Palmer Luckey on the Next Wave of Military Tech Powered by AI | EP #158

24:57And this is one of our dive LDs, one of our smaller submarines that we make. It can do a lot of things that used to be exclusively domain of a man submarine. And instead you can do it with an autonomous system. We have a much larger version of that called the dive XL. And of course I can't show you that on a video yet, but you're going to be able to see in the next few months. This is an Altia 600. It'd be launched on the move. You can carry one on your backpack and launch it. We actually just sent another big plane full of these few cranes. We sent a bunch of these to Taiwan and that got me sanctioned by China.

25:31So I'm gonna go to prison if I go to Hong Kong or China now. I am also sanctioned in Russia and Belarus. And so there's all kinds of places. Four countries down. You know, four countries. I'm going for a run next. I think, I'm thinking that's pretty good.

25:51That's beautiful. Yeah, the Nairs Road Runner. What a beauty. Twin Turbo, bridge, twin throttespector turbojet vertical take off and landing micro fighter. Now is road runner what you can use on the wildfire? You'll have to wait and see. Uh huh. You'll have to wait and see. I can't give away my secrets. Okay. We're collaborating with some of the companies that are in the competition. Love that. But others we're just going to destroy them. Yes. Give it up for that. But by the way, something you just said, which is important that I love about XPRIZE, is while we run this competition, we also create extraordinary collaboration between the teams, teams merge, teams partner.

26:30And Andrew is teaming with a bunch of other companies under there. I think I actually said this in DC when you were announcing it that I suspected the winning team was not going to be any one of these companies. It was going to be a consortium or collaborative effort between companies. I'm a huge believer in specialization of labor, not just at the company level, but even just the human level. Try, I am a generalist, and so maybe this is me fetishizing what I am not. But there's a lot of value in people becoming deep experts in exactly what they do. And we're partnering with companies that have deep expertise in parts of this problem that we don't have, and I have no intention of building.

27:03And then vice versa, we're doing things in androle that some of these other companies don't want to do. So I think that's actually also the healthiest outcome. The healthiest outcome is going to be a lot of different companies all working to solve this problem. Love it. And then he said the company is he's not partnering with, he's going to crush. Okay. Only the bad ones. Only the bad ones. Yeah. I like efficient markets. Alright. I'm going to ask one more question before we have a lot of them. But one more because I want to get to your questions here. How do you decide what to go after and what not to?

27:36I mean, you must have a person or as Andrew? As an entrepreneur. Let me put it that way. It's not a entrepreneur because you must have a thousand different ideas. Lots of approaches to you. Sure. What's your calculus for filtering this? I mean, personally, like when I started Andral, I just, it was, it was, it was my, like my first round, like I said earlier, it was me doing my hobby. The second time around, I wanted to prove. It was a combination of truly wanting to impact the world and wanting to prove to everybody that I could still impact the world. How important is that, that, that, that ego drive, right?

28:10Massive, absolutely massive. I need everyone who wronged me to weep. I, you know, what was it, you know, Conan, what is best in life to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentations of their women. Like, I want it all, I want it all. But like, I was in deciding, what I was gonna do to those being packed for, I was deciding between either fixing the defense industry, solving obesity, or solving the prison crisis in America. I decided for on defense for a long list of reasons we could talk about some other time When androle is trying to decide what problem we go after it's a lot easier.

28:46It's a lot more rational and less emotional We have kind of a four -part test for us before we work on something Seriously first it has to be something that the Pentagon deeply cares about that means that it can't just be a thing that someone One somewhere in the bureaucracy is technically tasked with doing. You need to pick their top problems. What are the things that keep the joint chiefs awake at night? Afraid that America is going to fall? Those are the problems that I want to work on. Things like industrial capacity for rocket boosters, for lack of manufacturing in the United States. Things like our lack of long -range fighters that can actually project effects and sensors deep enough into enemy territory to matter.

