Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Palmer Luckey on the Next Wave of Military Tech Powered by AI | EP #158

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

In this episode, recorded at the 2025 Abundance Summit, Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, discusses building cutting-edge defense tech, taking over the IVAS contract, and his journey from Oculus to Anduril.  Recorded on March 12th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. ​Palmer Luckey is an American entrepreneur renowned for founding Oculus VR and designing the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that significantly influenced the VR industry. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion. Following his departure from Facebook in 2017, Luckey established Anduril Industries, a defense technology company specializing in autonomous systems and artificial intelligence for military applications. As of 2025, Anduril has secured substantial contracts, including a $250 million deal with the Pentagon, reflecting its growing impact in the defense sector. ​ Learn about Anduril: https://www.anduril.com/  Learn more about Abundance360: https://bit.ly/ABUNDANCE360  For free access to the Abundance Summit Summary click: diamandis.com/breakthroughs  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod ____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

Hi, my name is Palmer Lucky and I build killer robots. Palmer Lucky, tech prodigy and defense disruptor, shaping the future of AI and military tech. You must have a thousand different ideas. What's your calculus for filtering this? We don't have time for business as usual. We don't have money for business as usual. We have to try something. I think you're going to see humanoid robots in defense applications pretty soon, but they're not going to be for what people expect. We need to avoid outsourcing responsibility for violence to machines, to robotics.

If we are gonna kill people, we need to kill people. And it needs to weigh on us. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. I do appreciate you showing us your advanced designs here. When I asked Palmer backstage, do you have this in your development, he goes, yeah, kind of, something like this. Yeah. Yeah, kind of, something like this. Yeah, I mean, this is a long, this is a long discussion, but I think you're gonna see humanoid robots in defense applications

pretty soon, but they're not going to be for what people expect. The first use is not gonna be like humanoid special forces door kickers. It's going to be guys, you know, robots who walk around with about the physical ability of maybe an 85-year-old man, and they operate a lot of the existing systems we have. So think about things we have that are manned systems today, like a surface-to-air missile defense system. Silos, yeah. Yeah, or missile silos. Exactly. Right now, they're fully manned. You could build robots that are, you that are 85-year-old man,

shuffle around, push a few buttons, pull a few levers. Instead of having humans being bored in there for day on day. Yeah, and there's a lot of jobs like that in the military. Same things for potentially, rather than automating old vehicle platforms, you could use humanoid robots that are able to just walk into it, close the door, and then operate it.

So is that going to be the ultimate future of robotics? Of course not, but there's a near term future for even the limited humanoid robotic systems that exist today and I'm excited about that. Yeah, me too, but tell me the truth. Iron Man suit coming soon? This is another one of those problems is the, it's the class of exoskeleton.

You are the closest thing we have. The United States should have invested, I mean, look, Walt Disney was a huge fan of exoskeleton technology and he was part of the man amplifier project and a lot of the animatronics that are at Disneyland were actually a result of work that he did envisioning in that space. That said we probably should have invested in exoskeletons a long time ago. Too much time has passed and at this point you're probably just going to have fully remotely piloted robots or autonomous robots. Building a robot that is capable of doing superhuman things while also wrapping it around a person made of meat.

It's very difficult. It's much harder to do those two things at the same time. You have to answer the question, why am I doing this? What is the point? Am I trying to reenact my sci-fi fantasies or am I trying to solve the problem? And so if I had to guess, you're gonna see exoskeletons more in the consumer and civilian sector. And we had one here-

Where people just wanted to do cool shit than people who are actually out to do a job. We had that here in our tech hub this year for kids who need help walking and for elderly adults. Kids who want to walk good and do other stuff good too. Yeah. You have taken on industries that others have considered untouchable. I mean, first of all, the naivete and insanity of the VR industry. And then, of course, did people ask you whether you you know, you need to go

have your head exam to take on the DOD? I mean, at this point, I've been doing it for eight years. So, and I think they asked me a lot more at the beginning. You know, eight years ago, starting Andrew was very controversial. You might remember we were on, let's see, we were on the Bloomberg's most, they called us the most controversial company in tech. This was like as Uber was going through their ousting disaster, this was as WeWork execs

were being indicted. No, it was Andrel that was the most controversial company somehow, little old me with my two dozen people for the crime of daring to work with the US military. I was on Wired Magazine, named me the most evil person in Silicon Valley. So I mean, it's just, it's been a really interesting. What an honor. Oh, believe me.

Yeah, it is. That's extraordinary. So why do you do this? Why do you take on these seemingly impossible goals? I mean, what drove you to take, to build Andro? So I've actually been reflecting on what you've been asking people to do in terms of coming up with, you know, how they are going to do their moonshot.

How do you think about impacting the world? The first time that I did it was nothing like that process you're asking people to do. I did not start working on virtual reality because I said, oh my God, I want to impact the world. How can I best do it? Ah, this is how I will do it. It was much more simple than that.

I was a gamer. I liked gaming. I had been asking a question of myself for a long time. What's the next step in games? And then one day I woke up and asked, well, what's the final step in games? Clearly it's virtual reality. And I-

That's a passion driven, a purpose driven. But what I'm saying is it was just passion driven. Yeah. When I was raising money for Oculus, I was not at all certain that any of my investors were gonna make any of their money back. I felt like I had conned a bunch of people into paying me to work on my hobby full time all day.

And I mean, that's, that's I think how a lot of the best companies start, right? I mean, arguably, that's what the guys at Apple were doing. There were a lot of people who... Computer club. Computer club. And they conned some people into paying them to play computer club all day and do what they were doing in the computer club, but as a business.

And so I was really no different than that. Oculus turned out to be exactly the right thing at the right time. And I sold that company for billions of dollars after figuring out how to make VR headsets better. What was key was you said no to a billion dollars. How old was the company at that point when you said no to a billion dollars?

13 months. Holy shit. And then Zack came back with 2.2. Quite a bit later. And we were 18 months at that point. $13. $13. Holy shit. And then Zuck came back with $2.2. Quite a bit later, and we were 18 months at that point. But the thing to remember is the thing that convinced us, it wasn't... If you sell your company for a billion dollars or $2.3 billion, it's the same in terms of quality of life.

It wasn't the bump that made the difference. It was that Mark Zuckerberg committed that he was going to put at least a billion dollars a year into research and development of VR technology, which was my passion, for at least the next 10 years. So that's what I was weighing. What is it going to take for me, as Palmer Lucky, to raise $10 billion in R&D cash. Well, to do that, I'm gonna need to make some number of billions in revenue. I'm gonna need to dilute myself by some certain amount. I'm going to need to do some number of raises.

