Over the last two years, there have been an unprecedented number of congressional hearings about NHI’s non-human intelligence in alien craft. What are your thoughts? I’ve probably seen things that I can’t talk about. It’s hard for me to have an open discussion about it. I I think I can plainly say. So, my name is Palmer Lucky. Started Andre because I wanted to work in the national security space for a variety of reasons. GPTO3 just came in at a 135 IQ. I’m not betting my company on super intelligence, but I do believe it will happen. It’s not US versus China. It’s US and China versus the rogue actor. China is not going to purposely build a tailored boweapon that wipes out all the Jews, for example. But at the same time, I mean, China’s made real material threats and said they are going to reunify with Taiwan by force if necessary within this generation. Now, that’s a moonshot, ladies and
[00:01:00] gentlemen. So, Palmer, you’ve been on moonshots like four times in the last two years. And as a friend, there’s a bunch of questions I’d love to ask you that I truly deeply want to know the answer to. Let’s do it. All right. So, here’s the first one. Over the last two years, there have been an unprecedented number of congressional hearings about NHIS, non-human intelligence and alien craft by like the highest level generals, admirals, air force. It’s it’s crazy. What are your thoughts? I want to believe. You want to believe? It’s This is a tough topic for me because I’ve probably seen things that I can’t talk about. And if that was the case, it’s hard for me to have an open discussion about it. I I think I can plainly say I have not seen evidence of anything that is conclusive, obvious like, you know, I haven’t seen I have not seen recovered
[00:02:01] craft. I have not seen uh you know the programs that are that are that are that are that are that are that are analyzing alien wreckage but I have seen things that are not necessarily public that are very hard to explain. What makes it difficult in the public eye is that there are dozens of examples of very strange things that can be explained in one way or another. There’s really only a very small handful that even when you really dig deep, there is no explanation for the combination of human eyes on sensor data, the behavior, the activity, the timing. The brain makes a lot of things up. The brain is very very trickable, you know, and and it’s not just people. Different animals see the world in different ways. Our perception of reality is, for example, constantly actually lagging behind what we perceive. what to you feels instantaneous is actually as far as a second in the past. It’s amazing. I mean, like when you clap, you feel like
[00:03:00] it’s instantaneous. In reality, your brain is basically filtering to know that anything that it perceives before you should be perceiving it is not real. And it filters it out. And so, uh, you know, it it’s really interesting the conscious. I I I once wrote a sci-fi speculative short story about an alien species that it’s that’s like that but taken to the extreme. What if their per what if your perception was actually hours behind what you observed? If you had something that kind of reacts to things well enough, sees a snapshot, reacts to it by predicting what’s going to happen next, how long would it take for a person to figure out that the person on the other side or you know an alien spacecraft for example is actually operating under completely different principles of consciousness, awareness, perception, reality. It’s like having a conversation with someone on the moon and you’ve got a 2 and a half second time delay. But but but what if the alien was so smart that it was able to predict what you would say in response to it and then vice versa and then back again such that it seemed instantaneous.
[00:04:01] You know what what would it look like for a being to to to exist where its consciousness doesn’t let cuz we get along lagging by a second. Well, what if the lag was 100 times more? Is that really conceptually impossible to imagine? I I don’t think so. Um, just makes for a boring conversation though. Well, but maybe so in this in the story that I wrote, uh, people don’t figure this out until bad things start happening. Basically, like they don’t understand that the perception of these alien beings is is much the instantaneous perception is much slower, but they’re so smart about reasoning forward that a person can’t actually tell that they’re not responding to what you’re doing. They’re responding to what they predicted you were going to do five steps ahead. Now once you understand that gimmick, you can now do things that take advantage of it. You know, doing things that are completely unpredictable, that are outside of what they would expect. And when you live outside of social norms, you can do things that are very unpredictable. And so, uh, I from time to time I write these short stories just to entertain myself. I’ve never published any of
[00:05:00] them. But, uh, getting back to the top, I’ve not seen anything. There’s some weird stuff. There are at least a handful of examples that are very impossible to explain. And I I think we’ve talked about this at Abundance a few years ago, but I suspect that in the end it’s going to come out uh to be something that’s different than what we all expect. So probably less likely that it’s aliens from a nearby planet. I suspect it’ll be something like some natural phenomenon we have not yet begun to understand. But you hope it would be super cool. I I it is going to be something that is beyond our current understanding. I and I I I think it is more likely. For example, I’m not not saying that this is what it is. It is more likely that some of these craft are somehow traveling through time than coming from a nearby galaxy. If you kind of look at what’s more what’s more possible. And by the way, I don’t mean traveling through time necessarily backwards. People say Palmer, you there’s no how could they go forth? Perhaps they’re coming from the distant past, you know, like there’s there there’s a lot of ways to look at this. Uh and I don’t know what I wonder, you
[00:06:01] know. So, what’s interesting is wait, I got to ask what do you think it is? Um I believe life is ubiquitous in the universe. I truly believe it is probabilistically it seems like probabilistically and I think even in one sense almost thermodynamically I think that life is the end result of a series of processes. And where do you fall on dark forest theory? Um you the proud nail gets hammered. Life life doesn’t make it. I I don’t have an opinion but I haven’t figured out my opinion. I’m an agnostic on air force theory. So the question I have is if in fact it proves out what I mean what I find fascinating isn’t the UFO sightings from the 40s to 80s and the blurry photographs. It’s all of the testimonies that have been had over and over again congressional by seemingly extraordinarily credentialed individuals who have a lot to lose and very little to gain. Yep. In this regard. So I’m
[00:07:02] curious decorated war veterans, politicians who their career is is everything and their cred and their credibility is all they have. Yeah, it’s a it’s extraordinary. And so the question is what would be the public reaction if in fact it plays out to be true? And um you know I’ve always we you know you’re in the warfare business and I’ve always thought the only thing that could bring sort of unified peace to the planet besides a massively dominant force y uh which you know and it’s it’s an external threat. It’s an external threat. an external threat is like an asteroid coming towards us with, you know, 10 years of, you know, it’s a planet killer that we have 10 years to organize a response to or an alien saying, “Hey, we’re going to come and eat you.” And uh it brings all of our differences vaporize in the process. Yeah. I mean, I I do think that that’s that that is that that is uh I do think that is probably probably the case. Historically, it seems to bear
[00:08:00] out, too. Like it’s not just that we we’re unified with the people that we don’t care about. Even bitter enemies or ideological enemies can be unified by a common threat. I mean you look at the Japanese and the Germans during World War II. Culturally they couldn’t have been more different. Uh the the ideologically, you know, the Japanese were were were subhuman to the Germans. Yeah. And the hilarious thing is that the Japanese believed exactly the same thing of the Aryans. And yet they allied and worked together and smuggled controlled materials, controlled chemicals back and forth, things that they uniquely had because they had a common a a common enemy. And I I I I think that that could you you ask how people would react. I think if they were an enemy, I think we would unite. I I think uh assuming that they weren’t necessarily an enemy, maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like I I often feel like people wouldn’t respond the way that you
[00:09:00] expect. Like I almost feel like culturally we’re so inoculated. Like you believe that life is proliferated in universe. I think so does the average person. And I think that if we found out that, you know, Alpha Centauri, there’s some guys living over there who, you know, are kind of kind of like us. I think a lot of people would be like, “Wow, that’s really interesting, really fascinating.” I’m not sure it would even be the top trending topic on Twitter by day three. I I I think you’d get a day or two and then it would retreat. They get back to housewives of of Hollywood, right? I I I I mean, people are focused on the things that are in front of them. You know, can I get food on the table, uh the price of gas, the price of eggs, raising kids? I think that uh the existence of aliens is probably going to be as important as the context of those aliens. Are they coming to burn us all down? Okay, then that’s going to threaten my way of life. Are they just out there in the world? I think it would prompt a lot of naval gazing from the media class, the academic class. Oh, I I mean I mean it’d be for forget about selecting a new pope. I
[00:10:00] want to see what the Catholic Church does if intelligent life is proven to exist elsewhere. I suspect actually they would probably be one of the faster moving entities to say what you know the Catholic Church has been pretty clear. I’m not Catholic by any means, but I do appreciate that at least for the last couple centuries, they’ve said, “Look, anything new that comes to light that violates our understanding before is proof of God’s plan further revealed to us and needs to be incorporated into into the doctrine.” And I I I just I would love to see how they would deal with that. That’d be very very interesting. Yeah, for sure. A lot more unprecedented than a pope. you know, a lot there’s been a lot of popes, not a lot of uh doctrinal changes on the order of a new species of sensient beings. And of course, the the current folklore and it’s all that can be said is are uh all our micro tech technology emanated from UFOs and then the question is if the UFOs are real does China, Russia, India, US all vying for advanced technology there? I will take a stand there. I I
[00:11:00] don’t think our current micro electronics technology came from Alien Rex. I I I think that’s one area where we deserve the credit. We made it happen. We figured it out. Um Gordon Gordon Moore worked hard for his uh I I I I I think that we really did make that happen from scratch. And so uh you know, semiconductors, microprocessors, I I I think we can take credit for that. uh the I if if there is technology that’s that’s been derived from alien Rex I suspect it’s more likely to be related to fision or fusion or advanced metallurgical or ceramic compounds though gravity shielding would be awfully convenient for your vehicles it well yes that is that that is true but but on the other hand I have not seen anti any gravitic drives and I’ I’ve kept my eye out um I I I think it’s one of those things where people say well we’re holding in reserve for the right moment. Looking at how the government operates, it’s just hard to believe that they’re capable of uh having made it through the last half century of
[00:12:00] conflict without ever feeling like that was like like like that moment was the right moment. Maybe maybe I’m wrong, but and I and I think also people understand you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want. And so if you haven’t started a program to implement gravitic drives in an aircraft, you know, look at how long the F-35’s taken to get across the line. The F-35 was conceived during the Cold War. Pe people people think of it as a much more modern thing because of how long it was delayed. Remember that the Cold War ended December 25th, 1992. The F-35 program had already started. And so if you were going to get a gravitic drive into a bunch of fighters out, apparently it takes 30 years to make it happen. So, uh, I I I I I don’t really buy into this idea that there’s a a secret vault of technology that’s going to be busted out, uh, the moment that the threat level gets high because reality suggests it’ll take us decades to make use of it. Yeah. Well, at least for the traditional auh defense contract here at Andre. Yeah. Well, and and doing things differently, but I mean, you know, now
[00:13:00] the government’s been what, you know, betting that companies like Andre would exist. I I think that was a crazy bet eight years ago. It’s maybe a crazy bet today. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that’s true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. That’s what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it’s available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at diamandis.com/subscribe. That’s diammandis.com/subscribe. All right, let’s go back to the episode. So, there’s a there’s a different alien race that’s landed on the planet and is emerging right now, and that’s the whole AI world. Sure. Uh and so, let’s let’s jump into that. You know, I saw Eric Schmidt recently uh saying that uh AI is being underhyped. um that if you truly
[00:14:00] understood the power that we have today and what’s going to emerge on the back of uh recursive you know uh self-programming of AI models that we’re in the midst of this intelligence explosion and it’s about to get uh really crazy really fast. So uh obviously Lattis and everything you’ve built has been a a beautiful platform of of AI. How much are you thinking about digital super intelligence just to define that as orders of magnitude more intelligent than human systems? So Andall was an AI company back when it wasn’t cool to be an AI company. I mean the name of the company is Anderrol Industries. Acronym is literally AI. Yeah. But back in 200 17 AI was kind of like how VR used to be. Oh, it’s always in the future, never in the present. It’s the thing for the wacky crazy people to waste their lives on, not a serious doer to build a
[00:15:01] company on top of. And I I knew that AI was imminent because the smartest people that I knew were telling me that and illustrating it in ways that were very believable, showing how a bunch of schemes that had been improbable for decades were clearly scalable. Uh, one of those people was John Carmarmac, who was the I love John. John is he’s brilliant. He’s he’s one of the smartest people in the world. Definitely the smartest I know. Yeah. Um I remember John so years and years ago uh when the listening just so they just so they know who John is. Yeah. You he basically invented 3D gaming also started a rocket company later became the CTO of Oculus. He created Doom and Quake and basically the modern 3D game engine and I mean he’s and he deeply understands hardware and software. Sorry just because a lot of people might not know who John is. Yeah. He’s he’s amazing. And uh he had one of our teams in the original spaceflight x-prise, armadillo armadiller space. And they were doing
[00:16:00] vertical takeoff and landing rockets way before SpaceX. I mean like like a decade before SpaceX. Yeah. We had this lunar lander challenges where you had to launch, hover, translate 100 meters, do a soft landing, and come back. And I remember back then it was like he had on the side of his rocket this thing. I could How do you pronounce this? NVIDI DI Nvidia thing and Nvidia was a sponsor back in the 2005 2006 had I only known. Well, I mean Nvidia there was a there was a time where you know Oculus was acquired by Facebook and uh there was a point where we were considering acquiring Nvidia and I know that sounds crazy Facebook was considered Oculus was consider Oculus as part of Facebook so it would have been Facebook at the end of the day. Um, but I mean you got to remember that sounds crazy, but remember that when you go back to that point in time where we were acquired, Nvidia was worth like $4 billion. I mean like it’s