29:29So you want to work on things that are going to be a big part of solving big problems Because if you're not people aren't going to help you cut red tape and push down Boundaries you need to work on important stuff that they want to help you work on if you're gonna move fast enough So that's one Pentagon has to care too Congress has to care this might not be true for your business But for me I have to recognize that Congress has the power of the purse I can spend my own money developing things, but at the end of the day, Congress decides what gets money at scale. If you are working on solving a problem that they don't believe in, you are never going to get significant money.

30:07They're not going to tell you that. They're going to meet with you and it's like when there's a girl who's turning you down nicely and she's, oh, that's very nice, very nice, very nice. And then they never talk to you again. You have to recognize that the nice words are not a reflection of reality. It's just them being nice. And so I'll give you a good example. If you're working on stuff related to counterterrorism right now, it's just not what Congress cares about. They are worried about a great power conflict against Russia, China or Iran. They are trying to figure out how we're going to fight a war in the Pacific on the other side of the world and win.

30:41And stuff that looks a lot like the wars we've already fought and already won or lost, it's just not of interest to them. And then the last two things that we have to answer are, is it something we can do well? That sounds obvious, you should only do things you can do well, but that's really a call for Anderl for us to do more. There's things that we can do today that we never would have been able to do well five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. You always want to be growing as a company, because you can do more things and go after things that fit in those previous two categories. We couldn't have built an autonomous fighter jet eight years ago when we started the company.

31:14It's pretty, it's pretty fun. And now we're beating Boeing and Lockheed and North of Grumman doing the same. So again, and then the last one is, are other people already doing a good enough job? I don't want to be in the business of using my investors money, crush other companies that are doing a quite competent job. Even if I could do better, why would I spend my life achieving marginal gain over other American companies that are going to get the job done reasonably well? I want to build things that wouldn't exist otherwise, or kill companies that deserve to die. And so... So that's what it is.

31:52The Pentagon has to care, Congress has to care. We have to be able to do a good job. Other people are doing a bad job. If it fits all four of those categories, then you're going to see it in the Anderl showroom within a year or two. That was awesome, dude. It was about 13 years ago. I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive.

32:27And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a found upload. You know, found is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there Upload myself digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception You know look for any cardiovascular and cancer and your near degenerative disease any metabolic disease These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception So super important. So found is one of my keys.

33:07I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viral. And we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company in a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing, which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best feed -a -eat?

34:00Or what food should you avoid? Right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me? And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror, saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day twice a day is called one skin developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your looking appearance.

34:50So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode. All right, let's get to the microphones and as you do... And I'll note that less than half the products we make are even on our website right now. So, you know, like the things we're doing, it's beyond even what's necessarily public. I'm going to ask one question. What piece of conventional wisdom and defense or tech do you think because it's completely wrong. Follow your dreams. It's dumb as shit I've ever heard.

35:27Yeah. Yeah. I know it worked for me, but the reality is that most people are going to do better off following where they can have the biggest impact. It's following your skills, following your talents, not your dreams. A lot of kids have stupid dreams, and a lot of people have dreams that aren't gonna impact the world. And so like, when people say, oh, tell people to follow, I'm gonna tell my kids to follow their dreams. Like, my kids are probably stupid dreams. At least at some point in their life, If I'm not gonna tell him to follow that. YouTube or video game. Yeah, I mean, like in 1969, you know the number one job that kids wanted was, you can probably guess.

36:00Astronaut. Astronaut, fantastic. They're like supermen, fighter pilot, PhD, public speaker heroes. Okay, and what's the number one job today? It goes back and forth between YouTuber and professional gamer and streamer. It goes back and forth. And so I'd say like conventional wisdom that people say, like, follow your dreams, I think it is dangerous, it is bad, it would lead to a nation full of people not having impact and not taking care of their families. There's even people who say, I'm just gonna do this, I'm gonna do something I hate, at least. Like, if everyone follow their dreams, on average, people will not make enough money to get by and they will not be impactful.

