Pirate Wires - Palmer Luckey On Military Defense, War In Israel, & U.S. Manufacturing | Pirate Wires Podcast #22 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

EPISODE #22: Mike Solana is joined by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey. Anduril is leading the way as an entirely new defense company in the United States, specializing in autonomous systems. In this episode, Palmer discusses the war in the Middle East, the future of American war, concerns over China, banning TikTok, and the production of semiconductors in the United States. Featuring Mike Solana, Palmer Luckey Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Palmer Twitter: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Welcome Palmer Luckey! 2:00 - Selling Weapons To Other Countries 4:00 - Who Is Anduril Working With? 8:15 - Iron Dome 13:15 - New Anduril Projects That Palmer Can Speak About 14:15 - Cost-Plus Contracting 19:15 - Subterranean Warfare 32:00 - Technologies That Are Coming Soon 35:00 - 23andMe Hack 36:15 - The Next Pandemic 39:00 - How Palmer Manages Emotions While Taking On Such A Stressful Business 42:00 - Chinese Military Threats 46:30 - Manufacturing - How Do We Increase Manufacturing In The U.S. 56:30 - Banning TikTok 1:00:45 - Chips & Semiconductors In The U.S. 1:05:15 - Palmer Gives Optimism For The Future 1:07:00 - See You Next Week! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday! #podcast #military #war #Israel #Palestine #Hamas #defense #usa #tech #politics

Your job is to think of horrible things that could go wrong and fix them before they happen. The way I look at Iron Dome is the ultimate manifestation of the future of the United States' role in future conflicts. You could have a lot of those janky rockets level Washington, D.C. in a matter of a few days. Don't end up in the situation that Apple's in, so dependent on China. I believe that the next warfighting domain is the subterranean domain. What is something that makes you feel hopeful right now? Welcome back to the pod, guys. Today, we have the legendary palmer lucky founder of ondural i'm super excited to have you on man we've talked you know a handful of times now

at this point but this is the first time i've ever got you on the pirate wires pod um i wish it was in sort of less tragic horrifying terrible global circumstances but obviously we are at uh war not we the world is is sort of locked in a horrifying war again um you know a little over a year following the ukrainian escalation and uh is kind of you know pretty bleak moment i think a lot of people are feeling um nervous anxious about it and i uh, separate from those feelings, I'm just very curious about the war component of it all, the technology component of it all. This is a new terrain and who better to talk to about that, just the mechanics of that than you. So thanks for joining. And I kind of want to just get right into it.

Maybe we start with just the process of how a private defense company even works with governments and foreign governments. It's super basic, I know, for people who are super steeped in this stuff, but for a lot of our listeners, it's new. I'm assuming that the process here is like the government has a sort of okay list, and then you're working with Ukraine or you're working with Israel. Oh, it's even more than that. It's more even involved than that. I often get asked by people who are not experts in it or experts in anything like much of the media, if I would sell to X country, Y country, or Z country, what about this conflict? What about this hypothetical? And the good news is that it's actually not up to me. The United States government has rules. So it doesn't really matter

if I would be willing to sell to North Korea or willing to sell to China. It is prohibited by the United States government and I go to prison for doing so. That's a point worth harping on a little bit because it's important that it doesn't matter what my opinion is. You don't want to live in a country where our de facto foreign policy is determined by corporate executives deciding who they want to work with and who they don't. People in my position, in a private corporation making weapons systems, shouldn't have the ability to decide, yeah, I would love to sell to North Korea or no, I personally would not. But the guy down the street would. It's not a tenable situation. So luckily, the people who are making these decisions are to some degree accountable to the populace through the democratic process. If someone is

doing things they shouldn't, you can vote them out. And companies like mine, we have to work actually pretty closely with the government. There's something called FMS, the foreign military sales process. And pretty much everything that is, you know, exclusive for military use has to go through that process. And luckily, the United States has gotten better at facilitating those transactions that we can talk about how they could get to a good place. I'd say they're better, but not good. Before I get to sort of my technical questions about the kinds of defense technologies that might be useful in this particular conflict in the Middle East, is there anything that you can tell me about who you guys are working with right now? I'm not actually sure if you're allowed to. I can't talk about everyone that we're working with, especially where it would disclose things that are operationally sensitive, but things I can talk about. We, of course, work with the United States. We do a lot of work with the UK Ministry of Defense. We do a lot of work with Australia. We've sold to a few other European countries. We are doing some, of course, doing some stuff in Ukraine, have been since the second week of the war, and that continues to be ongoing. We're part of one of the recent aid packages, getting some more loitering munitions into Ukraine.

just about the United States. It was explicitly around defending the West. And I think that even goes back to the name of the company. We wanted to take this position that countries aren't just different, that there are countries that are better or worse, and that we were going to be on the sides of the ones that were better as determined by the handful of values that still remain true between those countries today. There's a book called The Sovereign Individual, and it talks a lot about the sort of shape of the future world as determined by new technologies that sort of force the world in a given direction. One of the themes I thought was very fascinating, I'm thinking about a lot right now, was very fascinating. I'm thinking about a lot right now is the way in which technology seems to

advantage the defensive over the offensive. It will be much easier, for example, the authors speculated that it would be much easier for an underpopulated and underpowered region with sufficient technology to defend itself from the outside than it would be to sort of go after it. Do you roughly agree with that given what you're seeing in the sort of technologies that are emerging right now? Are the defenders advantaged over the offenders or increasingly is that kind of the direction we're going? I think it depends on the technologies you're talking about. And there are a lot of things that certainly do accrue more to the defender than to the invader. I mean, it really depends. For example, if you're talking about the ability to manufacture large numbers of autonomous systems, it really doesn't matter so much who's the defender,

who's offensive defense as who has the larger industrial capacity. If you have China as this huge major industrial power, they're going to have a huge advantage in a world where autonomy enables them to win the way that they can best win against a much smaller nation. But on the other side, I'd say especially as you start to look at things that are enabled by AI, there are a lot of advantages that are going to accrue more to the defender. I kind of feel this way about bioweapons, for example. to the defender. I kind of feel this way about bioweapons, for example. People are pointing out that large AI models might allow for the creation of really dangerous bioweapons. I do think that that's kind of scary, but at the same time, it's an area where I think that AI biodefense is actually the thing that is going to get a stronger accrual of advantages. In other words, if I can use it to build systems that keep people free of pathogens, I'm just going to go way off the science fiction