[00:17:00] not that crazy. And remember, you don’t have to buy the whole company. They were publicly traded. So you just need to take a dominating a dominant position. Yeah. You don’t have to necessarily buy out every share. And uh so I mean we’re like you’re looking at like a low singledigit million investment to have control of. People people have often looked back said, “Oh my god, imagine if we would have done that. Imagine how what a big deal that would have been.” My point to them is if we had bought Nvidia, they never would have turned into what they are today, right? They wouldn’t have bet on uh on on on it would have been focused more on like ARVR processing. They wouldn’t have focused on cluster computing. They wouldn’t have focused on uh on on crypto and then they wouldn’t have gotten extremely lucky in that their crypto architecture happened to be exactly what you need to scale large language models. extraordinary and we’ve talked about this that you know your kids playing video games at home but but but in terms of super intelligence uh you know John was John John so John ended up leaving uh Oculus uh a long after I was fired actually in order because he wanted to work on on
[00:18:00] AGI and he he told me and now has said publicly that even though he thinks it was relatively low probability that he would crack the nut that the impact on humanity would be so fundamental that even a 1% chance of succeeding made it on a risk you know kind of costbenefit you know weighted analysis way of looking at it obviously the right thing to spend his time doing and so um that was one of the reasons I had such confidence starting and saying I’m going to build a company basically that the whole premise of the company is okay take for a given that AI is finally going to work take for a given that autonomy is here. What would that mean for the military? And then we’ve gone about building all the things that assumed it was true. That was really our early advantage. Other companies were not running their programs and their research and development programs as if AI was a real thing. And so a lot of these things we’ve broken into, it’s not that the people in the Air Force were dumb or the people in the Navy were were
[00:19:02] were stupid. It’s that they were making decisions assuming that AI wasn’t going to be real. And once it becomes real, well, that changes everything. Yeah. And and there’s a there’s a vast difference between an AI native startup and an old school company trying to retrofit trying to ram it in. Yeah. Right. And there’s also a difference between very different the company is is premised on AI versus just helped by it and a founder-led AI premise company. I mean the advantages that you have and Zuckerberg has Elon has as a visionary uh leader able to say no no no I know this is the way we used to do it we’re changing it we’re going this way now because it’s right way to go. Y it’s impossible for a a large scale public company in the in the defense industry to make any kinds of ships like that. Well I mean you know Zuck had an AI research lab of significant size back when all this stuff was considered crazy. So when they opened up their AI
[00:20:01] research lab where they were doing integrated AI and robotics, I mean we’re talking about like 20 2014 2015 they were doing this and a lot of people including in the public markets saw it as a folly. They saw it as Mark working on this ridiculous thing burning money totally you know totally a waste of time. And what it really is is it’s what it’s what you’re saying. The these founder-led companies can make bets that a you know hired executive would never make. You would never you would never have a hired CEO from the outside who’s also thinking about what his next job is going to be. He’s not going to say, you know what I think I’m going to do? I’m going to burn billions of dollars on this technology that everyone thinks is a total waste of time and I’m going to be punished for it quarter after quarter after quarter. And eventually someday it’s going to come to bear and everyone’s getting samurai because none of those guys are usually even around long enough to see the fruits of that labor. Uh and even if they were, there’s probably safer bets they could make. And yeah, founder companies can afford to do
[00:21:01] that. They can afford to say, you know what, I’m going to do it anyway because this is my company and I care more about it than anybody and I’m going to do the right thing for it in the long run. It’s it’s it’s it’s a powerful thing. It it is it is powerful especially when the founder really is so technically literate and has uh the re his teams rever him and I’m not saying you ever said that about yourself but your teams do as they do for Zuck as they do for Elon and others well you attract people who will I I think that’s true because the reality I’m not maybe rever is not the quite the right word but if they didn’t believe in the company they probably wouldn’t have joined and if they didn’t like what they see they probably won’t stay and so you end up building a a you know if you’re a founder company you’re going to attract people to to a certain certain extent reflect the vision of the founder you because you want to attract people who believe in that vision and then equally important repel people who not do not like yes equally important well you think you you saw that ad campaign we did don’t work at Anderol you know the
[00:22:00] whole point was hey here it’s it’s we work hard this is a real job you’re going to be in the [ __ ] this is 8 hour work weeks guys and we have a lot of people coming in and saying like from the outside oh this is a bizarre campaign aign. This seems like like why would you do a campaign about how hard it is to work at Anderol? And the point is guys, this is going to attract exactly the right type of person and most importantly repel anyone who wouldn’t enjoy working here once they get here. And by the way, our applications went up 3x the week after that campaign. And they’re all exactly the type of people. I believe that’s beautiful. So, one of the challenges a company has as it matures is deciding whether to go public or not. I don’t want to get into whether Andrew is going public or not, but eventually my guess is yes, we actually do. So we are we are going public. We have to at some point can’t win an F-35 scale program without doing. So let’s talk about that. So you’ve got uh you’ve got Elon saying, “I will never take SpaceX public, right? I don’t want to have a uh shareholders
[00:23:01] telling me whether I can spend money to go to Mars.” Sure. Right. And I don’t want to disclose all of my secrets in a 10Q and and so forth. Then you’ve got folks like Bezos. You know, I’ve known Jeff for 40 plus, 45 years almost. Uh, and you know, Jeff famously says, “Don’t invest in Amazon if you’re looking for me to maximize near-term returns or shareholder.” It’s like, “I’m going to build build.” How do you balance uh the benefits of going public so you can enjoy these large contracts at the same time of the agility that you’ve survived and you’ve thrived in? So I’ve never run a publicly traded company. So take this with a grain of salt. It’s as valuable as what you’re paying for my advice, which is nothing. Now you have a CEO. We do. We do. So our CEO is Brian Shy and you you’ve done an he’s an amazing individual. He is and and I think we’re we’re totally agreed. Everyone’s in alignment on this. When we become a public company, we have to keep doing
[00:24:01] what we’ve done in the private markets. It’s really no different than hiring. We need to attract people who believe in our vision and repel people who don’t believe in our vision. A lot of people imagine that if Andre goes public, we’ll become like other public defense companies because, you know, the less risk, not willing to invest in the future, uh, not you pay paying out dividends rather than investing in R&D, maximizing quarterly returns. But that doesn’t have to necessarily be the case. Even when you transition to the public markets, you can take action through your through communications, through your filings, through your decisions that that scare away people who want you to be like a traditional company. You you want to attract investors who believe in your vision of the world. And if you if that’s your whole investor base, they’re not going to force you to be something different. I think Elon’s other company, Tesla, is actually probably the strongest example here. Tesla has a extremely high price to earnings ratio. Why? because their investors believe that they are going to
[00:25:00] win across the board on a multi-deade time scale. They think they’re going to win at robotics. They’re going to win at energy. They’re going to win at and and I and I think they they have a very good shot at winning on all or most of those items. And you could ask yourself, well, wait, what? They’re a publicly traded company. Why why aren’t they like one of the more traditional automotive companies? Why what why you why weren’t they forced to be more like a traditional company? And the answer is simple. because they’ve cultivated an investor base that believes in what and sorry in what Tesla is and they’ve repelled everybody else. Many of the people they’ve repelled are now shorting Tesla because they don’t believe in it. Uh I I I think it’s the same way for us. We’re going to need to attract people who believe in what we are. Repel everybody else. And if we ever start getting enough of an investor base that is pressuring us to do the wrong thing, I’m going to need to go in the press and say some crazy [ __ ] to scare them all away because I do I don’t want those guys voting at my quarterly uh at my quarterlys. I don’t want them I don’t want them picking my board members. I want all the Anderl haters and people
[00:26:02] who want Ander to be what defense company used to be. I want them to be running for the hills. Nice. Nice. All right, let’s get back to AI. Um and you are an AI first company. I mean uh your software is the majority of your workforce and the majority of your products you’re developing. Digital super intelligence let’s define that as um you know so very famously uh we saw AI reaching IQ’s just above human levels of 101. This was uh Claude 3 and then GPTO3 just came in at a 135 IQ. And so the prediction is that we’ll, you know, Elon’s prediction when he was on our stage at at the Abundance Summit a couple years ago is as smart as all humans combined by 2029 or 2030. So that’s a vastly accelerated curve. Yeah. How do you are
[00:27:01] you skating to that where that curve is going to be? How are you thinking about it? I am Am I skating to where that curve is going to be? You know, I I’m actually probably running my company a lot more pessimistically than that. Um to bet that those most optimistic predictions will come true is probably not a responsible way for me to run my company. Sure. But a billion fold, a billionfold, 8 billionfold, let’s just say, you know, a millionfold smarter than a human. I think I I I think we are operating under the assumption that will happen. Um, yeah, and you could pick almost any point in even the last, let’s say, two years, and people say, “Well, AI might be getting smarter, but it’ll never be able to do this.” And then within weeks or maybe months, it’s doing it. And they say, “Well, but this video has this problem.” You see, the man has six fingers, and so that proves that he will never be able to replace a real illustrator. And then, of course, you know, you wait a couple weeks, and all
[00:28:00] of a sudden, that’s no longer the case. Uh, so I I’m not going to be one of those people who bets that we’re not going to get there. Um, at the same time, I have to I would say Andrew’s thesis makes sense even if AI doesn’t get smarter than a person. You know, I I I need it to have fast reaction times. I need it to be able to do things to think much faster. So, for example, processing what would have taken a person a month to process. If I can do as good as a person would have done in a month, but do it in a minute, that’s a superpower in and of itself for for military operations. So I I don’t actually need things to be super intelligent. I I I just need them to be better than people at speed at latency. Also, you know, if I’ve got a truck and I need a truck to drive itself around, I don’t need to have 135 IQ. 100 IQ is more than enough to drive a truck sufficiently well, especially if it’s, you know, a 100 IQ that’s not distracted, not sleepdeprived, never going to be abusing substances like that. That’s actually pretty great, especially when you can
[00:29:00] duplicate it a 100,000 times for free, unlike a a trained truck driver. Um, so I’m not I’m not betting my company on super intelligence, but I do believe it will happen. And because I have to imagine that super intelligence in the warfare game is just a small advantage. It it often a huge Well, so I often tell I often tell people like what you what would you rather do? Would you have an airplane that is twice as fast or an airplane that makes decisions that are twice as good? Or put another way, would you rather have an airplane that can carry twice as many weapons or be twice as smart about which targets to use them on and when? Uh- would you rather be able to predict the next five minutes of combat better or would you rather be able to uh you would you rather be able to have sensors to see more of like would you rather predict the battlefield or actually sense it and in most cases
[00:30:01] it’s the software advantage that you’d rather have like I I I would rather which by the way scales much faster than the hardware advantage ever will it scale well scales faster every copy of software you duplicate is free once you’ve you know, once you’ve invented it and it can often be applied to many hardware systems. If I make one aircraft better by investing in that one airframe design, it’s not nearly as useful of an advantage as a piece of software I can deploy to 10 different kinds of aircraft. And so I I mean that’s really the core of Andre. Our core product is Lattis, which is the AI engine that powers everything we do. The reason we’ve been able to pivot into so many different industries is because we invest so much in that AI platform that runs all of our products. So much of the world paints the I I do have to tell actually going this I haven’t thought about this in a while but um have we ever talked about kind of the philosophical origins of lattice. I don’t know if we have. No, I’m going to guess Skynet. So I mean sky skynet is is
[00:31:01] is the fictional example everyone thinks but there was a there was a French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Simone Lelass I used his equations and best known for Lelass transform um but he had this thought experiment uh known as Lelass’s demon and it was a thought experiment around whether free will exists or not and this was before anyone was talking about simulation theory. We didn’t even have computers. But he he he posited well to think about if free will exists. Suppose that there was a supernatural being, this demon that was so perceptive of the world that it could perceive every particle of matter in the entire world and the energy contained therein, the motion contained therein in the whole universe. He could perceive it all at once. And also suppose that this being were so intelligent that he could in an instant reason about the reactions that will occur as they collide with
[00:32:00] each other and physics occur and chemistry occurs and he could reason so on and so forth all the way until the end of time. Suppose that such a being could derive an equation that describes the actions of every person in the universe until the end of time. And and his question was this. If that being can even exist theoretically, doesn’t that mean free will isn’t real? Isn’t everything deterministic, just physics playing it way out? And so the question was also, are there things that change this idea? Are there non-deterministic elements in our universe? Are there supernatural effects? Are there spiritual effects? Are there things we cannot observe that nothing can observe? Could it be that the act of observing it in fact changes the outcome such quantum? This is long before quantum theory was in play, but he was asking these questions. Could it be that such a being is not possible? And and I think he posited that if such a being is even theoretically possible, free will definitionally does not exist. And that if such a being is impossible,
[00:33:01] then at least free will is a possibility. And most people get in deep into the philosophical side of this question. When I became familiar with Lelass’s demon as a thought experiment, my first thought is, who’s going to build Lelass’s demon? I mean, who like what what what would that look like? What would it look like to build something that is as close as you could get? It perceives as much of the world as you can. Omniscience. Omniscience. And not just on the present. What if you you this idea of gathering enough information to be smart enough to reason about where it’s going to lead? It’s the same as seeing the future or even traveling into the future. If what if I could predict what my enemy was going to do 10 seconds into the future with a high degree of certainty? M what if I could predict what he’s going to do for the next week with reasonable certainty? It won’t be bright every time, but you spread across enough bets. You take 10,000 guesses and 9,000 of them are right. That’s a that’s a superpower. I mean, that that would seem superhuman.
