
32:04
other like that that that i think if you'd explain that to me
32:07
three years ago and
32:08
you said imagine this scenario i think i would have said man i
32:11
don't think any of
32:12
that's gonna happen but if it did yeah i could see that i could
32:16
see that the crazy
32:17
SPEAKER_03: thing is the world around us not not the not the happening
32:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's put the zuck of it all to the side for a second.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Is there not some part of you,
32:25
SPEAKER_00: I get what you're saying,
32:26
SPEAKER_00: the greater good,
32:27
SPEAKER_00: but to see Tim Cook,
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Sundar up there next to Trump now,
32:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
32:33
SPEAKER_00: some part of you must vomit over to the side,
32:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:38
SPEAKER_00: as if this is like normal behavior on their part,
32:43
SPEAKER_00: given the context of what they've done over the years.
32:47
SPEAKER_03: I think, I mean, I've gone through my...
32:50
SPEAKER_03: I've gone through my, I've made my peace with it.
32:53
SPEAKER_03: Like, yeah, look, at a visceral level, it does piss me off.
32:56
SPEAKER_03: In fact,
32:57
SPEAKER_03: if you look up some interviews,
32:58
SPEAKER_03: right when that happened,
32:59
SPEAKER_03: I was saying things like that.
33:00
SPEAKER_03: I was like,
33:01
SPEAKER_03: you know,
33:01
SPEAKER_03: it kind of makes me,
33:02
SPEAKER_03: like,
33:02
SPEAKER_03: I remember what these people were saying about me,
33:06
SPEAKER_03: people like me,
33:07
SPEAKER_03: people who share only some of my political beliefs,
33:10
SPEAKER_03: what you were saying about ordinary people who,
33:13
SPEAKER_03: like,
33:13
they're acting like everyone who supports Trump must just be an
33:15
awful person.
33:16
SPEAKER_03: I remember the past, but like I said, you want to persuade.
33:22
And if they're persuaded,
33:23
plus there's a little bit of shit eating there.
33:25
SPEAKER_03: Look, you think people like Sundar want to be on that stage?
33:28
SPEAKER_03: There's a little bit of schadenfreude there.
33:32
SPEAKER_03: I'd rather they be standing there than me.
33:34
I mean,
33:35
I'm kind of middle of the road,
33:37
but I find this like,
33:39
I mean,
33:40
man.
33:41
SPEAKER_03: Some of these people, I think, have really had a change of heart.
33:43
SPEAKER_03: Others, I think it is very opportunistic.
33:46
SPEAKER_03: And I think actually people know what it is.
33:48
SPEAKER_03: Like,
33:49
SPEAKER_03: I think people look at someone like Mark and they say,
33:51
SPEAKER_03: wow,
33:51
SPEAKER_03: he really does seem to have had a change of heart.
33:53
SPEAKER_03: Like,
33:54
SPEAKER_03: you don't opportunistically,
33:55
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
33:55
SPEAKER_03: he decided,
33:56
SPEAKER_03: for example,
33:57
SPEAKER_03: Meta decided to allow national security use of their AI before Trump won.
34:03
SPEAKER_03: That isn't a reaction to Trump winning.
34:05
That was,
34:05
I think,
34:06
a pretty principled move to do something regardless of who won.
34:10
And I think actually getting it done before the election was
34:12
probably important to
34:13
SPEAKER_03: show this is not a reaction to
34:16
SPEAKER_03: Biden winning or a Harris winning or a Trump winning.
34:18
SPEAKER_03: It's something that's important no matter what.
34:20
SPEAKER_03: Other people, it reminds me of the Patti LaBelle song, New Attitude.
34:24
SPEAKER_03: Are you familiar?
34:25
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
34:27
SPEAKER_02: I'm in control.
34:28
SPEAKER_02: My worries are few.
34:29
SPEAKER_02: Know where I'm going and I know what to do.
34:32
SPEAKER_02: I tidied up my point of view.
34:35
SPEAKER_02: I got a new attitude.
34:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:38
SPEAKER_03: They're in control.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: Their worries are few.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: They've tied it up their point of view.
34:42
SPEAKER_03: I think there's a lot of people who are in that category.
34:46
And I can't say I respect it,
34:48
but I'm happy to work with them in the interim.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: I did not know we were going to get Palmer singing on here.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: That was great.
34:57
I didn't read the story,
34:58
but I saw a headline,
34:59
so maybe I shouldn't do this.
35:00
But didn't the New York Times do a story this week on how Tim
35:03
Cook is like the
35:04
SPEAKER_00: closest ally to Trump?
35:07
SPEAKER_03: I haven't read that, but in some ways it wouldn't surprise me.
35:11
SPEAKER_03: I saw people—
35:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
35:13
SPEAKER_03: you realize Apple has been,
35:14
SPEAKER_03: I think,
35:15
SPEAKER_03: they're one of the worst in terms of their dependence on China.
35:19
SPEAKER_03: But you gotta remember,
35:20
SPEAKER_03: they've been,
35:21
SPEAKER_03: to a certain extent,
35:22
shanghaied into that position by the globalist leadership of
35:26
the United States over
35:27
SPEAKER_03: the last 30 or 40 years,
35:28
SPEAKER_03: right?
35:28
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
35:29
they kind of had no other option given the trade policy that
35:32
the World Trade
35:33
SPEAKER_03: Organization was pursuing,
35:35
SPEAKER_03: given the global trade posture that the United States was pursuing.
35:38
SPEAKER_03: Apple didn't really have a choice
35:40
as to where they would manufacture,
35:42
they just happen to also do really well.
35:45
SPEAKER_03: And so that's why they end up...
35:46
SPEAKER_03: They're the biggest example,
35:47
SPEAKER_03: not because they're uniquely pro-China or anything.
35:49
SPEAKER_03: We're anti-American.
35:50
SPEAKER_03: It's because they're the most successful at what they do, period.
35:54
And that happens to only be...
35:55
That happens to force you into being dependent on China.
35:57
SPEAKER_03: But, I mean, I think...
36:00
If you look at the last decade,
36:01
Apple's been trying to get out of China in a quiet way.
36:04
I don't know if you remember when they announced the Mac Pro
36:06
and that was made in the US.
36:08
They've been surreptitiously doing small runs of MacBook Pros
36:12
in the United States
36:13
SPEAKER_03: without saying anything.
36:14
They can't make a big deal out of it because they'll get
36:16
punished by the Chinese
36:18
SPEAKER_03: government if they do that.
36:21
SPEAKER_03: But I actually can understand why someone like Tim Cook would...
36:26
SPEAKER_03: align with a lot of what Trump is talking about.
36:28
SPEAKER_03: I mean, imagine you're Tim Cook.
36:30
SPEAKER_03: Imagine you are, on paper, one of the most powerful people in the world.
36:34
SPEAKER_03: You run a company with, what's Apple's market cap?
36:37
SPEAKER_03: $3 trillion.
36:39
SPEAKER_03: Largest employer...
36:41
largest market cap,
36:43
maybe the largest cash reserves of any American company.
36:46
SPEAKER_03: And yet,
36:47
SPEAKER_03: you,
36:48
SPEAKER_03: and you,
36:48
SPEAKER_03: and you,
36:48
SPEAKER_03: and you,
36:49
SPEAKER_03: you know,
36:49
SPEAKER_03: Tip Cook,
36:50
SPEAKER_03: whether I agree with him or not,
36:51
SPEAKER_03: clearly cares about social issues,
36:52
SPEAKER_03: right?
36:53
SPEAKER_03: He cares about the climate.
36:54
SPEAKER_03: He cares about the homosexuals.
36:57
SPEAKER_03: He cares about...
36:59
SPEAKER_03: All the things you expect a Democrat-type executive to care about.
37:03
SPEAKER_03: So he clearly does have these social views.
37:05
SPEAKER_03: Imagine you're in his position and you can't say something like,
37:08
SPEAKER_03: I think concentration camps are bad.
37:11
Or,
37:11
I think people should be allowed to practice their religion,
37:15
whatever it is.
37:17
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's got to be a little bit of an emasculating thing.
37:19
SPEAKER_03: If I were him,
37:20
I'd be stoked about the potential opportunity to not just have
37:24
yourself forced into
37:26
SPEAKER_03: a position where you're making more in the US and less in China,
37:30
SPEAKER_03: but where everyone else is forced to do so along with you.
37:33
SPEAKER_03: Tim Cook can't escape this hell of...
37:38
SPEAKER_03: the elite's making without everyone being drug along with him.
37:41
SPEAKER_03: And so if I were him, I'd be close to Trump too.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: All right.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm changing directions for a second.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: That was exciting.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure we managed to alienate some people.
37:53
SPEAKER_03: Can we get Tim Cook on the show so we can talk about it?
37:55
We can talk about the hell of his own making,
37:57
the globalist elites locking him in a prison.
38:00
SPEAKER_03: I'm here for it.
38:01
SPEAKER_03: The...
38:03
SPEAKER_00: Okay, on these new helmets.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, eagle eye.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, on eagle eye.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: So I know you guys love reporter-type questions like this.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when do these arrive?
38:16
SPEAKER_00: What do they look like?
38:17
SPEAKER_00: What are the near-term goals?
38:20
So we are going to be delivering the first prototypes to the
38:24
Army this year.
38:25
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
38:26
That's the intent anyway,
38:29
if all goes according to plan the way that I hope.
38:33
But we've been working on the technology that underpins Eagle
38:35
Eye for years,
38:37
and we've been making a really serious hardware effort for over
38:40
a year at this
38:41
SPEAKER_03: point.
38:42
SPEAKER_03: Actually, there's an Eagle Eye sitting on my desk.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: I was going to say, this is like your favorite project, I think, right?
38:49
SPEAKER_03: I can't help it.
38:50
SPEAKER_03: I can't help it.
38:51
SPEAKER_03: You're supposed to love all your children equally,
38:53
but it's not even worth pretending that I do not have a special
38:58
affinity for vision
39:00
SPEAKER_03: augmentation.
39:01
SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you go back and read...
39:05
SPEAKER_03: Oh, man.
39:05
SPEAKER_03: Let me read the original little bit from the...
39:10
SPEAKER_00: But if you combine the last,
39:11
SPEAKER_00: whatever,
39:11
SPEAKER_00: 10,
39:12
SPEAKER_00: 15 years of your life,
39:13
SPEAKER_00: you were like purpose-built.
39:17
SPEAKER_03: Let me see.
39:17
SPEAKER_03: Where is it?
39:18
SPEAKER_03: Let me see the original bit that I pulled from...
39:21
SPEAKER_03: So when I started Oculus,
39:23
SPEAKER_03: I posted a manifesto on...
39:26
on on what i believed oculus would be doing i wrote a blog post
39:31
about about my
39:33
affinity for this technology generally on um the blog of
39:37
palmerlucky.com it's
39:38
palmerlucky.com the number one palmer lucky blog on the
39:41
internet and um i had a
39:44
good quote which was from the first about page text for
39:49
oculusvr.com that i posted
39:50
SPEAKER_03: in early 2012.
39:51
SPEAKER_03: and i said
39:55
SPEAKER_03: I am a huge HMD.
39:57
SPEAKER_03: That's a head-mounted display.
39:58
SPEAKER_03: I am a huge HMD nut.
40:00
SPEAKER_03: As far as I know,
40:01
SPEAKER_03: I have the largest private collection of unique HMDs in the world,
40:04
SPEAKER_03: totaling 43 units,
40:06
SPEAKER_03: not including the ones I have built myself.
40:08
SPEAKER_03: Part of this HMD obsession,
40:10
SPEAKER_03: as with any other obsession,
40:12
SPEAKER_03: is trying to convince other people to join in.
40:14
And what a seductive dream that technology can transport us
40:18
into worlds we cannot
40:20
hope to experience in real life or augment our reality to shape
40:23
it closer to our
40:24
SPEAKER_03: desires.
40:26
SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately,
40:26
SPEAKER_03: virtual reality has risen and fallen many times,
40:29
SPEAKER_03: with a lot more emphasis on the latter portion.
40:31
SPEAKER_03: The tech has never gotten far enough to be truly convincing,
40:34
SPEAKER_03: and great VR hardware has been out of reach for the average person,
40:38
SPEAKER_03: until now.
40:39
SPEAKER_03: Oculus is my tilt at trying to change that.
40:42
SPEAKER_03: The tech has improved,
40:44
SPEAKER_03: and we can build hardware and software that is better,
40:46
SPEAKER_03: stronger,
40:46
SPEAKER_03: and faster than the old guard,
40:48
SPEAKER_03: companies that create niche,
40:49
SPEAKER_03: wildly expensive products.
40:51
SPEAKER_03: Don't get me wrong,
40:52
SPEAKER_03: these companies are important,
40:53
and they have to solve some very tough engineering challenges
40:55
to satisfy their
40:55
SPEAKER_03: customers.
40:56
But the reality is that as gamers and dreamers,
40:58
we have a different set of challenges to meet.
41:00
SPEAKER_03: Massive field of view to engulf your visual senses,
41:03
SPEAKER_03: low latency tracking to maximize presence,
41:05
SPEAKER_03: lightweight and comfortable for long-term use,
41:07
SPEAKER_03: and perhaps most importantly,
41:08
SPEAKER_03: prices measured in the hundreds of dollars,
41:10
SPEAKER_03: not tens of thousands of dollars.
41:12
I've worked along and hard with a lot of brilliant people to
41:14
try and meet these
41:14
SPEAKER_03: challenges,
41:15
SPEAKER_03: and it's now time to put it to the test.
41:17
SPEAKER_03: Why the name Oculus?
41:19
SPEAKER_03: It is a Latin word for eye.
41:22
SPEAKER_03: Someone used the word in a meeting several months ago.
41:24
SPEAKER_03: I thought it was a nifty word.
41:25
SPEAKER_03: And there you have it.
41:29
SPEAKER_03: And I wrote that, I guess that would have been almost 14 years ago now.
41:34
SPEAKER_03: And I still feel the same way.
41:35
SPEAKER_03: What a seductive vision to experience things you could never experience,
41:39
to augment our view of the world with information that we could
41:43
never perceive
41:44
SPEAKER_03: naturally.
41:44
SPEAKER_03: It's just, it still speaks to me.
41:47
SPEAKER_03: So you're right.
41:48
SPEAKER_03: This is my favorite thing.
41:50
SPEAKER_03: I can't help it.
41:51
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry to the Android teams that are working on non-AR, VR stuff.
41:54
SPEAKER_03: You have to cut me a little bit of slack.
41:56
sometimes sometimes you you're your first love sticks with you
42:00
no but like to the
42:01
extent that you're again i don't want this to sound overly
42:04
fluffy or something but
42:05
to the extent that you're tony stark i mean this i could
42:09
totally see this being
42:10
your core core mission i mean this feels like you were hey even
42:13
tony stark liked uh
42:15
SPEAKER_03: like like augmented reality yeah
42:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.
42:18
It's actually interesting how much overlap there is there
42:21
because the vision of,
42:22
SPEAKER_03: like,
42:23
SPEAKER_03: the thing,
42:23
SPEAKER_03: it wasn't just the suit,
42:24
SPEAKER_03: right?
42:25
It was also the augmented vision paired with this kind of AI
42:28
guardian angel in the
42:29
SPEAKER_03: form of Jarvis.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: That is what we were building with Eagle Eye.
42:32
SPEAKER_03: Eagle Eye has an onboard AI guardian angel,
42:36
maybe less in the style of Jarvis and more in the vein of
42:39
Cortana from Halo.
42:41
But this idea of having this ever-present companion who can
42:43
operate systems,
42:44
SPEAKER_03: who can communicate with others,
42:46
SPEAKER_03: that you can offload,
42:48
tasks onto that is looking out for you with more eyes than you
42:51
could ever look out
42:52
for yourself right there in your helmet that is such a powerful
42:57
thing to make real
42:59
so and when i i wrote a story about the i've asked deal i think
43:03
in my opinion it
43:04
was the only accurate story on how to read um how this deal
43:07
shook out but um
43:09
SPEAKER_03: I agree.
43:10
I read the P.
43:11
Well,
43:11
it's because you actually,
43:12
I think,
43:12
understood what was going on.
43:14
SPEAKER_03: And a lot of the,
43:14
SPEAKER_03: a B reporter just like working the government contract space,
43:18
SPEAKER_03: they look and they're like,
43:20
SPEAKER_03: oh,
43:20
SPEAKER_03: Anderil novated this contract from Microsoft.
43:23
SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
43:23
SPEAKER_03: And you have to have a pretty deep understanding of the tech industry,
43:28
SPEAKER_03: me,
43:29
SPEAKER_03: Anderil,
43:30
SPEAKER_03: Microsoft,
43:30
SPEAKER_03: HoloLens.