land here. But if we can get to building nanobots that are going through our blood and getting rid of everything that is not matching a biosignature that it's seen the week before, that's an advantage that is going to work against every potential pathogen that you could imagine making. And so now either there's thousands of ways you could try to beat that, but the one thing that you've made is now defending against all those. And then it's worse than that, maybe for the aggressor, they don't just have to go up against maybe one brand of nanobots. Maybe I'm going to have 10 brands of nanobots in my body, including an open source one. And they're all going to be continuously updated and competing against each other to try and stop these pathogens. So that's an example where I

think that and a whole bunch of other things, the defender does have the advantage. It's reminding me of the first, I think, really evocative technology of the conflict. And it's an old technology, but it's something that I think probably a lot of people just tuning in to all of this in the Middle East, which is average american which is really me i mean i've dipped in and out right now i'm like oh shit i have to pay attention to the middle east again um the iron dome uh so you have this really just i think visually spectacular representation of the power of defense up in the sky yep um you're seeing it sort of light up and you're being well defended. It's very unique.

Most, if maybe no other region of the world, no other city in the world or region of the world has this. I would love to know, and I know it's not exactly what you guys are working on at Unreal, and I'm sure that you would work on it in a slightly different way if you had to.

But in terms of that, like how does that work? Is it some kind of drone technology? Like it's not's not. They're doing anti-missiles or how is it working? targets like aircraft, but it's really good at going after the threats that Israel has been seeing. And Iron Dome, you might know, was a collaboration between the United States and Israel. There's a lot of US weapons technology in there. There's a lot of Israeli know-how in there as well. The way I look at Iron Dome is the ultimate manifestation of the future of the United States' role in future conflicts, which is not to be the world police, but to be the world gun store. So it's not that we're going to be setting boots on the ground

that are going to be marching around and dying for other people's countries. I think that our future role is going to look making things like Iron Dome more accessible to other nations, making defensive tools that allow people to defend their homes, making these countries into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. That's actually probably the best way for us to shape a lot of these foreign wars is just to pick who we're going to sell defensive tools to, and then double down on getting the right tools and letting them die for their countries when it comes to everything else. But giving them the tools to do that themselves rather than taking on the load ourselves. Yeah. You mentioned it's... I agree. Yes. And then also you were saying it's designed

for the specific challenges it's facing there, which are these sort of junky rockets. It's not that serious of a threat, right? I think maybe that's one of the misconceptions of the region is that it's like the super powered rocketry. They're just junky enough maybe to take on. I'm wondering how could the offensive escalate in ways that would be more difficult for the Dome to protect this, to Tel Aviv, for example, and how would you think about maybe improving it? I mean, I'd say, yeah, the rockets are janky, but they're carrying pretty significant payloads. And really, the reason that they're not such a huge threat anymore is only because of this

highly advanced defensive system that's been optimized against them. They're a very powerful asymmetric capability against a lot of the people. Put it another way, you can have a lot of those janky rockets level Washington DC in a matter of a few days because we don't have a system. Yeah. Well, I don't know if I'd say no defense, but certainly not capable of a prolonged defense against a barrage like that. And that's true of most nations in the world. Israel has been forced to confront the reality of violence as a part of their continued existence. And so they've had to build things like the Iron Dove. But I think the future is going to have actually a lot of these specialized systems. I don't think that in the past, the United States would develop these very

exquisite, powerful weapon systems that were often optimized around projection of force to the other side of the world. And then those are the things that would go through the FMS process, the foreign military sales process. And we would sell them to countries and we would be selling them things that were way too expensive for the particular threat that they had faced. I'll give you a critical example, Patriot missiles. They cost a couple million a shot, and you often need to fire two of them to make sure that at least one of them hits. They're reasonably reliable. But if you really need to take something out, you're not going to bet just one. They cost a couple million bucks a pop. And there have been cases where we have allies who are shooting down drones that caught like quadcopters that cost hundreds of dollars with multi-million dollar missiles.

And you and I have heard about these now for a long time, but I think the average American is not quite aware of how ridiculous it is that we're kind of selling these tools to people that are hugely overmatched for the real threat they have. I think that in the future, you're going to see the US doing a lot more work like what Anduril has done, where we work with customers to build things that are tightly tailored to their particular problem. The thing that solves Israel's problem is Iron Dome to a degree, but even Iron Dome doesn't solve the problem of a dozen other US nations.

We're going to need to build the things that allow them to cost effectively fight their terrors. Before I get into the... I want to talk about subterranean warfare. Yeah, yeah. But right before we get to that, you're alluding to some stuff that you're working on. I'm wondering how much of it you could share. I would love an example of a challenge you're facing that Ondaril is kind of solving in a unique way.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I can't talk about. I know. There's one thing I can't talk about the details of it, but we have a system that's a reusable counter-air effector. So it's something that allows you to, rather than throwing away a missile every time that you need to shoot down a large aircraft, you can instead use this tool and then

use it again and again and again and again and again. And that hasn't really been the way that cost plus contractors have thought about the problem. As long as governments are willing to buy single-use missiles that are really expensive, you actually want them to buy a whole new missile every time. But if you start to think about driving down the operational cost of using this for long periods of time, think like, how many dollars do I need to spend per kill rather than dollars per missile fired? You're going to make very, very different decisions. And so keep an eye out on some of that stuff. But I think we are thinking about it pretty differently because we have different incentives.

It's not because I'm smarter. I think a lot of these companies could have come up with this stuff. They didn't have any incentive to do that because- This is the cost plus. I know you guys have talked about it for so long, but do you mind- Oh man, we've talked about it so many times.