And you start to do the math and you realize- Very simple math. Yeah, you say, I'm not gonna be in control. That's gonna be almost impossible to do this. And here is a surefire way to, you know, maybe not be as in charge of my destiny. And of course, I ended up getting fired a few years later, so that really manifested fully the risk.

But the positive side and what did happen is $10 billion, I mean, that was the commitment. The commitment for Mark was $10 billion, a billion dollars here for 10 years. But the actual number has been $60 billion. And so I they changed their name in fact. Yeah and then actually the day that they changed their name back to or changed their name to Meta I actually put all of my liquid assets back into Meta stock so I mean I'm a total nutter I really fully believe in the in the in the Metaverse future whether people whether people think it's a fad or not. I've been with it long enough that at least you can't accuse me of chasing the fad.

You can only accuse me of being naive or stupid. But I'm a stupid person who really believes it. I believe you. Anderl, core mission. So how do you define why you built it and is that still the same mission that you have today? So the first page of our pitch deck to our investors said, Anderol.

I wish you had come and pitched me, but you didn't. OK. Sorry. I'm sorry. Never late than that. I mean, I'll tell you. I only ended up raising money that first round from one fund. It was Founders Fund.

And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Oculus after meeting with them and them beating up on me and saying, well, we don't think this is really going to work. If you, if this works, you're not just going to be the successful VR company. You'd be the first successful VR company in history ever. And so they said, we don't really believe this is gonna work, but we'll give you a million dollars.

And that is something I'll never forget, so I have a lot of loyalty to them for that. And then also, the guys at Founders Fund were some of the only people who were still willing to talk to me after I was fired by Facebook and ripped out of Oculus. And I know it seems hard to imagine today because I've clawed my way back to a level

of some relevance at least. But at the time, people literally would not answer my texts, would stay far away from me. And it came back to me through other people. They would explicitly tell other people, I'm staying away from Palmer, that guy's done. He's a one hit wonder, he got it good that one time, but he, I mean, he's toast.

I'm not stupid enough to tie myself to a millstone like Palmer Lucky. And that was a big part of why I started Andrew. I mean, you asked what our mission is. Our mission is to revolutionize defense, save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars by making tens of billions of dollars. But there's also an element,

I'm gonna prove those guys wrong. I'm gonna show that I'm still somebody, that I'm not a one-hit wonder. And then I'm going to ask for them to come and pitch us on why I should let them invest in my company. And in the end, I'm gonna say, I don't really wanna tie myself to that millstone. Love it. Love it. Love it. There is one investor who is in that category that I let invest just $100,000.

I won't say who. It was just enough to get information right so I can remind them how well we're doing. I love you, buddy. You're amazing. No, I'm a vengeful, bitter, cynical person. I appreciate that you appreciate it. I've seen some of the back and forth salvos. I would not want to be on the other side. I'm very kind about most things.

People imagine that I have this vengeful streak in general. But if you look, the only thing that I'm vengeful about is being the people who ripped me out of my own company that I started as a teenager and then celebrated it. And then, especially the ones who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Like the things I'm most bitter about, it's just that. You can actually slightly-

You're plain wrong. You can slight me today and I'm actually pretty forgiving. It's just, but that one, that one event in my life, I will never forgive any of the people who are responsible. All right. Very crystal clear. So there was an event that took place recently that is epic. You took over the integrated visual augmentation system contract,

$22 billion contract from Microsoft was handed over to Andrel. That's extraordinary. It is. I mean, so- Yeah. So tell us that story. I mean, it's a long story, but- Tell us shortly. The short version is this idea of putting a heads-up

display and a computer and a radio and an AI on every soldier has been around for a long time. It goes back to at least the 1959 Robert Heinlein novel Starship Trooper. I love it. I mean, it's, well, what's actually fascinating about Starship Troopers is it then achieves so much cultural relevance as a film, but the film doesn't actually have the mechanized infantry wearing heads-up displays or mech suits. It's very strange.

The thing that I most liked about Starship Troopers did not make it to the film, although there's a new film being made. Oh, that's awesome. So the question is, will there... I love Heinlein's story should all be made into film. Oh, yes. He has a lot of incredible stuff. If you haven't read his incredible number of things he's written then... One of the things I'm proudest of was getting the Heinlein award years ago.

But, so go on. So this idea is an old one, but nobody's ever been able to pull it off. There's been many efforts between land warrior, future warrior, connected soldier, net warrior. But what you really lacked is a backend that could feed such a device with useful information feeds. It's easy to make a thing that can show a 2D map floating in front of you.

It's hard to build something that can understand the world around you, augment your environment, show threats, show friendlies, tell you what to do. That's something that's only recently become possible. Now, Anderol actually tried to go after the Army's last attempt at doing this, which was IVAS, almost eight years ago. Eight?

Almost eight years ago. But at the time, Anderol was less than two dozen people, the whole company. And so it was pretty clear we were not going to win, and we didn't. And the whole time since, I've been wondering, you know, when I was going to get to tackle this problem. And the story then gets very long, very bound by NDAs, but then it ends with Microsoft saying, okay, we will hand over the entire contract to you. And the United States Army said, yep,

that's fine with us. We'll assign all responsibility and role for continuing this work rather than Microsoft. And the good news for me is that I've been putting enormous amounts of my company's money into building exactly the system you would actually want to get onto every infantryman. And I'm gonna be able to get done in about six months what other companies would take eight years to do. So I got to thank my investors for giving me all my money that I could use to invest

in that. Did Microsoft shut down HoloLens completely? Depends on the way you look at it. So actually, I didn't actually just get the IVAS contract. I actually bought Microsoft's entire mixed reality business. The only part remaining of any substance was IVAS. The original pitch of IVAS was it was a militarized variant of HoloLens, which was going to be an AR VR device for consumers and for enterprise.