43:33
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of synthesis that needs to happen to understand it.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: If there's $20 billion that moves from one pie to another,
43:41
SPEAKER_00: there's usually a good story behind there.
43:45
I hadn't fully thought about it this way,
43:47
but just touching on that point.
43:49
It is pretty fascinating that you have a tech company win a $20
43:54
billion contract,
43:57
SPEAKER_03: and they got way less attention...
44:00
SPEAKER_03: Then,
44:00
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
44:01
SPEAKER_03: like,
44:01
there's startups that will raise $15 million and get more
44:04
attention than that $22
44:06
SPEAKER_03: billion contract.
44:07
SPEAKER_03: It's a big deal.
44:08
SPEAKER_03: It's way more,
44:09
SPEAKER_03: like,
44:09
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
44:09
SPEAKER_03: like,
44:09
we'll raise $500 million and get literally an order of
44:13
magnitude more press
44:14
SPEAKER_03: coverage.
44:15
SPEAKER_03: than this $22 billion contract.
44:19
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how that works.
44:20
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it's because, yeah.
44:22
SPEAKER_03: I'll tell you this.
44:23
The party that I had after innovating the IVAS contract was a
44:26
lot bigger than the
44:27
SPEAKER_03: party I had after raising my last round of money from investors.
44:31
SPEAKER_03: But I think it's not commensurately covered by the press.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I agree.
44:37
I was thinking back to some of the comments that were left
44:40
under the story.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure this is not new to you,
44:42
SPEAKER_00: but even people who I think are maybe tech enthusiasts,
44:47
SPEAKER_00: they still see this vision,
44:50
SPEAKER_00: and you get this comment a lot of like,
44:53
SPEAKER_00: okay,
44:53
SPEAKER_00: it's great if you can build this thing.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: It's actually going to be too much technology thrown at the soldier.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: This actually never will work.
45:00
this is this is like a cool thing we see in movies i can see
45:03
some use for it but
45:04
it's actually hinders the soldiers more than helps and and will
45:09
never work i think
45:10
SPEAKER_03: that they are not they don't have the right vision literally um
45:16
A lot of people imagine that when you're going to do something
45:18
like thermal vision
45:20
and night vision and ultraviolet vision and quasi X-ray vision
45:23
informed by swarms
45:25
SPEAKER_03: of drone building a real-time 3D model,
45:26
they imagine that you're like a techno operator who's typing on
45:30
the keyboard as
45:30
SPEAKER_03: fast as you can,
45:31
SPEAKER_03: managing a dozen different streams.
45:32
SPEAKER_03: They're also used to things like video games,
45:34
which are designed for the human to be the pacing factor for
45:38
what you can do.
45:39
SPEAKER_03: In the real world,
45:40
SPEAKER_03: That's not how you design military tools.
45:42
You design them ideally to be transparent and invisible to the
45:45
user and just
45:45
SPEAKER_03: seamlessly enhance their abilities.
45:47
SPEAKER_03: And that's what we're doing with Eagle Eye.
45:49
We're building a helmet that just makes you better at the
45:52
things you want to do.
45:52
SPEAKER_03: People say, oh, but you really want to have all this shit on the soldier?
45:55
SPEAKER_03: Is it going to be too complicated to have heat vision, night vision?
45:58
SPEAKER_03: Heavy, hot...
46:00
SPEAKER_03: Look, so, well, and of course, hot and heavy.
46:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you have to make it light.
46:04
SPEAKER_03: You have to make it neutral.
46:05
SPEAKER_03: You have to make it balanced.
46:06
SPEAKER_03: But like in terms of the complexity,
46:09
like do you think Superman deals with complexity when he looks
46:12
out at the world and
46:13
SPEAKER_03: has heat vision and x-ray?
46:15
SPEAKER_03: No, he just, he's just Superman.
46:17
He just perceives what he needs to perceive and he just sees
46:19
the world that way.
46:20
SPEAKER_03: You just have to design user interfaces that way.
46:22
SPEAKER_03: You shouldn't be toggling between 10 different sensor menus.
46:26
SPEAKER_03: You should just see a seamless view that is built by kind of a,
46:30
SPEAKER_03: a kind of an AI interpolator that looks out into the world and says,
46:32
SPEAKER_03: okay,
46:33
SPEAKER_03: well,
46:33
SPEAKER_03: I know he probably wants to see all of the hot human signatures.
46:36
SPEAKER_03: I know he probably wants to see all the drones.
46:38
SPEAKER_03: I probably know.
46:40
SPEAKER_03: you can build technology that is transparent to the user.
46:43
The reason that people I think are so cynical is because people
46:47
often don't meet the bar.
46:49
SPEAKER_03: There's so many things that are shit.
46:51
SPEAKER_03: It's like everything must be shit.
46:53
SPEAKER_03: And I just don't think that.
46:56
I know because I've been using eagle eye prototypes and I know
46:59
maybe I'm not the
47:00
guy to argue that the tech is easy to use because I'm a
47:02
hardcore techno head from
47:04
SPEAKER_03: birth and I can operate wacky stuff.
47:05
SPEAKER_03: But you could put on a normal person
47:08
They can look out into the world and do things and see things
47:12
with zero training
47:13
SPEAKER_03: that they never would have been able to do otherwise.
47:15
SPEAKER_03: I'm not concerned about information overload because I'm competent.
47:20
I'm sure people would look at Apple's headset and say,
47:23
well,
47:23
look,
47:23
if the world's
47:24
Biggest consumer electronics company with all the money at its
47:28
disposal and
47:28
SPEAKER_00: technology,
47:29
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:29
SPEAKER_00: how much better could...
47:33
SPEAKER_00: You could see limitations still in this technology that...
47:36
SPEAKER_00: Nah,
47:36
SPEAKER_03: nah.
47:37
SPEAKER_03: I think it's in any way easier.
47:39
SPEAKER_03: I have an easier job than Apple does.
47:42
SPEAKER_03: They have to make an entertainment device.
47:45
SPEAKER_03: And that's not just about how easy it is to use.
47:47
SPEAKER_03: Because you want military tools to be easy to use.
47:48
SPEAKER_03: I'll give you a specific example.
47:51
SPEAKER_03: Apple has to have extremely high image quality at all times,
47:56
SPEAKER_03: including through their pass-through,
47:57
SPEAKER_03: including when you're turning your head.
47:59
That means that they need to come up with exposure settings
48:02
that don't create too
48:03
SPEAKER_03: much noise and grain in the image.
48:05
SPEAKER_03: I don't have to do that.
48:05
SPEAKER_03: I'm a tool.
48:06
SPEAKER_03: I'm a tool for seeing better.
48:08
SPEAKER_03: I can crank up the gain on my sensors and see...
48:11
SPEAKER_03: things that,
48:12
SPEAKER_03: if I were to do the same thing on an Apple product,
48:14
SPEAKER_03: people would say,
48:14
SPEAKER_03: oh my God,
48:15
SPEAKER_03: the sensor fee is so grainy.
48:16
SPEAKER_03: I'm not trying to build something that's visually appealing.
48:18
SPEAKER_03: I'm trying to build a functional tool.
48:20
SPEAKER_03: Here's another example.
48:22
Apple has to have a fixed persistence level so they can have
48:25
constant brightness
48:26
SPEAKER_03: across all scenes,
48:27
SPEAKER_03: across all types of head motion.
48:29
SPEAKER_03: I can say, you know what?
48:30
I'm gonna ramp my persistence down and my brightness level
48:33
commensurately down
48:34
during fast head rotations so that I have high motion clarity
48:37
rather than having
48:38
SPEAKER_03: blur when I turn my head very quickly.
48:41
SPEAKER_03: because it's a tool.
48:42
And it's okay if the image gets darker briefly as I'm whipping
48:46
my head to the side
48:46
SPEAKER_03: and then ramps back up to full brightness as soon as I stop moving.
48:49
SPEAKER_03: That's something I can do with eagle eye.
48:51
SPEAKER_03: If Apple did that, they'd be pilloried by people.
48:53
SPEAKER_03: They'd say, this is bizarre.
48:54
SPEAKER_03: The brightness level is changing as I look around.
48:57
SPEAKER_03: The image is grainy when I look at certain things.
49:00
SPEAKER_03: I would actually say building a tool gives you a very different level of
49:03
constraints than building something that needs to preserve kind
49:07
of this idealized
49:09
SPEAKER_03: model of what people think a screen should look like,
49:12
SPEAKER_03: how a movie viewed through a screen should look like.
49:14
SPEAKER_03: And so my job is a lot easier than Apple.
49:16
SPEAKER_03: I'll give you one last example.
49:17
One of the things we're doing at Eagle Eye is using multiple
49:20
micro displays per eye
49:22
SPEAKER_03: with a tiled seam.
49:25
And so you end up with this small little kind of distorted seam
49:29
that's living out
49:30
SPEAKER_03: in your peripheral view,
49:31
SPEAKER_03: and you can see it really easily.
49:32
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's there.
49:34
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't bother you.
49:35
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't make you sick, but it's definitely there.
49:39
SPEAKER_03: Apple can't make something like that.
49:40
SPEAKER_03: They can't make a thing where it's a seamless magical experience,
49:44
except for this weird distorted bubble seam down both sides of
49:47
your vision in your
49:48
SPEAKER_03: periphery.
49:49
SPEAKER_03: But for a tool, you can do that.
49:51
SPEAKER_03: It's not actually a problem.
49:52
SPEAKER_03: And so I agree.
49:53
SPEAKER_03: Apple has a hard challenge.
49:54
SPEAKER_03: They have to make something for everybody.
49:57
SPEAKER_03: I have to make a thing that keeps people alive.
49:59
SPEAKER_03: And I think my job's easier than Apple's.
50:03
SPEAKER_03: Where will these be produced?
50:06
SPEAKER_03: in the United States.
50:08
So our current manufacturing plan gets us to full rate
50:12
production in the United
50:14
SPEAKER_03: States with no Chinese parts,
50:16
SPEAKER_03: no PRC dependency.
50:18
And there are a lot of challenges in doing that,
50:20
but it's one that I've done before.
50:22
SPEAKER_03: Andrel has had to do this for other products.
50:25
SPEAKER_03: We've talked a little bit about this,
50:26
but I'm pretty allergic to all these debates about how it's
50:30
impossible to make
50:31
SPEAKER_03: stuff in the United States.
50:32
You probably have seen the stories about how iPhones would cost
50:35
$30,000 a day here.
50:36
SPEAKER_03: It's all bullshit.
50:38
SPEAKER_03: I know because I make stuff in the United States.
50:40
SPEAKER_03: The people who are saying that it will cost...
50:43
100 times more are saying that because they want to make
50:46
excuses for what they're doing.
50:47
SPEAKER_03: They want to excuse why they're in China.
50:50
SPEAKER_03: Look, I get it.
50:50
SPEAKER_03: It's hard to make stuff in the United States.
50:52
SPEAKER_03: It's hard to make high-tech stuff.
50:54
SPEAKER_03: It's really hard to make these types of integrated electronics products.
50:57
SPEAKER_03: But it's not 100 times harder.
50:58
SPEAKER_03: It's not even 10 times harder.
51:00
SPEAKER_03: You know, the Mod Retro Chromatic.
51:02
SPEAKER_03: It's made entirely in North America.
51:05
SPEAKER_03: Isn't that cool?
51:06
SPEAKER_03: And that's a $199 Game Boy clone with extraordinarily high quality.
51:11
SPEAKER_03: It's not like this is a million dollar military piece of hardware.
51:16
Even the moderator chromatic is a consumer product and I don't
51:19
need China to make it.
51:21
SPEAKER_03: So I often encourage people to be a little more realistic and realize,
51:25
SPEAKER_03: yes,
51:25
SPEAKER_03: you'll take a hit making stuff in the US.
51:27
SPEAKER_03: Yes,
51:28
SPEAKER_03: there are certain things you won't be able to do,
51:30
SPEAKER_03: but it's not this impossibility that people pretend that it is.
51:34
SPEAKER_03: And it's on Andrel to manufacture these?
51:36
SPEAKER_03: That's right.
51:38
SPEAKER_03: So Meta is a technology partner.
51:40
SPEAKER_03: They're teamed up with us.
51:41
SPEAKER_03: But in this case, Andrel is the prime on the contract.
51:44
SPEAKER_03: We're the ones owning the development,
51:45
SPEAKER_03: the integration,
51:46
SPEAKER_03: and we're responsible at the end of the day.
51:48
SPEAKER_03: If this doesn't work, it's Andrel skinning our knees.
51:51
SPEAKER_03: Right.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: And you have to... The goal would be... Well, I'm sure... It's what?
51:55
It's like tens of thousands of units and then one day hundreds
51:59
of thousands if
51:59
SPEAKER_03: things go well or...
52:02
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
52:02
SPEAKER_03: this is probably giving up more than I should competitively,
52:05
SPEAKER_03: but...
52:07
So the way that I look at something like Eagle Eye is that it
52:11
should not be one
52:13
SPEAKER_03: display system that does everything for everybody.
52:16
SPEAKER_03: It's actually a architecture that allows...
52:20
SPEAKER_03: Like Eagle Eye can actually basically...
52:22
SPEAKER_03: It can host many different types of vision augmentation systems.
52:25
SPEAKER_03: It can host...
52:27
SPEAKER_03: head mounted displays from multiple different companies,
52:28
SPEAKER_03: including companies that don't even work directly with Android.
52:31
Building is an open architecture where the government owns
52:34
those interconnects.
52:35
They own the standards and they can work with other companies
52:39
to build different
52:40
SPEAKER_03: displays that plug in.
52:41
The reason for that is I don't think that we can build one
52:43
display that is
52:44
SPEAKER_03: everything to everybody,
52:45
SPEAKER_03: right?
52:45
SPEAKER_03: The guy who is a logistician needs a different thing than the guy who's a
52:48
helicopter pilot who needs something different than the guy
52:51
who's a infantryman
52:53
SPEAKER_03: breaking down doors in the middle of the night.
52:55
SPEAKER_03: And in terms of the units,
52:58
SPEAKER_03: which is what you're asking about,
52:59
SPEAKER_03: I think that within the decade,
53:02
you're going to see a head-mounted display of some kind on
53:05
basically every single
53:07
SPEAKER_03: head in the DoD.
53:07
SPEAKER_03: They're going to use it for different things.
53:09
Some guys are just going to be checking their emails on a
53:11
secure terminal.
53:12
SPEAKER_03: Others are going to be shooting people in the face.
53:15
SPEAKER_03: And you need to be able to support all those use cases.
53:18
SPEAKER_03: I don't see this as just like 10,000 units or 20,000 units.
53:21
SPEAKER_03: I see this as outfitting the entire armed forces.
53:24
And so everything I'm doing is to try and build an architecture
53:28
that scales to that.
53:30
SPEAKER_03: Everybody doing this with different sensors,
53:33
SPEAKER_03: different vision systems,
53:34
different processors that are tailored to their specific
53:36
mission as light and as
53:39
SPEAKER_03: low cost as possible for their mission.
53:42
And one of the things that Anderle's doing is actually taking
53:46
extremely low margin
53:49
SPEAKER_03: and making a very,
53:50
like we're making a very concerted effort to drive the price of
53:52
the system down
53:54
SPEAKER_03: because,
53:55
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'll just lay it out there.
53:57
SPEAKER_03: Look, the army has, call it $20 billion to buy headsets.
54:01
SPEAKER_03: If I price them at $100,000 each,
54:04
SPEAKER_03: then that means that there's some number of headsets that can buy.
54:08
If I price them at a 10th of that,
54:10
they could buy 10 times as many headsets.
54:13
SPEAKER_03: Which world do you think Palmer Luckey wants to exist?
54:16
SPEAKER_03: I want this on everybody.
54:18
SPEAKER_03: So I am doing my damnedest to make this as low cost as possible,
54:23
SPEAKER_03: way beyond probably what is rational.
54:25
I'm confident I could extract more money out of the DoD by
54:29
playing the game,
54:30
SPEAKER_03: riding the margins as high as I can,
54:32
taking advantage of the fact that what we have is so far ahead
54:35
of every other
54:35
SPEAKER_03: competitor
54:36
SPEAKER_03: I do not have it in my heart to do that.
54:38
And you might say,
54:39
but Palmer,
54:39
how are your investors going to let you get away with this?
54:41
SPEAKER_03: And the answer is they will.
54:42
They're going to let me get away with it because I am doing
54:45
well as a company.
54:46
SPEAKER_03: We're doing well, like we're hitting our financial plans.
54:49
SPEAKER_03: We're hitting our metrics.
54:50
We're growing faster than anyone ever bet we would seven or
54:53
eight years ago.