[00:34:00] And so, in terms of super intelligence, that is actually what Lattis is supposed to eventually become. By tying enough sensors together, yeah, you can build a model of the world where you can react not to what the enem is doing, but what they will be doing. And and I think that that’s the type of capability where I’ I’d rather be able to predict where my enemy is going to be and what my best response is than be able to have a jet that goes ever so slightly faster. I mean, what if I can start going to where I need to be? Skate to the puck because I’ve predicted that’s where I need to be. I’ I’d rather have that. Yeah. You know, in the commercial world, I talk about this as a trillion sensor future where you can know anything you want because the sensors are there. You can predict a man’s blazer color on Madison Avenue because you can ask your AI to look at the camera feeds and so forth. And if you can know anything you want, then what’s interesting is it’s important to ask amazing questions. The questions you ask are more important than what you know. Sure. At that
[00:35:01] point, the world paints US versus China in the AI space. Um, I had a conversation with Eric Schmidt about this, where the concern in my mind, and I think in Eric’s as well, I’m curious for yourself, is not US versus China, it’s US and China versus the rogue actor, the individual out there who’s using, you know, digital super intelligence to code up the next virus or code up the next hack, whatever the case might be. How do you think about that here? I would probably take a bit of a counter position. I look, I’m very worried about rogue actors because rogue actors don’t necessarily act as rational actors. Nation states typically exist on a rational basis. And you could take kind of an extremist theocracy like Iran, and you could argue, well, they’re they’re not acting rationally. Um, but those are few and far between. In
[00:36:00] general, nation states follow game theory. they act in their rational self-interest. They don’t want to destroy themselves in the process of destroying you. Whereas when you bring that down to the level of an individual or a small group, uh you can have people who believe they win by losing. They could think that them dying is the victory. They could believe that bringing out an apocalypse is their destiny. And so I’m terrified of, for example, tailored bioweapons built by rogue groups. The idea though that it’s that it’s the US and China versus these rogue groups, I’m not so sure. Um, I think that China on its own poses its own unique type of threat. It’s it it doesn’t terrify me as much. China is not going to purposely build a tailored boweapon that wipes out all the Jews, for example. You know, that’s I I don’t worry about China trying to do that. Um but but at the same time, I mean, China’s made real material threats and said they are going to reunify with Taiwan by force if necessary within this
[00:37:02] generation. I I watched your most most excellent TED talk in the war the wargaming uh and it’s it’s chilling. Yep. Uh to see how that plays out. One, it’s not just Taiwan. China China has been China I mean in living memory China tried to invade Vietnam. Uh a lot of people who want they want to pretend they want to whitewash China be largely because they’re often working with China so they have to carry water for them and they say well China Taiwan is a special case there’s this long history. I say okay well what about when in living memory they invaded Vietnam. What about the fact that they are currently occupying huge swaths of territory in the Philippines? What about where they’re illegally building artificial islands in the sovereign territory of other nations? What about the fact that you now have shei going to conferences and saying that they think Okinawa, Japan, is actually a territorial vassel holding of China. He he’s pretended to have this awakening. He says, “Well, you know, the Okinawan people used to be a
[00:38:02] tributary state to China. They gave us tribute and we failed them by failing to protect them from being taken over by the Japanese imperialists.” He’s laying the groundwork. Revisionist revisionist. Well, he’s laying revisionist history because he knows he can’t motivate a bunch of young Chinese guys to go and take over a ter territory they have nothing to do with and absolutely no way of convincing anyone that is theirs. He has to tell them a story where this is actually part of the great Chinese empire. And so that that is actually where I think China is the their own unique threat. They they are willing to reinvent history with their own population much like how Russia has with Ukraine to justify death and violence at mass scale. I I think they want to take elements of Japan. They want to take elements of the Philippines. They want Korea. They want Vietnam. And certainly they want Taiwan. Imagine what a world looks like where China achieves even a
[00:39:00] even half of that. And by the way, a rogue actor is not going to do that. That’s what makes it such a unique threat. A rogue actor might take a virus, but they’re not going to take over a democratic nation and t seize control of the semiconductor supply. Having said having said all that, um my what you said about being rational actors and being able to uh take actions politically and militarily to prevent that from occurring uh gives you a a game plan. Oh, 100%. But the question I have I mean is are andal systems in in the notice of in the idea that lattis is giving us a uh omnisient level of knowledge you know to prevent rogue actors it is I think going to be critical to have enough data of what’s out there and being able to track it. I think that do you do you do you imagine that as part of your future? I think it’s it’s a part. Honestly, I’d
[00:40:00] probably have to give more credit to companies like Palunteer. Like I think they’re building more of these non, you know, not quite at the tactical edge realtime tools that allow you to find these bad actors. You they they’ve been involved in apprehending and killing a lot of really dangerous people, terror cells, multi-time violent criminals. I I think Palunteer and companies like them are actually probably doing that. I like if I had to split it, I’d say a company like Anderl is much more relevant to a more traditional hard power deterrence theory that stops a rational actor like China, less so a a a rogue nation state group. Everybody, I hope you’re enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion
[00:41:00] dollar opportunities. If you weren’t at the Abundance Summit, it’s not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That’s Let me flip the to the positive side of uh of ASI of advanced super intelligence. Uh there’s a lot of breakthroughs y that are on the precipice, right? We just saw the first Nobel Prize uh given to Demisabus and John Jumper for uh for Alphold. Uh what are you hoping for out of sort of advances in physics and math and science? Medicine. Medicine. So I I think there are so many elements of lowhanging fruit that we have not been able to seize partly because of the regulatory climate but also the cost of developing and testing new drugs is so high new and not just drugs but new therapies think you know therapies that require continuous intervention and monitoring we’ve not had the resources
[00:42:00] to try everything you have to pick very very tightly what you’re going to do and even then it mostly doesn’t work business I know and so and so automation at scale of those I mean what if instead of one lab, you could run 10,000. What if instead of running 10,000, you run a million simulations? I I I so medicine I’m I’m very optimistic. I think energy is another area where uh right now like I I I think that AI assisted design of fision and fusion energy generating systems is going to be a a massive massive way change in the way that we we use energy because you know energy is such a huge part of our way of life. It drives it drives food cost. It drives the cost of material. It drives the cost of a country. it it that’s right and there’s really no examples of high GDP countries that do not consume lots of energy not necessarily produce there are ones who buy their energy from elsewhere
[00:43:00] consumer is right but it takes energy it takes energy to to to to build the future and so I am I’m very excited there do you ever see and getting into the adjacency of the energy space or the biotech space the adjacency um I I think maybe I maybe we’re already a little bit adjacent but I I think We’re really focused on our mission of of of trying to modernize military capability and force and doing it well. So let’s get we like with energy, we partner with a lot of these companies. So there’s a lot of companies that are doing interesting things in the nuclear power space. We’re partnering with them. I I don’t see any reason for me to try to compete with them. I want to be a customer of theirs and I want to use the DoD as an early customer that can help accelerate the deployment of these new ideas in in how to split atoms and how to fuse atoms. I want to talk about the speed of defense system innovation. Yeah. Um and just a few uh metrics for comparison here looking at the glorious days of World
[00:44:00] War II in manufacturing and innovation. So um the first you know Kelly Johnson brings on the first US jet in 143 days from clean sheet of paper to a jet flying. Yep. Um, the Liberty ships got cut from 230 days per production to 4 1/2 days. Uh, the P-51 Mustang fighter goes from uh, concept of flight in 102 days. And one of the references you had was the B24 uh, Liberator bomber one per every 63 minutes by company. That’s insane. And like these were not small planes. These I mean these were, you know, flying fortresses. What happened? I mean I Yes, it was a war footing. Um, but I know I studied Kelly Johnson and Lheed Skunk Works and his philosophy of I mean if I remember correctly what what he did was he had a single blueprint in the center of the workspace and any of his engineers could go and make a change on it but they had to sign their name to
[00:45:01] it because they knew if they made a mistake um it was someone’s life. Yep. And the rate of iteration was so rapid. What happened that killed that level of innovation iteration? Look, you can blame a lot of things. I think actually it’s probably the end of the cold war. The end of the cold war was what I’m not saying that we should have continued the cold war. It’s just that that that is what caused the change to happen. Uh the United States government came in and you may be familiar with the last supper. They brought together the heads of for one dinner of all of the major defense companies and they said there will be consolidation. half of you should not exist by the end of next year. Like consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. The party is over. We are going to decide who the winners are. Musical chairs. And if you Well, and if you don’t get all and if you don’t get with this program, then you’re out and you’re done. And uh it it was very much a top down driven thing. So you ask it why why did the innovation go away? Why did the speed go away? It
[00:46:00] was because there was no longer a drive uh to to move quickly. uh there was there was no longer a government directive to move rapidly against against threats and we we moved into a peaceime posture that was willing to accept a high level of inefficiency because uh they they didn’t they felt like that was okay and I think it went worse than they expected. I think they expected some level of inefficiency. They did not expect that reduced industry to then capture the political side and maintain that inefficiency for decades. And so it it was one of those that it was one of those kind of okay ideas that didn’t turn out so well. And and by by the way that the argument that the people who architected The Last Supper would say is that we made the right decision. They’d say, “Look, we reaped a peace dividend. Look at what we did through the 80s and the ‘9s and the early 2000s. Look at the economic growth in the United States.” It’s it’s it’s hard to argue with the results. They argue that we did reap a peace dividend
[00:47:00] on the back of this, but we can still recognize it was a problem for our military prowess. We we we we had that huge explosion of economic development and technological investment elsewhere to the detriment of our military. And one last thing I’ll say is a lot of the smart people left. A lot of those people who helped build correct things like GPS for the military, they didn’t stay in government labs. They went into the private sector. and that now we have a proliferation of things that rely on GPS and pro look at the microprocessor industry. It was the same thing these same people who built microprocessors for the DoD. They instead you we had we had the explosion of Silicon Valley and those people that that’s where the smart people went and so that that was definitely also to the detriment of organizations like Skunk Works and and that’s been your philosophy to pull that talent out back is the way it exactly you know we’re just bringing them back to where they were. There’s a long tradition of the smartest people in the country wanting to work on national security problems and there there was a time where that
[00:48:01] wasn’t the case. I think that that’s finally reversing. I want to dive into your design philosophy here at Android. Sure. Um you know uh I’ve spent a lot of time with Elon talking about his design philosophy at at SpaceX. It’s like and it seems to be a very similar parallel. It’s like simplify parts count, simplify designs, um, but not overly too simple. So, how do you think, you know, how do you think of your design philosophy in the systems that you’re building? Boy, this is a huge question. Um, if there is an I mean, yeah. Well, I’m I’m trying to think what are some of the common threads. I mean, one of the common threads that I think is is different about Android than people would expect is that we generally do not vertically integrate. Um, SpaceX, Tesla, and others have really fetishized vertical integration. And and it makes sense for some of them. Um, it really does, but when I get pressure from
[00:49:02] usually people who don’t know my business that well, they say, “Oh, well, they kind of assume like, oh, when are you going to bring this all in house?” I I assume so as well. Well, the the thing you have to remember is that when you are building, let’s say, space launch systems, your customer base is pretty well known months or really years in advance. You know what your schedule is. You know how many rockets you’re going to need. You can plan all of this very predictably. Um, that’s not necessarily the case for weapons production. You need to be ready for [ __ ] to hit the fan and to 10x or 100x your production. Got it. I’m actually pretty irresponsible ramping up and ramping down. Yeah. If if I if I if I build a vertically integrated capability where I build every wiring harness, I don’t work with any partners on my fasteners, on my composits, on my casting. If I can only do that in-house, what happens when the DoD suddenly needs 100 times more of that system every single day? Well, that means I have to build what? 100 times more factory space. I need to hire 100
[00:50:01] times more people. How the hell am I going to do that? What’s much more responsible is for my engineers to design a part that can be made by any machine shop in the country everywhere. Yeah. To to to pick a to pick an adhesive where there’s 10 suppliers in the country, not just one. And I you certainly not something we only make ourselves. And that means that if I need to ramp up, I can multissource these things. I can ramp I can outsource it to lots of other places or I can do what we did during World War II. I go to the industrial capacity that exists for let’s say American automotive industry or the American commercial aviation space and you take over. You say, “Hey, good news. Our submarine can be manufactured by the same robot arms, the same plasma cutters, and the same assembly lines and people that were cranking out cars yesterday.” That’s how you build a resilient defense infrastructure. And I mentioned this in my TED talk, we have to design for mass production using existing infrastructure. you you you can’t assume that you’re going to have the time to
[00:51:00] build an alien dreadnot to build your thing. And and that’s again, you know, Tesla with the Model 3 wanted you they wanted to build this this this this hyper optimized capability. But Elon’s never going to have one year where he needs 100 times more Model 3s and then the next year 100 times less. It’s just not quite like that. Makes sense. Going beyond that, and I I completely It’s crystal now. Um in terms of uh how rapidly you iterate a product um how you focus on parts count y um materials and so forth. Is there are there other design elements that you so you have as a basis for the company that you learned that you learned perhaps when you were at in Oculus and I mean I I mean there’s so much that I’ve brought from my Oculus days. I mean, because I mean, that’s what makes this company different is Well, what’s interesting is so many of these things are are I almost don’t want to want to if I if I if I belabor them,
[00:52:00] it sounds like I’m uh it sounds like I think I’m a genius for doing things the way that are just already done everywhere. I mean, what we’re doing is taking the same approaches to design, design, review, velocity of manufacturing from, you know, like the consumer electronics world and just bringing it to defense. I mean, you know, with with at Oculus, we were launching a new a new product every single year. We had to manufacture millions of virtual reality systems. And it’s just it’s a totally different mentality than you see in the defense space. And so, I’d say the main thing we brought here is just just do it like that. Just do it the way that you do it in industries where you have to move fast, where you can’t afford to. Like, imagine if the iPhone was delayed by four years. Like iPhones get delayed from time to time, right? You you’ve seen this happen. But it’s usually, oh, you missed by a month, but but you know, we’re they’ll be over here soon. Or manufacturing was behind and so they couldn’t send it over on a boat. They had to air freight it and they lost a