That got shut down. They're stripping Windows Mixed Reality out of Windows. It's not going to be a part of Microsoft's near future, that's for sure. Let's not go down that road. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. Did you know that we're likely to see as many as 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040, and that Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure, anticipates they'll have robots in our home in the next two to three years. How about Max Hodak's new form

of BCI called Biohybrid Interfaces that could offer millions of connections between your neocortex and the cloud. Then there's Michael Andreg whose efforts at Eon is focusing on uploading the human connectome to the cloud by 2030 These aren't science fiction scenarios. They're serious efforts underway today I've distilled the most powerful insights and roadmaps from this year's abundance 2025 summit into a comprehensive report That will transform how you see the future Get your free copy of the abundance 2025 summit summary at diamandis.com slash breakthroughs. That's diamandis.com slash breakthroughs. I played in the aerospace industry in the launch business early on,

and it is one of the most entrenched industries on the planet. It absolutely is. I mean, literally a self-licking ice cream cone of people flowing in and out of the government onto these industrial military complex boards. How in the world did you penetrate that? The way that we did it seems crazy in hindsight, but we believed it would work and somehow it did. We decided that we weren't gonna start a defense contractor. We were gonna start a defense product company.

And the difference there is that you spend your own money to make something that works and then you sell that as a product versus trying to get somebody else, usually the government, to pay you to do work, right? And that makes all the difference. The incentives are different. When you're a product company, you

make more money when you move faster. You make more money when you make affordable decisions. You make more money when you do the right thing. And when you are paid on a cost plus contract, where you're paid time, materials, hourly, and a fixed percentage profit on top. You make more money when you spend more time working on something, when you buy

the more expensive components, when you don't reuse things that you've done in the past, instead redoing them from scratch. And so by changing that incentive and by also bringing in a lot of our own money and by building products not on the taxpayer dime but on our dime, we were able to much more efficiently build things. And yet, like we've built autonomous fighter jets and autonomous submarines and now vision augmentation systems

for the infantry, a lattice, AI system called Lattice that kind of binds all of our stuff together. And we've done that all on our own dime. That's the only reason that it works. I don't think people realize that military cost plus contracts are a thing of recent history, like post World War II. That's right. Before, it was a complete opposite way of doing contracting. Well, the United States has a long history of turning small technology companies into major defense companies. The problem is that we've now forgotten how to do that. We haven't done it for many decades. And cost plus contracting is a relatively recent artifact.

And the funny thing is, it's a contract structure that was intended to control graft and cost. The idea is, well, we don't want to let them make too much of a profit margin, so we'll fix their profit margin, we'll say we're only gonna pay them what too much of a profit margin. So we'll just, you will fix their profit margin. We'll say we're only gonna pay them what it costs plus a fixed percentage. What they forgot or didn't understand

is that incentivizes you to make it cost as much as possible, which harms everybody. Nobody wins. Yeah, yeah. Last time- I gotta point out that also the only other real industry that is dominated by cost Plus, like the military, almost all major defense acquisition, MDAPs,

major defense acquisition programs, meaning anything that is of substance. About 80% of MDAPs go to just five companies. 30% of MDAPs have a single bidder, meaning there's zero competition. And almost all of them are cost plus contracting. The only other industry with the same density of cost plus work is residential renovation construction.

And has anyone ever renovated their home and at the end said, that cost exactly as much as I thought it was going to cost. And I really feel like I got value for my money. No, that is not a coincidence that two industries going to cost that. And I really feel like I got value for my money. No. That is not a coincidence that two industries so different, so far apart would come to the same end.

Last time we spent a bunch of time together was the launch of our XPRIZE wildfire competition. The wildfire XPRIZE, yeah. That was in Washington, DC. It was great. Had a bunch of people there. Lieutenant Governor was there. A lot of Cal Fire officials. You announced you'd be the first team to register for that competition.

And then Peter Houland and I came and toured your facility and you showed us the technology you were going to use for that. I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. And it's worth noting that all that tech you saw without getting into details was stuff we developed entirely on our own dime. Like that wasn't something where the government was paying us to build it. Because we believed it was the right thing

and the right solution. And so we invested our own money and we're betting that eventually we'll be able to make it work. I won't always be right, but if I flip enough coins, enough of them will come up heads that it works out. And one of the things you said on stage then,

we've just gone through these, you know, hellacious wildfires. My family and I are still out of our home. We'll hopefully be back in the next couple of weeks. But we're lucky, so many thousands lost their homes in a quarter of a, you know, what is it? $250 billion or thereabouts in damage. Probably not even accounted for fully.

But one of the things you said was- $250 million in damage and they can't seem to find a few million dollars to do controlled burns. It's really interesting. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, I can tell you. No, it's insane. It is, it's a set of perverse incentives.

And the insurance industry is broken. Don't get me started on that. If you want to start a third company, let's talk about reinventing the insurance industry. I mean, the insurance industry should be, we ensure to make sure your home never burns down. We're going to protect your home. Life insurance keeps you alive.

Health insurance keeps you healthy from getting sick, right? That should be the reinvention of our insurance industry. One of the things that you said on stage at that press conference in DC was that you felt at the end of this competition or with the technology that you said on stage at that press conference in DC was that you felt at the end of this competition or with the technology that you were creating that this could be the end of wildfires. I'm going to be a pedant here, a pedant of destructive wildfires. Not planned.

The ecologists were really, really insistent on this. I remember prepping for this speech. You can't say the end of wildfires because wildfires are a natural force that is healthy and- Not in the Pacific Palisades. Yeah, yeah, not in the Pacific Palisades. No, the end of destructive wildfires.

Man, my press training from years ago, it's coming back to me. I absolutely still do, I do still believe it. I mean, I think you're not giving yourself quite enough credit here. I mean, you were trying to make the Wildfire X Prize challenge happen for a long time before it actually happened,

and there was a lot of resistance, even from the governments that did end up involved, and the government agencies, where like there was just not a interest, there was, I think, not a belief that technology could solve this problem. It was easy to say, you're just a bunch of techno boys

with your techno heads and your techno keyboards, and you just type on your computers and you do your techno stuff and they didn't really believe that that could be part of the solution. I think now people are finally figuring it out. You convinced a lot of people on that. Thank you. It's slow. And I think the impact of these wildfires make clear that we don't have time for business as usual. We don't have money for business as usual. We have to try something. One of my dear friends and co-author, Steven Kotler, showed me the data that in the next 20 years,

the Northwestern United States is going to burn. The amount of dry kindling in the forest has exceeded 50%. And there will be just continual burning for it. Now, some of that needs to be controlled, burns and taken care of, but you should have our towns and cities protected. You have some tech to show us on video, I think. I think we have Roadrunner. What's going to happen?

What's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Tell us what we're about to see. Well, we're seeing, I think a few things. I mean, I know I recognize what this is. This is the end of 2024 Andral sizzle reel from the Andral Holiday Party that our team must have sent over your way.