36:42That is a bad thing. And if you are not passionate about and about any of the things that you're talented in doing, you need to get better at doing stuff. Like go find something to be good at or find something to be passionate about. You need to change yourself, not just follow whatever path you've randomly found. You don't just fall out of a coconut tree and then go and do whatever you feel like. It's good to yoss. Hi, yoss. Hey, Peter. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for coming back. I was a huge fan two years ago, still a fan. Thank you. My question for you is, I really admired at that time and what you were doing for Ukraine.

37:20And I'm curious about what the new administration means for your company. So the new administration, in regards to Ukraine or generally? Generally is fine, but however you feel comfortable. All right, generally, the ceiling for positive change is much higher. And the point that I try to make with some of my friends who are more left -leaning. And I was fired because I gave $9 ,000 to anti -clinton groups. So you can guess where I fall. But I argue with some of my well -meaning, but more liberal colleagues, as Reagan would say, and I say, look, whether or not you agree with individual decisions, the variance today today, the ceiling for positive changes certainly much higher.

38:00I'm actually quite optimistic. I think that things are going to happen that never would have happened previously. I think we will be able to cut spending in a very big way. I think that that will force people to tighten their belts and think hard about where we're spending money and develop more effective techniques. Necessity is the mother of invention. If there are things that our government needs to be doing and they find themselves with less money, given competent people in the role, they will figure out how to innovate and do better. We've always done that as a country. There's never been catastrophic failures in our country that were because we couldn't figure out how to be more technologically savvy.

38:37It just hasn't happened. Anything that we've actually sent our minds to, we've done. whether it's going to the moon or trying to build bitter databases. So I think we can do that. With Ukraine specifically, I hate to abdicate responsibility for this. We've had stuff as Andral in Ukraine since the second week of the war. I met with Zelensky before the war, and I met with him again in Kiev during the war. I've been to Ukraine to help train operatives and how to use Andral's weapon system. So again, you can probably guess where I fall. But it is not appropriate for me, in my opinion. People ask why I'm not tweeting about this.

39:14Why are you not tweeting? I tweeted about ascending the more weapons. But why aren't you tweeting more about what should be done politically? My answer is simple. Because I'm the executive of a weapons company making money, selling weapons to Ukraine, to the United States for Ukraine, to the United Kingdom for Ukraine, aren't we supposed to hate it when the military industrial complex advocates for longer more extended wars in a way that clearly benefits their pocketbooks. But my point is whatever my opinion is, I'm not the right guy to be telling the message. I don't think it's the place of weapons companies to be weighing in on what conflicts are appropriate, how long they should go on, what quantity of weapons you should...

39:56I just don't. And so I think people see this too, or like Palmer, would you work with this country, would you work with that country would you enter this war? And my point is, you better hope that that decision is not made by me. You better hope we're not moving into a dystopian future where corporate executives de facto control US foreign policy and military policy. Because if you believe in democracy at all, then those decisions need to be made by civilian leadership that is accountable to the body populace. Not me. I'm not accountable to anyone. My board is three people and I control all of them.

40:31It's not it's That that that would that be my look big picture and little picture. Good question. You all thanks. All right Thomas. What do you got? Thank you. Thank you. I'm Very enjoyable. I know ex -ex sculpting aside. I kept thinking of Tony Stark when I saw that video So remind me of him I'll probably have a private question, I'll try to ask you later. But in your bio that I read, you talked about your inspiration when you first started out to form an angel, you were like helping veterans with PTSD. Could you share a little bit about that and how that happened because I'm a huge believer we've got a big problem there and psychedelics can help, a lot can help.

41:07So for about eight months prior to me ever starting Oculus, I was still, I started building virtual reality heads that's when I was 15 years old. I started to ocult when I was 19, but in between there somewhere, I worked for about eight months at the ICT mixed reality lab, which is an Army affiliate research center working on an Army program called Brave Mind. And Brave Mind was doing a lot of different things. The conspiracy theorist say it was a brainwashing program, it wasn't. It was a program to treat veterans suffering from extreme PTSD using virtual reality exposure therapy. So by exposing them to things that trigger them, you could train them to engage in coping techniques, thinking techniques, biofeedback techniques, they would mitigate their physiological responses.