I know you have. But for this audience, cost plus contracting is the way that most procurement of new weapon systems are done in the United States. And the background here is 80% of the procurement money goes to just five companies and 30% of weapons, major weapons programs have only a single bidder, meaning no competition at all. A cost plus contract is where the government agrees to pay you for all of your costs and then a fixed percentage of profit on top,

let's say four or five or 6%, it's usually a pretty low margin thing compared to the consumer space, the B2B space. The problem with that is that it incentivizes you for your costs to be high because I only make money on the plus and there has to be more cost if there's going to be more plus. So you actually want your programs to run as long over schedule as you can get away with before it gets canceled. You want to use the most expensive bolt, the most expensive engine, the most expensive sensor that you can possibly justify. And you're never going to propose a system that can solve a problem for $10,000 if you could instead build a system for $100 million that does the same thing. Where's the money in it? You can't make money in a cost

plus world if you're too cheap. You actually have to fundamentally think about the problem. million that does the same thing. Where's the money in it? You can't make money at a cost plus world if you're too cheap. You actually have to fundamentally think about the problem. And maybe that means defining the problem is larger than it needs to be. An Iron Dome example would be, what if they claimed Iron Dome didn't just need to shoot down these kind of janky ballistic missiles, but it had to work against high speed maneuvering air targets as well. That's the type of thing that a contractor would say because they can't make money on the cheaper system. And so it's a horrible set of incentives. It puts you in an interesting place where you're one of the few, if not the only defense contractor that has to just think independently about the sort of new war terrain.

You're not given a set of things to build. You're not even given a set of problems. You're thinking of problems that you want to solve. Well, we always say to trust that the customer knows what their problem is, but never trust that they know what the solution is. These guys know how they're getting their asses kicked and they know what their weak points are, but they don't necessarily have enough awareness of the entire engineering possibility space to know what the right way to solve their problem is. And they certainly don't know what building blocks Anduril is incentivized to reuse because we're not a cost plus contractor. We're not trying to redo work over and over again. We want to reuse the exact same ingredients to build new things,

just like Taco Bell does for their menu. Now, this brings me to the subterranean warfare stuff, because while the principles of the sovereign individual sort of tend to be working in the favor of Israel in the context of protecting Tel Aviv from rocket bombardment, it would seem to me that a bit of technology on the side of Hamas in Gaza makes it very difficult to, more difficult than ever. I mean, invading somewhere has always been difficult. Japan, famously, people predicted way more deaths had the atom bombs not been dropped. We had millions of US casualties, tens of millions on the Japanese side. Paul Fussell wrote a great essay called Thank God for the Atom Bomb that specifically addressed this kind of thing. I think people don't realize how difficult it is and how much carnage on both sides

there will be. Well, if you really want to get spicy, I'd say it's not that people don't remember, it's that people have erased it. People are working... You'll see people strongly arguing, here's why it really wouldn't have happened. Here's why they wouldn't have fought to the death. I mean, there was a recent... I forget who it was. It was one of the higher profile internet talking head journalist people. And he says, do you people really imagine that the Japanese would have fought to the last head? And it's like, dude, look at the outer Pacific Japanese islands. They did. They fought to the last person and they ran off cliffs when it became clear we were going to win. People have erased this because I feel like it's almost... I think people don't like to admit how different cultures

can be. And they act like the modern multicultural global culture is what you need to look at World War II with, that that's the right lens and they're just wrong. Yeah. We're all the same is the assumption. We're not so different, you and I. We're two sides of the same coin. It's a trope for a reason. It feels like people forget how different we were. With religion, I think we see this a lot where people just genuinely do not believe when someone really believes in a religion. It is hard for the average American. You've been right about this on Pirate Wires. Because they don't really believe, they assume everyone else is just kind of in the same bug.

Like, oh, he doesn't really believe that he needs to be a jihadist. That's just a convenient political angle for him to get his way. And then he blows himself up and you say, oh, he actually believed it. Then you get accused of bigotry for just listening to the things that people say.

And it's like, no, I think you're the bigot. You're not believing that. They're telling you who they are and how they think. And I think there are lots of people. I mean, there are different religions and different ways of doing things. Believe all jihadists. Oh, man.

Subterranean warfare now. So we have the principles of the sovereign individual working in defense, perhaps, of Tel Aviv to a certain extent. And I think I'm hoping that as technology, as the bombardment intensifies, which I expect has to happen, new technologies will be used to defend that region. to take out Hamas now, you have to go into Gaza and the Hamas militants have dug this incredible series of tunnels deep underground where they are hiding and storing weapons and everything else. A lot of this stuff is under civilian infrastructure. It seems hopeless. I don't even know how you... How do you enter a viper nest like that and take care of business? As someone who has to sit down and look at problems like this and pick up new solutions, have you thought about this one at all? And how might you begin to think through potential solutions for folks on the ground? So I've been thinking about not exactly this

problem, but actually a much broader problem for the last few years. And I've talked about this publicly, but nobody ever really talks about me talking about it. So I guess I'll just keep saying it and eventually people will pay attention. But very, very big picture, I believe that the next warfighting domain is the subterranean domain, in the same way that air, land, sea, space, and arguably cyberspace are. And people think that I mean subterranean, that I mean tunnels and caves. That isn't what I mean. I mean using the entire volume of the earth as a three-dimensional space that you can maneuver in and fight wars in. And that sounds a little crazy,

but then you remember that the United States and the Soviets used to believe this. During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union both had subterranean programs trying to build nuclear-powered underground vehicles that could bore through the earth as easily as a submarine moves through the water or an aircraft moves through the air. Maybe not quite as easily, but at least the same in principle. The idea that you could go anywhere arbitrarily and a submarine moves through the water or an aircraft moves through the air. Maybe not quite as easily, but at least the same in principle. The idea that you could go anywhere arbitrarily and deliver big payloads, big effects, and do so using the earth as the medium through which you traveled and hid. And unfortunately, when the Cold War started wrapping up, all of this kind of collapsed, the Soviets actually built a working prototype. It wasn't just a concept. They actually built one.