This is a CCA collaborative combat aircraft. Actually just got its official designation from the Air Force a few days ago. It's a FQ-44, which is F for fighter, Q for unmanned. It's the first unmanned fighter jet. That was our Ghost surveillance drone. There's a bunch of those in Ukraine, a lot of those with the US forces, just one in major conflict with the US Army for MRR. This is Anvil. These are in service on US military bases all over the world, protecting bases from drone attacks. These are some of our ASTs, Andral Sentry Towers.

They're on the border, on military bases, on critical nuclear and other energy infrastructure all over the world. We're covering about 35% of the US southern border right now with those actually. This is Menace, it's a mobile command and control. I love your names by the way. Thank you.

They're pretty good. Half the names are good and half of them are code names that the engineers always get to pick and then the customers get so attached that they never change them. One of those examples is Roadrunner which was competing with a Raytheon project called Coyote. And this is one of our dive LDs, one of our smaller submarines that we make. Can do a lot of things that used to be exclusively the domain of a manned submarine and instead you can do it with an autonomous system. We have a much larger version of that called the Dive XL and unfortunately

I can't show you that on a video yet but you're gonna be able to see in the next few months. This is an Altia 600. If we launch on the move you can carry one on your back in a backpack and launch it. We actually just sent another big plane full of these to Ukraine. We sent a bunch of these to Taiwan and that got me sanctioned by China. So I'm gonna go to prison if I go to Hong Kong or China now. I am also sanctioned in Russia and Belarus.

And so there's all kinds of places. Four countries down, you know. Four countries, I'm going for Iran next. I think that's pretty good. That's beautiful. Yeah, and there's Roadrunner. What a beauty. Twin Thrust Vector Turbojet, Vertical Takeoff and Landing,

Micro Fighter. Now is Roadrunner what you can use on the wildfire? You'll have to wait and see. You'll have to wait and see. You'll have to wait and see. I can't give away my secrets. We're collaborating with some of the companies that are in the competition. But others, we're just going to destroy them.

Yes. Give it up for that. But by the way, something you just said, which is important though about XPRIZE, is while we run this competition, we also create extraordinary collaboration between the teams. Teams merge, teams partner. And Anderol is teaming with a bunch of other companies that are there. I think I actually said this in DC when you were announcing it, that I suspected the winning team was not going to be

any one of these companies. It was going to be a consortium or collaborative effort between companies. I'm a huge believer in specialization of labor. Like not just at the company level, but even just the human level. Try, like I am a generalist, and so maybe this is me fetishizing what I am not, but there's a lot of value in people becoming deep experts in exactly what they do.

And so we're partnering with companies that have deep expertise in parts of this problem that we don't have, and I have no intention of building, and then vice versa. We're doing things at Anderol that some of these other companies don't want to do. So I think that's actually also the healthiest outcome. The healthiest outcome is going to be a lot of different companies all working to solve

this problem. Love it. And then he said the companies he's not partnering with, he's going to crush. Okay. Only the bad ones. Only the bad ones. Yeah. I like efficient markets.

All right. I'm going to ask one more question before we have a lot of them, but one more, because I wanna get to your questions here. How do you decide what to go after and what not to? I mean, you must have- As a person or as Anderl? As Anderl, or as an entrepreneur.

Let me put it that way, as an entrepreneur, because you must have a thousand different ideas, lots of approaches to you. Sure. What's your calculus for filtering these? I mean personally like when I started Androl, it was like my first round, like I said earlier, it was me doing my hobby. The second time around I wanted to prove, it was a combination of truly wanting to impact the world and wanting to prove to everybody that I could still impact the world. How important is that ego drive? That massive, absolutely massive.

I need everyone who wronged me to weep. What was it, Conan? What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentations of their women. I want it all. I want it all. But like, in deciding what I was gonna do that was gonna be impactful,

I was deciding between either fixing the defense industry, solving obesity, or solving the prison crisis in America. I decided on defense for a long list of reasons we could talk about some other time. When Anderl is trying to decide what problem we go after, it's a lot easier. It's a lot more rational and less emotional. We have kind of a four-part test for us before we work on something seriously. First, it has to be something that the Pentagon deeply cares about. That means that it can't just be a thing that someone somewhere in the bureaucracy is technically tasked with doing.

You need to pick their top problems. What are the things that keep the Joint Chiefs awake at night, afraid that America is going to fall? Like those are the problems that I want to work on. Things like industrial capacity for rocket boosters, for lack of manufacturing in the United States. Things like our lack of long range fighters that can actually project effects and sensors deep enough into enemy territory to matter.

So you wanna work on things that are going to be a big part of solving big problems, because if you're not, people aren't going to help you cut red tape and push down boundaries. You need to work on important stuff that they wanna help you work on if you're gonna move fast enough. So that's one, you need to work on important stuff that they wanna help you work on if you're gonna move fast enough.

So that's one, Pentagon has to care. Two, Congress has to care. This might not be true for your business, but for me, I have to recognize that Congress has the power of the purse. I can spend my own money developing things, but at the end of the day, Congress decides what gets money at scale.

If you are working on solving a problem that they don't believe in, you are never going to get significant money. They're not gonna tell you that. They're gonna meet with you, and it's like when there's a girl who's turning you down nicely, and she's, oh, that's very nice, very nice, very nice.

And then they never talk to you again. You have to recognize that the nice words are not a reflection of reality, it's just them being nice. And so, I'll give you a common example. If you're working on stuff related to counter-terrorism right now, it's just not what Congress cares about.

They are worried about a great power conflict against Russia, China, or Iran. They are trying to figure out how we're gonna fight a war in the Pacific on the other side of the world and win. And stuff that looks a lot like the wars we've already fought and already won or lost, it's just not of interest to them. And then the last two things that we have to answer are, is it something we can do well? That sounds obvious. You should only do things you can do

well, but that's really a call for Anderle to all, for us to do more. There's things that we can do today that we never would have been able to do well five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. You always want to be growing as a company so that you can do more that we never would have been able to do well five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. You always wanna be growing as a company so you can do more things and go after things that fit in those previous two categories. We couldn't have built an autonomous fighter jet eight years ago when we started the company.