41:51And in doing so, you could reduce their dependence on medication, improve their quality of life. And it was, I can't take any credit for the success of the program. I was a lab technician, I was a cable monkey, a monitor -minder, all kinds of names. They came up with for us. But the people who are doing the real work on that, they successfully shepherded that from one VA hospital, clinical trials, to 40 VA hospitals across the country. It's a great example of how technology can help people if you apply it in ways that to a normal person, like people thought it was crazy. But it ended up having better impact and better results than any of the medical interventions, any of the pharmaceutical interventions, it was fantastic.

42:41There's so many areas across the government like that, and you mentioned psychedelics and novel substances. I'd say the thing in common between these is sometimes things that seem crazy to the existing bureaucracy are in fact the right solution. And the problem is that no bureaucrat ever got fired for doing the same thing his predecessor did, right? And the number one job of most bureaucrats is to not get fired. And so we need to normalize doing crazier things. We can do them somewhat responsibly, but I think we can afford to borrow from science fiction and at least give it a shot. Thank you. Let's go to Craig and back here.

43:20So during the last eight years, have you seen any of the major defense contractors actually be able to make change? Are you seeing them continue to do what they've always done? Some of them are definitely engaging in change. But it's a matter of speed and extent, right? Like they're not totally static. They are somewhat changing. I don't think they're changing fast enough. And if you look at their revenue streams, it's not actually dominated by new procurement. If you're a company that's been around for many decades and you're supporting platforms that the United States has spent tens of billions or hundreds of billions at dollars for curing, you're actually making more money off the things is that you've done for the last 20 or 30 years, then anything that you're doing in the next 10.

44:05And so that drives incentives. That drives how they think and how fast they can move and react. And you've got to remember that at the end of the day, companies are the product of their shareholders. And shareholders, you can define that in a lot of ways. Like some people literally hold physical shares. Some people, they're the employees. They have a stake in the company, whether they own shares or not. in the case of these major defense companies, their investors don't want them to be like Andrew. Their investors want them to be an ultra low risk extension of the United States government, akin to a bond in terms of risk that will continue to exist even if, let's say, COVID -LAMDivariant comes along and wipes out consumers spending for a couple years.

44:48That is the asset category they fit into. And so, suppose I were the CEO of a major defense company and I were to announce that we're gonna be like Andrew. We've seen the light, we've seen the way, we're going to be a defense product company, instead of putting 1 % of our revenue back into internal research development, we're going to put 100 % of our revenue back in the IRED. You know what's going to happen? You know what that CEO is going to say the next day? Nothing, he's already been fired by the board. That's not what his investors hired him to be. And so that is actually the biggest challenge.

45:18Before we go to the mic, can I just run through some of the ones that are on the video? Sure, go for it. We've got, number one, are we militarily ready enough? No. What is next for Mod Retro in the chromatic? For people who don't know, oh hell yeah, you have my second favorite color. For people who don't know, I have a side company called Mod Retro. It was a forum that I started when I was 14 years old. We started a project, we were modifying vintage game consoles with modern technology. For me and some of my buddies, we've been working on a project for 15 years to build a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy color.

45:50And we finally finished last year and we started selling them to people and open source to it. So if you want an open source clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color with a sapphire screen lens and magnesium aluminum alloy chassis, there's what, it's beautiful. Would you like one? You can't order it. It's not for sale. They're completely sold out. So I'm like, what is next? We're going to be doing an Nintendo 64. Oh, I'm good. How important is the human and your future work? Very, very important. We can't automate people entirely. Will you need employees? I think so. So how do you differentiate for yourself from competition?

46:24I think we're just very differentiated. Mostly we struggle to convince people that we're not too crazy. We are very different. We're so fundamentally different at a product level. I don't have customers coming in saying, so what makes you different? It's not my problem. It says they can hire the same talent in TechnoHow, but you're in products out in AnimatedM. This is what I got to before with that last question. Yeah, they could in theory hire the same talent in TechnoHow, but people don't want to work for companies that don't put their own money into things that try to drag things out. They don't want to work for low -risk companies like that.