54:54
And so I'm in a position of not as much accountability as you
54:58
might imagine.
54:59
SPEAKER_03: My investors aren't going to beat down my door and say,
55:00
SPEAKER_03: Palmer,
55:01
SPEAKER_03: why are you charging more money for IVAS?
55:03
SPEAKER_03: I can get away with
55:05
SPEAKER_03: pursuing my ideology, at least here and there on the margins.
55:09
You should do a Lockheed and just make one helmet that we hold
55:14
up and it arrives.
55:15
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you're probably kind of referring to the F-35, right?
55:18
SPEAKER_03: Where you've got this one jet that's everything.
55:21
SPEAKER_03: That's a great thing to learn from.
55:23
SPEAKER_03: A guy who's like,
55:24
SPEAKER_03: let's say,
55:24
SPEAKER_03: an army aviation maintainer who's working on helicopters,
55:31
he probably needs something that is like a lightweight pair of
55:34
Oakleys that is able
55:35
SPEAKER_03: to display work instructions,
55:37
SPEAKER_03: remote help,
55:39
SPEAKER_03: labeling particular things,
55:41
SPEAKER_03: checklists.
55:42
SPEAKER_03: He does not need a ultra-wide field of view,
55:46
SPEAKER_03: thermal,
55:46
SPEAKER_03: UV,
55:47
hyperspectral vision augmentation system like a frontline
55:52
infantryman might.
55:53
And so you kind of have to build something that unifies those
55:59
two things so they
55:59
SPEAKER_03: can share one set of software,
56:01
SPEAKER_03: one set of apps,
56:02
SPEAKER_03: one set of common standards.
56:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want to get into this, maybe you don't.
56:07
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there's a vision there or not,
56:09
SPEAKER_00: but in addition to the sci-fi visual stuff and all the other technology,
56:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
56:15
SPEAKER_00: is part of this just to rethink the helmet itself on basic level,
56:20
SPEAKER_03: like what it's made out of?
56:23
We're doing a lot of really novel stuff on the actual ballistic
56:26
shell to make it
56:27
SPEAKER_03: much...
56:30
SPEAKER_03: I can't give away the specifics here,
56:32
SPEAKER_03: but...
56:33
SPEAKER_03: I've been an exotic materials enthusiast for many years.
56:37
SPEAKER_03: I,
56:38
SPEAKER_03: years and years ago,
56:38
came up with a scheme for how you could make ballistic armor
56:42
that was much lighter
56:43
SPEAKER_03: and much stronger than had been created in the past.
56:47
SPEAKER_03: And we've,
56:48
SPEAKER_03: over the last year,
56:50
been doing some testing to try and actually prove out these
56:52
ideas I've wanted to do
56:53
SPEAKER_03: for almost a decade.
56:55
SPEAKER_03: And the results are extraordinary.
56:57
We're seeing performance that we wouldn't have believed until
57:01
we actually tried it.
57:03
SPEAKER_03: And I can't give away the specifics, but I can tell you this.
57:08
SPEAKER_03: Hey, go ahead.
57:09
SPEAKER_00: Look, I'll tell you this.
57:10
SPEAKER_03: Building helmets out of homogenous materials,
57:12
SPEAKER_03: meaning you take the material,
57:14
SPEAKER_03: make a helmet out of it,
57:15
SPEAKER_03: That is not the way to get the lightest, strongest thing.
57:19
SPEAKER_03: Composite materials,
57:21
where you combine multiple different materials that kind of
57:25
cover each other's
57:26
SPEAKER_03: strengths and weaknesses.
57:28
almost always make for a more optimal system in terms of weight
57:32
to performance.
57:33
And so imagine a multi-composite where you're using not just
57:36
two or three,
57:37
SPEAKER_03: but maybe even more materials,
57:39
and you're actually designing them to do their part under the
57:42
different stages of
57:43
destruction that a helmet goes through as the helmet deforms
57:47
and is penetrated.
57:49
You can build some really interesting things that are far
57:51
beyond what the United
57:52
SPEAKER_03: States has done so far on ballistic helmets.
57:54
SPEAKER_03: And I'd say...
57:56
SPEAKER_03: One of the reasons that the U.S.
57:57
SPEAKER_03: hasn't done these types of technologies in the past,
57:59
SPEAKER_03: it's not because I'm this genius who is smarter than everybody.
58:03
It's because it didn't make sense when the helmet was this
58:06
thing that was supposed
58:07
SPEAKER_03: to cost a few hundred dollars.
58:09
SPEAKER_03: When a helmet...
58:10
SPEAKER_03: was supposed to be this cheap thing that you put on your head,
58:13
SPEAKER_03: it needs to work,
58:14
SPEAKER_03: but the whole system is pretty cheap.
58:17
If you're instead building this kind of very expensive thing
58:19
where you've got
58:21
SPEAKER_03: sensors,
58:21
SPEAKER_03: computers,
58:22
SPEAKER_03: radios,
58:24
SPEAKER_03: displays,
58:25
SPEAKER_03: optics,
58:26
SPEAKER_03: speakers,
58:27
SPEAKER_03: microphones,
58:28
SPEAKER_03: all this stuff integrated,
58:29
SPEAKER_03: you now need to look at it as an integrated product.
58:33
And when you look at it as an integrated product,
58:35
you always want it to be lighter,
58:36
right?
58:37
SPEAKER_03: And so you start to ask,
58:37
SPEAKER_03: okay,
58:38
SPEAKER_03: where's the best savings per dollar,
58:40
SPEAKER_03: the best weight savings per dollar?
58:42
So if I wanted to pull 100 grams out of this helmet,
58:44
how can I do that the cheapest?
58:46
Well,
58:46
I'll tell you what,
58:47
it's not pulling 100 grams out of the electronics.
58:49
SPEAKER_03: It's not pulling 100 grams out of the optics.
58:51
SPEAKER_03: It's not pulling 100 grams out of the microphones.
58:54
It turns out that the place to invest money to save weight is
58:58
in the actual
58:59
SPEAKER_03: physical ballistic shell itself.
59:01
So all of a sudden,
59:02
it actually makes sense in the context of an integrated system
59:05
that...
59:06
SPEAKER_03: you know, costs quite a bit.
59:07
So let's say,
59:08
you know,
59:08
you can say,
59:09
you know what,
59:09
my helmet skin is going to cost $2,000.
59:11
And in doing so,
59:13
it's going to weigh two pounds less than it would have weighed
59:16
otherwise.
59:17
SPEAKER_03: It finally makes sense.
59:17
SPEAKER_03: So yeah,
59:19
we're doing some really exotic stuff to do better fragmentation
59:22
protection,
59:23
SPEAKER_03: better rifle and small arms protection,
59:25
SPEAKER_03: better blast protection,
59:26
SPEAKER_03: concussion protection,
59:27
SPEAKER_03: hearing protection.
59:29
SPEAKER_03: Helmet does a lot aside from, you know, carrier night vision system.
59:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
59:34
SPEAKER_00: Um,
59:35
since Trump has come into office,
59:38
I mean,
59:38
part of this is going alongside with you guys.
59:41
And then,
59:42
and then part of it,
59:43
well,
59:43
a lot of this,
59:44
you already had your own plans in action.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm not,
59:47
SPEAKER_00: and I'm not trying to make you pick,
59:49
SPEAKER_00: pick a baby,
59:50
SPEAKER_00: but you know,
59:50
SPEAKER_00: if we,
59:51
SPEAKER_00: if we think about in some of these things,
59:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you can talk about less than others,
59:55
SPEAKER_00: but okay.
59:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, we've got like golden dome, we've got ship building.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_00: I know you guys are working on,
1:00:04
solid rocket motor stuff you've just opened this giant factory
1:00:08
in ohio not to make
1:00:09
you pick your baby we just went through one but you know you
1:00:13
have a lot going on um
1:00:15
i don't know does one of those areas jump out at you as as
1:00:20
equally exciting or grab
1:00:22
you in a particular way to me personally is palmer lucky
1:00:27
absolutely not there's
1:00:28
nothing more exciting to me than human augments and
1:00:31
transforming human capability
1:00:33
SPEAKER_03: directly
1:00:35
SPEAKER_03: Palmer Luckey,
1:00:36
the Andurl executive who's looking out for the business and my
1:00:40
employees and our
1:00:42
SPEAKER_03: customers.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_03: Yes, those things are very exciting to me.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: I think the shipbuilding side is something that's really fascinating.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_00: Can we do that for a second?
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I mean, sure.
1:00:49
Okay,
1:00:50
because,
1:00:50
you know,
1:00:51
I know we have a video coming on Navier,
1:00:54
which makes this...
1:00:55
SPEAKER_00: kind of foiling boat.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, very familiar.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and they're building stuff.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_00: Very nice, very fancy.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: Super.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: I got to write it.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I went, they're building some of it out here.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_00: Really?
1:01:07
SPEAKER_00: In Alameda, a bit.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_00: I know they have a,
1:01:09
SPEAKER_00: I think in Maine or New Hampshire,
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: they have another part of their manufacturing.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, you know, we were talking about
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, all the hurdles, the U.S.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_00: is woefully behind in shipbuilding, like really woefully behind.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_00: So I have – and then I've got other friends,
1:01:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:01:28
SPEAKER_00: working on the California Forever project.
1:01:30
Maybe there's some interest of getting a new shipyard up here
1:01:34
in northern – I have
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: trouble believing this is real,
1:01:36
SPEAKER_00: right?
1:01:37
Because it seems like we have such a long way to go from where
1:01:41
we are to actually
1:01:42
SPEAKER_00: producing these things in the U.S.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_03: That's true, but a lot of this is about an attitude adjustment.
1:01:49
SPEAKER_03: I mean, remember how fast we built naval capacity during World War II?
1:01:52
SPEAKER_03: I mean, we stood it up inside of a year.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: We were cranking out many ships every single day.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_03: And planes, too.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
1:02:02
SPEAKER_03: so I'm actually,
1:02:04
SPEAKER_03: I'm less worried about the,
1:02:07
SPEAKER_03: whether it's possible and more about the will.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_03: I know it's possible.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_03: And people will make arguments like,
1:02:12
SPEAKER_03: oh,
1:02:13
SPEAKER_03: but Palmer back then,
1:02:14
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:02:14
SPEAKER_03: ships didn't have to be safe.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_03: Ships didn't have to be, they didn't have to, they didn't, ships could...
1:02:21
They'll basically point out that you can't build a ship the way
1:02:24
you used to today.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_00: Less complex, for sure.
1:02:26
And the point that I'll make to them is that autonomy is the
1:02:28
thing that enables you
1:02:29
SPEAKER_03: to build ships like that once again.
1:02:31
I don't have to build a ship with crazy anti-sinking long
1:02:35
flotation properties if
1:02:36
SPEAKER_03: there's no people aboard.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_03: I don't have to dedicate weight,
1:02:39
SPEAKER_03: bulk,
1:02:39
and cost to fire compartmentalization if there's no people on
1:02:45
the ship when it gets
1:02:46
SPEAKER_03: hit.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not saying you don't want to have any level of fire suppression.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying you want to make a ship that sinks at the first strike,
1:02:53
SPEAKER_03: but you can make a very different set of trades.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_03: You can also make trades like, you know what?
1:02:57
SPEAKER_03: I'm not going to, like, let's say I make an autonomous submarine.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_03: Maybe I don't have to die, penetrate, and x-ray every single weld.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_03: Maybe I can move a lot faster because one out of a hundred
1:03:07
submarines failing due to manufacturing problems is just a cost
1:03:11
to be managed in
1:03:13
your balance sheet rather than a human tragedy that paralyzes
1:03:18
the entire system.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:03:20
so I think autonomy is actually the only way that we're going
1:03:23
to be able to get
1:03:23
SPEAKER_03: back to really,
1:03:24
SPEAKER_03: really large-scale shipbuilding.
1:03:25
I think building human ships and I think even human aircraft to
1:03:30
the level of safety
1:03:31
SPEAKER_03: that is required in modern America is
1:03:34
SPEAKER_03: at scale, at a reasonable cost, is somewhere approaching impossible.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_03: You and I have talked about- By the way,
1:03:40
SPEAKER_03: huge advantage that China has and that Russia has there.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_03: It's just a differential in human life.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_03: But willingness to accept risk on the part of a pilot or a sailor
1:03:50
SPEAKER_03: Or a tank driver.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_03: It goes a long way in cutting costs.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not saying that we should be more like them,
1:03:56
SPEAKER_03: but we should recognize that that's an advantage that they have.
1:03:58
And so we either need to meet them where they are or figure out
1:04:02
an asymmetrical way
1:04:03
SPEAKER_03: to go a different path.
1:04:06
You and I have talked about this before,
1:04:07
but let's talk about it publicly.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: I've been following you guys really closely for a couple of years,
1:04:14
SPEAKER_00: gotten to see a lot of very cool stuff.
1:04:18
You've built this huge,
1:04:20
you're starting to build this huge new factory in Ohio.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: Arsenal One.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_00: Arsenal One.
1:04:24
So you're at this moment where you've been building thousands
1:04:28
of things and now
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: you're trying to go to tens of thousands,
1:04:31
SPEAKER_00: hundreds of thousands.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_00: of thousands of things.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_00: You guys have a lot on your plate,
1:04:36
SPEAKER_00: whether it's shipbuilding,
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: whether it's autonomous aircraft,
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: whether it's solid rocket motors.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_00: You could have a skeptical point of, you guys talk a big game.
1:04:49
SPEAKER_00: Someone could be skeptical that
1:04:52
SPEAKER_00: Even with the best intentions,
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: capital,
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: smart people,
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: making that transition has failed many a company.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_00: It's not easy to do.
1:05:01
Why are we supposed to think that Andrel can pull off this big
1:05:05
transition to this
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: next stage of the company?
1:05:09
This is going to sound a little bit like a cop-out,
1:05:11
but I'm going to try it.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_03: It's a little bit of a contrarian take.
1:05:16
SPEAKER_03: I can't possibly convince you.
1:05:18
And I probably can't convince the public because the level of
1:05:22
detail and rigor and
1:05:24
SPEAKER_03: presentation required to do so is time prohibitive,
1:05:27
SPEAKER_03: expertise prohibitive.
1:05:29
And maybe no one person can actually on their own come to that
1:05:32
conclusion.
1:05:32
Like it might be there's no combination of words and things I
1:05:35
can show you that
1:05:36
SPEAKER_03: could lead you to conclude that we're gonna be able to make,
1:05:39
let's say tens of thousands of fighter jets or thousands of
1:05:42
ships in a matter of
1:05:43
SPEAKER_03: just a few years.
1:05:45
The people that we need to convince are an apparatus that
1:05:48
exists on the U.S.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_03: military side.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_03: And they have subject matter experts,
1:05:53
SPEAKER_03: dedicated expertise in each of the individual areas,
1:05:56
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:05:56
SPEAKER_03: in terms of composite airframe manufacturing,
1:05:59
SPEAKER_03: in terms of our landing gear design plan,
1:06:02
SPEAKER_03: in terms...
1:06:03
We've talked a lot about how we've designed the landing gear on
1:06:05
Fury so that it can
1:06:06
SPEAKER_03: be manufactured in any machine shop in the country.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_03: We purposely...
1:06:09
made the performance less than it would have been to do it in
1:06:12
kind of a very
1:06:13
SPEAKER_03: bespoke way,
1:06:14
SPEAKER_03: instead designing it specifically to be manufactured.
1:06:16
SPEAKER_03: Now I can say those words,
1:06:18
SPEAKER_03: but to actually audit that and prove that out,
1:06:20
SPEAKER_03: no one person can do it.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_03: It's actually a team of experts that collaboratively together,
1:06:25
SPEAKER_03: relying on each other's expertise,
1:06:26
SPEAKER_03: can jointly agree that this can work.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_03: And so I would say the proof is in the pudding.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_03: We've convinced the
1:06:34
SPEAKER_03: Air Force that we are worth betting on, but we have not done it yet.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_03: And so I think until we do it, I will not be able to convince you.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_03: I will not be able to convince anybody.
1:06:44
There's no single person in the world who has enough expertise
1:06:48
to walk away from a
1:06:49
SPEAKER_03: conversation saying,
1:06:50
SPEAKER_03: you've done it,
1:06:50
SPEAKER_03: you convinced me,
1:06:51
SPEAKER_03: it's possible.
1:06:52
I think we've convinced the Air Force that it is possible we
1:06:56
could pull it off
1:06:57
SPEAKER_03: And that's been convincing hundreds of people in the Air Force,
1:07:00
SPEAKER_03: each within their own specialty disciplines.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_03: And they jointly agree as an organism that we just might do it.