It's pretty funny. And now we're beating Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop Grumman doing the same. So again, and then the last one is, are other people already doing a good enough job? I don't want to be in the business of using my investors' money to crush other companies that are doing a quite competent job, even if I could do better. Why would I spend my life achieving marginal gain over other American

companies that are going to get the job done reasonably well? I want to build things that wouldn't exist otherwise or kill companies that deserve to die. And so, that's what it is. The Pentagon has to care, Congress has to care. We have to be able to do a good job. Other people are doing a bad job. If it fits all four of those categories,

then you're gonna see it in the Anderil showroom within a year or two. That's awesome, dude. It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding.

It was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a fountain upload. Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. Look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease.

These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, health is in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed,

as a bio defense weapon, and their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best for you to eat? Or what foods should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements,

and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help

you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. All right, let's get to the microphones. And as you do.

And I'll note that less than half the products we make are even on our website right now. So, you know, like the things we're doing, it's beyond even what's necessarily public. I'm gonna ask one question. What piece of conventional wisdom in defense or tech do you think is completely wrong? Follow your dreams.

It's dumbest shit I've ever heard. Yeah? Yeah. I know it worked for me, but the reality is that most people are going to do better off following where they can have the biggest impact. It's following your skills, following your talents, not your dreams.

A lot of kids have stupid dreams, and a lot of people have dreams that aren't gonna impact the world. And so when people say, oh, tell people to follow, I'm going to tell my kids to follow their dreams. Like my kids are probably have stupid dreams. At least at some point in their life, I'm not going to tell them to follow. Are you a YouTuber, video game? Yeah. I mean, like in 1969, you know, the number one job that kids wanted was?

You can probably guess. Astronaut. Astronaut. Fantastic. They're like supermen, fighter pilot, PhD, public speaker heroes. OK. And what's the number one job today? It goes back and forth between YouTuber and professional gamer

and streamer. It goes back and forth. And so I would say conventional wisdom, that people say follow your dreams, I think it is dangerous. It is bad. It would lead to a nation full of people not having impact and not taking care of their families.

There's even people saying, I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna do something I hate at least. Like you might, if everyone followed their dreams, on average, people will not make enough money to get by and they will not be impactful. That is a bad thing. And if you are not passionate about any of the things that you're talented in doing,

you need to get better at doing stuff. Like go find something to be good at or find something to be passionate about. You need to change yourself, not just follow whatever path you've randomly found. You don't just fall out of a coconut tree and then go and do whatever you feel like. Let's go to Yoss.

Hi Yoss. Hey Peter, thanks for having us. Thank you so much for coming back. I was a huge fan two years ago, still a fan. Thank you. My question for you is I really admired at that time what you were doing for Ukraine and I'm curious about what the new administration means

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

decisions the variance day to day the ceiling for positive change is certainly much higher. I'm actually quite optimistic I think that things are going to happen that never would have happened previously I think we will be able to cut spending in a very big way. I think that that will force people to tighten their belts and think hard about where we're spending money and develop more effective techniques. Necessity is the mother of invention. If there are things that our government needs to be doing

and they find themselves with less money, given competent people in the role, they will figure out how to innovate and do better. We've always done that as a country. There's never been catastrophic failures in our country that were because we couldn't figure out how to be more technologically savvy. It just hasn't happened.

Anything that we've actually sent our minds to, we've done, whether it's going to the moon or trying to build better databases. So I think we can do that. With Ukraine specifically, I hate to, I hate to abdicate responsibility for this. You know, we've had stuff as Anderle in Ukraine since the second week of the war.

I met with Zelensky before the war and I met with him again in Kiev during the war. I've been to Ukraine to help train operatives in how to use Anderle's weapon system. So again, you during the war. I've been to Ukraine to help train operatives in how to use Androl's weapons system. So again, you can probably guess where I fall. But it is not appropriate for me, in my opinion, people ask why I'm not tweeting about this. Why are you not tweeting,

I tweeted about us sending them more weapons, but why aren't you tweeting more about what should be done politically? My answer is simple, because I'm the executive of a weapons company making money selling weapons to Ukraine, to the United States for Ukraine, to the United Kingdom for Ukraine. Aren't we supposed to hate it when the military industrial complex advocates for longer,

more extended wars in a way that clearly benefits their pocketbooks? My point is, whatever my opinion is, I'm not the right guy to be telling the message. I don't think it's the place of weapons companies to be weighing in on what conflicts are appropriate, how long they should go on, what quantity of weapons we should... I just don't. And so I think people see this too, are like, Palmer, would you work with this country? Would you work with that country? Would you enter this war? And my point is, you better hope that that decision is not made by me.

You better hope we're not moving into a dystopian future where corporate executives de facto control U.S. foreign policy and military policy. Because if you believe in democracy at all, then those decisions need to be made by civilian leadership that is accountable to the body populace, not me. I'm not accountable to anyone.

My board is three people and I control all of them. It's not, it's, it's, it's, that, that, that would be my look, big picture and little picture. Good question, Yoss. Thanks. All right, Thomas, what do you got? Thank you. Thank you.

Very enjoyable. I know exoskeleton aside, I kept thinking of Tony Stark when I saw that video, so it reminded me of him. A private, private question I'll try to ask you later, but in your bio that I read, you talked about your inspiration when you first started out to form Andro. You were like helping veterans with PTSD. Could you share a little bit about that and how that happened? Because I'm a huge believer we've got a big problem there and psychedelics can help, a

lot can help. Yeah. So for about eight months prior to me ever starting Oculus, I was still, I started building virtual reality heads. That's when I was 15 years old. I started Oculus when I was 19. But in between there somewhere, I worked for about eight months at the ICT Mixed Reality Lab, which is an army affiliate research center working on an army program called BraveMind.

BraveMind was doing a lot of different things. The conspiracy theorists say it was a brainwashing program, it wasn't. It was a program to treat veterans suffering from extreme PTSD using virtual reality exposure therapy. So by exposing them to things that trigger them, you could train them to engage in coping techniques, thinking techniques, biofeedback techniques. They would mitigate their physiological responses and in doing so you could reduce their dependence on medication, improve their quality of life, and it was

it was I can't take any credit for the success of the program. I was a lab technician, I was a cable monkey, you know, a monitor minder, all kinds of names they came up with for us. But the people who are doing the real work on that, they successfully shepherded that from one VA hospital, clinical trials, to 40 VA hospitals across the country. It's a great example of how technology can help people

if you apply it in ways that to a normal person, like people thought it was crazy, but it ended up having better impact and better results than any of the medical interventions, any of the pharmaceutical interventions. It was fantastic. There's so many areas across the government like that, and you mentioned

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

Thank you. Let's go to Craig in the back here. So during the last eight years, have you seen any of the major defense contractors actually be able to make change? back here. So during the last eight years, have you seen any of the major defense contractors actually be able to make change? Are you seeing them continue to do what they've always done? Some of them are definitely engaging in change. But it's a matter of speed and extent, right? They're not totally static. They are somewhat changing. I don't think they're changing fast

enough. And if you look at their revenue streams, it's not actually dominated by new procurement. If you're a company that's been around for many decades and you're supporting platforms that the United States has spent tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars procuring, you're actually making more money off the things that you've done for the last 20 or 30 years than anything that you're doing in the next 10. And so that drives incentives, that drives how they think and how fast they can move and react.