But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the recognition of the powers that be, that nuclear was going to not be a significant part of our civil economy or wartime strategy. We banned the idea of tactical nukes. Basically said, you know, strategic nukes is all we're going to have. We're going to keep nuclear powered ships that we already have and the submarine operations we already have, but we're not going to just go out and find new things for nukes to do anymore, which was a huge mistake. Maybe the biggest mistake our country's ever made, but we can have a whole podcast on that. especially on the power density side, air independent propulsion side, and also the ability to put useful payloads into very small things, has actually brought back this idea in my mind as the next future of warfare being underground. And so I've actually built vehicles here at Anduril that are capable of tunneling underground

and delivering a variety of electronic and kinetic effects to wherever you want them to go. I wish I was further along on it. I'd say things like the tunnels in Gaza are just one example. North Korea has a huge tunnel system. They have them built into mountains, built into the ground. You have a lot of other similar subterranean systems that are in Iran, where they are very, very smartly locating all of their critical stuff deep underground. So it's one of those cases where you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools that you want. And right now, we do not have the tools to fight in the subterranean domain. And I think that eventually you're going to have a US subterranean core. I don't know

which service that's going to live under, but I strongly believe that. And if we had robots and vehicles that could move around underground as easily as submarine moves in the water, this tunnel problem would be so much easier to solve. You would be easier to map them. It'd be easier to take them out. It'd be easier to do so without having to go through the air and then through the ground and then into the underground domain. I mean, the bombs from the air is a really, really high power, imprecise way to take out tunnels deep underground. It's really the only options these Israelis have. It's the only option really anyone has. But nonetheless, if you just look at it from a first principles perspective, bombs that have to

go through the air and then through buildings and then through the ground and then into a tunnel is a lot less elegant than something that could just go into the tunnel. To back up a moment, you were mentioning tactical nukes banned by the US. I'm confused. How did that affect the tunneling? Were the tunnels being, I mean, they were nuclear powered tunnel borers or were they actually nuking? What I'm saying is more as a, it's an example of a broader shift in what we were to do with nukes. The idea being nuclear weapons on the battlefield used to be a very reasonable thing. We were imagining we're going to use them to bust tank formations. We had nuclear anti-aircraft missiles that could take out a squadron of bombers. And so nukes were

kind of envisioned as an enabling technology for all types of war fighting across every domain. We've decided that that's not the case. Nuclear weapons, particularly, are basically the domain of ICBMs, which are strategic, mutually assured destruction weapons. Nuclear powered submarines, which are themselves primarily justified through the existence of mutually assured destruction nuclear weapons. And then also, we had built nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and we weren't going to go back on that because it's the only way to actually make a modern aircraft carrier group work. But there was a recognition, okay, we're done.

We're not going to build nuclear-powered fighter jets. We're not going to build nuclear-powered tanks. We're not going to build nuclear-powered boring vehicles underground. That's off-limits now. And the shift away from tactical nuclear weapons is just part of that shift away from having nukes on the battlefield as part of an everyday conflict. So the tactical thing was an actual ban, but you... Actually, to be clear, I'm actually not sure it was a ban as much as a policy change. We said, we are not going to have tactical nukes as part of our strategic doctrine, whereas it's worth noting the Russians do. To this day, the Russians train for using tactical nukes on the battlefield. They imagine saying, I'm going to deploy a nuclear weapon to destroy a battalion of tanks,

or to blow up a naval formation, or to get rid of an airfield. And that's why you might remember, maybe it was a year ago. Ukraine, yeah, was at risk of this. Well, they moved the unit that's in charge of tactical nuke deployment into high alert and had them doing day-to-day, back-to-back training on scenarios. So it's part of their doctrine. It's not part of ours. I think that also Russia, not to gas Russia up too much, but they've made similar good decisions in using nukes for

non-military applications. Did you know that in Russia, there are multiple privately owned civilian nuclear icebreaking and container ships? How crazy is that? That's the type of thing that we should have in America. We should have the zero emissions, zero carbon, dirt cheap to operate nuclear container ships. And instead, it's the Russians. You can even book a tour on one of them as a normal person. You can go to the North Pole on a nuclear powered icebreaker that's run by a civilian company. So they did not abandon the atom the way that we did, which is, again, one of the worst decisions we ever made. Yeah, I think I very naively assumed that the tactical nuke thing was like a treaty between

the two countries and we all sort of put our nukes down. I didn't realize that the Russians were really innovating in this way while we were just choosing not to. Yeah, we've chosen that we don't want it to be part of the way that we fight wars. So the extra power is what you would need to bore very, very easily. Is that why the nuclear boring was? So it used to be. So this gets down to the payloads problem that I talked about. Back then, they were imagining that these would be manned vehicles.

And so they had to be large enough to have crew quarters and room for the pilots and for the operators. And to do that, it's true, you need fission or fusion to make enough energy to displace enough soil at a fast enough speed to be relevant. And so they had to be nuclear powered. Today, because you can automate so much of that, you don't necessarily need, let's say, a room full of signal operators who are running your electronic warfare or data collection systems. You can actually fit all this stuff

into much smaller diameter stuff. If you want to go to the extreme, a vehicle that is, you know, a hundred kilometers long and a millimeter wide is not going to take very much energy to push through a hole because at the end of the day, you bore the hole, length is free. Once you've made the hole, everything going through

the hole after that is kind of very negligible energy cost. Making that diameter in the first place is what's expensive. So I don't want to give away my whole scheme here, but it totally works. This is not like crazy and far future science fiction it's the type of thing where if i would have started working on it five years ago we would already be deploying it today unfortunately i only started working on it two years ago so right so we would be deploying our own boring technology i guess the question i'm wondering is how do you approach going after the enemy inside a series of tunnels? There's a ton of ways.

I mean, so the first thing you do is you need tactical situational awareness. You need to know where these tunnels are. So first, you need to send these things in, and you would map them all out using ground penetrating radar and a variety of acoustic schemes. It would not be that hard to build a pretty high fidelity map of what's going on there, especially if you had built that map up ahead of time.