46:56It's a different type of person for a different type of role. Anyway. Let's go to John Battalion, Zoom. Hey, John. Hey, great information. Wow. Unbelievable. So my question is about your creative process. How, when do your big ideas come to you? Are they in a dream state? Are they when they're in the shower? Is it a consistent way they come to you? And so how do you get yourself in that state? I steal all of my ideas from science fiction from the 60s and 70s That's that's most that's mostly what I do And in fact I had a friend of mine Art Dula who used to literally read all of Heinlein stuff I've read every novel.

47:37He's ever but and I steal everything. Yes, and he can't do anything about it He's dead. Yes, he is But he amazing stuff brilliant designer Well, you read about stuff. He published a piece in I think a 1945 issue of a serial called Astounding Science Fiction. And it was a short story about fighter jets and space fighters piloted by intelligent AI that flies alongside human pilots. And that is what we are building today. And I kid you not. There are ideas that he lays out for how he believes you should communicate with and personify AI for piloting ships that we have copied into our products. And it's not just him.

48:25My job is to look at problems in the world and find the solutions. But I need to first come prepared by knowing what the solutions that people in the past who have thought about things very deeply and thought about the future deeply have already come to the conclusion. I'm not going to be able to do as well sitting on my own in a room thinking about what the future could be as the combined works of the top, let's say, 1000 sci -fi authors over the last century, right? They've had a lot more time to think about it. They've a lot. They've a lot of constrained time. And they've been able to think about the first order effects, second order effects, tertiary effects.

49:02And so I can just rip off all their thinking. And of course they get it wrong because some of them are trying to tell stories. This is also, by the way, I like to rip off sci -fi that's old because new sci -fi is largely not as concept driven. Books were this way for a while. There was a period in the 70s and 80s. It was the take -up piece of technology, and that is the show genre, like Nightrider. And Aero Bull for the 6 million. I mean, even Robocop. It's like, there's this thing, right? And it's a tech thing. All right, so here, that's the story. That genre has gone away, which is unfortunate.

49:37I wanted to come back. So what's the pitch? What's the movie about? Oh, it's a car. And it's really fast because of this new technology. He's like, oh. It's going to one of our faculty members, Gillibardon. Hey, Gill. Welcome back. Speed racer. I love Speed racer. Hey, cars fast. That's the story. Gill, like, a bet here. I think we follow each other on Twitter. First of all, a big fan. I want to thank you for the vibe shift you started. For all deep tech and defense tech founders. I'm personally working on AI chips to win the chip war. and I think your chip on the shoulder energy definitely resonated with me as well.

50:11Have a good one. Thank you. I appreciate that. Having gone through the media swarm attack myself and supposedly I'm building Skynet or something, I don't know. But you would believe it. I was a journalism major before I dropped out. I could have been one of them. I'm kind of like one of those terminators that turned good.

50:31I know how to spin a story until a narrative and twist the truth, but this time I'm back. I'll be back. Awesome. Yeah. A lot of the vibe is shifted for this new generation of founders, but there's still sort of inertia from the media, inertia from the venture capital community to invest in deep tech and have some actual courage. So what sort of advice would you have for this new generation of founders in deep tech and defense tech in El Segundo and beyond? Control your narrative. You don't need to work with the press. Yeah. I think that maybe I'm going to be wrong. So this is probably the thing I've least conviction in.

51:09So it's like a crazy opinion that I have like 60 % conviction in. All of the media companies, every single one, is running on either fumes or in some cases a half full tank of gas left over from when interest rates were near zero. There was a lot of money put into tech companies and media companies and everything that made no sense at all And they are all trying to figure out what they are going to do about the fact that their businesses are terrible Nobody likes them and they're irrelevant in modern society That like they that is that is that is what is driving That is what is driving a lot of the vitriol I think they like they know the numbers They're not putting the numbers out publicly in most cases, but they know the numbers.