And you gotta remember that at the end of the day, companies are the product of their shareholders. And shareholders, you can define that in a lot of ways. Like some people literally hold physical shares, some people, they're the employees, they have a stake in the company, whether they, holds physical shares. Some people, you know, they're the employees, they have a stake in the company, whether they own shares or not. In the case of these major defense companies,

their investors don't want them to be like Anderil. Their investors want them to be an ultra low risk extension of the United States government, akin to a bond in terms of risk, that will continue to exist even if, let's say, COVID lambda variant comes along and wipes out consumer spending for a couple years. That is the asset category they fit into.

And so suppose I were the CEO of a major defense company and I were to announce that we're gonna be like Anderil. We've seen the light, we've seen the way, we're going to be a defense product company. Instead of putting 1% of our revenue back into internal research and development, we're gonna put 100% of our revenue back into IRED. You know what's gonna happen?

You know what that CEO is gonna say the next day? Nothing, he's already been fired by the board. It's, that's not what his investors hired him to be. And so that is actually the biggest challenge. Before we go to the mic, can I just run through some of the ones that are on the screen real fast? Yeah, sure, go for it.

All right, we've got, number one, are we militarily ready enough? No. What is next for ModRetro and the Chromatic? For We've got number one, are we militarily ready enough? No. What is next for Mod Retro in the Chromatic? For people who don't know, oh hell yeah, you have my second favorite color. For people who don't know, I have a side company

called Mod Retro. It was a forum that I started when I was 14 years old. We started a project, we were modifying vintage game consoles with modern technology. For me and some of my buddies, we've been working on a project, we were modifying vintage game consoles with modern technology. For me and some of my buddies, we've been working on a project for 15 years to build a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. And we finally finished last year

and we started selling them to people and open sourced it. So if you want an open source clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color with a sapphire screen lens and magnesium aluminum alloy chassis, there's what? It's beautiful. Would you like one? You can't order it, it's not for sale. They're completely sold out.

So I'm glad you got it. What is next? We're gonna be doing a Nintendo 64. Yeah. How important is the human in your future work? Very, very important. We can't automate people entirely. Will you need employees?

I think so. How do you differentiate for yourself from competition? I think we're just very differentiated. Mostly we struggle to convince people that we're not too crazy. We are very different. We're so fundamentally different at a product level. I don't have customers coming in and saying,

so what makes you different? It's not my problem. It's as they can hire the same talent and tech know-how, but you're in products, I didn't make them. Yeah, I think this is what I got to before with that last question. Yeah, they could in theory hire the same talent and tech know how, but you're in products out in them. Yeah, I think this is what I got to before with that last question. Yeah, they could in theory hire the same talent and tech know how, but people don't wanna work

for companies that don't put their own money into things that try to drag things out. They don't wanna work for low risk companies like that. It's a different type of person for a different type of role. Anyway. Let's go to John Battaglia on Zoom. Hey, John.

Hey, great information. Wow, unbelievable. So my great information. Wow, unbelievable. So my question is about your creative process. How, when do your big ideas come to you? Are they in a dream state? Are they when you're in the shower? Is it a consistent way they come to you? And if so, how do you get yourself in that state?

I steal all of my ideas from science fiction from the 60s and 70s. That's mostly what I do. Um, in fact, I had a friend of mine, Art Dula, who used to literally read all of Heinlein stuff. I've read every novel he's ever put and I steal everything. Yes. And he can't do anything about it.

He's dead. Yes, he is. But amazing stuff. Brilliant designer. Well, and I mean, you read about stuff. Like he published a piece in, I think, a 1945 issue of a serial called Astounding Science Fiction. And it was a short story about fighter jets and space fighters piloted by intelligent AI

that flies alongside human pilots. And like, now that's what, like that is what we were building today. and space fighters piloted by intelligent AI that flies alongside human pilots. And like, now that's what, like that is what we were building today. And there, I kid you not, there are ideas that he lays out for how he believes you should communicate with and personify AI in for piloting ships

that we have copied into our products. Like, and it's not just him. My job is to look at problems in the world and find the best solutions. But I need to first come prepared by knowing what the solutions that people in the past who have thought about things very deeply and thought about the future deeply

have already come to the conclusion. I'm not gonna be able to do as well, sitting on my own in a room, thinking about what the future could be as the combined works of the top, let's say, thousand sci-fi authors over the last century, right? They've had a lot more time to think about it. Unconstrained time. And they've been able to think about the first order effects, second order effects, tertiary effects. And so I could just rip off all their thinking.

And of course, they get it wrong because some of them are trying to tell stories. This is also, by the way, I like to rip off sci-fi that's old because new sci-fi is largely not as concept driven. Like books were this way for a while. There was a period in the 70s and 80s, like it was the take a piece of technology

and that is the show genre, like Knight Rider, and Erebol, for the $6 million, or even RoboCop. It's like, there's this thing, right? And it's a tech thing. All right, so here, that's the story. That genre has gone away, which is unfortunate. I want it to come back. We're like, so what's the pitch?

What's this movie about? Oh, it's a car, and it's really fast because of this new technology. You're like, oh. It's good. One of our faculty members, Gil Berdon. Hey, Gil. Welcome back.

Speed Racer. Thank you. Speed Racer. I love Speed Racer. Hey, cars fast. That's the story. Gil, AKA, Beth here. I think we follow each other on Twitter.

First of all, big fan. I want to thank you for the vibe shift you started for all deep tech and defense tech founders. I'm personally working on AI chips to win the chip war. And I think your chip on the shoulder energy definitely resonated with me as well. Thank you. I appreciate that. Having gone through the media swarm attack myself and supposedly I'm building Skynet

or something. I don't know. But you can believe it. I was a journalism major before I dropped out. I could have been one of them. I'm kind of like one of those terminators that turned good. I know how to spin a story and tell a narrative and twist the truth, but this time I'm back for good. I'll be back.