If we had these tools, you wouldn't be building it right as the war starts. They would have had a continuous awareness of where every tunnel was. Once you have that map, there's a variety of effects that you can deliver. The boring one, pardon the pun, the boring payload is just explosives. I'm just going to collapse the tunnels. Another good idea is to flood the tunnels with just going to collapse the tunnels. Another good idea is to flood the tunnels with seawater from the Mediterranean. Just bore a hole from the Mediterranean to a pump station, pump station to a whole bunch of holes, and just fill all those

holes with water. That's another thing you can do. And then there's my personal favorite, which I haven't seen anyone talking about, but it's something I've always thought was underutilized is using carbon dioxide as a structure denial weapon. So carbon dioxide, the gas, really easy to move around as liquid CO2 or as dry CO2 with really, really good expansion ratios. Fun fact about the body. The human body does not have the ability to detect lack of oxygen. It only has the ability to detect lack of oxygen. It only has the ability to detect

presence of CO2. And so if you've ever been in a room that gets really stuffy, that's the CO2 building up and it makes you really want to get out. If you're in a room that has enough CO2 in it, it's going to feel like you're holding your breath and it's going to make you feel like you're suffocating, even though you're totally fine in terms of oxygen going to your brain. I think we should just fill the tunnels with carbon dioxide. That wouldn't be perfect. They would still, for example, be able to move through them using self-contained breathing apparatus.

So these guys could haul out their scuba gear and walk around in the tunnels. But man, that would make it a huge pain in the ass to be in those tunnels if you couldn't take even one breath of them without feeling like you're suffocating. But you're not actually suffocating people. If you filled the tunnels with, let's say, nitrogen gas, people would be walking into the tunnels and just falling over dead and suffocating. You pump CO2 in, they're going to feel like they're suffocating. It's an immensely powerful physiological response, but you would not actually be necessarily killing them. And so I actually had started

experimenting with this a long time ago doing CO2 delivery from drones. The idea being, let's say you've got a hostage situation where normally you'd have a SWAT team trying to rescue people. One idea is you would just pump the building full of carbon dioxide gas from a liquid CO2 container in a few minutes. And everyone in that building is going to say, it would be like being in the stuffiest room you've ever been stuffed in. And you would feel an immense panic and need to get out. And I've tested this on myself. It definitely works. It's not great. What are some of the other technologies that perhaps have not made it to the battlefield yet, but that you anticipate people are going to pull out that could

complicate not just the conflict in the Middle East, but abroad. So I guess I'm asking, what are the things that are coming that people are not aware of that they should be aware of and how much you work around them? Oh, man. I mean, look, this is all a game of cat and mouse, right? Very big picture. You're never going to win forever. You just need to win more often than they do at the important breakover points. If I can build something that keeps me and my people safe for five years, and then they're able to break it, but then I'm able to fix it again, but with something better within a day, that's a huge win. And that's really the best we can hope for. We're not going to get to the

point where it's absolutely perfect coverage. It used to be the United States could build things like stealth fighter aircraft, and we were just the best in the world by far. Nobody was close for decades at a time. Those days are kind of over. The proliferation of knowledge has made it impossible to keep secrets like that once they're out of the bag. And so we need to be in a world where we can move quickly. Other technologies that are going to be a really big deal, I think that there's a lot of stuff that can be done to deny humans

access to areas uniquely. This is a little boring, but there's a lot of old stuff on the chemical warfare side and the biological warfare side that is not being used simply because everyone's agreed that it's a bad idea to do so. It works when everyone is a rational actor and it works when everyone is kind of afraid of biological weapons in a mutually

assured destruction sense. But how does that work when you have irrational actors who believe that they are the highest glory in life is to die a martyr. You really kind of have shifted the equation where maybe they don't even mind overwhelming retaliation in exchange for it. I'd say I also worry about people believing that they can use biological weapons in a way that accomplishes their ideological aims. For example, their ideological aims. For example, you could imagine Hamas. They can realize, you know what, it's probably a bad idea to use biological weapons. They're going to end up killing a bunch of my own people too. It's very hard to control these things. Not a good idea to just even have them out there at all. But what if Hamas believed or could engineer a pathogen that was engineered to kill only

people with a certain genetic line? And the thing is, they don't even need to be right. That's the really scary thing. When I say they imagine it, they could be getting conned. They could be not really understanding it. It could be that it mutates away from that function within one generation. But if they believe they've created that, you can imagine someone saying, heck yeah, we're going to wipe out the Jews with the Jew virus and we're all going to be fine.

Right. That changes the calculus around weapons when you're willing to be a martyr. We just saw a hack of 23andMe, a massive hack, specifically accessing the dna of ashkenazi jews yep and it i thought of the same thing like it just does not there's no way that something good is coming of a hack like that um it's nerve-wracking the future someone gave me a 23 and me kit for christmas a few years ago and uh i politely i politely returned it and told them why. And it's exactly along these lines. Well, right. Because I mean, if you could imagine... Those databases are obviously going to be compromised, whether it's through foreign intelligence or leaks or profit motivated

hackers. It's very obvious that at some point that that data is going to end up out there. And if I want to use it for good things, I can keep it to myself and use it for those good things. I'm not against DNA testing. I'm against having everyone's DNA in a gigantic database that's going to be stolen by the Chinese Communist Party and then used to wipe us out. I guess one thing we have in our favor in that regard is American DNA is so diverse that there is some robustness there to us, immigration and over so many hundreds of years working in our favor in that regard. The bio thing is interesting. I always am worried about just the next virus. So the next HIV is one that I'm really frightened about just because it takes so long to even realize that you're sick.

And I was talking to a guy who – he's a bio guy. He sort of works for the government. They mostly spend their time in airport bathrooms checking for viral shedding because that's where most of the contamination comes from. They're just looking for evidence of new things. They don't even care what it is necessarily. They're just looking to see if something is proliferating. Anything new is worth understanding. Because anything new is bad.