[00:53:01] little bit of money. Have you ever heard of an iPhone being delayed by four years? How about 20 years? Right. Have you ever heard of Exact? It’s just It’s unthinkable. And so a lot of what I do is just doing things the way that they’re done in industries that aren’t subsidized by taxpayer dollars that can’t afford to fail. When when you when you when you skin your knees when you fall, you’re a lot more careful to not trip. And I I I think that that’s really what has helped Anderl in an overarching way. We hire people from consumer electronics, from the automotive industry, from the from the maritime industry who are used to working in those kinds of conditions. It’s Do you ever expect the tech you develop in Android to go back into the consumer space? Not really. Um maybe it’s even a breach of fiduciary duty, but I I just don’t have a a big interest in it. Um I started this company to a reason to fix national security. And early in our company’s history, we had the opportunity to do quite a bit of
[00:54:00] commercial work that I think would have actually grown faster than our DoD work. And that would have been a problem. Imagine a world where Andre has a product line where half of half of the team is dedicated to military and half is dedicated to let’s say commercial like oil and gas security or or you know uh or you know uh critical infrastructure security. And imagine a world where the commercial side is growing three times as fast. What investor is going to allow me to continue to spend half the team on the thing growing at a third of the rate? I I was terrified early on that that could become a reality. It was actually similar to our our border security work. I was worried that that part of the business would put us in a position where we weren’t able to invest in the military side. And so there were times where we said, you know what, we think we could make money there. That is not our mission. We are going to f we need to stay laser focused on our mission. That’s how we’re going to get to where we want to be, which is being the a next generation defense product company that
[00:55:00] really you our first page of our first pitch deck said and will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions. I love that line. Love that line. And that that that was the mission. So will it come to consumers? I don’t know. And I I’ll finish off this bit by by also noting anything that we sell to consumers is at the end of the day going to end up in the hands of our adversaries. People have asked me over and over again, Palmer, you’re building Eagle Eye, this new integrated vision augmentation system that’s giving soldiers superhuman thermal vision, uh, night vision, uh, augmented views of the world. When are you going to build a consumer version of that? I would love to except it will end up on the heads of Chinese commandos and and they’ll say, “Oh, but Palmer, there’s export restrictions.” Yeah, but if you have if you’re selling something to civilians, eventually you will sell to a trader and that trader will get that gear into the hands of your enemies. And so, you know, the Russian
[00:56:00] special forces, they’re not wearing Russian gear. They’re wearing American night vision, American helmets, American armor. They’re using the best. And that’s because they prioritize getting these things smuggled out of the United States and and into Russia. And so, yeah, sure, maybe you can stop it from being on every Russian soldier or every Chinese soldier, but I mean, how do you think I would feel if I built advanced capabilities that we sold to civilians and then in an invasion of Taiwan scenario? That’s what’s a bunch of Chinese commandos drop out of helicopters, kill all the top political leadership of Taiwan using andal gear. I I mean that would be that would be the the the worst reversal of intent in my life that I can imagine in terms of intent versus effect. So I that that that is my biggest problem with selling back to civilians. I I would only sell tech that I don’t worry about getting into Makes a lot of sense. Um and that’s not what you’re passionate about. If I
[00:57:00] figured out how to do you I’m we’re not doing this but like if I figured out how to do let’s say better biological defense like I’ve I’ve long been interested in long incubation antibiotics. So things like in antibiotics that are encapsulated live in your body for long periods of time and are only released when you have some biological trigger that causes them to be released and become active or you know like biological antibiotics. Same same idea. Sort of a loitering defense system. a loitering defense system, but one that is only active in the bloodstream when there’s a threat. Because if you just have it all the time, like if if you just loaded people up with antibiotics all the time, you would create super bugs because they would continuously be active in people. So like suppose I figured out how to do that and there was crossover to the civilian side. That I would be absolutely a fan of, but I would have I’d have to make sure that I’m not inadvertently giving a tool of of of of great power to an adversary. I want to jump five years out. It’s 2030. What does warfare look like in 2030? You’ve got AI far more advanced. Um, uh,
[00:58:03] humanoid robotics, and I know your position on humanoid robotics, but the ability to enhance super soldiers takes on a brand new meaning. Yep. Um, uh, you know, drones have gone from zero to infinity in in record speed. It’s extraordinary. uh what you know uh what are you thinking? Well, I hate to be a cynic here, Peter, but I actually think warfare in 2030 is going to look more or less the same as it does today with a few very small exceptions where things are breakthrough capabilities getting in. I said earlier, you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want. The reality is the vast bulk of our arsenal was built a decade or two or three ago. And so even as companies like Androl move very very quickly like we’re trying to build things that are relevant to a fight with a great power whether it’s Iran or Russia or particularly
[00:59:00] China. Uh but but even if we move at breakneck speed as fast as we can we’re going to end up being 1% of the fight. Mhm. 2% of the fight. Right. I like we we can try our very best. It’s it’s going to take years and years to replace these legacy capabilities with with new things. So I think what will the battlefield look like? You’re going to have a weird anac an anacronistic mash of things that were built in the Reagan era. Like are tracked vehicles built in the Reagan era operated by humanoid robotics that just rolled off the line a few weeks ago, but only like only like one column of the of them. And all the rest are going to be crewed by people. You’re going to have things like AI fighter jets flying alongside aircraft that were built under Bill Clinton and they’re going to be flying together in formation. And unfortunately, there’s probably going to be a lot more manned aircraft and the AI aircraft are going to be a tip of the spear val, you know, a valuable component. They’ll be the tip of the spear making first contact and
[01:00:01] they’re probably all going to be blown up and we’re going to say, “Shit, I wish we would have been building those for another couple of years.” It’s just 2030. I mean, it’s close. It’s there. It’s just it’s just so little time to build it, deploy it, and then train people on it. Remember, you can’t just deliver these things day one. People have to train for years to become proficient in something. Imagine if you showed up with a new alien weapon system pulled straight out of the Roswell wreck today. And you handed it to a soldier and said, “You have to go to war with this tomorrow.” That won’t work. You that you need to develop tactics. You need to develop doctrine. You need to have him train with his squad for years potentially. Let’s take it slightly different. Let’s talk about the 0.01%. Let’s talk about let’s talk about the the elite Navy Seal team uh or equivalent out there that will have the most advanced technology. And well, you’re going to see you’re going to see lower fatality rates. You’re going to see people who are acting as omnisient technommancers who are kind of acting as
[01:01:00] a central hub in AI surround. They know where they know where the good guys are. They know where the bad guys are. I I I think to to a certain extent, I think the future of warfare is going to look a lot more like like chess than dodgeball. Uh you if if you if you understand what’s happening and you know exactly what you’re up against, where it is, when it is, you can kind of know when you can win, and also know when you need to retreat. You don’t necessarily get to the point where you, you know, win or lose the battle of Midway. You know, well ahead of winning or losing what the likely outcome is. And that drives probably better decisions. I think you’re going to see a lot less casualties, a lot less fatalities. You’re not going to allow yourself to, you know, will your way into a scenario where everyone gets wiped out. And there and there’s good and bad there. I mean, when you give people better visibility into what’s going to happen, you imagine
[01:02:00] this. Imagine a world where we get into a fight that we can’t really afford to lose and then we find out that to stay in that fight, we’re going to have to send 50,000 sailors to the bottom of the sea. I don’t think the United States has the political will to do that. Uh we we just don’t, especially knowing that it will happen. And so, like, it’s it’s a double-edged sword. But I I I think in general I’m I’m on the side of having the information to make that decision and and that I mean it’s going to make decisions a lot harder for these guys because right now there’s a lot of I guess I’ll end with this. In current warfare, fog of war allows for enough indeterminism that someone can make hard decisions without really knowing what the impact would be. You you believe, hey, this might work. Everyone might be fine. It is interesting to ponder what happens when that uncertainty is removed. What happens when when you order someone to do something? You’re no longer sending
[01:03:00] them into a you know into a non-determinate you know liinal space like oh well they might live they might not. What happens when you know that they are with a high degree of certainty going to die. Um that will be a a change in the nature of warfare at at a at a very high level. Now, of course, the flip side is like I said, I think there will be lower casualty rates, better decisions will be made, but it’s going to make for a very hard set of ethical quandies, but I don’t think anyone I I I the flip side is I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s better to not know. I don’t think you’d find anybody saying it’s better to not have that information in your decision-m process. So, this Navy Seal has uh is omnisient. They’ve got enhanced uh imagery, enhanced knowledge, probably a 100 to1 ratio of autonomous systems to men. You know, every every person who’s going to be out there is going to be working in a highlyworked fashion commanding drones and robots and and basically their extension. Some will be commanding and I think a lot of them
[01:04:00] are going to be just autonomously doing their jobs. You know, suppose that you have that Navy Seal. He might be aided continuously by 10 drones that are sensing the world around him, looking for things that are a threat. He’s not so much commanding them as consuming the information that comes in. And he’s not watching 10 drone feeds. He’s just seeing in his augmented view of the world where those threats are. And as things become a critical threat, the system is able to highlight that to him. He doesn’t have to look at 10 drone feeds and say, “Huh, that guy’s running. I I think he might be going over there.” The system’s going to say, “Hey, this is the top threat. It’s the only thing that might kill you in the next minute. You need to deal with this. What do you want me to do? So, it’s going to be a little different than com he won’t be commanding the drones so much as, you know, them feeding feeding him a view of the world. And I I I it’s a I I act like this is the future, but of course, this is what we’re doing with our customers right now. I like people are doing these things in exercises and in small level conflicts all over the world right now.
[01:05:00] It’s just going to be a different thing when it’s Have you taken the time to dream five years out beyond I mean so you’re building with five years out I know exactly what I’m doing five years is easy like the the things that are going to be relevant 5 years out out we we we’re starting to build them today like you know you know we just we just uh we just started construction on a $900 million factory in Columbus Ohio to build our autonomous fighter jets. Those are going to be in combat before 2030. So 2030 easy for me. I I know exactly what we’re The question is, what are you starting to design and build in 2030? Yeah, that’s that that that’s that’s the interesting one. It’s actually hardly anything. Uh in in general, Andre is very focused on building weapons for that kind of immediate near-term. It’s it’s it it’s it’s leaked out through the press that we have certain teams working under a mandate called China 27, which is if you’re if if the feature you’re building
[01:06:00] or the the capability you’re working on is not going to be ready for a fight with China before the end of 2027, you can’t be working on it. You need to you need to find something that is relevant to that. Um, that’s I I don’t want to say that I’m not even thinking about 2030 and beyond. It’s just I I I probably say I dedicate 1% of my time. Like I’ll tell you what one thing I think I think you’re going to see subterranean warfare become a much bigger part of the future. Really? Oh, it’s I I believe it’s the next major warf fighting domain. I’ve said this many times and everyone thinks that. What does that drilling machines? What does that look like? So, yeah, more or less. I mean, uh, have you seen the movie The Core? Oh my god. Was a while ago, 2006, I think. It’s about a group of guys who have to drill to the center of the Earth to use nuclear bombs to restart the Earth’s core spinning to protect us from from from from from uh from cosmic rays. Um, not a scientifically sound movie, but uh
[01:07:01] something like that. Uh, you know, the United States and the Cold War, uh, sorry, the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War both had subterrane programs, building vehicles that moved through the crust of the earth just like a submarine would move through the ocean. And the Soviets actually built a prototype and then lost it in the crust of the earth. So, it worked that well. It worked that it just went off and they and they lost track of it melting through the crust. Um, I I think that that’s going to become a very powerful part of the future of warfare. And I’m not talking about, you know, just tunnels or bunkers. I mean using the crust of the earth as a fully three-dimensional battle space that you will be moving supplies through. Uh you’ll you’ll be doing electronic warfare, kinetic warfare, psychological warfare, uh you know, high-end logistics and uh that that I don’t think is relevant to China. The technology is just not quite there. I I can’t really build things at scale that are relevant by then. that that’s one of maybe the few things I think past the 2030
[01:08:00] timeline I think it’s going to become a huge deal and at some point the same way you see a space force I think it’s very likely you’ll see some kind of subterraner corps I I don’t know exactly how what that’s going to look like but right you know right now the people who work on subt bunkers and tunnels I I think it’ll become a large enough part of warfare that you’re going to need a dedicated group that focuses on the unique challenges of the subterranean domain Amazing. I saw the video you posted on Pulsar L recently. Uh that was uh that was a bit of magic. It felt it looked like a bunch of mosquitoes flying out of dropping out of the sky. Well, I mean that was it’s so funny. I don’t know if you describe that for for folks. Well, yeah, we just launched this video that shows Pulsar L. It’s basically a thing the size of a of a small cooler. And you can carry it in the back of a truck. And it is an AI powered electronic warfare system capable of jamming, spoofing, hacking, targeted cyber effects, general cyber effects, uh doing things that make
[01:09:01] the motors of drones want to stop working, makes their navigation not do what it’s supposed to do. It’s things that don’t just work against remotely piloted drones. It even works against autonomous attack drones. It looks like an EMP being triggered and everything just falls down. We released this video where and by the way that was a real test event. So we had 25 autonomous attack drones and then they’re flying towards the target and you turn on Pulsar L and they all fall out of the sky, fall to the ground. Um this is a real capability. We’ve been selling it to real military customers. They’re using it in combat right now and we finally were able to start showing it publicly. Um, and it’s so funny because we released this video and I don’t know if you saw my tweet about this, but people were all saying there’s no way this is real. This is all totally fake. It’s all CG. And wishes that it was this easy. What they don’t understand and don’t see is that we’ve been investing in electronic warfare at Anderoll for the last 5 years. That this is a culmination of all of that work that this is a real capability and in fact
[01:10:01] the video is literally an actual live test event. So I I actually tweeted about it. I said, “Okay, fine. We’ll we’ll release all of the behind the scenes footage. We’ll just take all the video footage that we showed actually of it working. Now, we’re not going to be able to talk about, you know, the the specifics of exactly the the you the way that we’re being clever with the electrons um because that stuff falls into the classified domain. But I I will note too things like pulsarl, they’re not the solution because it’s possible to make a drone that can survive that type of attack. They’re a very useful part as a layered approach, right? You need to have directed energy. You need to have EW. You need to have kinetics. You need all these things working together. And it’s very hard to make a drone that pass makes it past all of those things. Very hard to make a drone that can survive all of the ways that Andre has for stopping a drone. Yeah. It looked like the kind of device that I’d want in every Jeep on the war on the war battlefield. I mean, every Jeep. And I I I would love to see it at every airport.