Awesome. Awesome, yeah. You know, a lot of the vibe has shifted for this new generation of founders, but there's still sort of inertia from the media, inertia from the venture capital community to invest in deep tech and have some actual courage. So what sort of advice would you have for this new generation of founders in deep tech and defense tech and El Segundo and beyond?

Control your narrative. You don't need to work with the press. I think maybe I'm going to be wrong. So, this is probably the thing I have least conviction in. So, it's like a crazy opinion that I have like 60% conviction in. All of the media companies, every single one is running on either fumes or, in some cases, a half full tank of gas left over from when interest rates were near zero. There was a lot of money put into tech companies

and media companies and everything that made no sense at all. And they are all trying to figure out what they are going to do about the fact that their businesses are terrible, nobody likes them and they're irrelevant in modern society. I love that. That is what is driving a lot of the vitriol, I think.

They know the numbers. They're not putting the numbers out publicly in most cases, but they know the numbers. And when they see more and more people getting sources from citizen news sources, you know, when I'm not just talking about an ex, I'm talking about like, you know, I subscribe to a Patreon called Inner City Press. And he's a fantastic independent journalist who covers mostly things in New York City courtrooms way better than any mainstream press

outlet. There's a lot of sub stacks that are the same. There's a lot of YouTubers who are doing a great job. And so they're seeing this all happening and realizing that they're things are coming to an end. So I would say just don't worry about it. Wait them out. You'll be here when they're gone. There was a question given that so much innovation comes from defense.

Oh no, it disappeared. It was given how much there that so much innovation comes from defense, oh no, it disappeared. It was given how much there's so much innovation in defense, are you going to sprinkle some of that in the civilian world? The answer is no, not really. I set out to start a company that would solve our national security problems. And in fact, I've purposely avoided doing things that I knew were going to do better on the civilian side than the military side. I have nothing, there's nothing wrong

with civilian applications, but it's not what I set out to do and when you run a company, you need to be focused. And to be clear, I think I could make more money if I just focused on where I need to make money. But I make enough money and control my company sufficiently well enough that I can afford to leave money on the table and do things that I want to do.

I want to work on national security problems, and so I will. Me and J. Cal on good terms now. Absolutely not. He's a horrible person. Everyone laughs, ha ha, no. He's a really bad guy, and it's really terrible how he's still out there on podcasts where

he says, oh, no, nobody agrees with Palmer. I know all his board members and I have a good relationship with... No, he doesn't. I think he couldn't even name a single one of our board members. He's literally just lying to people because he can get away with it and he's surrounded by psychophants who won't call him on it and say, but Jason, you're just lying. That's not true. They're all condemnable. Anyway. All right. Richard. Hey Palmer. Thank you for all the great work you're doing. Two years ago,

we brought the dream of flying cars here to A360. I think you met Thomas Patan, the founder, and we got some of the community here to invest. Last week we had the first serial production but as we continue dreaming do you think that the consumer dream of the personal aerial mobility sports car of the sky is the future or now that you have seen the other side is it more government first responder police ambulance or potentially military logistics? It's all of it. I mean I'm look I'm a I'm a rotary wing pilot. I own seven helicopters, including a UH-60 Blackhawk. I really love vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

And I believe that EV toll stuff is going to come to pass. It's taken longer than I wanted. I think that we wasted a lot of energy on purely electric systems when we should have been focused on hybrids. Because EV tolls, they're not actually designed to haul people around. They're designed to haul batteries around over and over and over again.

And then a person gets to hitch a ride. That's where all your mass is. So anyway, I'm glad we've stopped wasting time on that. I still believe that that is going to happen. Now there's obstacles in the way. I was at CES a couple years back and the head of Los Angeles Department of Transportation said that the city of Los Angeles will not allow any vertiports, new vertiports to be installed until VTOL Transport is as cheap as public transportation because she refuses to allow the billionaires to come in and compete

and subsidize and destroy public transportation. And you know, some of the guys from Bell Helicopter are on the same panel and they're saying, yo, that's a beautiful vision for the future. It'll start expensive, get cheaper. She said, no, I wanna be clear, no Vertiport's still as cheap as the city bus. And so unfortunately, there's a lot of dumb people in the world, and that is actually gonna be

our biggest obstacle for EV toll. It's going to come to places where, I think Dallas is gonna be a place that turns into a hub pretty early. I think New York, obviously, because they already have heliport infrastructure. No, I totally believe in it. That said, you might have seen we partnered with Archer

a few weeks ago. That was announced. I think that a lot of the tech that's developed by the civilian EV toll sector will have huge military applications. And this is one of those things where if people are going to design FAA-certified drive train, powertrain components, they can go 15,000 hours, flight hours, without

a single maintenance interval. I absolutely want to use that in my military aircraft. I don't think I need to rebuild it. So it's essentially a platform where you don't choose, you go both ways. If I were you guys, I would probably, if I'm just making shit up. If I were you guys, I would probably realize that search and rescue, fire, police, that is the now. And the future is still EVTOL. Because remember, government and like, it's public works. Public works applications have waivers to everything. You don't even need to be FAA certified. If you can find a public agency, you

don't even need a pilot's license to fly for a fire department. Do you know that? Or for a fire department. Do you know that? Or for a police department. They can put you in a helicopter that they build themselves with a pilot that's got no training. And of course, they don't actually do this. In practice, they buy surplus military helicopters, civil helicopters, and they're mostly private pilots or people that they put through their own training programs. But the point is the waivers are there. That is the now. You need to hope that the FAA gets their act together before you run out of money if you're going to make money on the civilian side.

That's the mosaic, right? The brand new, all of everything modernization program in the FAA. They've pushed it back for what, five or six years now? You need to last long enough for mosaic to get through. And if you don't, then you're gone. Thank you. Love your chill outfit. What do you wear when you show up for government meetings? I wear a suit.