It's just like you can't have anything that you don't understand suddenly proliferating, anything viral in nature. Well, that one is a little bit outside. By the way, he's probably been thinking from the perspective of viruses that have long incubation periods or they take a while for you to know you have them, and then they become lethal. But if you look at things that have been developed on the therapeutic side, like optogenetics,

where they're figuring out how to build viruses that bind to your cells and make them so that they're responsive to certain frequencies of light, you will start to realize you can actually build pathogens that do not have an internal trigger. Like you could, for example, hypothetically build something that infects you, has absolutely no symptoms at all. And then when the summer comes around and you're exposed to UV light of a certain concentration, all of a sudden you become extremely sick and die. And you can imagine deploying that in a way where an entire country could become infected during one period, and then boom, without even knowing it, everyone's triggered all

at once. So the old rules of pathogens don't really apply to engineered viruses. You can have viruses that would never survive in the wild turning into something that is much scarier. It's also, I think, one of the really scary, to sort of contrast it with what we're looking at right this minute in the Middle East, what we're seeing in the Middle East is not abstract. It's big and physical, and you see the threat, and even the tunnels, they're new. That's a new kind of thing, problem to work through, but it's a problem that you can wrap your mind around. All of the biological stuff is so abstract that we just saw a pandemic and what that means. And

we've kind of immediately gone back to the memory hole. We've erased it from our memory. We're not worrying about it. No one's asking what happens when, not even forget weapons, just the next natural pandemic, if it were a natural pandemic. Whoa, whoa, that's pretty controversial. The next natural virus? I thought we were talking about COVID. So yeah, there's nothing. We're just kind of not addressing that. That one makes me nervous. How do you spend so much time? This is a very personal question, and then I want to get into manufacturing a bit. But how do you spend so much time. This is a very personal question and then I want to get into manufacturing a bit. But how do you spend so much time thinking about all these problems and, I don't know, manage your emotional states or happiness, your day to day? I mean, your job is to think of

horrible things that could go wrong and fix them before they happen. It seems stressful. Well, you build up an immunity to a certain degree. We've talked about this, but I don't want to be doing Andoril necessarily. I would actually be having much more fun building the world's fastest race cars or- The balloon cities that we talked about. Yeah. Skysteading. I want to be doing skysteading. I want to be planning my dream ship RV that's going to take me to the moons of Saturn. That's really what I want to be working on. the moons of Saturn. That's really what I want to be working on. You know, I'm a fan of uplifting species, which you fear leads to a multipolar world that's very dangerous, which is a very reasonable fear. But nonetheless, I want to do it. Where's my super intelligent parents?

Smart horses. Yep. That's what I want to be working on, but I'm working on national security because I think that it's very important. And you do have to deal with the seriousness of it. And so I don't want to say necessarily that I'm cut differently than other people because I've got thousands of people working in Anduril who think the same way and are dealing with those same pressures.

But if you work on this every day, it's not quite so horrible being exposed to new threats. You're like, oh, it's another threat we need to consider. There's all these threats we're thinking about every day. When you spend all day thinking about how you're going to counter Russian weapon systems that are hugely outclassing the ability to defend them, when you're thinking about how screwed we are versus China in a mass on mass conflict, you throw in the viruses, you throw in energy weapons, you throw in cyber attacks, man, there's just a whole bunch of this stuff.

On China, that actually is a great segue into the manufacturing question. But first, what you just mentioned is nerve wracking. You said we're completely outclassed when it comes to the Chinese, I'm assuming the Chinese military. How exactly, if you could just measure it, like not measure it, but weigh it, sort of like US to China, what is the lay of the land there head to head?

Well, a lot of what China's building right now, I actually think is not the right thing for them to be building. They're investing in a lot of prestige projects. So aircraft carriers, high-end manned fighter craft. I think that a lot of it is just political. They want to be toe-to-toe with the United States. They want to show that they're a superpower. They want people in other countries who think that that's what a superpower looks like to believe that China is a peer to the US. So I would say those things are theater. So when you hear people saying, oh my God, China's going to build so many aircraft carriers, they're going to have all of these manned fighter jets, they're kind of missing the real game.

The real game is the stuff that China is not going to reputationally ride on. They're not going to nearby nations and saying, hey, look, we can make tens of thousands of autonomous anti-ship missiles at a tenth of the price of the Americans. Because that's not what a superpower looks like in a marketing sense. But it is what a superpower looks like in terms of ability to project power and take over regions and take over countries and invade other countries with impunity, especially if they sink the entire US Navy in the first round of that fight and then just do whatever the heck they want for the next 20 years as we remain unable to build any new ships. The real power of the

Chinese military is the ability to manufacture. They have dozens to hundreds of times more military shipbuilding capacity than we do. People debate on how much it is, but it's at least dozens of times more capacity. And as someone who's made things in China, I know how cheap things can be done over there. Not because the labor is cheap, but because the people are good, the regulations are good, the supply chain and logistics and materials are very favorable. So when I talk about China kicking her ass in a mass-on-mass conflict, I'm talking about what happens when you have the things that they're good at making versus the things that we're good at making in an actual war, not a prestige war or a marketing war. And unfortunately, right now, they are very much on the right side of the equation. They're building weapons that are sometimes better

than ours for a 10th of the price and 100 times the scale. When you say... A moment ago, you said in some hypothetical combat scenario where the entire US Navy is wiped out in moments. I mean, that sounds like the opening scenes of Battlestar Galactica. What weapon are they using? What series or what kind of, what class of weapon are you imagining is going to be targeting or could potentially target the Navy? And I mean, I guess the next question is how to defend against it, but let's just start with what the actual problem is. I mean, it's a whole bunch of things. Anti-ship missiles are a huge concern, particularly ones that get into the high supersonic or low hypersonic regime where

it's very hard to defend against them. And even if you can defense against one, can you defend against 10? Can you defend against 100? And when an aircraft carrier is so many billions of dollars, it doesn't take that many... You can justify throwing a lot of missiles at it, and it still makes a lot of sense from China's perspective. The scenario I'm talking about, I don't think China's going to go for a Pearl Harbor. I don't think that they're going to aggressively seek out the United States Navy wherever they are on the planet and try to wipe it out. That's not in their strategic interests, not today, probably not in the near future. But what they probably could do right now is deny the US Navy the ability to operate in pretty much any area that they make a priority.