[01:11:00] I’d love to see it at every sports stadium. The biggest obstacle is actually regulatory wise. Uh it’s it Pulsar L is completely illegal in the United States for for for for non-military use. I there there’s there’s nobody in the United States who’s allowed to use something like Pulsar L. The only guy who’s allowed to push that button is someone with very special authorizations via the military. And I think that’s going to change. Uh I I’ve I’ve I’ve been spending years now talking with members of Congress who understand we can’t afford to have our airports shut down by drones. We can’t afford to have our military bases surveiled by drones. We can’t afford I I suspect inevitably there will be someone who commits a large scale terror attack or series of terror attacks using drones. And it’s cheap enough to get ahead of these threats that we should at least try. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that’s very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. company is called Fountain Life and it’s
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[01:14:01] fountainlife.com/per. It’s one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let’s go back to our episode. You mentioned recently um that that we need to look at the ethics of using AI and warfare on a case- by case basis. Absolutely. And I the examples you gave were compelling and I agree with you and I’d like to scratch that a little bit. Uh where does that case by case ethical review happen? Do you guys do you have that kind of conversation inside of Anderoll? Is this something that’s happening with your DoD customers? Sure. I mean, how do you think about this? The good news is that the DoD actually already has these these processes in place and they have for decades. The reason that so many people are freaking out about autonomous weapons is because they think that it’s a new thing. You know, I mentioned in my
[01:15:01] TED talk, people think that they’re keeping Pandora’s box from being opened. What they don’t realize is that every US military base and aircraft carrier is protected by autonomous weapons that shoot down incoming boats, incoming missiles, incoming aircraft. They don’t realize that destroyers are all capable of operating in a fully autonomous mode even if the bridge is completely destroyed and not a single person is living on the top side. You go back to World War I and World War II. That’s right. For all of you know all the landmines that were those are autonomous weapons triggered on their own. We go back even further. I I I’ve given a couple talks where I argue about that this idea of building weapons that execute the intent of the designer even when the person is not immediately physically present. That goes back thousands of years. Spike traps, pit traps, you know, but poison wires, all of these are autonomous weapons. Now AI allows you to do new things, but I mean also like in Vietnam, we were using
[01:16:00] missiles that would be fired from a jet, fly into an area, look for, for example, surfaceto-air missile launchers, and then destroy them. Those are those are fully autonomous weapons. They’re deciding which targets to hit, which to destroy, and they’re discriminating between one type of target and the other. And so yeah, what what what I mentioned is that you have to look at these on a case-byase basis and not have a blanket prohibition on AI autonomy for any for you you you can’t have a blanket prohibition. Imagine if you could say, “Hey, I can make take this I can take this landmine and it’s an anti- vehicle landmine. It’s not set off by by by people. It’s set off by vehicles.” Right now, it can’t tell the difference between a school bus and a tank. Yeah. Why would you want that? Why would you want that? There are people who are fighting for that. They want a UN level resolution to condemn the use of AI and weapons to make it illegal for a robot to pull the trigger. And my point to
[01:17:01] them is if you’re going to use landmines, shouldn’t they be able to make that difference? Shouldn’t you be able to use every tool to in achieve the most precise, most surgical, least civilian casualty attached outcome? And and they’ll say, “Oh, you here’s why I don’t believe that.” And my point of them is if you have a problem with landmines, ban landmines. Don’t ban landmines from being as good as they can be at not killing civilians. And it’s the same thing with a bomb. If I can make a bomb that using autonomy does not kill the person who’s a hundred yards over to the side of the guy that I need to get rid of. If I’m taking out the head of al-Qaeda, isn’t it better to have something that kills that guy and doesn’t blow up the building next door? There are people who would argue no. It’s such an ethically fraught problem they can’t deal with how icky it feels to have a robot decide who lives or dies. And my point to them is, guys, the DoD has a process for this that they’ve
[01:18:00] been applying for decades. The key is to never abdicate human responsibility. A person always needs to be responsible for how force is used. When that AI weapon kills the wrong person, there needs to be human accountability as if there was a person pulling the trigger. That is the thing we cannot afford to compromise on. banning AI wholesale is just going to ensure that one we lose and two that we’re fighting with our hands behind our backs and a lot of civilians are going to die as a result. That is not a moral outcome in my opinion. I I have to admit I mean you’ve been on my stage at the Abundance Summit twice now and the first time you were on stage I was a bit nervous about how the audience was going to react. Sure. Right. And it was like just standing ovation. People were completely won over by that argument of if we’re going to if we’re going to get into a war, if we’re going to aim to kill somebody, let’s make sure that the collateral damage is completely minimized. That’s right. And
[01:19:01] let’s have, you know, focus on the intention. And there’s very uh what arguments have you gotten against that? Because I can’t imagine one that would would win. It’s differences in in philosophy like uh the I think okay there there’s per perhaps I could steal me on this there are people who will usually argue uh one of two things either they’ll make a a purely philosophical argument but like it is not the place of tools to rebel against man you know we we we cannot there are certain things we cannot outsource no matter the cost of life they would rather civilians die today Yeah, then outsource these decisions to to AI models and and it’s just a difference in philosophy. It’s not it’s it’s I I think that minimizing civilian deaths is really important. There’s other people who I think take a more existential risk approach. Like you’re you’re from the
[01:20:00] X-risk people in the AI community. They say, “I have no problem with the landmine.” Okay, the landmine that doesn’t blow up the school bus full of kids I have no beef with. But first it’s the landmine and then it’s the gun and then it’s the nuke and then it’s Skynet and it wipes out every and so but my my point to them is look that just isn’t how the DoD looks at these things. It it is these are usually people who are not familiar with how the DoD actually makes decisions. It’s hard enough for me to get AI into that landmine like that. That’s actually hard. There is such an extraordinarily stringent review before they deploy new weapons. I here’s a great example. There was a new landmine that was capable of a fully autonomous mode that was developed during the ’90s. It was developed by the United States Army and it was capable of basically it was basically a sensor that could trigger remote mines around it and it would detect what kind of vehicle was and and and blow up if it detected it. They actually disabled that capability in the final version of it because they
[01:21:00] couldn’t figure out how to attach responsibility for malfunctions. They couldn’t figure out how they were going to say who’s responsible. Is it the guy who ordered the the mind mine deployed? Is it any time that the instructions to it are updated or the categorization is updated that it’s responsibility? Is it that the contractor who develops the differentiation model whose liability for civilian casualties that the military is actually fundamentally very conservative? They they don’t take these crazy risks. And so people imagine there’s a slippery slope to Skynet. remember that our nuclear arsenal until a few years ago ran off of floppy discs. They were so conservative they didn’t even want to move to to digital circuits controlling these things and they kept it all analog. Uh I I I’m given that I’m just not that worried about the slippery slope. I think the people who are in charge of these problems are very sharp and if you don’t believe in the process that puts these people in positions of power then you just don’t really believe
[01:22:00] in the democratic process period. I mean look the the alternative is you have people who are making all of these decisions flawed as they are. Well, and and my point is, look, if you trust a 19-year-old kid to not nuke uh you know, the wrong people, I’m just kid that that’s a rid Sorry, that’s a little ridiculous. 19-year-olds are don’t get the don’t get the nuclear keys. You know, it’s it’s people who are a little more senior, but you you you get my point. If we are trusting people, young men, with decisions of great life and death import, uh it seems a bit strange to me to say, “Oh, well, I I think that uh I think that the system as a whole, though, is is is just going to trend towards irresponsible use of force and the machines are going to kill us all.” I I I I understand the ex-risk people, but similar to you, I don’t know how you feel like it’s the same thing where people say this about AI that has nothing to do with weapons. They say we shouldn’t develop AI to help us with physics because what if it develops new physics and then it uses those to
[01:23:01] exterminate humanity? And I I just I I’m a lot more worried about evil people with with existing AI. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s human stupidity I’m worried about. Yes. Yes. The a the AI part is the part I’m least worried about. I’m I’m worried about bad people using good AI, not super AI turning against everybody. All right. A lot of people don’t realize that the tech you’ve been developing has some significant nonwarfare applications. And here I’m pointing directly uh at uh the prevention of perilous wildfires. So, uh, two years ago, two and a half years ago, very proud we were in DC together. You were the first registrant for our 11 million wildfire prize. You really pulled together a lot of people. You had the lieutenant governor of California there, the head of Calire, a lot of people from the US Fire uh, Forest
[01:24:00] Service. Yeah, it was it was a great it was a great event and I and I’m you know it was valuable to have you step up as uh as our first registrant and even more valuable for what you said which is these and god knows 6 months ago we were all you know front row seats to the Palisades fire. Um that shouldn’t ever happen again. It shouldn’t have happened then. I mean the really the really crazy thing is and you and you know this but but not not all your listeners might. Um and started working on firefighting technology right at the start of the company. We built the Century firefighting tank. It was a tracked autonomous firefighting vehicle that could continue to fight fires even after a fire had overwhelmed an area. So continue fighting long after all the people have shipped out. And the problem we ran into was actually purely political. It’s that people were afraid it was going to replace jobs, automate jobs. And they were saying, “If you fund
[01:25:00] this, then we’re going to come out against you politically in the upcoming elections.” And that that that was really a that was really a big problem. I I I think we should have been working on and I think that you similar things for for for for even you know the whole point of that for people don’t know the wildfire x-prise. It’s to end destructive wildfires using autonomous technology. Build things that can detect and react to fires instant instantly. Yeah. And the problem was people not everybody wants things to work that way. They there there are people who don’t necessarily want to stop wildfires because they’re job is tied to fires continuing to exist at scale. And that that that’s the hardest part of this. Well, look, I mean, if you if your whole job is to do, let’s say, largecale firefighting tanker operations, you’re not going to be excited about giving money up in your budget to build something that stops that from ever happening. Uh, it’s it’s it’s a perverse set of incentives. Yeah,
[01:26:01] I don’t think any of these people are, you know, waking up in the morning saying, “Haha, I I I can’t wait for there to be more fires and more death so that I can get my budget.” But they’re not going to ever want to take risk if even a successful outcome is one that is probably probably bad for them. But I I I mean I said it at the event, I’ll say it again. We can do this. This is not a distant future. This is not a super intelligence problem. This is a matter of product execution. The tech to detect and exterminate destructive wildfires. Maybe not in all of them, but I like let’s say 95% of them. it exists today. We just have to put the pieces together and demo it and like yeah I mean I think the I think the I think the evaluations for the prize are coming up in October so not that far away but you know whole whole bunch of companies are put like the most you’ve seen and you’ve seen the companies I mean you’re registering right now and we’re and we’re teamed up with some of them the coolest part about this prize is unlike maybe some other X-
[01:27:02] prizes where there were a bunch of people trying to figure out if it was even possible and pushing the limits in this case I think there’s actually lots of companies that are proving that it is very much possible. It’s now just a matter of of of cost and effectiveness. How much will it cost to do this? And so everyone’s trying to drive down the cost, increase the effectiveness. Nobody I don’t think I I I think all the teams are in a place where they’ve proven it can work. Have you publicly come out to say what tech you’re going to use? I don’t think we’ve publicly gotten into too much. The the plan right now is uh we’re going to use we’re going to demonstrate multiple things. So, and this is how I think it’ll be in the real world. In the real world, you’re not going to have one type of solution. The thing, you know, the aircraft that will respond to a fire that’s on a hill out, you know, a hundred miles out in, you know, in in in the brush, very different than one that is, let’s say, going to start in a power substation right next to a bunch of trees. It’s just you you’ll need different tools for each job. And so what you need to do is detect fires, classify what kind of fire
[01:28:00] it is, and therefore what kind of firefighting agent you need, like you even and what the environmental conditions are in terms of wind. Exactly. how how you can approach it. Exactly. You how far is it? What’s the closest asset? What type of compounds do you need to fight that fire? And you actually need a system that then autonomously decides which of these available assets is the best to stop this particular problem. Then deploy it and then see through did it work. Did I slow the fire? Did I stop it? Do I need to continue to deploy assets? You know, do I need to actually have the big guns come out while I try to just camp this down? And so I think our plan is we’re going to have multiple Android and assets, different types of assets with different type of capabilities and then demonstrate how different types of fires trigger a different response from the system. I also think that’s how it’s going to work in the real world. And like if Andre were to deploy, let’s say, a lattice instance with sensors and firewatch towers and and and and space-based layers and people say, why not just do it all from space? The answer is sometimes you have weather that makes it impossible uh to, you
[01:29:01] know, to to see what’s going on. You might have a lot of fog, you might have a lot of clouds. Uh, and so you probably need some terrestrial layer as well. Um, but if you were to build all that, I think Andre’s probably not going to be building all the vehicles that respond. I think you’re actually going to see a lot of different companies focusing on their niche. You’ll have some people building a vehicle for, you know, more urban type environments. You’ll see others building it more for long range, you know. And what I love about next prize is it’s a Darwinian evolution where you have hundreds of different approaches all competing and at the end of the day like you said you probably will collaborate with uh with a number of I think I think I think that in the end probably a half dozen of the teams that are competing like if if CalFire were to award a multi-billion dollar contract to deploy these systems at scale and stop wildfires I am very sure it would not be any one of us getting all that money. it’s it’s going to end up being, you know, a distribution of money
[01:30:00] to people to people for for a lot of different different things. And yeah, the thing that that is insane is when you have these these Malibu fires, these Palisade fires and uh over over the years and then it’s impossible to get insurance for your home. Well, and the cost because the cost is so immense and the requirements California’s put on these insurance companies is also so immense. What what what blows my mind is when people we’ve talked to people in like you know Caloes, Office of Emergency Services and um they I’m not I’m not putting them down. They’ve got a lot of constraints they have to work under. But what’s so fascinating is when we talk about the cost to deploy a system that would detect every fire and put out many of the fires. They say, “Oh my god, well that it’s billions of dollars. Where are we going to get billions?” And my point is if you stop even one fire, you’ve already made the money back. you’ve already lives lives lost, property lost, time, it’s crazy. And the lives are irreplaceable. But even if you look at it just in dollars and cents, it stopping one of these