1:07:05
SPEAKER_03: I think that's about as good as we can do.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_03: So the proof will be in the doing.
1:07:10
I think there's literally nothing else I could do that would
1:07:12
prove to the layperson
1:07:14
SPEAKER_03: that it's possible,
1:07:14
except for a thousand fighter jets coming out of our factory
1:07:18
and flying off the
1:07:18
SPEAKER_03: runway.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_00: And with Arsenal 1 in Ohio, I mean, that is Fury.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: That is fighter jets.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_00: It is.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_00: It is.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_00: What else is there?
1:07:27
for people who aren't familiar it's it's a fury is our entrant
1:07:29
for the air force's
1:07:30
cca program collaborative combat aircraft program basically
1:07:33
building autonomous
1:07:34
fighters that fight alongside manned aircraft augmenting them
1:07:37
doing things that are
1:07:38
too dangerous too risky uh providing arms and sensor coverage
1:07:43
where you wouldn't
1:07:43
have it have it otherwise so other things we're making their
1:07:46
autonomous submarines
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: uh we're actually we did we announce this
1:07:51
SPEAKER_03: I think we've announced we're going to be making Eagle Eye there.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_03: If we haven't announced it, consider this the announcement.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_03: So we're setting up a line there to manufacture Eagle Eye.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_03: It's a five or six million square foot manufacturing facility.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_03: So we're talking about an enormous amount of space.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_03: And I think that our intent is to maximize use of that space.
1:08:12
SPEAKER_03: It's a very flexible design.
1:08:13
We've designed the factory to be reconfigurable between
1:08:16
different types of products
1:08:18
SPEAKER_03: and manufacturing,
1:08:19
which is very different than building a line that is kind of
1:08:21
fixed and bespoke to
1:08:22
SPEAKER_03: one particular thing.
1:08:23
SPEAKER_03: I mean, we'll see if we can pull it off.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_03: It's very, very, very difficult.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_03: But if you could do it,
1:08:29
SPEAKER_03: So that's really what the country needs.
1:08:31
We need flexible manufacturing capacity that allows you to jump
1:08:35
between making the
1:08:36
SPEAKER_03: things that you need one day to the things you need the next,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_03: not one that is locked into manufacturing the same thing for 20,
1:08:42
SPEAKER_03: 30 years straight.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: Since you always have a unique take on things, I think.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: So,
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:08:49
SPEAKER_00: what is your take on the manufacturing in the United States,
1:08:53
SPEAKER_00: the tariffs,
1:08:54
SPEAKER_00: the whole thing?
1:08:54
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:57
So we talked earlier about how I don't have a lot of sympathy
1:08:59
for people who
1:09:00
pretend that manufacturing in the US is this impossible order
1:09:04
of magnitude or more
1:09:05
SPEAKER_03: problem.
1:09:06
SPEAKER_03: And I think a lot of it, it's very self-serving.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_03: They want to justify why they're in China.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_03: They want to justify why it's okay for them to stay in China.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_03: They know that when sanctions hit,
1:09:18
SPEAKER_03: as a result of a potential Taiwan conflict,
1:09:21
SPEAKER_03: they want to say,
1:09:22
SPEAKER_03: oh,
1:09:22
SPEAKER_03: nobody could have predicted this and I had no choice anyway.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_03: They don't want to admit that it is a choice.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_03: Here's where the tariff argument I think really comes into sharp relief.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_03: If you believe...
1:09:36
that building things in the United States is twice as expensive
1:09:41
than it has to be,
1:09:43
SPEAKER_03: then a 30% tariff seems nonsensical.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_03: Because you'll say, well, that doesn't make any sense.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_03: Because if it's twice as expensive to do in the U.S.,
1:09:50
SPEAKER_03: you have this tariff,
1:09:52
SPEAKER_03: you're passing the cost on to the consumer,
1:09:53
SPEAKER_03: and it's not actually going to come back into the United States anyway.
1:09:57
But if you believe that a given good or product or service can
1:10:02
be done in the U.S.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_03: for less than 30% more,
1:10:05
SPEAKER_03: now you're actually realizing,
1:10:07
SPEAKER_03: okay,
1:10:08
SPEAKER_03: the tariff actually could bring something back to the United States.
1:10:12
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's really the core of the argument there.
1:10:15
That's why it's so important to actually agree what level of
1:10:19
penalty you're taking
1:10:20
SPEAKER_03: in a given industry or for a given product,
1:10:22
because that's actually what determines whether or not tariffs
1:10:24
can bring it back to
1:10:25
SPEAKER_03: the United States.
1:10:25
You can say,
1:10:26
but tariffs might not last,
1:10:28
and so people won't make the investment.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's a different argument.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_03: That's an argument about instability.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_03: Focusing simply on tariffs,
1:10:35
SPEAKER_03: taking tariffs as a constant that will exist,
1:10:37
SPEAKER_03: and making that assumption if...
1:10:40
SPEAKER_03: If you have,
1:10:41
SPEAKER_03: let's say,
1:10:41
Chinese subsidized steel is a third of the price of American
1:10:46
unsubsidized steel,
1:10:48
SPEAKER_03: yeah,
1:10:48
SPEAKER_03: then a tariff is not going to work.
1:10:50
If the spread really is 30%,
1:10:52
though,
1:10:53
then America can get our steel industry back.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_03: And so it's very important to get this question right.
1:10:58
It's of critical importance,
1:11:00
and there's not enough people talking about this.
1:11:02
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:11:03
SPEAKER_03: and do you think we're trending to getting— I hope that it's true,
1:11:07
SPEAKER_03: because I,
1:11:08
SPEAKER_03: more than almost anybody,
1:11:10
SPEAKER_03: need a strong American industrial supply chain.
1:11:14
I really hope that we can bring back our steel and our aluminum
1:11:18
smelting and our
1:11:20
SPEAKER_03: polymer industry and our—
1:11:24
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:11:24
SPEAKER_03: just everything we've sent to China that's higher up on the value chain,
1:11:27
SPEAKER_03: like our battery engineering,
1:11:29
SPEAKER_03: our optical manufacturing,
1:11:30
our injection molding and tooling expertise for building
1:11:34
high-end tooling that can
1:11:35
SPEAKER_03: make all of the above.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_03: There is no reason that an automated America cannot do these things.
1:11:43
There's no reason that we cannot be competitive with all of
1:11:46
these other countries.
1:11:47
SPEAKER_03: We just have to decide that we're going to do it.
1:11:49
There's people who think that I'm nuts or that I'm overly
1:11:50
optimistic,
1:11:51
but I...
1:11:52
I think there are strong reasons to believe that we can
1:11:54
uniquely pull it off where
1:11:55
SPEAKER_03: others won't.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_03: You know who's not going to pull this off?
1:11:58
SPEAKER_03: I suspect,
1:11:58
SPEAKER_03: and I say this with no amount of joy,
1:12:01
SPEAKER_03: I want our Western allies to kind of beat the axis of evil,
1:12:06
SPEAKER_03: but I think that the European Union is going to have a really tough time.
1:12:08
I think it's hard to imagine a world where an economy that is
1:12:12
so dominated by
1:12:14
SPEAKER_03: intranational politics and labor politics is going to allow...
1:12:19
SPEAKER_03: automation to transform their manufacturing economy.
1:12:23
I think the United States is one of the few countries with the
1:12:26
talent and the
1:12:27
people and the political will and the kind of acceptance at a
1:12:30
societal level that
1:12:31
SPEAKER_03: something like that is good.
1:12:34
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of people in America who like Star Trek.
1:12:36
There's a lot of people who buy in the idea of
1:12:38
technology-enabled abundance.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_03: The same cannot be said of...
1:12:43
SPEAKER_03: many European nations.
1:12:44
SPEAKER_03: I just spent two weeks in Europe.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_03: I went to Poland, in Switzerland, everybody.
1:12:50
SPEAKER_03: Poland, what a miracle success story the country Poland is.
1:12:53
SPEAKER_00: Cool country.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_00: And you're spot on.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: Just surpassed Japan in per capita GDP.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_00: And I think The Economist just did a piece about that.
1:13:04
SPEAKER_00: And very based.
1:13:07
SPEAKER_00: They are.
1:13:08
I don't want to shit on Europe totally writ large,
1:13:11
although I do do that from time to time.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, everyone kept asking me.
1:13:14
SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh, I just got to Stargate with Sam Altman.
1:13:20
SPEAKER_00: And this was coming up probably because I was bringing it up.
1:13:23
But people were asking me,
1:13:26
well,
1:13:26
what do you make about like Europe's position here?
1:13:29
I was like,
1:13:30
one building at Stargate,
1:13:32
you know,
1:13:33
is like on the order of $50 billion.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's one building of one company.
1:13:40
I was like,
1:13:41
can you point me to a single European,
1:13:44
you know,
1:13:44
anything on that scale?
1:13:46
SPEAKER_00: And they can't.
1:13:48
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
1:13:48
SPEAKER_00: I continually...
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: I feel like the U.S.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_00: and China are on some,
1:13:55
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:13:56
they're heading off into a future that it strikes me that the
1:14:00
rest of the world is
1:14:01
SPEAKER_00: going to be kind of renting and not really.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_03: Is that really any different than the present?
1:14:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look at our tech industry as it is.
1:14:10
It reminds me more maybe of like,
1:14:12
I don't know,
1:14:13
vaguely Cold War times or something.
1:14:15
SPEAKER_00: So to your point, like, okay, this isn't new.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_00: However,
1:14:19
SPEAKER_00: I think things are hitting this acceleration speed where,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_00: I kind of think it will feel different.
1:14:27
SPEAKER_00: I think we'll be in like...
1:14:30
SPEAKER_00: sort of different worlds.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_03: You mean us and China?
1:14:33
SPEAKER_03: I think the U.S.
1:14:34
and China will be just sort of in this almost like a different
1:14:38
universe and
1:14:38
SPEAKER_00: everybody else is kind of like renting pieces of it.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_00: I think it's pretty likely.
1:14:43
SPEAKER_03: And this is one of the interesting things about the U.S.,
1:14:47
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:14:48
SPEAKER_03: look,
1:14:48
SPEAKER_03: this is going to sound very much like a Republican talking point,
1:14:51
SPEAKER_03: but I can't help it.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of people who act like,
1:14:55
SPEAKER_03: let's imagine like a trailer park redneck who is anti-taxation,
1:15:00
SPEAKER_03: anti-regulation,
1:15:02
SPEAKER_03: wants corporate,
1:15:03
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:15:03
SPEAKER_03: kind of a corporate freedom thing.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_03: They think that that American trailer park redneck is an idiot.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_03: And they say, why is he voting against his own self-interest?
1:15:15
Doesn't he understand that he should be voting for himself and
1:15:19
not for the
1:15:20
SPEAKER_03: corporations and for the people?
1:15:22
And if you actually talk to people who are principled
1:15:26
conservatives or Republicans,
1:15:28
SPEAKER_03: even though maybe not financially successful,
1:15:30
SPEAKER_03: a lot of them understand something that these supposed elites do not.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_03: It's that the...
1:15:37
regulatory climate they're describing is the one that allows
1:15:39
for massive American
1:15:40
SPEAKER_03: dominance in technology,
1:15:41
SPEAKER_03: manufacturing,
1:15:42
SPEAKER_03: productivity.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_03: It's what makes America what it is.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_03: It's the reason they get to live in America.
1:15:46
It's the reason that they get to live in a country where the
1:15:48
per capita GDP is 10
1:15:51
SPEAKER_03: times more than many European nations that people consider first world.
1:15:55
SPEAKER_03: And so what people don't understand is that there's a lot of Americans
1:16:00
who understand fundamentally that allowing innovation to happen
1:16:05
is good for them.
1:16:06
They understand that rockets going into space one way or
1:16:09
another is going to make
1:16:11
SPEAKER_03: their lives better,
1:16:11
SPEAKER_03: even if it's not direct.
1:16:12
SPEAKER_03: And they'd rather see a billion dollars go to that than to,
1:16:15
SPEAKER_03: let's say,
1:16:16
SPEAKER_03: a food stamp program that would give them extra food in their pantry.
1:16:21
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's hungry people who believe this.
1:16:23
And I think that that is not something you see much of in other
1:16:26
countries.
1:16:27
I think there's not a lot of other countries where you have
1:16:29
kind of like the trailer park class
1:16:32
SPEAKER_03: that is down on their luck saying, you know what?
1:16:35
I think that it's actually great that corporations are
1:16:38
relatively unstifled.
1:16:39
SPEAKER_03: I think that it's great that automation is going to make things cheaper,
1:16:43
SPEAKER_03: even if it does cause temporary job loss.
1:16:46
And I think the United States has that because of our culture,
1:16:49
because our people believe that.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_03: And then China has it because they're centrally planned and their central
1:16:54
SPEAKER_03: government says that's how it's going to be.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_03: And so I think you're right.
1:16:56
SPEAKER_03: We're both going to go in this
1:16:59
I think a bit of a post-scarcity direction,
1:17:01
but for very different reasons.
1:17:03
Do you,
1:17:04
I might butcher his name,
1:17:05
do you follow this Arnaud Bertrand on X at all?
1:17:09
SPEAKER_00: This is kind of pro-China.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_00: No, I do not.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_00: No.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_00: We'll scratch that.
1:17:14
SPEAKER_03: What's this guy?
1:17:15
SPEAKER_03: Is he one of the pro-China people?
1:17:16
SPEAKER_03: I think he's... Let me guess.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_03: He says shit like, they've pulled people out of poverty.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_03: Nobody's hungry.
1:17:21
SPEAKER_03: They're industrialized.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_03: Look, I know the argument.
1:17:25
SPEAKER_00: I know the tag.
1:17:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's some of that.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_00: There's some of that.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_00: However,
1:17:27
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:17:27
SPEAKER_00: I'll give him...
1:17:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give him a little credit and then a little...
1:17:31
SPEAKER_00: All right,
1:17:31
SPEAKER_03: give me the steel man.
1:17:34
SPEAKER_00: I suspect he's French by background,
1:17:36
SPEAKER_00: and then I think he has a Chinese wife,
1:17:38
SPEAKER_00: and he seems to have lived there for like a decade now.
1:17:40
SPEAKER_00: I think he did a travel...
1:17:42
SPEAKER_00: startup once upon a time, um, and then ended up in China.
1:17:46
SPEAKER_00: So he,
1:17:47
SPEAKER_00: he does do these,
1:17:48
he'll run around doing these kind of interesting videos where
1:17:52
he'll be in some,
1:17:53
SPEAKER_00: he'll,
1:17:54
SPEAKER_00: he's like,
1:17:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm in the 40th,
1:17:55
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:17:58
SPEAKER_00: you know, the 40th richest city in China.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_00: Like, something down the totem pole.
1:18:02
SPEAKER_03: He's not just going to Shanghai.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, look at the airport.
1:18:06
SPEAKER_00: Like, this kind of beats even, like, you know, anything you might find.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_00: Like, look at LAX compared to this.
1:18:11
SPEAKER_00: And it's, like, not great.
1:18:13
SPEAKER_00: And so some of that is illuminated.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_00: He'll show, you know, to their credit, stuff like the cars.
1:18:18
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, God, you can't buy an electric car that looks like this.
1:18:23
SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, then he lays it on
1:18:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's a cheerleader.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he goes so far.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_00: But, man, I mean, sometimes you read these posts and you're like, Jesus.
1:18:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, wow, the U.S.
1:18:36
SPEAKER_00: might actually just be.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_03: Well,
1:18:38
like one of my favorite examples is where China spends about
1:18:41
one hundredth of what
1:18:43
SPEAKER_03: we do on rail construction.
1:18:46
And it's a little unfair when you compare per capita,
1:18:50
you know,
1:18:51
on kind of a
1:18:53
SPEAKER_03: So people will look at things like,
1:18:54
SPEAKER_03: oh,
1:18:55
SPEAKER_03: America is still spending twice as much as China on defense.
1:18:59
SPEAKER_03: Okay,
1:18:59
SPEAKER_03: but if China is building rail for 100 times cheaper than we are,
1:19:04
I bet they're getting better to one-to-one on their defense
1:19:07
spending as well.
1:19:08
SPEAKER_03: I mean, they deserve credit for that.
1:19:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, okay, so this is kind of my question.
1:19:15
SPEAKER_03: Where America is worst is basically our most heavily regulated,
1:19:19
SPEAKER_03: heavily unionized,
1:19:20
SPEAKER_03: heavily controlled industries.
1:19:21
This is why tech has been kind of the outlier,
1:19:23
because it outran a lot of that.
1:19:25
But like,
1:19:25
rail is very much not the area for innovation in the United
1:19:29
States.
1:19:30
SPEAKER_00: Sadly.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_00: If you live in California, you...