If you make enough hypersonic anti-ship missiles, you're not going to have ships existing in range of those missiles. And if the United States knows that, what actually happens is not the destruction of the US Navy, but the neutering of the US Navy. It's not that we lose those ships. It's that we realize we can't actually use them. And so they just sit somewhere else watching Taiwan get invaded, then watching the Philippines get invaded, then watching Northern Japan get invaded, then watching Southern Japan get invaded. What is the idea that we don't have the technology as well? I mean, wouldn't the existence of this technology... It's not the technology, it's the manufacturing capacity.

We have anti-ship missiles. They're great. We don't have enough. I mean, this is the Anduril mission problem, right? How do we do these things cheaper? How do we do them better? How do we do them faster? The United States has a lot of missiles that are excellent, excellent missiles, not just on the anti-ship side, anti-air

side, tactical missiles for going after ground targets, but we don't make enough of them. If China makes 100 times more missiles than we do, it's just very hard to win. And this is really going back to what you were saying. By the way, this is why Andrel bought Adranos, the solid rocket motor company, and why we're investing in building all of these building blocks for missiles and missile systems that the United States, right now, there's only two vendors making the missiles and neither of them are particularly good. And they're both owned by major defense primes. We need to have, I think we need something like a hundred times more capacity than we currently have, even if we're not using all

that capacity continuously. The manufacturing question now. So you're saying you're imagining a future potential conflict scenario where really the victory comes down to who can produce the most, the cheapest, the fastest. And we don't manufacture much in America anymore. I mean, there are lots of things we manufacture, but it's really just been shattered, our manufacturing capability. One thing, so recently, I understand Anduril has gone to great lengths to remove dependents from China. How difficult has this been? And how difficult do you think it will be for the broader United States economy? I mean, we see it at the most benign level, a place like Apple seems, a company like Apple seems hopelessly compromised in this

way. And in any future conflict scenario, obviously just a flip of the switch and we lose all of our manufacturing there, it's a huge problem. So yeah, walk me through that process of how you think about it personally with your own company and then maybe some advice for the rest of the nation? Yeah, we have put a lot of effort into this. And we're not there yet. We're doing a lot better. I'd say better than basically anyone in the entire country, but we're not perfect. The thing is, there's two standards as I see it. One is the legal standard, which we obviously comply with. They say you can't make certain components in China. You need to remove dependence on China with these materials, with these components. You can't have your stuff made in China.

Fine. Complying with that's easy. The hard part is not relying on China in practice. On paper, it's easy. In practice, it's hard. There's a lot of companies that make things compliant with these rules that if we actually sanctioned China and we actually couldn't get any components or materials from them, or if they couldn't get stuff from us into them and then back into us, their whole supply chain would fall apart

and they would be unable to make things. There's a lot of people making things that they say are made in the United States, compliant with NDAA regulations that are going to be impossible to manufacture if we actually go to war with China. That's just the reality. And it really bothers me when companies only fit the paper standard and not the practical standard because the paper standard is supposed to be the backstop for the practical standard. It's just that people have figured out how to get around it too much and China's figured out how to get around it too much. One of the crazy things that I've seen is, I won't name names, but you have executives at major defense companies who are going out and saying that it's impossible to decouple from

China, that it's impossible for the United States or for a defense industrial base to decouple from China. At the same time, you have these same companies getting billions of dollars in contracts for weapon systems that are only useful in a world where we are fighting China toe to toe, which sure implies a decoupling to me. You have it on both sides. We can't decouple. Also, give us tons of money for things that are only useful after we decouple. It becomes clear that it's really just a near-term argument for why Congress should not force the practical independence of China into your company. You asked about advice to other companies. I would say, take a look at this dynamic, realize how farcical it is, realize that it is going to get forced on you politically

at one point or another. Maybe it's out of the blue. Maybe it's after China invades Taiwan. But I tell new founders all the time, don't end up in the situation that Apple's in. Don't end up where you've built a company so dependent on China that you can't speak your mind about things like Uyghur genocide. You can't talk about organ harvesting. You can't talk about censorship in their media or Chinese censorship of American media. Tim Cook could not even talk about the espionage problem. I remember the hearing with Cook and Zuckerberg, and I think Dorsey might have been at that one. They were asked if... Oh, and Bezos was at that one. They were asked if

there were a problem of spies at the company's corporate corporate spot and tim cook was just like i've never heard of anything like that and they cut to zuckerberg and zuckerberg laughs and he's just like of course there's a problem with this like everybody knows there's a problem with this that's like the name of the game and it's not just china it's not just spies from china there's a spot of course there's a problem with that. Well, you might remember when Peter was getting slammed for this, where he said that Google is certainly compromised by Chinese intelligence. I think it was Google. How can you say that? They use the old rut. Peter Thiel claims without evidence that Google is compromised by intelligence.

And I think it's even just the statistical argument is so obvious. Like, well, they have hundreds of thousands of employees. And imagine if China was so incompetent that they couldn't get a single asset into one of the largest American companies. Like, flip it the other way. Imagine how incompetent the United States would be if we didn't have a single asset or source anywhere in Alibaba or Tencent. Isn't that just obviously unbelievable? But people freak out about it when you talk about it

because Tim Cook can't talk about it. And I think a lot of these media companies aren't allowed to talk about it either. They have to pretend it ain't so. I think part of it is the compromise. I think part of it is a lot of people in media are genuinely too dumb to realize that spies are a common thing sure it's just it's just culture war stuff yeah they just don't get it they're and they're thinking oh no spies that that's that would be an act of war they don't realize that like just their spies fucking everywhere that's what is happening i don't know like where have you been now you're a professional writer but that is then that's the landscape imagine like imagine a world where you have california politicians sleeping with

chinese spies but they haven't managed to get any spies into google like it's just like obviously the landscape. Imagine a world where you have California politicians sleeping with Chinese spies, but they haven't managed to get any spies into Google. It's just obviously unbelievable. Yeah. But you're right. Tim Cook can't talk about these things. And it's not because he's an idiot. It's because he is acting in self-interest to preserve his company. And so I tell founders, don't let yourself get into that situation. It'll happen if you're not careful. Because if you're careful about it, you can remain untethered from China. You can even do it even if you are using certain Chinese materials and components. As long as you always have a backup plan, you always have a second path. And that's my biggest advice to people. Because imagine how stupid you're going to feel if you start a company, you raise money against all odds, you achieve the dream, you build this company worth many billions of dollars, you create financial independence for you and all your