[01:31:01] fires would pay for the whole system in terms of the economic damage. And so it it’s one of those things where it it seems like a lot of people are being pennywise and pound foolish. And we we have we have to we have to fix that. I’m going to ask you a rapid fire set of AMA questions from uh from my Twitter audience. Let’s do it. I’ll be efficient in my answers so that we can hit as many of them as possible. Can a can a drone fly in formation, hit the land, transform into a robot, uh two or four legs or wheels, recon, and attack on land? Do you imagine sort of a a mixed mode set of drones? Such a thing is definitely possible. And I’ve actually seen companies that are building exactly this. I’ve seen companies building quadcopters with legs, for example, where they they they land and most of them they they land on their legs so they can loiter for long periods like as a watch capability. I’ve seen people building robot dogs that basically have jetpacks. I I I I’ve seen the gamut. The the thing is
[01:32:01] I’m not going to say any of these don’t make sense. It’s really a matter of how many situations need both need both. Exactly. Like like why why not just keep flying? Why not get there just walking? Or here’s another example. Why not put the robot dog onto a flying vehicle that drops the vehicle in place and then you don’t have to carry all of that extra parasitic weight that it is always possible to come up with some niche scenario where you know, oh, I need it to fly, land, walk into a cave, jump over a hole, fly out the other side. It, you know, those do exist. But, uh, I I here’s the good news. making these different niche robotics. Uh I I I think it’s going to be a big part of the future. There’s not going to be one form factor that dominates everything, right? You’re not going to see C3PO style humanoid robots doing literally everything. There’s going to be hundreds of different form factors. And I bet some of them will have wings and legs just like in nature. All right, next one. A serious one. Between US military tech and Chinese
[01:33:00] military tech, is America behind? There’s places where America is behind. there’s places where we’re ahead. It’s it’s it’s it’s hard to give a universal answer. Um, in general, I think the United States has a strong lead in a lot of the areas that people would consider critical, but at the same time, you have to look at the fact that China has about 300 times more ship building capacity than we do. I I mean, it’s people can’t visualize it. I saw your tweet. Uh, and by the way, that’s not during wartime. They say, “Oh, well in America would just scale it up during wartime.” Well, so will China. And and and they’ve proven that they can do it. They’ve also like I’m not saying we should do this. I’m not saying we should copy every movement of authoritarian centrally planned state. But China has made it a law that many types of boats, for example, passenger fairies, car fairies. They can be commandeered and they have to build every passenger ferry to military specifications so that it can be used for a Taiwan invasion. All of their car fairies have to carry have
[01:34:01] meet a certain deck plate load standard so that they can move armored vehicles onto them and move them to Taiwan. That’s an advantage that they have. And so are they ahead of us on like amphibious landing capability? Imeasurably so by orders of magnitude. had a tweet um that I found particularly uh uh interesting about the importance of a navy. Yep. In projecting global domination. Yep. Protect and also protecting freedom of movement, freedom of trade. It’s just our our navy is kind of the backbone that allows global commerce. Yeah. All right. Here’s one you may or may not want to answer. What are your honest thoughts about Mark Zuckerberg? What are my honest thoughts about Mark Zuckerberg? Uh well, I mean the the the subtext there that people may not be picking up is that uh uh uh Facebook acquired my company in 2014. I worked there for a few years on VR. Um you my company was Oculus VR and uh then I was fired uh after giving money to the wrong
[01:35:01] the wrong political group. Um the libertarians. But but I I think people people need to realize that what look, I’ll put it this way. I took every single liquid dollar that I had and bought into Meta Stock the day that they announced they were changing their name to Meta. Mark is the number one VR fan in the world. I It’s a It’s It’s a title I wish I could have. Yeah, I wish I could be the world’s number one VR boy, but I’m not. Mark spent $60 billion on AR and VR. That he he beats me handily, and he’s done so through immense pressure from people who don’t understand his vision or where he’s going. And so, uh, you know, look, what what whatever whatever beef I might have with Mark over other items in general, I think he he understands the future. He’s resisting extreme and
[01:36:00] severe pressure from people who don’t understand his vision. Uh I I think he’s done he’s been he’s been very practical and he’s been very pragmatic in his engagements with the government even to you know the detriment of his press coverage and you know the the attitude that people show show show towards him. Um and the the thing that I like that I that I’ve had to come to terms with is you know it wasn’t Mark who fired me. It was the apparatus that was undermark. And one of the things I’ve had to come to terms with is that the people who ousted me, the people who orchestrated my my destruction, who who seized my baby from me, they’re not even at Meta anymore. It’s been 8 years. The people who conspired to stab me in the back, they’re gone. And so, you know, can I really be can I really be upset at the corporate structure that remains behind people? like, you know, am I am I mad am I mad at their ghost? Am I mad at the ghost of the people who once walked the halls of of Meta? Um, and so, uh, I I I
[01:37:03] I’d say my my opinions have varied over the years, and this is probably more than I than I even should should be should be should be saying about it, but in in general, I have a lot of respect for Mark. And I’ve I there’s been times where I’ve been a lot more upset with him than the present. And a lot of that came down to through a series of unrelated unrelated litigation, it became very clear in the discovery process that it was not Mark who had stabbed me in the back. It was people who were much closer to me. Well, some could say that Andrew exists now because of that action and the world is a better place or at least the United States is a better place because of that. I that’s an argument that’s been made. The point that I make to those people is if a guy got shot in the head by uh by, you know, by by a by by a by by a burglar and then he gained superpowers. He became supernaturally intelligent. Um the guy still shot you in the head, right? Like I I’m not going to say, oh, but but but
[01:38:01] so so I I understand that, but the point that I would make is look, like the thing is, yeah, Mark was in charge of the company at the time, but imagine this. You’re the executive of a major company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. the people who you trust come to you and say that the people that they trust have come and said, “We have to fire Palmer. There’s no other way around it. That this is the only way to handle the situation.” What are the odds that you’re going to go and say, “You know what? I think that the people that I trust are being lied to by the people they trust. The entire thing is a farce and that they’re doing it for purely political reasons. I I reject you and I override this decision two levels down.” That’s not how the real world works. At the same time, you got a thousand other problems going on that you’re dealing with. Thousand other problems and and and I hate to say it, but that’s probably the decision I would make in my company. If if I if I had people coming up multiple levels through and they said, “This is the only way that this is going to work. Here’s what’s going on.” My first instinct is not going to be I think that you are all lying to me. You
[01:39:02] know, maybe I’m not saying the people who talk to Mark are lying. I’m saying you go far enough down the chain. It’s it’s hard to say. I I think everyone is actually engaging in an or in in a in an orchestrated coup based on false information to run Palmer out of his company so that we can seize power and get more money out of the performance bonus fund that he will not get access to if I blow him out. That that’s that’s a that’d be a crazy thing for you to perceive from the top. So I as someone who’s now running an organization with 4,000 people in it, almost 5,000 people, I’m very sympathetic to the realities of of large companies. Bitcoin, how much do you love it? Do you own it? What are your thoughts on it? I’m a big-time Bitcoin guy. I have been from the beginning. I have been mining my own Bitcoin since before People have often asked you when did you buy in? I didn’t buy in. I mined in. And and I’ve been doing that since before there were any exchanges. I was on the Bitcoin talk.org org forums. I sold a banner ad on one of
[01:40:00] my websites for 700 Bitcoin. I remember very vividly in my and my website was like a little crappy internet forums and I still did that. I remember very vividly going to an online Bitcoin slot machine and betting 60 Bitcoin on one pull. Nice. Didn’t work. Uh and and you know I I was part of the Mount Gaus hack. I lost all of my coins that were in Mount Gaus and then 10 years later I got like 13% of them back, you know, through the recovery process. So, I mean, I’ve I’ve been in Bitcoin since the very very beginning begin. I’m a huge fan of Bitcoin relative to other cryptocurrencies. I’ve often said there’s two kinds of crypto. There’s Bitcoin and Shitcoin. Um, and it’s it’s a long discussion as to why I believe that. Um, but uh I’m I’m a I’m I’m a big fan and I I actually originally got became interested in cryptocurrency because of a essay by Jim Bell on his website the outpost of freedom um called assassination politics and it was about how he believed cryptocurrency would
[01:41:00] reshape world politics, the insurance industry, the military, governments across the world. Um, Jim Bell was arrested and sent to prison for being a terrorist later and also didn’t pay his taxes. So, uh, a very interesting guy. I’m not saying he’s my hero, but I am saying he did predict the Bitcoin and many of the impacts back in 1996. That’s when he he wrote Assassination Politics in 1996. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to read what someone who is very ahead of his time though on the fringes of society uh was thinking about crypto before anyone else was. Fascinating. All right, here’s a fun one. Would you ever consider or would you ever buy a defense prime Northrup Lockheed? I won’t rule anything out, but I I suspect it won’t make sense. Uh we we are in the same industry but we’re very different businesses and our investors are very different. I talked earlier about how you have to attract a certain
[01:42:00] type of investor and repel another. Their type of investors compared with our type of investors and in terms of what they want us to be I think it’s a a bit like oil and water and we’ll team up with those companies. We we we do frequently uh there’s like we’re selling rocket motors to some of those companies. They’re supplying payloads into some of our systems. So, we we’ll work together, but I think to actually bind our fates in that sort of way, it would be uh it’d have to be it’d have to be exactly the right mix. And I think that only happens if the world changes a lot. All right, I’m going to put you on the spot here. It’s a conversation we’ve had over dinner on a couple of occasions. Um, we just awarded a $100 million prize that Elon funded for carbon extraction, which was amazing. The winning team uh had some uh a brilliant approach. I didn’t see that. Yeah, I was uh at time 100 last week. Is the carbon that’s recovered just stored or turned into some kind you turn it into a synthetic longchain hydrocarbon? Yeah. So there we
[01:43:00] we had 1300 teams enter that competition. Yep. Uh from 88 countries. Uh we awarded six of them uh part of the 100 million. One team called uh Matty Carbon got 50 million. and I hand the guy a $50 million check on stage. Now, this guy’s amazing. He’s uh living in Houston, born uh and spent much of his life in India. Um and uh they’re actually using a technology for uh uh uh rock weathering. Okay. So, it turns out that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. that basalt. Yeah. And then it absorbs it absorbs the carbon. But what he what he It’s crazy. You just bust up the rocks and they fine powder. Are are they are they doing it with an atmospheric process or an in water process? They’re they’re basically spreading it on farmland. Oh, fascinating. I was mostly familiar with like maritime weathering projects that use ocean as the carrier for for the carbon, but atmospheric weather is interesting. It increases crop yields by 20 to 30%. Oh, because you’re pulling in
[01:44:00] all of that carbon which just also water retention and it’s uh so he’s been building it out uh in a number of nations and he’s just going to spend the money and I just introduced him to an incredible philanthropist that’s going to just 100x what he’s doing right now. So, it’s it’s a beautiful one-two punch. The 100th anniversary of Lindberg’s flights coming up 1927 to 2027. I’m a huge fan of Charles Lindberg. I have a I have a signed portrait of him that my grandfather gave me before my grandfather passed away. He was a he was a airline pilot for 40 years and Charles Lindberg was his hero and I’ I’ve been to I’ve been to Lindberg’s grave out on out in Hawaii. Um well Eric Lindberg who’s one of my trustees at the X-P prize. I’d love to introduce you to him. He’s he’s amazing. I had no idea. Yeah. Grandson. And he when I announced the So the original X-P prize uh for spaceflight came out of the Spirit of St. Louis book, right? Right. I was reading about uh this $25,000 prize and it sparked, you know, the aviation
[01:45:01] explosion and Lindberg, the most unlikely guy, pulls it off. Long story short, uh we’re looking for uh Eric Lindberg and the Lindberg Foundation want to fund a uh or put together a massive X-P prize again. So, we’re looking for what’s a big bold idea. A big bold idea bold idea that we should build an X-P prize around. It’s interesting. Yeah. So, I’m I’m you last asked me the same question I think four years ago. And I’m trying to remember what I said there. I think you said tuna farming was one of them. Tuna farming was one. Basically, large scale aquaculture of species that are on the precipice. Um, and what what else did I say? You talked about um uh upleveling animals. Uplift. Uplift. Yeah, I’m still a I mean I mean can you bring a nonhuman species to human level sensience? And I’m not sure what the right bar is. Like it’s probably not the Turing test because even an intelligent species was
[01:46:02] probably going to think so differently. Well, you and I are both fans of of Ben. But I mean, what if I could get if you Yeah. If you get an octopus to an IQ of 100, which is the human intelligence measurement, and it’s not far off, probably. It’s it’s it’s maybe not. And there’s there there’s there’s a lot I stopped eating octopus because of that and and and there’s there there’s a question you don’t have to do this naturally. We we we understand what octopus is actually one of the hardest because we understand them so little. But like but like for for for birds we we understand what the common traits of the smartest birds even in a local population are. You see more brain folding higher you know higher uh higher surface area on the brain and we also know I mean you mentioned colossal they I mean they they know how to modify animals to produce exactly those effects. Um and so it it’s not like we need to come up with from scratch. If we just take the things that we know make animals smarter. Another example is like like dolphins. They have very high glucose brains, very similar structurally to humans. Uh if you were
[01:47:01] to make a few choice modifications, you could probably massively increase their intelligence with just a few edits. And and people say, “Well, how come they didn’t evolve that way then, Palmer?” And the answer is because there was that’s not how that’s not how evolution works, right? It’s you you need to reproduce to be fit, not necessarily smart time. Yeah. Right. Well, and there were no natural environments that would favor them necessarily dedicating even more calories to being more intelligent. Humans have developed in a very complex environment where using tools working as social animals is is is critical. The ocean is a relatively sparse environment. And so there there’s there’s a question as like one of my favorite ideas is what would happen if you took even existing marine mammals like if you took a whale and you put it in a VR headset and trained it to teaoperate a humanoid robot like could you train a mammal to interact in a much richer environment that that requires tool use and and collaboration you know at a manual physical level. Uh it’s I I
[01:48:03] I’m I’m I’m not so sure it wouldn’t work. And uh na there were some NASA projects back in the 50s and 60s where they tried to have uh where they tried to have uh various animals interact with people and you know raise them from birth around people to see how smart they could get them and uh if that would be relevant for space flight. And I I I would not there there’s there’s quite a bit of sci-fi that suggests this fun idea that maybe humans are not the optimal earthbound species for space flight. It’s not a crazy it’s not a crazy thought. Well, your homework assignment is uh keep thinking about this challenge. Keep thinking. Keep thinking. What is a challenge? come up with another challenge that would that would spark people to take risks but is not so one of the people say well how about New York to London and you know in in in 60 minutes or hypersonic flight but the cost for a team to take that on as an X-P prize challenge is just a fundraising competition I mean another one is probably like maybe you guys haven’t done an inner species
[01:49:00] communication prize have you we’ve been we have talked about it and we’ve been trying to raise the capital for it but I think that’s a great prize because one of the things that bomber X-P prize. Well, you what’s interesting is you’re getting to that team idea. The money to tackle something like that 10 years ago would have been just unthinkable. Yeah. Now it’s two guys in a Yeah. and and some clever ideas in a GPU and and an AI model. You might have seen uh Google just released uh uh uh I think it’s it’s Dolphin GMA which is Yeah. So, they’ve adapted their dolphin translation and they actually they’re working with the uh with the wild wild dolphin project and I’ve actually given a lot of money to those guys over the years. Um it’s well if you want if you want that would be a great one. If you want to do that X-P prize, we’re ready to run with that one. Now, here’s the question. Are you guys going to are you going to are you going to prohibit me from from using the the dolph you know the dolphins we translate uh with is there going to be a prohibition from uh inducting them into the United States Navy? Absolutely not.