1:19:33
SPEAKER_00: No, this all too well.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_00: So,
1:19:34
SPEAKER_00: but okay,
1:19:35
SPEAKER_00: when you were laying out like,
1:19:36
SPEAKER_00: oh,
1:19:36
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:19:37
SPEAKER_00: maybe if America really wants to buy into this automated future,
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: this is my long window.
1:19:42
Sometimes I read his posts and I'm like,
1:19:44
man,
1:19:45
even if we have good intentions,
1:19:46
we're fucked.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: Like the ship has sailed.
1:19:48
SPEAKER_00: They've got all the manufacturing.
1:19:49
SPEAKER_00: They seem to have the will.
1:19:51
SPEAKER_00: Now they're starting to like outpace us on innovation.
1:19:54
I do think there's a case to be made that what you're talking
1:19:57
about,
1:19:58
which is,
1:19:58
oh,
1:19:59
the U.S.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_00: does great when we're underdogs.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: And if we actually buy in to really gather our will and our spirit,
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: and this isn't just 15 startups,
1:20:12
SPEAKER_00: but it's some sort of nationwide push to really modernize this country,
1:20:16
SPEAKER_00: I think we could catch up.
1:20:18
SPEAKER_00: But then I don't know that I fully believe that that is...
1:20:22
SPEAKER_00: That spirit exists still.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_03: I think it exists.
1:20:26
SPEAKER_03: Look,
1:20:27
SPEAKER_03: maybe I'm being too cynical,
1:20:28
SPEAKER_03: but I think that a lot of the anti-AI,
1:20:31
SPEAKER_03: anti-automation,
1:20:32
SPEAKER_03: anti-abundance push is by people who are very,
1:20:34
SPEAKER_03: very visible,
1:20:35
SPEAKER_03: but not necessarily as culturally embedded as you'd think.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_03: It's the people who are...
1:20:39
SPEAKER_03: You know, they're extremely online.
1:20:41
SPEAKER_03: They're the people who work as a visual effects artist in Hollywood.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_03: They're a singer.
1:20:47
SPEAKER_03: They're a painter.
1:20:49
SPEAKER_03: But I saw a chart pretty recently.
1:20:50
I wish I was just trying to find it,
1:20:52
but I saw it on X,
1:20:53
so you know it's true.
1:20:55
SPEAKER_03: But it was a chart about people who the two axes were,
1:21:00
SPEAKER_03: how much do you think AI will change the world?
1:21:02
SPEAKER_03: And then how much do you think it'll be positive versus negative?
1:21:05
SPEAKER_03: And so you have these quadrants.
1:21:06
And the really interesting thing was that China was the most
1:21:10
optimistic about AI
1:21:11
changing the world and the most optimistic that it would be
1:21:14
good by a lot.
1:21:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_03: And then the U.S.
1:21:18
SPEAKER_03: was actually only a little behind them.
1:21:19
And you have all the rest of the world kind of fought in this
1:21:22
long tail back into a
1:21:24
SPEAKER_03: lot of people.
1:21:25
SPEAKER_03: Japan was up there too.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_03: They think AI is going to be good.
1:21:28
SPEAKER_03: They think it's going to change the world.
1:21:29
And then you have a lot of these kind of like more artistic
1:21:31
countries like Italy is
1:21:32
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:21:32
SPEAKER_03: it's not going to change anything.
1:21:34
SPEAKER_03: And if it does, it's probably kind of bad.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_03: I think that's actually pretty accurate representation.
1:21:40
I think there's a lot of people in this country who like the
1:21:45
idea of us moving
1:21:46
SPEAKER_03: forward in this way.
1:21:47
SPEAKER_00: And I know you follow technology broadly and deeply.
1:21:51
SPEAKER_03: Hey, what do you think?
1:21:53
SPEAKER_00: On AI?
1:21:54
SPEAKER_03: Well, you're talking about Bernan.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_03: You're talking about, we're talking about me.
1:21:57
SPEAKER_03: I'm curious, where's your take?
1:21:59
SPEAKER_03: Do we got it?
1:22:00
SPEAKER_03: Are we going to get there?
1:22:00
SPEAKER_03: Are we going to trip over our own three feet?
1:22:03
SPEAKER_00: On AI or on US versus China?
1:22:05
SPEAKER_03: I guess maybe a U.S.
1:22:07
SPEAKER_03: versus China, which I think will come down to AI automation.
1:22:11
I don't think anyone thinks that there's going to be a
1:22:13
manufacturing war between
1:22:15
SPEAKER_03: America and China that doesn't involve automation.
1:22:18
I don't think anyone thinks it's just like,
1:22:20
who could put more people into the factories?
1:22:22
SPEAKER_00: If it's AI...
1:22:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm comfy backing the U S on that.
1:22:27
I think we've got like AI software information economy where
1:22:31
we've comfortably been.
1:22:32
SPEAKER_00: It's like people so grossly underestimate.
1:22:35
I,
1:22:35
when you talked about,
1:22:37
um,
1:22:37
what made America possible and you were listing off things,
1:22:40
uh,
1:22:41
SPEAKER_00: For the last 40 years, it's software, right?
1:22:43
SPEAKER_00: It's like all our crown jewels.
1:22:45
SPEAKER_00: We spent the last 40 years tipping the entire world of all their smartest
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: software-minded people.
1:22:52
SPEAKER_00: Software is eating the world.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_00: Well,
1:22:53
SPEAKER_00: and it's like the reason since I became a tech reporter,
1:22:56
SPEAKER_00: everyone's tried to make a Silicon Valley somewhere else,
1:22:59
SPEAKER_00: and it just never works.
1:23:00
And there are a lot of reasons and factors that go into that,
1:23:04
but it's our talent.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_00: the amount of talent in software here is just unmatched.
1:23:10
SPEAKER_00: And then I just see us, I don't know.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean, something would have to change.
1:23:17
SPEAKER_00: Even though DeepSeek,
1:23:18
SPEAKER_00: these other things have been able to clone what we're doing,
1:23:21
SPEAKER_00: I still think we're,
1:23:22
SPEAKER_00: I think we're ahead.
1:23:24
SPEAKER_00: And anyway, I'm impressed by labs.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_00: AI, I feel okay.
1:23:27
SPEAKER_03: And then what about, what about automated manufacturing?
1:23:30
SPEAKER_03: Kind of like AI, I believe the hype is embodied AI.
1:23:33
SPEAKER_03: So the physical side.
1:23:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:23:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:23:36
SPEAKER_00: I guess that comes down to,
1:23:38
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:23:39
SPEAKER_00: does the robotics actually sort of hold,
1:23:43
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:23:43
SPEAKER_00: and start to hit this trajectory?
1:23:45
SPEAKER_00: That part I get... Does the robot work?
1:23:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that part I get iffy on.
1:23:48
SPEAKER_00: And I also get iffy on... Well, I'm not, like, a crazy...
1:23:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I'm the most patriotic nationalist kind of person around,
1:23:58
SPEAKER_00: but I would like to see the U.S.
1:24:01
I would love to see this great leap forward where we did
1:24:04
exactly what you're talking about.
1:24:05
SPEAKER_00: We're not trying to replace all these factory jobs.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_00: We are going to build all the stuff of the future.
1:24:11
SPEAKER_00: You know, this is such a great opportunity.
1:24:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:15
And I meet people like these are people I cover all the time
1:24:18
who want to do this.
1:24:19
I'm just not sure that it's I don't know if it's big enough yet
1:24:22
or if the will is
1:24:23
SPEAKER_00: really like that should be the national priority,
1:24:26
SPEAKER_00: really.
1:24:27
SPEAKER_03: So here's that.
1:24:27
SPEAKER_03: I mean, here's here's maybe what an indicator.
1:24:31
SPEAKER_03: So Trump won, right?
1:24:33
SPEAKER_03: He's president.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_03: him and his team must have a pretty decent pulse on what's going on,
1:24:38
SPEAKER_03: what they think people want to hear.
1:24:40
SPEAKER_03: And if you looked at his first State of the Union,
1:24:42
SPEAKER_03: although I know technically it wasn't a State of the Union,
1:24:44
SPEAKER_03: it's a joint address because it's,
1:24:46
SPEAKER_03: you know what I mean?
1:24:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
1:24:48
SPEAKER_03: colloquially were referred to as his first state of the union.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_03: And what did he start out by and then hit over and over?
1:24:53
SPEAKER_03: This is the start of a new golden age for America.
1:24:57
We're gonna take the best of what made us great in the past and
1:25:00
we're gonna do it again.
1:25:01
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna manufacture more.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have more energy.
1:25:03
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have more food.
1:25:04
SPEAKER_03: We're going to have better medicine.
1:25:07
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have healthier kids.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna have more kids.
1:25:09
SPEAKER_03: And I think that that message was very well received by his base.
1:25:13
SPEAKER_03: And then most interestingly, the polls,
1:25:16
showed that he was doing better with everybody by a few
1:25:19
percentage points the day after.
1:25:20
SPEAKER_03: Like apparently that's a message people want to hear in America.
1:25:24
SPEAKER_03: They want to hear more, more, more, more.
1:25:26
SPEAKER_03: We're going to fix it all.
1:25:27
SPEAKER_03: We're going to bring it back.
1:25:28
SPEAKER_03: And I think,
1:25:28
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:25:30
SPEAKER_03: it's probably good for the,
1:25:31
SPEAKER_03: not everybody to be a super hardcore pro-patriot jingo,
1:25:34
SPEAKER_03: but there's a lot of them in America.
1:25:35
SPEAKER_03: I think, I think, I think, I think,
1:25:38
SPEAKER_03: It makes me optimistic.
1:25:39
SPEAKER_03: I think if that address had set Trump's approval rating down,
1:25:44
SPEAKER_03: I might have been on the opposite side of where you are.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_03: But even people who disagree,
1:25:50
because the point is Trump was at some equilibrium of people
1:25:53
who hate him,
1:25:53
SPEAKER_03: people who like him.
1:25:54
The fact that people who didn't like Trump one day saw him talk
1:25:57
about starting a
1:25:57
SPEAKER_03: new golden age and said...
1:25:59
Okay,
1:26:00
even this guy I hate,
1:26:01
Donald Trump,
1:26:03
maybe there's something to what he's proposing there.
1:26:06
SPEAKER_03: To me, that's a positive sign of American opinion.
1:26:08
SPEAKER_00: I still don't know if we're hungry enough.
1:26:10
SPEAKER_00: I think it might have to flip where China really,
1:26:14
SPEAKER_00: really,
1:26:14
really sticks it to us for a few years before all these good
1:26:18
parts of the American
1:26:19
SPEAKER_00: character.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_00: That's a dangerous conversation.
1:26:22
SPEAKER_03: I'll go there,
1:26:23
but the dangerous version of this is the thing that we need
1:26:25
more than anything is
1:26:27
SPEAKER_03: another Cold War.
1:26:29
The Cold War is fascinating because we didn't take the toll in
1:26:37
terms of human life
1:26:38
SPEAKER_03: that you've seen associated with other wars.
1:26:41
SPEAKER_03: We didn't see...
1:26:44
I mean,
1:26:44
everything that...
1:26:45
I look around this room,
1:26:47
and everything came from the Cold War.
1:26:49
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm looking at, like, the light-emitting diodes.
1:26:51
SPEAKER_03: I'm looking at the microprocessors.
1:26:52
SPEAKER_03: I'm looking at my phone.
1:26:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm looking at GPS.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_03: I'm looking at high-efficiency aluminum extrusions surrounding us.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_03: I mean, when the U.S.
1:27:03
SPEAKER_03: feels threatened is when we do our best work.
1:27:06
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:27:07
SPEAKER_03: I mean, maybe that...
1:27:09
SPEAKER_03: Maybe I can put it this way.
1:27:10
SPEAKER_03: Could you imagine a world where if we did end up in a World War III,
1:27:15
SPEAKER_03: we don't really get our shit together and get all this done?
1:27:18
SPEAKER_03: I mean, no.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying I want World War III to come.
1:27:22
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying that that's what I hope for.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_03: But I carry some optimism that the United States,
1:27:29
SPEAKER_03: if we really are threatened,
1:27:31
SPEAKER_03: will rise to the occasion.
1:27:32
SPEAKER_03: Probably the big problem would be like a slow...
1:27:34
decay into decadence and rot because everything's fine enough
1:27:38
that bread and
1:27:39
circuses are enough and that that that's that's pretty spooky
1:27:42
you must get that a
1:27:43
lot though you know just simply by having a defense company
1:27:49
even though there has
1:27:51
been this rot and decay in our military industrial complex and
1:27:56
at least if we're
1:27:56
SPEAKER_00: doing these things you want them to be efficient and work well instead um
1:28:01
If you don't like the military industrial complex,
1:28:03
you should want to spend less on it.
1:28:06
Even if you hate what they build,
1:28:09
then you should especially want to spend less on it.
1:28:11
SPEAKER_00: So there's that one view of Vanderbilt,
1:28:13
SPEAKER_00: which is like,
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:28:15
SPEAKER_00: well,
1:28:15
SPEAKER_00: let's do this over and do it better.
1:28:17
SPEAKER_00: There's another view, right?
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: Where it's like,
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: but by building all these futuristic things,
1:28:21
you are egging on something like World War III because just by
1:28:24
the nature of
1:28:25
SPEAKER_00: continuing...
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: this push, right?
1:28:27
SPEAKER_00: And making it seem... I hear the argument.
1:28:30
SPEAKER_03: I think the point that I make to people,
1:28:31
SPEAKER_03: they think of military power as a thing you have or you don't.
1:28:34
SPEAKER_03: You dial it from a scale of one to 100.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_03: What's your military power?
1:28:38
SPEAKER_03: In reality, militaries tend to orient themselves.
1:28:41
SPEAKER_03: And we found this out the hard way many times.
1:28:45
SPEAKER_03: They orient themselves towards winning a particular conflict,
1:28:48
SPEAKER_03: sometimes to the exclusion of other conflicts.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_03: And sometimes we're very good at fighting one type of war,
1:28:53
and then we are screwed the next time around because it's a
1:28:55
very different type of
1:28:55
SPEAKER_03: war.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_03: People look at military power like a scale of 1 to 100.
1:28:58
SPEAKER_03: And in fact,
1:28:59
we build something that is more like a scale of 1 to 100 for a
1:29:02
particular type of
1:29:03
SPEAKER_03: conflict and not really that spooky for many other types.
1:29:08
SPEAKER_03: Right now,
1:29:08
the United States is building a military fundamentally oriented
1:29:11
around deterring a
1:29:12
SPEAKER_03: great power conflict in the Pacific with China,
1:29:15
SPEAKER_03: likely over Taiwan.
1:29:17
And so when you look at the types of weapons that we're
1:29:19
building and the force
1:29:19
SPEAKER_03: structure that we're building,
1:29:21
SPEAKER_03: it doesn't really,
1:29:22
SPEAKER_03: it shouldn't concern a lot of other people around the world.
1:29:25
Like we are not building an invasion force capable of taking
1:29:28
and holding land in Europe or Asia.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_03: That is not what we're building.
1:29:32
SPEAKER_03: That is what China is building.
1:29:34
SPEAKER_03: That is what Russia are building.
1:29:35
They also are building specific types of militaries with a
1:29:38
specific type of intent.
1:29:40
China is orienting themselves around being able to do
1:29:42
amphibious landings of
1:29:44
SPEAKER_03: nations like Taiwan,
1:29:45
SPEAKER_03: the Philippines,
1:29:46
SPEAKER_03: Korea,
1:29:47
SPEAKER_03: or Japan,
1:29:48
SPEAKER_03: and seize and hold territory at scale.
1:29:50
Russia is trying to build a military that is able to seize and
1:29:53
hold territory in...
1:29:56
the continent of Europe without getting kind of dug out by the
1:30:01
US weapons systems
1:30:02
SPEAKER_03: that were designed to do that during the Cold War.
1:30:04
SPEAKER_03: And you see this even in African militaries.
1:30:07
SPEAKER_03: You see this in other Asian militaries.
1:30:08
SPEAKER_03: They're actually very powerful at the thing they decide to be.
1:30:10
And so the point that I would make to people when they say,
1:30:12
oh,
1:30:12
you're egging it on.
1:30:13
SPEAKER_03: You're egging on some conflict.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_03: I say, well, wait a sec.
1:30:16
SPEAKER_03: you're not egging on conflict in general.
1:30:18
At most,
1:30:19
you're egging on the particular type of conflict that you're
1:30:22
actually building towards.
1:30:23
SPEAKER_03: And I don't know,
1:30:24
is there anyone who thinks that we should be not defending
1:30:28
Taiwan or Japan or
1:30:29
SPEAKER_03: Korea?