52:01And when they see more and more people getting sources from citizen news sources, when I'm not just talking about on X. I'm talking about, like, I subscribe to a Patreon called Intercity Press. And he's a fantastic independent journalist who covers mostly things in New York City courtrooms way better than any mainstream press outlet. but there's a lot of substacts that are the same. There's a lot of YouTubers who are doing a great job. And so they're seeing this all happening and realizing that they think things are coming to an end. So I would say just don't worry about it. Wait them out. You'll be here when they're gone.

52:37I love it. Thank you. Thank you. There was a question given that so much innovation comes from defense. Oh no, it disappeared. It was given how much there's so much innovation in defense. Are you gonna sprinkle some of that in a civilian world? The answer is no, not really. I set out to start a company that would solve our national security problems. And in fact, I've purposely avoided doing things that I knew were going to do better on the civilian side than the military side. I have nothing wrong with civilian applications, but it's not what I set out to do. And when you run a company, you need to be focused.

53:12And to be clear, I think I could make more money if I just focused on where I need to make money. But I make enough money and control my company sufficiently well enough that I can afford to Leave money on the table and do things that I want to do. I want to work on national security problems And so I will our me and Jake howl on good terms now absolutely not he's a horrible person Everyone laughs ha ha no he's he's a really bad guy and it's really terrible how he's still out there He on podcast, he says, oh, no, nobody did agrees with Palmer. I know all his board members, and I have good relationship with, no, he doesn't.

53:50I think he couldn't even name a single one of our board members. He's literally just lying to people because he can get away with it. And he's surrounded by psychofants who won't call him on it. But Jason, you're just lying. That's not true. They're all, they're all, they're all, all condemnable. Anyway. All right. Record. Hey Palmer. Thank you for all the great work you're doing. Two years ago, we brought the dream of flying cars here to A360. And I think you met Thomas Patan, the founder, and we got some of the community here to invest. Last week, we had the first serial production. But as we continue dreaming, do you think that the consumer dream of the personal area and mobility sports car of the sky is the future?

54:35Or now that you have seen the other side, is it more government first responder, police, ambulance, potentially military logistics. It's all of it. I mean, look, I'm a rotary wing pilot. I own seven helicopters, including a UH -60 Black Hawk. I really love vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And I believe that EV toll stuff is going to come to pass. It's taken longer than I wanted. I think that we wasted a lot of energy on purely electric systems when we should have been focused on hybrids, because EV tolls, they're not actually designed to haul people around. They're designed to haul batteries around.

55:05Over and over and over. And if people first get hit, you're right. That's where all your masses. So anyway, I'm glad we've stopped wasting time on that. I still believe that that is going to happen. Now, there's obstacles in the way. I was at CES a couple years back. And the head of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation said that the city of Los Angeles will not allow any vertiports, new vertiports to be installed until VTOL transport is as cheap as public transportation. Because she refuses to allow the billionaires to come in and compete and subsidize and destroy public transportation.

55:38And you know, some of the guys from Bell helicopter on the same panel and they're saying, yo, that's a beautiful vision for the future. It'll start expensive, you get cheaper, you said, no, I want to be clear. No verteports, so it's as cheap as the city bus. And so unfortunately, there's a lot of dumb people in the world. And that is actually going to be our biggest obstacle for EV toll. It's going to come to places where, like, I think Dallas is going to be a place that turns into a hub pretty early. I think New York, obviously, because they already have heliport infrastructure. No, I totally believe in it.

56:07That said, you might have seen we partnered with Archer a few weeks ago. That was announced. I think that a lot of the tech that's developed by the still -villian EVTL sector will have huge military applications. This is one of those things where if people are going to design FAA certified drive train, power train components, they could go 15 ,000 hours, flight hours without a single maintenance interval, I absolutely want to use that in my military aircraft. I don't think I need to rebuild it. So it's essentially a platform where you don't choose, you go both ways. If I were you guys, I would probably, if I'm just making shit up, if I were you guys, I would probably realize that search and rescue, fire, police, that is the now and the future is still EV toll.