And that is because- Does it have Hawaiian patterns on the suit? Not when I meet with the government. Okay. The suits are for funerals, weddings, Pentagon meetings, Capitol Hill meetings. That's it. It's simple. It's just a matter of respect. Hi. Hello there. I'm Australian, but I'm from London. Hi, Palmer. I really respect what you're doing. And I remember getting the Wired magazine of Oculus in 2014, and that got me

into the whole metaverse and Snow Crash and Neil Stevenson. So I bond getting the Wired magazine of Oculus in 2014, and that got me into the whole metaverse and Snow Crash and Neil Stevenson, so I bond over the science fiction and I love what you're doing with autonomous vehicles and defense. My question for you is in the perspective of moonshots as our conversation and how that changes over time based on cultural context and all these different factors,

do you foresee a moment in your lifetime and your kid' lifetime when we're no longer at war as a human species? I believe collaboration is more important than competition. My science fiction books going to the moon at the end of the year and I got Frank White to write the foreword for it which is the overview effect and the whole idea is that we're one human family on Spaceship Earth and we should start viewing it like that. I would love to see personally in my lifetime where we're at a time where we don't even have to talk

about war as an industry. I think that there will be a time without war and then that time will come to an end. Like, yeah, I'm not, human history, we've been fighting for way too long for me to sit on this stage and say, yeah, I think we're just, we're gonna get over that. And it's one of those interesting problems

where the more, let's say you totally get away with it, like war stops, the longer you spend away from it, the less that people believe it's possible and the less you do to prevent it. This is the theory of the end of history that existed pre-World War I, then pre-World War II, then before the war in Vietnam, and then before the war in… Like, there's… The kind of globalized financial elites every time come to this conclusion where they say, well, we're the most important people in the world,

and so sternly worded letters from us and intertanglement between our companies economically mean that large scale conflict is impossible. I encourage you to go back and read people who wrote about the end of history right after World War I. They said World War I was so horrible and now we are so unified, Europe is so unified that never again is war even possible. It's not even possible to imagine. And then they said, also, all the territorial disputes, they're so settled that nobody's ever going to try

to undo the borders. I mean, like, it happens over and over again. And I refuse to be the guy who's quoted like that a hundred years from now where they said, and here's this idiot Palmer who he said, I believe that someday war will be over. So, yes, I think there will be a period where war ends. I think it will go on for a long period of time. I think we can build tools of deterrence that make…wars start when one or both sides disagree as to the outcome, when they disagree as to who will win and who will lose. When the outcome is relatively known,

wars don't start. And so, I'm a big believer in either unipolar or maybe, you know, bi or multipolar power. But like, if you have a few powers in the world that are relatively at stalemate with each other and your interests don't diverge too much, you can get away with no war for a long time. But who's to say that someone's not going to come up with an asymmetrical advantage, a programmable virus that wipes out all of his enemies, and he decides that he's gonna launch an asymmetrical war, and he's gonna get a bunch of crazy people on his side? The last thing I'll end this with is war can come in a lot of forms. You can have nation states, or you can have radical extremist groups. You can have radical, radical extremist groups. You're gonna have radical, violent religious groups. And it would be very hard for me to imagine

that never again will there come a group that is willing to die, lose, and consider that victory in pursuit of their extremist goals. How do you deter someone like that? Who's like, oh, I'm gonna lose so hard. I'm gonna die and go to heaven so good. It's just, how do you deter that? It's very difficult. All right, we're

Running short. I'll be efficient my time so Jacob and Carrie short questions. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Good. This is controversial I work in prosthetics I work with a lot of active warriors They suffer a traumatic amputation and the first thing they want to do is go back. Have you ever thought of militarizing prosthetics? We... It's an osteo integration.

I actually collect high-end prosthetics. So I... For a hobby? Yes. I have... So the thing is, there's a lot of interesting... There's a few disciplines in the world that attract extremely competent people

who really fight for every last bit of weight savings, power density, materials, science advantage. One of them is F1 racing. Another one of maybe a half dozen in the world that is the best at attracting these people is high-end prosthetics. I mean, there high-end prosthetics. There are very advanced prosthetics that have the most power-dense actuators in the world, the best material science in the world. They're not too cost-sensitive, small,

improvements in performance make a huge difference on the quality of life for these people. So have I considered getting into that industry? Of course I'm daydreaming about it. I look at some of these, you know, cool multi-composite and, you know, metallic, ceramic, carbon wonders and I say, man, I would love to be doing something better. But this is actually one of those areas where my conclusion was there are already people doing a quite good job. I think that the best that I could do would be to somewhat make it a little better for a while. But then the other people would leapfrog me. And so it would be a continuous fight to be a tiny bit better.

I'm very interested in this space and it continues to advance rapidly. But I think it's probably not going to be one for that reason that Anderil gets into. Thank you. All right. Last question, Jacob. Hello, Palmer. I hope this is a short question, but it's a big one. Based on your experience in DOD, do you believe that there will ever be a time where the United States employs a fully autonomous global warfare system, where we no longer fight wars with our men, but with our technology and our machines? If so, when do you think this will be, and what do you think are the technologies that will be within these future wars?

I don't think it'll ever be fully autonomous because the gains aren't there and the negatives are. It's one of those things where going from, let's say, a million people doing some task to a hundred thousand people through automation, that's a huge gain in cost. You can often do much a better job going from a hundred thousand to, let's say, a thousand people. Maybe there's even gains there. If you look at the United Kingdom, a smaller country than ours, they're looking at reducing the size of their Navy over the next 10 years by 30%. And that's still significant for them. Going from a thousand people to zero people, I don't see the gains. It's just, if people are

going to be responsible for violence, and if we are going to be responsible for violence and if we are going to be responsible for use of force against other nations, against other people, there has to be a level of attention and responsibility to measure it with the consequence. Exactly. Imagine if you had one person, not nobody, but one guy who runs the whole war. You can't actually hold him accountable for anything because you could say, oh my God, this thing happened, it's absolutely unthinkable. And he's going to say, well, of course, I had to do a thousand actions over the course of an hour, I had to take out a million targets. Of course, I couldn't actually ever possibly dedicate any meaningful amount of attention

to anything. And that is what we need to avoid. We need to avoid outsourcing responsibility for violence to machines, to robotics. If we are gonna kill people, we need to kill people. And it needs to weigh on us. I never thought I'd be clapping for, we need to keep kill people. Hi, my name's Palmer Lucky and I build killer robots.

Ladies and gentlemen, on that note, give it up for Palmer Lucky. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, at this year's abundance summit, Raoul Pal and Bill Barheight predicted that the tokenization of assets will create an unprecedented amount of wealth, growing from 3 trillion today to 100 trillion by 2034. You know, that's more wealth than all the Silicon Valley billionaires, Russian oligarchs, Chinese tycoons, and Wall Street bankers combined. Meanwhile, Vinod Khosla explained how AI will multiply our scientific capacity by 10x to 100x within five years. These opportunities are way too big to miss.

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