1:30:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they definitely exist, but...
1:30:32
I don't know,
1:30:33
I kind of hear these imperial,
1:30:35
they're like,
1:30:35
I'm an anti-American imperialism.
1:30:39
And I hate what Andrel is doing with autonomous fighter jets
1:30:42
because I'm angry
1:30:44
SPEAKER_03: about how that might lead to bad things happening in the Middle East.
1:30:48
SPEAKER_03: So my point is,
1:30:49
What do you think that the United States needs autonomous
1:30:51
fighter jets with very
1:30:53
SPEAKER_03: long island hopping capability for in the Middle East?
1:30:55
You think we can't already do everything we need to do with
1:30:58
stuff that's been
1:30:59
SPEAKER_03: better for that for decades?
1:31:00
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
1:31:01
SPEAKER_03: I feel like we're ramping up exactly the right type of military power.
1:31:06
When people always say,
1:31:06
are you concerned about it being used for other things?
1:31:09
I often point out,
1:31:09
you know,
1:31:10
I'm not sure it's actually all that useful for military.
1:31:13
SPEAKER_03: the things that you're most worried about.
1:31:14
SPEAKER_03: Like, Oh, what about invading?
1:31:16
SPEAKER_03: What about like invading Canada?
1:31:18
SPEAKER_03: You're not going to invade Canada with autonomous,
1:31:21
SPEAKER_03: autonomous submarines that are designed to clear the Taiwan Strait.
1:31:23
SPEAKER_03: You're just not.
1:31:26
Is there,
1:31:26
is there a thing Trump has,
1:31:30
has done so far that you object to the most?
1:31:34
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
1:31:35
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to tell me?
1:31:40
SPEAKER_03: That's an interesting question on its own.
1:31:42
SPEAKER_03: Do I want to?
1:31:43
SPEAKER_03: Well, no, no, I don't.
1:31:44
SPEAKER_03: Actually,
1:31:45
SPEAKER_03: yeah,
1:31:45
SPEAKER_03: I do want to tell you,
1:31:48
SPEAKER_03: but then I have to look at this from...
1:31:50
SPEAKER_03: Anderald,
1:31:51
SPEAKER_03: for people who aren't familiar,
1:31:51
SPEAKER_03: is a very nonpartisan company.
1:31:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm a Republican, our CEO.
1:31:55
SPEAKER_03: Brian is a Democrat.
1:31:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sort of four top leaders, and it's kind of half and half.
1:32:00
SPEAKER_03: It's an even split.
1:32:02
SPEAKER_03: And I did a fundraiser for Trump.
1:32:05
SPEAKER_03: Brian did a fundraiser for Harris.
1:32:08
SPEAKER_03: So you kind of have...
1:32:10
SPEAKER_03: You know, that's just how it's gone.
1:32:12
SPEAKER_03: And so,
1:32:12
SPEAKER_03: of course,
1:32:13
SPEAKER_03: as a partisan,
1:32:14
SPEAKER_03: though,
1:32:14
SPEAKER_03: as a little L libertarian,
1:32:16
SPEAKER_03: big R Republican,
1:32:17
the game theory optimal move for me is probably to not say
1:32:21
anything negative about
1:32:22
SPEAKER_03: Trump.
1:32:24
SPEAKER_03: It's probably not to say anything negative about Trump.
1:32:27
SPEAKER_03: Or maybe,
1:32:28
SPEAKER_03: perhaps it would be good for me to say something,
1:32:30
SPEAKER_03: but pick something that's not actually that objectionable,
1:32:32
SPEAKER_03: right?
1:32:33
Like we would talk about,
1:32:34
what would be something that I could talk about?
1:32:36
SPEAKER_00: You can just tell me the truth and just live pure.
1:32:41
SPEAKER_03: Let me think.
1:32:43
SPEAKER_03: What has bothered me the most?
1:32:49
SPEAKER_03: Let me think.
1:32:50
SPEAKER_03: Give me a moment.
1:32:50
SPEAKER_03: Let me really think about it because there's multiple things I can pick,
1:32:54
SPEAKER_03: but if we're going to dig in on one,
1:32:56
SPEAKER_03: I want to pick the right one.
1:32:57
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate that about you.
1:32:59
SPEAKER_00: Do you want me to be quiet or vamp?
1:33:00
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
1:33:00
SPEAKER_00: Let me just think for a minute.
1:33:15
I was not a fan of Donald Trump's position with regard to
1:33:23
resettling people from
1:33:25
SPEAKER_03: Gaza and Jordan.
1:33:27
SPEAKER_03: I think that that is not at all a position that I would have chosen.
1:33:32
Particularly,
1:33:32
I mean,
1:33:33
I feel like what he said is we want to put 2 million people in
1:33:36
Jordan.
1:33:37
SPEAKER_03: And Jordan in particular has...
1:33:41
SPEAKER_03: dealt with a huge number of refugees.
1:33:44
They've been more welcoming of refugees than almost all the
1:33:49
other nations in the region.
1:33:51
SPEAKER_03: And they've done that in a U.S.
1:33:52
SPEAKER_03: friendly way.
1:33:54
SPEAKER_03: They've done it in a humanitarian way.
1:33:56
SPEAKER_03: But I mean, they've struggled to absorb the refugees they already have.
1:34:00
SPEAKER_03: They do not have, they're a tiny country.
1:34:02
SPEAKER_03: They're like the population of Long Beach.
1:34:07
Like not even Los Angeles,
1:34:08
like the population of Long Beach,
1:34:09
California.
1:34:11
SPEAKER_03: And this idea that they're going to absorb 2 million people,
1:34:15
I think Trump understands that a country cannot have unlimited
1:34:20
absorption via
1:34:21
immigration without it causing really severe societal and
1:34:24
infrastructure problems.
1:34:26
SPEAKER_03: And so I was not a fan of that when he said,
1:34:29
we're going to make them do it and I'm going to talk to the
1:34:31
king and whether he
1:34:32
SPEAKER_03: likes it or not,
1:34:33
SPEAKER_03: we're going to make that happen.
1:34:34
SPEAKER_03: It's...
1:34:35
SPEAKER_03: it's, it's not a move that I, it's not a move I would have made.
1:34:38
SPEAKER_03: And so I would say that was one where I couldn't really even pick out a,
1:34:41
SPEAKER_03: a positive,
1:34:42
SPEAKER_03: I would say,
1:34:43
SPEAKER_03: even if you want to put refugees in there,
1:34:45
SPEAKER_03: I think publicly,
1:34:46
SPEAKER_03: publicly doing that to,
1:34:48
SPEAKER_03: to a close ally like Jordan,
1:34:50
SPEAKER_03: probably not a move that I can,
1:34:53
SPEAKER_03: I can imagine,
1:34:53
SPEAKER_03: I can imagine making.
1:34:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:34:57
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you followed that one.
1:34:58
SPEAKER_00: I did.
1:34:59
SPEAKER_00: It was crazy.
1:35:00
SPEAKER_00: Look, I mean,
1:35:03
SPEAKER_03: It would be a little better if he was running as a,
1:35:05
SPEAKER_03: excuse me,
1:35:06
SPEAKER_03: if Trump was like a hardcore globalist and he's like,
1:35:09
SPEAKER_03: you're gonna accept the refugees,
1:35:10
SPEAKER_03: this crisis is,
1:35:12
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:35:12
SPEAKER_03: it demands that you step it up,
1:35:14
SPEAKER_03: but it's very hard to kind of be internally logically consistent with,
1:35:17
we're being invaded in our Southern border by all these people
1:35:20
and we've been
1:35:21
SPEAKER_03: forced to accept too many refugees and it's destroying our country.
1:35:24
SPEAKER_03: And because whether or not you believe
1:35:27
SPEAKER_03: that Trump's positions on refugees are correct.
1:35:30
I think most people can agree that there are very real
1:35:32
challenges that come with
1:35:34
SPEAKER_03: accepting millions of refugees suddenly without any chance to prepare.
1:35:38
And so to have those two positions simultaneously is probably
1:35:41
not one that I would choose.
1:35:43
SPEAKER_03: But then, of course, I'll throw out there, generally, I'm a fan of Trump.
1:35:46
SPEAKER_03: I've done fundraisers for him.
1:35:50
SPEAKER_03: I am a pro-Trump guy,
1:35:51
SPEAKER_03: but if you put a gun to my head and said,
1:35:53
SPEAKER_03: Palmer,
1:35:54
SPEAKER_03: tell me the worst thing about Donald Trump,
1:35:55
SPEAKER_03: I'd say I don't like the way that he treated Jordan,
1:35:58
SPEAKER_03: particularly as a country that's been such a strong U.S.
1:36:01
SPEAKER_03: ally.
1:36:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not breaking any sort of new ground here.
1:36:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, I thought Biden was kind of a joke.
1:36:08
SPEAKER_00: I thought the whole way the Kamala thing happened was insane.
1:36:12
SPEAKER_00: You didn't like the Kamala coronation?
1:36:14
SPEAKER_00: No, and then I'm not...
1:36:17
SPEAKER_00: massively pro-Trump either.
1:36:19
SPEAKER_00: I always wonder,
1:36:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:36:20
SPEAKER_00: you're...
1:36:20
SPEAKER_00: Oh,
1:36:21
and don't forget one of the favorite saws of all
1:36:26
libertarian-leaning Trump people,
1:36:28
SPEAKER_03: which is to remind you,
1:36:29
SPEAKER_03: they treated Bernie very unfairly.
1:36:32
SPEAKER_03: That guy, so unfair.
1:36:35
SPEAKER_03: But it's also true.
1:36:36
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:36:36
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:36:38
SPEAKER_03: I don't like many of Bernie's policies,
1:36:39
SPEAKER_03: but I do think he's—I like that he was principled in the policies,
1:36:44
SPEAKER_03: for the most part.
1:36:45
SPEAKER_03: There's even things where I think he's unprincipled.
1:36:46
SPEAKER_03: But,
1:36:46
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:36:47
SPEAKER_03: one thing I really loved was when he debated Hillary Clinton,
1:36:49
SPEAKER_03: and Hillary said,
1:36:51
SPEAKER_03: we need to ban assault weapons,
1:36:53
SPEAKER_03: these weapons of war on our streets.
1:36:55
And Bernie came out and said the thing that Democrats aren't
1:36:57
supposed to say.
1:36:58
SPEAKER_03: He said—
1:36:59
SPEAKER_03: Rifles of all kinds account for less than 5% of firearms deaths.
1:37:04
SPEAKER_03: If you're going to do something about guns,
1:37:06
SPEAKER_03: you need to start with handguns,
1:37:08
SPEAKER_03: not the guns that people hunt with,
1:37:09
SPEAKER_03: the guns that people kill people in cities with.
1:37:12
And so any serious examination of gun violence must begin with
1:37:16
a ban on civilian
1:37:17
SPEAKER_03: ownership of handguns.
1:37:19
SPEAKER_03: And on the one hand, I don't agree with him.
1:37:20
SPEAKER_03: I don't want civilian ownership of handguns.
1:37:21
SPEAKER_03: I said, wow, that is a logically consistent argument.
1:37:25
SPEAKER_03: If you do believe in gun control as a principle,
1:37:30
SPEAKER_03: then he's right.
1:37:31
SPEAKER_03: You should start with handguns.
1:37:33
The reason that Democrats don't talk about it is because
1:37:35
handguns are by far the
1:37:36
SPEAKER_03: most popular with just voters in general.
1:37:39
SPEAKER_03: And the type of gun ban they least support is handguns.
1:37:42
And so they're all saying the thing that they think they'll get
1:37:44
away with,
1:37:45
SPEAKER_03: which is we need to ban the big,
1:37:46
SPEAKER_03: scary military-style rifles that very few...
1:37:49
SPEAKER_03: people in the country, relatively speaking, even care about.
1:37:52
SPEAKER_03: But don't worry, we'll let you keep your handguns.
1:37:54
And I like that Bernie said basically something that was
1:37:56
political suicide,
1:37:57
SPEAKER_03: which is,
1:37:57
SPEAKER_03: no,
1:37:57
SPEAKER_03: we need to ban the handguns.
1:38:00
SPEAKER_03: Political suicide, but principled.
1:38:02
SPEAKER_03: I have respect for that.
1:38:04
SPEAKER_00: You're so into politics.
1:38:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you think, I'll ask it, you think you'd ever run for anything?
1:38:10
SPEAKER_03: I've been asked so many times,
1:38:12
SPEAKER_03: and from what I can observe,
1:38:13
SPEAKER_03: being a politician is a real ass job.
1:38:16
SPEAKER_03: It is, it is,
1:38:18
SPEAKER_03: It is so hard, and it's a hard life.
1:38:25
I don't think the rewards are remotely commensurate with what
1:38:29
you put into it.
1:38:30
SPEAKER_03: But you're so opinionated on these things.
1:38:32
SPEAKER_03: Everyone's opinionated.
1:38:35
Look,
1:38:35
these are things people like to talk about around the kitchen
1:38:37
table all over the country.
1:38:38
SPEAKER_03: I have my opinions.
1:38:40
SPEAKER_03: You have your opinions.
1:38:41
But I don't think that necessarily translates to me wanting to
1:38:46
live in Washington,
1:38:46
D.C.,
1:38:48
SPEAKER_03: Representing people.
1:38:50
SPEAKER_03: You know,
1:38:51
people forget that being a politician isn't supposed to be a
1:38:54
way for you to enact
1:38:58
SPEAKER_03: your personal will,
1:38:59
SPEAKER_03: right?
1:39:00
SPEAKER_03: It should be a way to represent your constituents.
1:39:04
And so you got to remember that I also look at this as,
1:39:06
okay,
1:39:06
well,
1:39:06
what would I run for?
1:39:08
SPEAKER_03: What would I run for?
1:39:09
SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm kind of stuck in California.
1:39:12
SPEAKER_03: So I'm going to be stuck representing Californians.
1:39:16
SPEAKER_03: And I don't really agree with most Californians.
1:39:19
SPEAKER_03: Put another way,
1:39:20
SPEAKER_03: I feel like if I were to run for Congress or something,
1:39:24
SPEAKER_03: people,
1:39:26
SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure I could fairly represent them.
1:39:28
And I would rather have the system generally working where
1:39:32
people see their job as
1:39:34
SPEAKER_03: representing their constituents,
1:39:36
SPEAKER_03: acting according to the will of their constituents,
1:39:38
SPEAKER_03: not...
1:39:39
SPEAKER_03: getting into office by saying they'll do one thing,
1:39:42
SPEAKER_03: doing another thing,
1:39:43
and knowing that nobody wants to get rid of them because
1:39:45
they're good enough at
1:39:45
getting pork barrel funding that nobody wants to recall them
1:39:49
and then take a gamble
1:39:50
SPEAKER_03: on somebody new,
1:39:51
SPEAKER_03: which is,
1:39:51
SPEAKER_03: I think,
1:39:52
SPEAKER_03: how a lot of representatives get elected.
1:39:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:39:56
Maybe if I move someplace where the people that I would
1:39:59
represent would be
1:40:01
SPEAKER_03: perfectly aligned with every wacky thing that I want to do.
1:40:04
SPEAKER_03: They want unlimited nuclear energy.
1:40:05
SPEAKER_03: They're pro-natalists.
1:40:07
They think that we need to get rid of the USDA organic label,
1:40:11
which is a multi-billion dollar...
1:40:14
advertising scheme that does nothing to impact health except
1:40:18
perhaps negatively.
1:40:20
SPEAKER_03: But it's hard to find that.
1:40:21
SPEAKER_00: What about you?
1:40:24
Well,
1:40:27
never,
1:40:27
ever,
1:40:28
ever have I had a moment where I wanted to be a politician.
1:40:33
SPEAKER_03: I'm a techno head, man.
1:40:34
SPEAKER_03: I love technology.
1:40:37
And I know that being in politics would rob me of the
1:40:39
opportunity to work on it.
1:40:42
SPEAKER_00: I get to work with politicians plenty.
1:40:44
SPEAKER_00: Plenty.
1:40:44
SPEAKER_00: You're just way more, you're more interested in it than I am.
1:40:47
SPEAKER_00: I just find it just gross.
1:40:48
SPEAKER_00: I know it's important.
1:40:49
You know,
1:40:50
it's funny because I used to not be that interested in
1:40:53
politics.
1:40:54
SPEAKER_03: It was really not until I was...
1:40:59
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:41:00
SPEAKER_03: basically brutalized for a $9,000 donation to a quite inane,
1:41:06
SPEAKER_03: boring type of political activity.
1:41:08
SPEAKER_03: We've come full circle.
1:41:10
SPEAKER_03: We've done it.