[01:50:00] The Navy has a has a has a large a large dolphin program. Not maybe not large. They’ve they’ve spent a lot of money over the years and have a small dolphin program that consumes a lot of money. But probably the the best experts in the world in terms of dolphin psychology are actually in the United States Navy. Well, I do think an inter species prize for dogs, for birds, for Could you imagine a commercial a potential of being able to talk with your dog? I mean, oh my god, it’d be a trillion dollar company just like that. It’d be huge. Real quick, I’ve been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. The truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills scenile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it’s one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. Uh, if you’re interested, check out the show notes. I’ve asked my team to link to it below. All right, let’s get back to the episode. So, another AMA
[01:51:01] question here is, will aging warriors be able to keep fighting uh using robotic technologies? Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things about special forces is that they actually tend to be much older than the conventional forces. And people people often don’t understand that. They imagine that these must be like the youngest guys at the peak of their athletic prowess. It turns out that what you more often need in special forces operations is people who have unique experience. Uh a lot of hard fought, hard one lessons implanted in their brain. And the thing that takes them out is that you do still need a certain level of high physical competence and excellence to to to survive on the battlefield. I I think it’s almost inevitable as you have more and more resources shift to robotic systems, remote systems, exoskeleletal systems. Well, I I think it’s exoskeleton systems, but I mean, I’m not even sure that it’s, you know, putting old guys into exoskeletons. I think you might
[01:52:00] have more like the wizard approach. You a wizard doesn’t fight through strength. He doesn’t he doesn’t imbue his limbs with force so that he can use a sword. He fights through other means. He he fights at a distance. He he he perceives the battlefield well enough that he can act in other ways. I suspect that if we do our job right at Anderol, we should make physical prowess maybe not irrelevant. I mean, you still got to be able to walk around. You still got to be able to, you know, get in and out of your car, but I don’t see a reason you couldn’t have someone who’s much older or who has, you know, a missing limb or missing limbs. People people who today can’t operate effectively. I would not at all be surprised to see them be able to stay in service much longer. The question then becomes how do we keep them in? Because right now it’s really hard to keep people especially who have had life ch changing injuries, people who are who are getting much older who who who maybe want to focus on raising families. So it’s it’s two things. We’re going to need if we’re going to keep that experience in the military and keep
[01:53:00] those guys and maximize utility, we need to make tools that allow them to safely keep operating into you later in life. And we also need to figure out how we can pay these guys and give them good enough benefits that they don’t depart the armed forces for very practical pro- family reasons because at the end of the day most people they want to do they want to do well by their families. Yeah. And we can do a much better job of keeping and retaining those people. We just I got to give them better benefits. We got to pay them more. You do that you’ll keep them. All right. Uh, next question uh from the X is, could a neural linked trigger finger fire faster than your nervous system? Absolutely. It it’s without question. There’s there’s an enormous amount of latency in the link from your brain all the way through your peripheral nervous system out to your finger. Um, I actually I’ve talked about this several times, but years ago I actually built a peripheral nervous system bypass to test exactly this. And I wasn’t going directly to the brain, which is what would be fastest enough. I was just uh basically triggering it off
[01:54:01] of a muscle that was uh basically a jaw muscle. And it turns out that your jaw and tongue muscles are much lower latency than your fingers are all the way at out at the end of your hand. The nervous transit uh velocity is much higher to here. And the and the literally the physical length of the link is just much shorter. And so you actually need very good control of your tongue and your mouth to not bite your tongue. Like try chewing sometime. Notice how crazy it is that you’re basically opening your mouth, shoving food into the hole with your tongue, and then as you bite down, your tongue pulls out just so, and you do it hundreds of times in a meal without even thinking about it. That coordination is crazy. So, what I did is I made a system that would uh I could click my mouth by flexing a click, sorry, click my mouse on my computer as a proxy for, you know, trigger finger by flexing a muscle in my mouth. And in doing so, I had greatly reduced latency in playing first-person shooters. And it turns out that that
[01:55:00] just totally works. You can trim a lot of your reaction time right off by just using different muscles. And that’s not even directly to the brain. It’s also worth noting you don’t just have to go to the brain. It turns out that nervous signals are, you know, they’re they’re kind of a mix of chemical and electrical signals. And those of you who’ve been in high school chemistry might remember that most chemical reactions happen an accelerated rate when you up the temperature. And so one thing you can do to reduce peripheral nervous system latency, it’s just heat up your arm. Like the whole thing, if you soak your arm in hot water to a very uncomfortably high temperature, it will be very uncomfortable and you’re your reaction time will actually go up for clicking a mouse or pulling a trigger. I’ve actually pondered the idea for years of like a product like the Magma Sleeve or something and and and and like you’re you’re you’re playing your game, it’s down to the last round, you’re like, “Oh no, I really got to pump it up.” And it would just superheat your arm to the point of getting first degree burns if you did it for more than a minute, but it would give you that little last bit
[01:56:00] of extra edge. I I I think that’d be a really interesting product for somebody to do. Another question related to video games. Um, a lot of kids are playing a lot of video games today. They sure are. Uh, how do you feel that? How do you think about that for the next generations coming? Good thing, bad thing? Was it valuable for you? Is it distracting from education? So, the parents who’ve got like me, you know, teenagers who are loving their video games and it’s it’s the focus and obsession. What’s your advice? I struggle with this because I love video games. You know, I started the mod retro forums game mod game console modification community when I was a teenager. Um, we just launched our first product after 17 years, which is a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. I like I love I love I love games. I spent a lot of time as a teenager playing games. I mean, thousands of hours. And on the one
[01:57:01] hand, it makes me worried when I see the current generation spending all this time playing Fortnite and Minecraft when they Roblox when they could be doing more productive things. But then I remember I mean I did the exact same thing. And so it’s hard to know where where is the val you there’s there’s connections being created that are valuable in other contexts. Are they more valuable than things they could be doing if they were doing sports or books? I I feel like I’m just becoming the old person. Right? On the one hand, I said, “Oh man, I’m not going to let my kid play games like I did.” You know, all these kids today, they’re all iPad babies. But then, you know, Socrates supposedly said, you know, what are to become? You look at the children of today. They have no respect for their elders or their society. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions, pursuing their own desires. What is to become of them? And I and I realize, you know, people have been saying this for like 2,000 years. They’re like, “Oh, man. this new generation, what’s going to become of them? And and and they seem to generally turn out fine. And so, I
[01:58:02] don’t feel like I’m in a place uh to be able to to to to speculate beyond saying, you know, it’s probably going to be fine. It’s probably going to be fine. So, you’re up on the TED stage giving your most excellent talk, and for those who haven’t seen it, they should go take a look at it. Um, and you’re wearing these glasses and there’s a lot of speculation about whether or not your speech is being fed to you uh in the glasses. Are you I was I was cheating. I had my notes up on my glasses. Uh the the the hardware in particular is uh made by a company company called Even Realities. So I I was wearing a pair of Even Realities G1 glasses and it’s a really remarkable product. They’ve done a great job of making smart glasses that really do look like normal glasses. I mean, the arms are very, very thin. It kind of hides the battery and interface back in your hair, which I have huge hair, so I hide most of that bulk. Um, the lenses look like normal lenses. And
[01:59:00] it’s giving you not just in one eye. It’s giving you a full stereoscopic little uh window that’s green only, so it’s not full color, but it it can it has a a really great uh function that can show you your notes. It can show you your script. You can pull up critical information in messages. If someone were to tell you, “Palmer, slow the [ __ ] down.” You can you can have that message pop up and and you just see it. Oh, okay. I’m not saying I got a message like that, but if I had, I’d be able to. And so, uh, for people who don’t know, TED uh doesn’t allow any teleprompterss. They they they they want you to memorize your whole talk. They want you to just memorize the whole thing. And I I’m pretty good at this stuff. when I prepare, but I have to admit I especially when you talk about like specifics, you know, like the number of bombers that were built in this specific year per minute or you’re talking about you the the specifics of some of some technical item. It’s really nice to have your notes up so that you can refer to that and make sure you
[02:00:00] don’t say something that has everyone making fun of you for a year. Um, and pointed out, oh, what about Palmer where he said that China has, you know, 200 times instead of 300. this guy barely knows what’s going on. It’s um it yeah, it was it was I and I’m a huge fan of augmenting human capability. I think that when you expand your capabilities beyond what you were born with and you can le you kind of extend yourself out into, you know, your phone and into your wearable glasses. You augment your vision. You augment your haptic perception. You’re living what you what you preach. I’m living what I preach. And it was uh it was uh it was especially uh funny where uh there were people who are like, “But why would Palmer why would Palmer wear, you know, wear where why would Palmer wear something like that when it makes him look so dumb?” And all I could think when I was reading these criticisms are, “Have you seen me? Have you seen me? Do you do I look like the kind of guy who who wakes up in the morning and says,
[02:01:00] “Okay, first things first. What will people think of my outfit today? I’m I’m I’m blessed with I’m glad you’re wearing flip-flop shorts and a Hawaiian shirt on stage. I mean, you know, look, here’s what I’ve real, you know, I I I I’ve been doing it for so long and I I get away with it now. And uh I think the point that uh I usually make to people is look, you you you when when you achieve success, you earn a certain level of eccentricity that is allowed. And so if I want to be eccentric, that’s okay. uh to a certain level. And I’ve decided that I’m going to put all of my allowed eccentricity points into my mullet and into my clothes so that I can focus on other things and look how I want. And I’ve I’ve you know I when I got this mullet um I’d always wanted a mullet my whole life. How long ago did you How long did I want one? My whole life. How long when did you start? A few a few years ago. Um, my mom would never let me get one. And then I started dating my wife Nicole when I was 15. So,
[02:02:02] we’ve we’ve been together for a very long time. Uh, we met at a debate camp at a at a law school in Maryland, Virginia as teen teenagers. And, uh, she didn’t want me to get a mullet. And then when we got married, I realized that there’s nothing she could do. I I like, “Oh my, I can get the mullet. She can’t leave.” And I I So, I got the mullet. and uh and and and and luckily she actually she actually likes it now. Although I’m way overdue for a haircut. It’s it’s it’s out of control. I’ve I’ve transcended mullet man to homeless man. Um but uh but again that’s the eccentricity that I’ve that I’ve earned. I love that. Is there a favorite principle or mental model that you live by that is sort of like a guiding set for you? A guiding principle. Yeah. I mean there’s so many. Um, you know, Marcus Aurelius had had a whole bunch of stuff in meditations that that that that that speaks to me. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say I’m uh I wouldn’t say I’m fully in his philosophical camp, but you know,
[02:03:00] you you you can you can pick and choose a few on stage with me. I have um what else? I mean, I pro probably the one that I like most recently is uh you know what Roosevelt said about it’s not the critic who counts, it’s the man in the arena, it’s the one who actually bets it all. It’s the one who actually sacrifices and gives and inevitably will fail and he will get beaten up and bruised. But it it’s his contribution that counts, not the people who stand on the sidelines not risking anything, picking apart everything he might have done wrong, whether it’s wrong or not. And I I I I like to remember that especially when things do go bad because they don’t always go well. Sometimes you flip a coin and you get tails. Along that line, one of my pet peeves has been so many incredible people who have created a, you know, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth. Yep. Who are sitting on the sidelines and not betting it to make the world a better
[02:04:01] place. You talk about the people who are cruising the Mediterranean on their yacht. You know, they’re investing. I’ve always wanted to take out a New York Times page. I hate the New York Times and all all traditional media, but you know, these are the people who are working to make the world a better place. These are the people with the biggest yachts. Yeah. Brutal. It is brutal. I’ve asked myself the similar question. I’m in I’m in a group chat called the B Boys Club. Mhm. And it’s all boys who have sold a company for at least a billion dollars. That’s the that’s the the membership criteria. Um it doesn’t exclude women. Women would be allowed. It’s just thus far only boys only boys have applied. And so I I’ve for years like this goes back to when I sold my company. I got invited to the B boys club and I’ve tried to shame people and said, “Guys, you have so much money. Why are you not doing what you know is the right thing to do with this capital?