56:51Because remember, government and like, it's public works, public works, applications, have waivers to everything. You don't even need to be FAA certified. If you can find a public agency, you don't even need a pilot's license to fly for a fire department. Do you know that? Now, or from police department, they can put you in a helicopter that they build themselves with a pilot that's gotten no training. And of course, they don't actually do this. In practice, they buy surplus military helicopters, civil helicopters, and they're mostly private pilots or people that they put their own training programs.

57:20But the point is the waivers are there. That is the now. You need to hope that the FAA gets their act together before you run out of money if you're going to make money on the civilian side. That's the mosaic, right? the brand new all of everything modernization program in the FAA. They've pushed it back for what five or six years now. You need to last long enough for Mosaic to get through. And if you don't, then you're gone. Thank you. Love your chill outfit. What do you wear when you show up for government meetings? I wear a suit. And that is because... Does it have Hawaiian patterns on the suit?

57:59Not when I meet with the government. No suits are for funerals, weddings, Pentagon meetings, Capitol Hill meetings. That's it. It's simple. It's just a matter of respect. Hi, hello there. I'm Australian person, London High Palmer, really respect what you're doing. And I remember getting the wide magazine of Oculus in 2014 and that got me into the whole Metaverse in Snowcrash in Stevenson, so I bond over the science fiction and I love what you're doing with autonomous vehicles and defense. My question for you is in the perspective of moon shots as our conversation and how that changes over time based on cultural context and all these different factors, do you foresee a moment in your lifetime and your kids' lifetime when no longer at war as a human species?

58:47I believe collaboration is more important than competition. My science fiction books go into the moon at the end of the year and I got Frank White to write the forward for it, which is the the view effect and the whole idea is that we're one human family on Sparership Earth and we should start viewing it like that. I would love to see personally in my lifetime where we're at a time where we don't even have to talk about war as an industry. I think that there will be a time without war and then that time will come to an end. Like, yeah, I'm not human history. We've been fighting for way too long for me to sit on this stage and say, yeah, I think we're just, We're gonna get over that.

59:24It's one of those interesting problems where the more, let's say you totally get away with it, like war stops. The longer you spend away from it, the less that people believe it's possible, and the less you do to prevent it. This is the theory of the end of history that existed pre -World War I, then pre -World War II, then before the war in Vietnam, and then before the war on territory. There's the kind of globalized financial elites. Every time come to this conclusion where they say, well, we're the most important people in the world and so sternly worded letters from us and intertanglement between our companies economically mean that large scale conflicts and problems, well I encourage you to go back and read people who wrote about the end of history right after World War I.

1:00:13They said, World War I was so horrible and now we are so unified. Europe is so unified that never again is war even possible. It's not even possible to imagine, and then they said also all the territorial disputes, they're so settled that nobody's ever gonna try to undo the borders. I mean, it happens over and over again, and I refuse to be the guy who's quoted like that a hundred years from now, and he said, and here's this idiot Palmer who he said, I believe someday war will be over. So I yes, I think there will be a period where war ends. I think it will go on for a long period of time I think we can build tools of deterrence that make war's start when one or both sides Disagree as to the outcome when they disagree as to who will win and who will lose when the outcome is relatively known Wars don't start and so I'm a big believer in either Unipolar or maybe you know buy or multi -polar power.

1:01:13But like if you have a few powers in the world that are relatively at stalemate with each other and your interests don't diverge too much, you can get away with no war for a long time. But who's to say that someone's not going to come up with an asymmetrical advantage, a programmable virus that wipes out all of his enemies and he decides that he's going to launch an asymmetrical war and he's going to get a bunch of crazy people on his side. The last thing I'll end with this with is war can come in a lot of forms. You can have nation states or you can have radical extremist groups. You can have radical, violent, religious groups.