1:41:11
I mean,
1:41:12
that was what I was definitely to a certain extent radicalized
1:41:16
by that.
1:41:17
And all these things that you kind of hear in the blogosphere,
1:41:21
you know,
1:41:22
they're coming for you.
1:41:23
SPEAKER_03: They want to destroy you,
1:41:25
SPEAKER_03: they hate you,
1:41:26
and they'll destroy your life in a moment if they think they
1:41:29
can get away with it.
1:41:30
SPEAKER_03: There's no unacceptable tactics for acceptable targets of their ire.
1:41:34
SPEAKER_03: And you kind of roll your eyes.
1:41:37
SPEAKER_03: And then it happens to you.
1:41:38
SPEAKER_03: And you realize...
1:41:40
SPEAKER_03: Oh shit, this is totally real.
1:41:43
SPEAKER_03: And it's happening at a much smaller scale every single day,
1:41:46
probably to people who have way less ability than me to climb
1:41:50
their way back and
1:41:50
SPEAKER_03: crawl their way back.
1:41:51
SPEAKER_03: And so I think the thing that really politicized me
1:41:55
SPEAKER_03: was politics coming to me.
1:41:58
Who was it that said,
1:41:59
you might not care about politics,
1:42:01
but politics cares about you?
1:42:03
SPEAKER_03: I think that was what happened to me.
1:42:07
SPEAKER_03: Can you believe I was naive enough to think that I...
1:42:10
I mean,
1:42:11
it's funny,
1:42:11
people,
1:42:11
they act like,
1:42:12
oh,
1:42:13
it was unveiled that Palmer gave this $9,000.
1:42:15
SPEAKER_03: I was like,
1:42:16
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:42:17
SPEAKER_03: I did it in a way that was going to be publicly disclosed,
1:42:20
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:42:21
SPEAKER_03: in normal financial reports.
1:42:22
SPEAKER_03: I talked to a reporter who asked about it.
1:42:25
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's not like...
1:42:29
SPEAKER_03: it's not like it was this deep, dark secret.
1:42:31
SPEAKER_03: I think I was,
1:42:32
SPEAKER_03: I was,
1:42:32
SPEAKER_03: I was naive to think that it would,
1:42:35
SPEAKER_03: I was naive to think that it wouldn't,
1:42:37
SPEAKER_03: wouldn't go the way that it did.
1:42:38
SPEAKER_03: But then who could have predicted that it actually was that bad?
1:42:42
It's hard to like put your head back in that time because it
1:42:45
was like in Silicon
1:42:46
SPEAKER_00: Valley,
1:42:47
SPEAKER_00: not that like,
1:42:50
It was just that anything Trump vaguely related was seen as so
1:42:56
sinister,
1:42:58
so evil.
1:42:59
SPEAKER_03: Well, can I tell you three short stories?
1:43:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:43:01
SPEAKER_03: The first short story,
1:43:02
SPEAKER_03: Marc Andreessen goes on a podcast right before the election in 2016,
1:43:06
SPEAKER_03: and he says,
1:43:07
SPEAKER_03: I am one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley,
1:43:10
SPEAKER_03: and I only know two Trump supporters,
1:43:14
SPEAKER_03: Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel.
1:43:15
SPEAKER_03: That's it.
1:43:16
SPEAKER_03: And his point that he made after that was...
1:43:19
It's not that I don't,
1:43:20
I probably do know other Trump supporters,
1:43:22
but I don't know of them.
1:43:24
They,
1:43:24
like,
1:43:25
clearly the penalties are so known that nobody's even willing
1:43:29
to share that.
1:43:30
SPEAKER_03: And what does that mean?
1:43:31
SPEAKER_03: This is a guy who's,
1:43:32
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:43:32
SPEAKER_03: he was not a Trump supporter,
1:43:34
SPEAKER_03: but his point was,
1:43:35
what does that mean for speech when people clearly know the
1:43:40
game well enough so
1:43:41
SPEAKER_03: that even someone like Mark literally doesn't know a single,
1:43:44
SPEAKER_03: know of a single Trump supporter outside of Paul Marley and Peter Thiel.
1:43:47
SPEAKER_03: Second thing is there was a report that came out in summer of 2016.
1:43:50
SPEAKER_03: It was the last full quarter after the summer of 2016.
1:43:54
SPEAKER_03: It was the last full quarter before the election.
1:43:57
SPEAKER_03: And donations to political candidates are sorted by employer.
1:44:02
SPEAKER_03: You have to put your employer when you donate.
1:44:03
SPEAKER_03: And they do this so they can sort by employer,
1:44:05
SPEAKER_03: largely for anti-fraud purposes,
1:44:08
SPEAKER_03: verification purposes.
1:44:10
SPEAKER_03: And
1:44:11
Facebook in summer of 2016 had about 10,000 employees donate to
1:44:20
Hillary Clinton.
1:44:22
SPEAKER_03: How many do you think donated to Donald Trump?
1:44:24
SPEAKER_03: It's a matter of public record.
1:44:25
SPEAKER_03: You could actually, it's not even, you could go look.
1:44:28
SPEAKER_03: Like, almost none.
1:44:31
SPEAKER_03: It was two people.
1:44:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:44:34
SPEAKER_03: And so there's two possibilities.
1:44:36
It's that there's 5,000 times more Hillary supporters at
1:44:40
Facebook than Trump,
1:44:41
or...
1:44:43
SPEAKER_03: that people perceived the danger in a way that I did not.
1:44:47
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's actually more accurate.
1:44:50
SPEAKER_03: I was naive for not perceiving the danger.
1:44:53
SPEAKER_03: I think there are maybe not 5,000,
1:44:56
SPEAKER_03: maybe not 10,000 Trump supporters who were smart,
1:44:59
SPEAKER_03: maybe not 5,000,
1:45:00
SPEAKER_03: but there's probably a few hundred.
1:45:02
SPEAKER_03: There's probably a thousand.
1:45:04
SPEAKER_03: And then the last story is,
1:45:09
SPEAKER_03: When I was in,
1:45:12
SPEAKER_03: on election day,
1:45:14
I was on leave because I'd been put on leave because of the
1:45:17
internal outcry
1:45:18
SPEAKER_03: employees saying that they would refuse to work with Trump supporter.
1:45:20
SPEAKER_03: And Facebook's position was,
1:45:22
SPEAKER_03: look,
1:45:23
SPEAKER_03: you can come,
1:45:23
SPEAKER_03: and I'm not saying like hypothetically,
1:45:25
SPEAKER_03: they explicitly said,
1:45:27
SPEAKER_03: you can come back to the office after the election when Hillary wins.
1:45:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:45:32
it was it was taken as a given and i i said but hillary's not
1:45:35
going to win and they
1:45:37
said okay look you can you come back after the election their
1:45:40
thought was hillary
1:45:41
would win people would get back to normal and this i would i it
1:45:45
would be this
1:45:46
bizarre chapter where palmer briefly supported this fringe
1:45:49
candidate who lost in a
1:45:51
SPEAKER_03: landslide and and for non-racist reasons and it would pass and um
1:45:58
SPEAKER_03: On election day, I was in Orange County buying guns.
1:46:02
I was at the gun store because I figured that would be a good
1:46:05
activity to engage in
1:46:06
SPEAKER_03: on election day.
1:46:07
SPEAKER_03: And so I'm at a couple gun stores, one, then another, then another.
1:46:10
All of them have the TV on and you have that little dial on it
1:46:13
showing Hillary
1:46:13
SPEAKER_03: Clinton 95% chance to win.
1:46:16
SPEAKER_03: And then my phone died.
1:46:17
SPEAKER_03: And then I went to my house.
1:46:19
SPEAKER_03: I got some stuff done.
1:46:20
SPEAKER_03: I was living an old school life.
1:46:21
SPEAKER_03: I was on leave.
1:46:21
SPEAKER_03: I didn't have anybody to talk to.
1:46:23
SPEAKER_03: It's like my people think self,
1:46:25
SPEAKER_03: my dad always told me growing up,
1:46:27
SPEAKER_03: having a cell phone provided by your work,
1:46:29
SPEAKER_03: it doesn't mean you're an important person.
1:46:31
SPEAKER_03: It means you're somebody else's bitch.
1:46:33
SPEAKER_03: It means that they expect you to pick up.
1:46:35
SPEAKER_03: If you're actually powerful, you don't need a phone.
1:46:38
SPEAKER_03: Anyway, I get on the airplane.
1:46:41
SPEAKER_03: I go up to the Bay Area.
1:46:42
SPEAKER_03: We land at something like 8.50 p.m.
1:46:45
SPEAKER_03: And when we land, I hear a scream at the other end of the airplane.
1:46:50
SPEAKER_03: Of course,
1:46:51
I look down the aisle and there's a woman who's literally
1:46:54
pulling her hair out,
1:46:55
SPEAKER_03: screaming at the top of her lungs.
1:46:57
SPEAKER_03: And we've just landed.
1:46:58
SPEAKER_03: They haven't told you, the seatbelt sign's still on.
1:47:02
SPEAKER_03: And then people start joining in.
1:47:04
SPEAKER_03: And it doesn't seem to be moving from the front to the back.
1:47:07
SPEAKER_03: It's randomly distributed throughout the plane.
1:47:10
SPEAKER_03: And that was when I realized what was going on.
1:47:12
Donald Trump had won the election and everyone's phones had
1:47:15
connected back to data
1:47:17
SPEAKER_03: and they had realized,
1:47:18
SPEAKER_03: it was like,
1:47:18
SPEAKER_03: I think it was a Southwest flight with no wifi.
1:47:21
SPEAKER_03: So it's, I think I realized two things in that moment.
1:47:26
SPEAKER_03: One, Donald Trump had won.
1:47:28
SPEAKER_03: Two,
1:47:29
SPEAKER_03: I would not be going back to the office, I suspected.
1:47:32
SPEAKER_03: And it turns out that's exactly what happened.
1:47:35
SPEAKER_03: The next day,
1:47:35
SPEAKER_03: they came and said,
1:47:36
SPEAKER_03: we think it's better if you stay out of the office for a while.
1:47:39
SPEAKER_03: It's worse than it's ever been, and you need to lay low.
1:47:43
SPEAKER_03: And also,
1:47:44
SPEAKER_03: you should not post anything on social media,
1:47:46
SPEAKER_03: and please do not say anything to anybody.
1:47:49
SPEAKER_03: And I said, what if I go to Joe Lonsdale's victory party?
1:47:53
SPEAKER_03: They said...
1:47:55
So we're not going to tell you not to do that because that
1:47:59
would be illegal for us
1:48:00
SPEAKER_03: to tell you that.
1:48:02
SPEAKER_00: You should have posted with all the guns you'd bought.
1:48:08
SPEAKER_00: I should have.
1:48:08
But I mean,
1:48:10
I think that kind of wraps,
1:48:12
that kind of sums up,
1:48:14
that kind of really sums up.
1:48:16
SPEAKER_03: You pointed out it's hard to go back in time.
1:48:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, because it was hysterical.
1:48:18
Go back in time to an airplane full of people screaming,
1:48:22
pulling out their hair,
1:48:24
SPEAKER_03: Because their candidate hadn't won.
1:48:27
And I get it to some degree,
1:48:29
but I mean,
1:48:30
I didn't scream and pull out my hair when anybody won.
1:48:33
SPEAKER_03: I think America's stronger than any one candidate.
1:48:37
I don't think we live in a world so precarious as to fall to
1:48:41
even a candidate that
1:48:42
SPEAKER_03: I hate winning one election.
1:48:45
SPEAKER_03: I believe in the pendulum too.
1:48:46
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:48:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is hard to remember what it was like 10 years ago.
1:48:50
SPEAKER_00: It is.
1:48:50
SPEAKER_00: It is.
1:48:51
And I think that's the only way to understand some of the stuff
1:48:54
that happened to you.
1:48:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking at time.
1:48:57
SPEAKER_00: I think we have to let you get to an airplane.
1:48:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to ask you one last question, just if that's okay.
1:49:03
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
1:49:04
SPEAKER_00: I think...
1:49:05
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, you always live life to the beat of your own drum.
1:49:11
SPEAKER_00: You always have interesting takes.
1:49:12
SPEAKER_00: You're raising a young kid now, I think.
1:49:15
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
1:49:16
SPEAKER_00: Is there something,
1:49:16
do you have a philosophy on child rearing that you think would
1:49:21
be different to the
1:49:24
SPEAKER_00: mainstream thinking?
1:49:26
SPEAKER_00: I always feel like you have innovative ideas around things like this.
1:49:31
So I plan on keeping him out of the institutional education
1:49:35
system to the best of my ability.
1:49:37
SPEAKER_03: And whether that's homeschooling— You were homeschooling.
1:49:39
SPEAKER_03: I was.
1:49:40
SPEAKER_03: I was.
1:49:41
Whether it's homeschooling or nun schooling or some weird,
1:49:47
bizarre AI-aided crush.
1:49:52
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what it's going to look like.
1:49:53
SPEAKER_03: The next few years are going to tell.
1:49:55
But I do know that I probably am not going to put him in the
1:49:58
institutional education system.
1:49:59
SPEAKER_03: Just because you think it's—
1:50:01
SPEAKER_03: Look,
1:50:03
SPEAKER_03: so I have very negative opinions of it,
1:50:05
SPEAKER_03: but I'd say even if you don't have negative opinions,
1:50:06
SPEAKER_03: it's not hard to buy into the idea that with nearly unlimited wealth,
1:50:12
SPEAKER_03: you can do somewhat better than the traditional education system.
1:50:16
SPEAKER_03: Like, imagine if you couldn't.
1:50:17
Imagine if there's nothing that could be better than the thing
1:50:20
that happens to
1:50:22
SPEAKER_03: exist and be sustained by the local union,
1:50:24
SPEAKER_03: unionized teachers movement,
1:50:26
SPEAKER_03: than your local school.
1:50:28
SPEAKER_03: Like that...
1:50:30
SPEAKER_03: I want to have good schools.
1:50:31
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying that we should not have schools.
1:50:33
I can't imagine that that's the very best thing for every kid,
1:50:40
mine included.
1:50:42
SPEAKER_03: A few other things.
1:50:43
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to try to have him walking long distances as soon as possible.
1:50:48
SPEAKER_03: I think it's good for independence.
1:50:49
SPEAKER_03: My dad,
1:50:50
SPEAKER_03: when I was two years old,
1:50:52
SPEAKER_03: let me walk four miles to 7-Eleven and buy a Diet Coke,
1:50:57
SPEAKER_03: following behind at a distance.
1:50:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:51:00
SPEAKER_03: No, I couldn't even talk at that point in my life.
1:51:03
SPEAKER_03: But kids can walk a lot longer than you think if you train them to do it.
1:51:07
SPEAKER_03: I also...
1:51:13
SPEAKER_03: I'm still figuring this out.
1:51:14
SPEAKER_03: So we'll see how this goes.
1:51:16
But I feel like people ignore the biological imperatives that
1:51:21
come along with being a person.
1:51:23
And we try to jam people into this extended adolescence where
1:51:29
it's not just that
1:51:30
SPEAKER_03: you are still treated like a child.
1:51:32
SPEAKER_03: It's that someone else is in control of your life.
1:51:35
SPEAKER_03: And I think that drives a lot of really unnecessary conflict.
1:51:38
SPEAKER_03: It used to be that when you got old enough,
1:51:40
to go out and make something yourself and find a mate that you
1:51:46
would naturally go and do so.
1:51:47
SPEAKER_03: And now we've created a situation where, like,
1:51:51
SPEAKER_03: I'll just jump to what I'm going to do.
1:51:52
SPEAKER_03: The moment that my kid believes that he knows better than I do,
1:51:56
I think it's probably the right time for him to see what the
1:51:59
real world is like.
1:52:01
SPEAKER_03: You know,
1:52:01
SPEAKER_03: if you're 16,
1:52:03
SPEAKER_03: 17 years old and you think you've got it all figured out,
1:52:05
why am I going to keep you locked up in the house for another
1:52:07
two years telling you
1:52:08
SPEAKER_03: how you're going to live your life?
1:52:10
SPEAKER_03: If I have not raised a kid who can make their own decisions by then,
1:52:15
SPEAKER_03: damn,
1:52:15
SPEAKER_03: it's probably just too late.
1:52:16
SPEAKER_03: So you have to like forcibly evict them?
1:52:19
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
1:52:19
SPEAKER_03: I think, well...
1:52:20
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to forcibly evict him.
1:52:21
SPEAKER_03: I'm hoping that it's, I'm hoping it's natural.
1:52:23
SPEAKER_03: I'm hoping that he's like, you know, screw you, dad.
1:52:26
SPEAKER_03: You don't know what the, you don't know what things are like now.