[02:05:00] Why why are you not according to whatever your system of values is? I’m not even saying do what I want you to do.” Why are you doing what you know you should be doing? And some people this is actually like they they I’ve had people tell me, you know, this really actually changed my thinking. Uh I I should be doing what I know is right. And there’s other people who have said very clearly, you know what, racing old vintage race cars is extremely fun, Palmer. I’ve I’ve I’ve paid my dues. I am not in it to I I I I’m not in it to to to to stress like I used to when I started my company. And it’s my point to them is are are you going to be are you going to be Batman or are you going to be you and I you I’m not saying you everyone should become a vigilante crime fighter but you don’t you why wouldn’t you use your resources to do the thing is your intelligence right because money giving away money is the easier part of that’s a great point well money intelligence and network and
[02:06:01] reputation I why was I able to start and money was a small part of it. It was because I was able to raise further money. It’s because people believed in me because I had I was a proven founder. I had started a multi-billion dollar company. I had successfully exited it. That makes it easier to recruit people. You’re you’re right. These people, they’re in a position that no amount of money alone could do. You could take some guy off the street, give him $10 billion, and he won’t be able to accomplish half of what some of these people would be able to accomplish. I I’m I I don’t want to pick anybody in the B boys club, but like but like imagine what would happen if Oh, I don’t know who would who who who who would maybe be be a good fit. Who’s a tech founder who’s who’s not really doing anything anymore? Well, you know, I’ve got imagine that guy. I’ve got examples. I mean, with 100 plus billion dollars and gone. What if they announced they were starting a new company to start to solve some problem and they were hiring the founding team and they
[02:07:01] were going to build another many billion dollar. They would attract the greatest, you know, players on the planet instantly. Instantly. Yeah. And there’s and that’s almost a free resource. You don’t even have to spend your money. Just you’re you’re you’re just betting your reputation. Yeah. I don’t know. It I mean the flip side of it is what do you do? you leave your money to your kids to ruin their lives or I what I love even even more is the is the irony of the giving pledge. Sure. Which I, you know, I’ve had this conversation with Gates. I’ve not had it uh with others, but you’re pledging to give half of your money to a nonprofit before you die that could sit on the money and do nothing with it. Well, you’re you’re basically betting I don’t know. I I might I look I hopefully I don’t piss anybody off who’s done the giving pledge, but the way that I look at it is when you pledge to give away your money, what you’re really saying is I think other people can do
[02:08:00] more good with my money than I can. I think that my view of the world will be more competently executed by others than myself. And on the one hand, I look, maybe there’s people like that are like that for real. Maybe some of them they they they are truly mentally not what they used to be, physically not what they used to be. But for many of these people, I think that they absolutely could achieve their goals better than handing it to a nonfounder NGO to go and a bunch of lawyers to go and correct. And so let me give you the op the let me give you the uh the that’s why I have that’s why I haven’t done it. my my my thinking is look I’ I’ve I’ve got a view as to how the world should be and I don’t think that there’s anyone else who’s going to more faithfully execute on that than me. Uh so my proposal is when I’m all old and used up maybe I’ll change my mind. Hopefully we’ll have some good longevity products by then. Uh but my view of the world is instead of that I want people to uh to do an impact pledge. Mhm. like
[02:09:01] I pledge to eliminate you know child slavery or uh you know uh uh hunger in this country and then or die or like or or or bank go bankrupt trying or go Yeah. Sure. And there are some amazing people like you know Tony Robbins does this you know Mark Mark Benoff does this and others but where you you call your shot. Sure. And then you invite others to come and join you. So imagine if you would sort of a list of all of the impacts around the world being well you and then you can measure the results by the quality of the outcome rather than the number of dollars put in. Right now it’s oh well he put you know a billion dollars into this thing. It’s really hard to it’s really hard to track that outcome versus saying you know I will end this disease. To be fair I think Bill Gates has done that. Bill Gates has done that for sure despite being signing the giving pledge. has also gone and said, “Here’s my stake. We’re going to eliminate this disease. We are going to achieve this level of carbon capture per
[02:10:02] dollar.” And that that that actually pretty cool. It’s very real. Um and for everybody else, uh for God’s sakes, uh you know, and I know you’ll do this and others others have is commit yourself the wealth. I mean, because you can only spend so much money in your lifetime, right? You know, so we have the ability to do such extraordinary things as humans and solve so many problems, especially in the time we live in. You ever I mean, I know you do. Like it’s so great to wake up and realize, wow, there are things that I can do today almost trivially easily that would have been the work of a lifetime just a few decades ago. Isn’t that Isn’t that extraordinary? The stuff you did between breakfast and lunch would qualify you as a god a 100 years ago. Yep. It’s it’s it it’s so easy to lose sight of that when you fall into you the human routine and and and you say, “I have these I have these problems. You know, I’m struggling. I’m
[02:11:01] struggling to deal with this situation. I’m having this family problem.” And those are all very true. It’s all very true. It doesn’t mean they don’t they aren’t real, but but it’s there are some people who feel like, “Oh man, I was born in the wrong generation. I can’t imagine being born any other time. This the only time more exciting today is tomorrow.” Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you know, I have I I I like to, you know, it’s it’s fun to imagine, you know, what if to be born in the age of exploration, you know, what must have that have been been like? That’s the only other time. But but even even then, I don’t think I would make I don’t think I would make the trade. I don’t know. I could see you with an eye patch and a sword. I I I could I I look what what guy hasn’t watched Master and Commander with his bros and said, “Oh man, that is that is something else.” Just what you know, imagine us on the high seas having adventures. How great would that be? True true discovery, not knowing what culture would be on that land over there. Well, my plan is to die on one of the moons of Jupiter right now. I’ I’ve reserved the right to change my plan. It’s not like my life drive. I’m not
[02:12:01] like Elon where I must get to Mars. But I sus the thing I would like to do, all things being equal, right now, would be not die on Earth, die on a reasonably colonized, reasonably terraformed uh moon of Jupiter or elsewhere in our solar system. Nice. Um I I feel like I feel like setting my sights on another solar system, it’s it’s a bit much. Uh the Jovian moons have really high radiation belts there. So you might just Yeah. Look, if you have enough nukes, it’s not a problem. Just generate a synthetic magnetic field. Bam. You’re all set. All right. I don’t know if it’s that easy, but I I’m just make I’m just making it up on the fly. I’m sure people a lot smarter than me are going to figure it out. But I’m going to need to make a lot of money if I’m going to need to buy Jovian real estate. I think I think it’s going to be I think it’s going to be uh I think it’s going to be in high demand in our lifetime if if everything goes well. I love it. Oh, no, no, no. I I want to live in a nice uh a nice a nice uh gated nice gated Jovian community with a with a nice HOA making sure the oxygen stays on. Make sure that our you know make sure our our plutonium prices aren’t through the roof. Yeah, that’s that’s the type of world I hope G
[02:13:02] bouncing around flying. Oh, no. I’m a 1G guy. 1G. I I want 1G. I want I want I want my full bone density. I want I want my normal metabolic process. Maybe like a 0.9g. That could be kind of fun. But uh having read up on the impacts of low G, I’m Have you ever Do you know Gerard K. O’Neal and the work that he did at Princeton? So he designed these large rotating um uh space colonies that were basically cylinders. And I’m familiar with most of the weird designs. You got tin cans on strings. You got the big rings. You got the big thing of course is uh you know at the center of rotation there’s zero gravity. on the outside there’s one gravity so as you get older you could sort of move up a mountain side. That’s a fun idea. Yeah. You know, I had a I had a a thought for a a reality television program at one point. Um it’s called Fat Flight and it’s you’ve seen My 600 lb Life. Uh it’s it’s it’s a show about people who are 600 lb or more and and they try to mo it’s they’re trying to motivate them to lose
[02:14:00] weight, exercise, get gastro bypass surgery, you know, like regain control of their lives. I had an idea for a show called Fat Flight and you would take really really obese people and to give them motivation. These are people who like are immobile. They can’t even walk around and you would put them on one of those zero gravity flights. I did. You did this. I did this. So So I mean, you know, I founded ZeroG, right? The commercial operator here. And there was a television show called The Biggest Loser. I’m famili Yeah. Okay. I don’t watch it frequently, but I’m familiar with it. And it was for people losing weight. And we took at the beginning of their season, we took, I think it was eight biggest loser candidates who are, you know, 300 lb higher into zero G. Ah, so Z, See, here’s what I wanted to do. I want to put them in a zero G plane, build a living room in the plane, and then you would fly on a like 0.1G or 0.2G so they can stand up and they can walk around and experience normal life. Imagine what it would be like if you
[02:15:00] could walk. Give them one 6G. Oh, that we gave him Luna Rabbit. You already did this then. You can go find the episode someplace, man. See, this is this is this is this is uh this is very much aligning with what I usually say, which is none of the ideas I’ve ever come up with or something that someone hasn’t already done before. You’ve you’ve you’ve already done it. You’ve already done Fat Flight. Bummer. Yeah. Well, my fa my favorite my favorite flight of you know, I did hundreds of flights. My favorite flight was taking Steven Hawking up into Zurich. That’s got to be fun. That was that was extraordinary. How did it end up how did it end up being a 727 that you guys bought? cuz that’s always that’s my favorite airplane. I I I want to I want to fly around myself in one someday, but haven’t figured it out yet. So, it was interesting. We um we looked at 737s. We looked at 767s um and the wide bodies were too expensive for us. Uh the 737 uh was the problem was that the fuel lines between the wing tanks and the engines were very short. The 727 had three advantages. It had the rear air
[02:16:01] stairs, right? Which I love them because we could load and unload there. And you don’t need any infrastructure wherever you’re taking off, wherever we go. Uh we had centerline thrust. So three engines in 727. So engine 1, two, and three. So when we’re going into a parabolic flight, we take engines one and three, take it back to neutral, and we would just throttle engine two to have the perfect amount of uh of thrust overcoming drag. And then the third thing was that the fuel lines control when you especially like in descent to have two 737 engines and match them up just so exactly and then the fuel line between the tanks in the wings and the engines were long enough that during the zerog portion the fuel in the lines fed the engines and you didn’t run out. I see. And um so all those three things and then the final thing our original business model was we were going to be using uh uh we
[02:17:00] call sort of cargo airplanes and palletized interiors. So cargo airplanes fly you know FedEx DHL were flying at night. Yep. And the airplanes were sitting on the ground during the day. Well and in fact I think like UPS I think has a whole fleet of seven 727s that sit at Ontario airport not used for most of the year. or they only use them in during the holiday season, so they’re just they’re sitting unused. So, I went to try and negotiate with all of the all of the players out there and uh and finally said, “No, we got to buy our own plane.” So, we fell in love with the 727 the same way you did. It’s a beautiful plane. It’s I mean, it’s it’s it’s a it’s kind of like it’s a brick [ __ ] house. Well, and and it’s it’s it was made by a Boeing that knew how to really make airplanes for pilots. Uh and I mean, it’s fast, too. You can cruise at Mach 97. Yes. It’s a great what what Yeah. What an what an incredible plane. I’m I’m It’s my It’s my dream to own a 727 and then put Volvo RM8s on it, which was a licensebuilt derivative in Europe of the Prattton Whitney I think JT8D.
[02:18:02] Yeah. PT18D. No, I can’t. Anyway, there there was a version of the engine in the 727, the one of the later engines. And it the difference was it was built by Volvo with an afterburner on it. Nice. And so it would be a direct one to one swap and I could have a 727 with triple after burning engines. And I I think that would be the fire of plume out the back ship. Wouldn’t that be the coolest plane ever? And the the only runner up would be uh I don’t know if but but air uh uh Aeromax or Air Mexico. They had 727s with real FAA certified rocket boosters. Have you seen these? No. So when they would take off hot and heavy out of Mexico City and an engine went out, they wouldn’t be able to maintain altitude. So what they did is they actually built they solid rocket boosters only to be activated by an emergency pull in the cockpit and they could pull them and I think it was four boosters would allow it to and the FAA certified this which is so cool. Cool. So, but one of my dream they would never
[02:19:00] certify today, but one of my dreams is to find one of those old Aerommex 727s and restore it because all of those uh all those STCs would be wavered grandfathered in and I would then have a a nice uh nice, you know, nice rado assist 727. That’d be pretty cool. Small aside, what are you flying these days? So, I’m mostly a rotary wing pilot. I I own a few helicopters. Got a UH60 Blackhawk. Evan and Austa Robinson. Um, nice. I I When can when can Lattis become operational for pilots? Oh, already. I mean, no, no, no. Oh, commercial pilots. I want I I want my heads up display. I want I want to be able to see fields in the distance. I want to see. It’s like the entire ATC system so ridiculously broken. I look I I have to admit uh one of the non-military problems I would love to work on would be modernizing ATC. Yeah. Uh it’s unclear exactly what’s going to
[02:20:00] happen. Uh President Trump has said he’s going to build a a beautiful system like nothing anyone’s ever seen. Uh I would love to be part of that. I I’m not sure if it will end up making sense for us to do so. But I mean to to your point, we should be giving pilots full synthetic vision, full awareness. They should know everything that’s going on. You should never have, for example, military helicopters running into into aircraft. No, that’s just it’s that’s that that we shouldn’t be getting within it shouldn’t even be in within the realm of possibility of that happening. And uh it’s kind of crazy that with all the tech that we have that the things like that are still happening. So uh we we’re building things for the military that I think are are are oriented around avoiding those types of situations. Day, night, weather, you name it. I I would love to see that tech fall in this. That is one place I think tech could flow back into the commercial world. That that that’s one where I think it could and I think I the way I would justify it is these these things are operating in close proximity. You know like if I if I
[02:21:01] making making man aviation safer and commercial aviation safer does actually make military aviation safer. The two are so closely intertwined in terms of operating out of the same airfields, operating out of the same airports, using a lot of the same support infrastructure. So, safer airports make for a safer military. So, that’s yeah, that’s maybe how I’ll justify doing something I I wanted to do. Anyway, buddy, listen, thank you for your time today. No, this has been a lot of fun and thanks to everybody who sent in questions. It’s it’s it’s it’s fun to to a long list, but I figure it’s uh it’s a good place to break. And uh just outside of these uh our media room that we’re in are our beautiful devices connected by lattice. Well, their form follows their function. Yeah. It’s it’s very interesting how a lot of the things that we build end up following natural form. It turns people say oh wow you know this looks like you know some you know some sleek you know sleek predator. It’s like well it turns out that predators have certain characteristics inherent and it doesn’t matter whether they’re biological or technological. It turns
[02:22:00] out a lot of them share the same characteristics whether they’re moving through air, water or or land. Yeah. It was uh I remember I was with Bert Rutan at Skele Composits and he was putting up an equation uh for drag and and he added a term to the equation for drag C subD uh subb and and like what is that? And he goes it’s the coefficient of drag due to beauty. Hey good-looking airplanes are good flying airplanes. Yeah. Anyway, always a pleasure. Always a pleasure, pal. Thank you everybody. Thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs. A lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals. The things that I’m learning, the conversations I’m having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you’re interested, again, please join me and subscribe at diammadis.com/subscribe.
[02:23:02] That’s dmmadness.com/subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots. [Music]