1:01:44And it would be very hard for me to imagine that never again will there come a group that is willing to die, lose, and consider that victory in pursuit of their extremist goals. How do you deter someone like that? He's like, oh, I'm going to lose so hard. I'm going to die in heaven, so good. It's just, it's How do you how do you deter that it's very difficult all right we're Running short I'll be officially my time. So Jacob and Terry short questions. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, go ahead This is controversial. I work in prosthetics. I Work with a lot of active warriors They suffer a traumatic amputation and the first thing they want to do is go back.

1:02:26Yeah, have you ever thought of militarizing prosthetics we it's lost your immigration I actually collect high -end prosthetics. So, I have... Yes.

1:02:41So the thing is, there's a lot of interest... There's a few disciplines in the world that attract extremely competent people who really fight for every last bit of weight savings, power, density, materials, science, advantage. One of them is F1 racing. Another one of maybe a half dozen in the world that is the best at attracting these people is high -end prosthetics. There are very advanced prosthetics that have the most power dense actuators in the world. The best material science in the world. There's like, they're not too cost sensitive, small improvements in performance, make a huge difference on the quality of life for these people.

1:03:21So have I considered getting into that industry? Of course, I'm daydreaming about it. I look at some of these cool multi -composite, metallic, ceramic, carbon wonders, and I say, man, I would love to be doing something better. But this is actually one of those areas where my conclusion was there are already people doing a quite good job. I think that the best that I could do would to be to somewhat make it a little better for a while. But then the other people would leapfrog me. And so it would be a continuous fight to be a tiny bit better. I'm very interested in this space and it continues to advance rapidly, but I think it's probably not going to be one for that reason that Andrew gets into.

1:04:00Thank you. All right, last question, Jacob. Hello, Palmer. I hope this is a short question, but it's a big one. Based on your experience in DOD, do you believe that there will ever be a time where the United States employs a fully autonomous global warfare system where we no longer fight wars with our men, but with our technology and our machines? If so, when do you think this will be, and what do you think are the technologies that will be within these future wars? I don't think it'll ever be fully autonomous because the gains aren't there and the negatives are. It's one of those things where going from, let's say, a million people doing some task to a hundred thousand people through automation, that's a huge gain in cost.

1:04:39You can often do much a better job. Going from a hundred thousand to, let's say, a thousand people. Maybe there's even gains there. If you look at the United Kingdom, a smaller country than ours, They're looking at reducing the size of their Navy over the next 10 years by 30 percent and that that's still significant for them Going from a thousand people to zero people. I don't see the gains It's just you if people are going to be responsible for violence And if we are going to be responsible for use of force against other nations against other people There has to be a level of attention and responsibility to measure it with the concept exactly like you imagine if you had one person Not nobody, but one guy who runs the whole war.

1:05:21You can't actually hold him accountable for anything. Because you can say, oh my god, this thing happened, it's absolutely unthinkable. And he's gonna say, well, of course, I had to do a thousand actions over the course of an hour, I had to take out million targets. Of course, I couldn't actually ever possibly dedicate any meaningful amount of attention to anything. And that is what we need to avoid. We need to avoid outsourcing responsibility for violence to machines, to robotics. If we are gonna kill people, we need to kill people and it needs to weigh on us. I never thought I'd be clapping for we need to keep kill people.

1:05:55Hi, my name is Palmer Lucky and I build Killer Robots. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Matt Note, give it up for Palmer Lucky! Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, at this year's Abundance Summit, Raul Powell and Bill Barhite predicted that the tokenization of assets will create an unprecedented amount of wealth growing from 3 trillion today to 100 trillion by 2034. You know, that's more wealth than all the Silicon Valley billionaires, Russian oligarchs, Chinese tycoons, and Wall Street, you know, bankers combined. Meanwhile, the node Kostla explained how AI will multiply our scientific capacity by 10X to 100X within five years.

1:06:35These opportunities are way too big to miss. I've compiled all the game changing insights from this year's abundance summit into a comprehensive report. You can download that free report at dmandis .com slash breakthroughs. And position yourself at the forefront of this wealth creation wave.