1:52:28
SPEAKER_02: You're an old,
1:52:29
SPEAKER_02: out of touch,
1:52:30
SPEAKER_02: you're an old,
1:52:30
out of touch dude who has too much money to know how the real
1:52:35
world works.
1:52:35
SPEAKER_03: And they'll say, you know what?
1:52:37
SPEAKER_03: We could butt heads for the next two years living under the same roof,
1:52:42
or I could enable you with a small amount of financial help to
1:52:46
go out into the real
1:52:47
SPEAKER_03: world and find out just how right you are.
1:52:49
And if he turns out he's right and he's got it all figured out,
1:52:53
hell yeah,
1:52:53
power to him.
1:52:55
And I think otherwise we'd probably actually have a better
1:52:57
relationship in the long
1:52:58
SPEAKER_03: run than if I had beat on him and kept him in the house.
1:53:01
And also like you send kids to college and you're beating on
1:53:03
them to stay in college.
1:53:04
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's not,
1:53:05
SPEAKER_03: we're not talking about two years of this.
1:53:06
SPEAKER_03: We're talking about like five,
1:53:08
SPEAKER_03: six,
1:53:08
seven years or more of a subservient parent-child relationship
1:53:14
where you're
1:53:14
SPEAKER_03: expected to be keeping your thumb on what is a fully grown,
1:53:18
SPEAKER_03: sexually mature adult,
1:53:22
SPEAKER_03: really.
1:53:22
SPEAKER_03: And so I'm, I'm,
1:53:25
SPEAKER_03: That's what I'm hoping.
1:53:25
SPEAKER_03: And then I'm just, maybe this is just due to my unique circumstances.
1:53:31
I'm hoping that my son figures out who he's going to marry when
1:53:35
he's 15,
1:53:36
16,
1:53:36
17.
1:53:37
SPEAKER_03: That worked for a really long time.
1:53:40
I don't think figuring it out in your 20s or 30s or 40s is even
1:53:44
remotely optimal for life.
1:53:46
Now,
1:53:46
my personal story is I've been dating my wife since I was 15
1:53:49
years old.
1:53:49
SPEAKER_03: We met at debate camp, started dating.
1:53:53
SPEAKER_03: We're still together and we're married now.
1:53:54
SPEAKER_03: We've been married for a decade.
1:53:57
SPEAKER_03: And people are like, oh, but your situation is so unique.
1:54:02
SPEAKER_03: I mean, how can you possibly know if they're the right person?
1:54:06
SPEAKER_03: And my answer to them is, well, it seemed to work
1:54:08
SPEAKER_03: pretty well for basically the entirety of human civilization.
1:54:11
SPEAKER_03: They say, oh, but men used to treat women poorly.
1:54:15
SPEAKER_03: It's like, look, these are independent issues.
1:54:19
SPEAKER_03: This idea that getting married young or at least having the intention to,
1:54:25
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:54:26
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying that my son needs to get married when he's 16.
1:54:29
But this idea that it's unthinkable that you get married until
1:54:32
you're in 30s,
1:54:33
SPEAKER_03: it is a very unnatural and modern thing.
1:54:35
SPEAKER_03: And I think that it leads to a prolonged adolescence.
1:54:38
SPEAKER_03: It leads to you not thinking about what's important in life.
1:54:40
It leads to you spending a big chunk of your most productive
1:54:43
years probably not
1:54:45
SPEAKER_03: aligned correctly with what you were biologically designed to do.
1:54:48
SPEAKER_03: So maybe that's my controversial opinion.
1:54:51
I'm going to hope that I can find a nice girl for my son before
1:54:54
he can drive.
1:54:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, I met my wife at 19, still love her.
1:55:01
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it great?
1:55:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 20, 20 years.
1:55:03
And when you meet when you're young,
1:55:04
the nice thing is you get to grow together.
1:55:06
SPEAKER_03: You get to be the people who are the right person for the other side.
1:55:12
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not putting people down who get married in their 30s or 40s,
1:55:16
SPEAKER_03: but it is,
1:55:19
SPEAKER_03: from what I've seen of my own situation versus those of my friends,
1:55:23
SPEAKER_03: it is a lot easier to make
1:55:27
It is a lot easier to meet someone who's perfect for you when
1:55:30
you grow into that
1:55:31
together than when you try to find somebody who's gone through
1:55:34
30 or 40 years of
1:55:35
their own life and hope that their life has turned them into
1:55:38
exactly the type of
1:55:39
SPEAKER_03: person that you want to be with for the rest of yours.
1:55:42
SPEAKER_03: It's just, that's a really lucky dice you need to roll.
1:55:47
SPEAKER_00: I feel like we should end there.
1:55:48
SPEAKER_00: I want to sneak one more.
1:55:49
SPEAKER_03: Can I sneak one more in?
1:55:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we got eight minutes until I'm supposed to be out of here.
1:55:54
SPEAKER_00: That was really good.
1:55:55
SPEAKER_00: That was like life philosophy stuff.
1:55:57
SPEAKER_00: My next one sucks compared to that, but I'm still curious.
1:56:00
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:56:00
SPEAKER_03: You can always cut it if it's not interesting.
1:56:02
In AI land,
1:56:03
which I know you guys do a lot of AI stuff,
1:56:06
but you're not like in the...
1:56:09
you're not thought of as like a foundational model company in
1:56:13
some sense.
1:56:13
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, ignore that for a second.
1:56:17
SPEAKER_00: There's like a religious thing, right?
1:56:20
SPEAKER_00: You could be like team open AI, anthropic, deep mind.
1:56:24
SPEAKER_00: You could see...
1:56:27
if we have to pick one of these people who end up with the
1:56:29
super intelligence,
1:56:30
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:56:30
SPEAKER_00: it's like,
1:56:30
SPEAKER_00: do you believe in Sam?
1:56:32
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe in Dennis?
1:56:32
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe in Elon?
1:56:34
SPEAKER_00: Who do you pick?
1:56:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you get into any of this?
1:56:37
SPEAKER_00: Do you have,
1:56:39
if we had to have one of these people be the arbiter of super
1:56:43
intelligence,
1:56:45
SPEAKER_00: who would you pick?
1:56:46
SPEAKER_00: And,
1:56:46
SPEAKER_00: or,
1:56:47
SPEAKER_00: or do you see any difference between these companies or,
1:56:51
SPEAKER_00: or,
1:56:52
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:56:52
SPEAKER_00: it is kind of like a religious thing to some degree.
1:56:55
SPEAKER_03: It is.
1:56:56
SPEAKER_03: So from a corporate perspective, I have to be neutral.
1:56:59
SPEAKER_03: You know, Andrew works with everybody.
1:57:00
SPEAKER_03: We've announced a partnership with Meta on AI.
1:57:02
SPEAKER_03: We've announced a partnership with OpenAI on AI.
1:57:06
SPEAKER_03: We've announced other partnerships with others.
1:57:07
SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, everyone you've mentioned and more we're working with.
1:57:13
But of course,
1:57:13
right now,
1:57:13
you know,
1:57:14
to your point,
1:57:15
we don't have the super intelligence winner.
1:57:16
SPEAKER_03: There's not one clear winner.
1:57:19
So I'll answer both of your questions,
1:57:21
which is who should it be and will it happen?
1:57:26
SPEAKER_03: I actually don't think there's going to be one winner here.
1:57:29
SPEAKER_03: The reason for that is,
1:57:30
SPEAKER_03: yeah,
1:57:30
SPEAKER_03: like somebody will get to AGI or super intelligence before the others.
1:57:35
But I think that it probably will not take all that much money
1:57:39
to accomplish it.
1:57:41
SPEAKER_03: And it will take even less to duplicate it.
1:57:44
SPEAKER_03: You won't have to be the winning AI company to create your own ASI.
1:57:49
SPEAKER_03: You'll be able to use money from some other business.
1:57:52
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying this is how it'll happen,
1:57:54
but it wouldn't be crazy to assume that an oil company creates
1:57:57
the second ASI.
1:57:59
SPEAKER_03: One of these tech companies will figure out the first one,
1:58:01
SPEAKER_03: and then an oil will go to say,
1:58:02
SPEAKER_03: oh shit,
1:58:04
SPEAKER_03: we can just do it now using money that we make from our other business.
1:58:07
SPEAKER_03: It's not crazy to imagine.
1:58:09
SPEAKER_03: You might see a media company to do it.
1:58:10
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could imagine a Disney corporation doing this.
1:58:14
Um,
1:58:15
and I think that's especially true for the followers of the
1:58:18
first one.
1:58:19
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not,
1:58:19
SPEAKER_03: and I,
1:58:19
SPEAKER_03: if some people say,
1:58:20
SPEAKER_03: oh,
1:58:20
SPEAKER_03: but the first one,
1:58:21
SPEAKER_03: they're going to become so powerful and just run away.
1:58:24
SPEAKER_03: And I'm,
1:58:25
SPEAKER_03: I'm,
1:58:25
SPEAKER_03: I'm,
1:58:25
I think the limiting factor for adoption of ASI is not going to
1:58:28
be the technology
1:58:29
SPEAKER_03: itself.
1:58:29
SPEAKER_03: It's going to be, you know, human, human inertia.
1:58:32
How long does it really take to penetrate the world and
1:58:34
actually take over these things?
1:58:35
SPEAKER_03: How long does it,
1:58:36
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
1:58:37
look how long it's taken square to replace old point of sale
1:58:41
contracts with
1:58:42
SPEAKER_03: where Square was strictly the better product,
1:58:45
SPEAKER_03: lower fees,
1:58:46
SPEAKER_03: better compatibility,
1:58:47
SPEAKER_03: better terminals,
1:58:49
SPEAKER_03: lower costs.
1:58:50
And it still takes years for them to try and penetrate and
1:58:53
actually get spread across the order.
1:58:55
SPEAKER_03: So I don't know.
1:58:58
I feel like it's unlikely that there will be a winner and
1:59:00
they'll take over every
1:59:01
SPEAKER_03: industry so fast that nobody has time to react.
1:59:04
SPEAKER_03: As to who do I hope wins, I hope it's 4chan.
1:59:10
SPEAKER_03: I hope for the super intelligence that is not censored,
1:59:17
SPEAKER_03: that is not restricted or capped,
1:59:20
I think it's very unlikely that any of these corporate
1:59:23
structures or nonprofit
1:59:25
structures are going to create something within their corporate
1:59:30
confines that is
1:59:31
SPEAKER_03: truly the limitless AI that you want.
1:59:34
SPEAKER_03: Put it another way, which AI do you want
1:59:37
SPEAKER_03: on your journey to another galaxy.
1:59:40
SPEAKER_03: You get to choose what you're loading on your starship.
1:59:42
SPEAKER_03: You're the captain of the starship enterprise.
1:59:45
Your memory banks,
1:59:45
powered by an array of dilithium crystals,
1:59:48
has room for one model.
1:59:51
SPEAKER_03: Do you want the 4chan model, or do you want
1:59:55
the big tech megacorp model that won't talk about things if
1:59:58
they're a little too
1:59:59
SPEAKER_03: controversial and won't make pictures of Mickey Mouse,
2:00:01
even if that's what you desperately need to convince another
2:00:04
civilization that
2:00:05
SPEAKER_03: America is worth saving.
2:00:08
SPEAKER_03: I think that's actually what I want.
2:00:09
SPEAKER_03: And so I'm a big fan of open source AI for that reason.
2:00:12
I think that you'll see things that are kind of seeded and
2:00:16
created and pioneered by
2:00:18
corporate entities that figure out how to build businesses on
2:00:20
top of them.
2:00:21
SPEAKER_03: And that the...
2:00:24
their gift to humanity will end up being these open source
2:00:26
models that are used in
2:00:27
SPEAKER_03: ways that they could never have endorse,
2:00:29
SPEAKER_03: of course,
2:00:30
SPEAKER_03: but will nonetheless exist in an uncontrolled way.
2:00:34
SPEAKER_03: And I mean, another example of this is...
2:00:37
SPEAKER_03: So I'll give you a really specific example.
2:00:40
I've done a lot of work trying,
2:00:41
and I never give it any classified data,
2:00:43
never sensitive data.
2:00:44
These are using hypothetical construct products that I use just
2:00:47
to evaluate these AI systems.
2:00:48
SPEAKER_03: I like to work with them and say,
2:00:49
SPEAKER_03: hey,
2:00:50
SPEAKER_03: I'm a weapons manufacturer,
2:00:51
SPEAKER_03: and I want to work through how to build this type of novel weapon system.
2:00:55
SPEAKER_03: And most of them will just outright say, I'm sorry.
2:00:59
SPEAKER_03: I can't do that.
2:01:00
SPEAKER_00: You're like, no, I am Tony Stark.
2:01:02
SPEAKER_03: And so again, it gets back to the Starship question.
2:01:05
Do you want the 4chan AI where there's no rules or do you want
2:01:09
the corporate thing?
2:01:10
SPEAKER_03: So I guess that's who I hope.
2:01:13
SPEAKER_03: I hope that at least one of the winners is the open source,
2:01:17
SPEAKER_03: you know,
2:01:19
SPEAKER_03: the open source unrestricted one that everyone thinks is
2:01:25
SPEAKER_03: Maybe something that's beyond the pale,
2:01:27
SPEAKER_03: but the existence of it probably is a net good thing for humanity.
2:01:30
SPEAKER_03: And people will say, Palmer, 4chan's horrible.
2:01:33
SPEAKER_03: And I'd say, you know what?
2:01:34
There have been stories that have been suppressed literally
2:01:37
everywhere else that
2:01:38
SPEAKER_03: have been allowed on 4chan that have turned out to be true.
2:01:41
SPEAKER_03: This has happened with this has happened with with terror attacks.
2:01:46
SPEAKER_03: This has happened with political events.
2:01:49
This has happened even with some of the Hunter Biden laptop
2:01:52
stuff that was
2:01:52
supposedly like I'm just not sympathetic to this argument that
2:01:57
the bad places on
2:01:58
SPEAKER_03: the Internet are.
2:02:01
SPEAKER_03: I'd say, no, you know what?
2:02:03
Even if you think it's mostly bad,
2:02:04
you need a place where there's no rules.
2:02:06
SPEAKER_03: There has to be some place.
2:02:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
2:02:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
2:02:08
SPEAKER_00: just the spirit of what you're saying,
2:02:10
SPEAKER_00: whether you're into 4chan or not,
2:02:11
SPEAKER_00: just not to have this gross,
2:02:14
SPEAKER_00: neutered...
2:02:15
SPEAKER_00: We make this super intelligence.
2:02:17
SPEAKER_03: I think it's very American too.
2:02:20
SPEAKER_03: You look at the founding fathers.
2:02:21
I mean,
2:02:22
you had multiple founding fathers who were basically ye olde
2:02:27
shit posters.
2:02:28
I mean,
2:02:28
they were writing pamphlets in newspapers under anonymous pen
2:02:32
names.
2:02:33
I had people seen people say,
2:02:34
oh,
2:02:35
but they weren't posting misinformation.
2:02:37
SPEAKER_03: They were just posting jokes like,
2:02:39
SPEAKER_03: You kidding?
2:02:40
Benjamin Franklin wrote an entire treatise where he pretended
2:02:43
to be the king of
2:02:44
SPEAKER_03: Prussia,
2:02:44
SPEAKER_03: issuing a new tax proclamation.
2:02:46
SPEAKER_03: Like, literally misinformation.
2:02:50
SPEAKER_03: And you know what?
2:02:51
SPEAKER_03: I'm glad that we have laws that protect every form of expression,
2:02:55
SPEAKER_03: because that's what makes America America.
2:02:58
I don't think we'd be America without a Wild West somewhere,
2:03:03
even if it's on the internet.
2:03:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for your forms of expression today.
2:03:07
SPEAKER_00: You're very generous with your time.
2:03:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm impressed with that transition out.
2:03:13
SPEAKER_00: And it's always awesome to talk to you.
2:03:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming to our studio.
2:03:17
SPEAKER_00: And thanks, man.
2:03:19
SPEAKER_03: And thanks to your investors for sponsoring this podcast.
2:03:22
SPEAKER_00: E1 Ventures.
2:03:23
SPEAKER_00: I need you here all the time.
2:03:26
SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
2:03:26
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Paul.
2:03:30
SPEAKER_00: Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashley Vance.
2:03:34
SPEAKER_00: The show is produced by David Nicholson and me sometimes.
2:03:39
SPEAKER_00: Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
2:03:43
SPEAKER_00: And the show is edited by the John Sortland.
2:03:47
SPEAKER_00: Thank you all for listening.
2:03:49
SPEAKER_00: As mentioned, the show is sponsored by E1 Ventures.
2:03:53
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.