employees, and then China invades Taiwan, just like everyone expects to happen, and then Congress passes sanctions on China, and then your company completely collapses and fails overnight. Who's the idiot? Is it everyone else or is it you? Well, a moment ago, you said forced. Eventually, the people who are compromised on manufacturing by China will be forced to decouple. Until they are forced, it's an economics thing, right? It's just so much- Oh yeah, it's not ideological. So we've talked about this. The whole Silicon Valley doesn't want to work with the US military for ideology. I think it's actually hugely overblown. I think it's actually mostly practical. They don't want to appear to

be on the side of the US because that'll make it harder for them to work with China. They don't want to appear to be on the side of the US because that'll make it harder for them to work with China. They don't want to be building weapons that are going to be used to fight China because they need to keep operating in China and be in their good graces. It's a purely practical financial calculus, not ideological. I wish it was ideological because then me and you could just talk real good and change their minds. Yes. But no amount of talking good is going to change these people's minds because they're doing the right thing. change their minds. But no amount of talking good is going to change these people's minds. So my question is, how do you make it cheaper to manufacture at home or at least in countries that are super allied with America? I mean, my sense is Mexico would be much better than China,

for example. So how do you get to there? Well, we're unfortunately not in the most influential position. It's largely a political problem. The United States didn't just ship all our manufacturing overseas out of the blue. It was the result of specific policy decisions around how we levy tariffs, what we were willing to have made by other countries, what we were willing to sell to those other countries. And so I would say the China problem is one of our own creation. We created it through policy. And if you continue to allow foreign adversarial powers to sell heavily subsidized goods to the United States, remember, it's not a fair fight. People say, well, I'll just do better. And I say, you don't get it. The Chinese government is already subsidizing certain industries of theirs to ensure we don't build up a competitive one for strategic reasons. And if you figure out how to do it even cheaper, they'll just undercut you even more because they don't need to make money in everything all at once. Now, if we could

all do this and everyone got way cheaper across every industry, eventually China runs out of debt and they can't compete. But I'm not optimistic about that. I'm not optimistic about the ability to out-compete China to an extreme degree in every single industry for as long as we have the energy policy we have, the labor policies that we have, the tariff policies that we have. So trade, let's just, if you could just start with trade. So libertarians are super resistant to the idea of, let's just, if you could just start with trade. So libertarians are super resistant to the idea of, let's say mercantilism would be the negative framing

of what I'm constantly asking for now. And it's specifically because of this. Like you can't have free trade in a world where the other country has its government guaranteeing an unfair competition, right? In a very, very narrow example of something like-

And where trade isn't free. Like China, trade isn't free. Like China, this isn't even a tariff situation. They just straight up ban huge swaths of the US economy from competing in China. They're not like, oh, we're going to tariff you. Like, yep, you can't do that. It'd be like if we said, oh, like Chinese movies and Chinese phones. Nope, just not legal. We just need a narrow example of social media. I mean, we're having this principled conversation

right now about TikTok, even though it's an actual spy app for the CCP. Let's say it wasn't a spy app for the CCP, and it was just a very influential piece of social media, the dominant maybe social media platform in the country right now. And meanwhile was just a very influential piece of social media, the dominant maybe social media platform in the country right now. And meanwhile, every single one of our competing pieces of software is banned in China. That makes no sense. We cannot fight that way. And that's what I was saying during the Trump years was that you need to look at... I was kind of frustrated that people made TikTok into a cultural issue. By the way, I'm totally on the culture war side of it. But I was saying, practically speaking, you should not make this a culture war issue. Don't talk about how it's ruining our youth's ideals. Just say strictly

on a trade basis, we cannot allow them to sell this thing to us if we can't sell the same thing to them. That should be totally fair. So my idea was to just say, hey, China, it's not that we're banning TikTok. It's that we're saying there must be, it's Full Metal Alchemist, the law of equivalent exchange. You got to have the ability to go back and forth. And of course, they wouldn't have allowed that. China would have said, no, you can't do that, which would have been the de facto TikTok ban. But that's how I think we should have done it. Pure trade issue would have been easy for Congress,

easy for the president to justify it. All the youths would whine. You're banning TikTok. Say, listen, like whine to China. You want free trade? You want globalism? Okay, let's do it. Yeah, what we can't have is an is a one-sided system yeah and and it's like

you gotta have to be all the way freer or not um it sounds like the policy the prescription here is for policymakers to help find ways to actually make manufacturing cheaper not to tinker with like you know the cost of labor and things like this, but to actually look at what is causing the bloat here, the expenses here, and dramatically slash that. Because if we don't have manufacturing capability at home, it's so hard because it's an abstract question, or it's an abstract concept. I think people don't think of it this way, but your manufacturing capability is your ability to defend yourself. That is how we won the second world war. And if we don't have that, there's nothing that we can do. We can't build anything. And so that's the piece. It's like,

how do you make these things less expensive? And then the businesses will do the rest. You guys will do the rest. You'll build here. Everything will be built here if it is affordable to do so. But if it's not, then it won't. And that will be the end of us. Well, this is what the AI doomers don't recognize is they imagine that we live in this isolationist world where if they can just protest enough

and if they can just get automation out of the factories, then you're going to keep all these factory jobs. That's not what's going to happen. You're just going to have everything made elsewhere in the world and they'll have incredible wealth and prosperity of everything that they could ever want. And we're all going to be buying handwoven baskets at the farmer's market for $300. That's actually the future that these people are signing us up for.

Yes. You're right. We got to stop just tinkering on the edge of this. We need to really fundamentally rethink the way... I think we can do this. You're probably familiar with the fact that China can't make semiconductors without a handful of American and European tools. There are things that we've proven we can do, the West really, that China hasn't been able to grab their heads around despite trying really hard to do so. I would love it if we could prove that automated manufacturing at a large scale is one of those things because they have not figured that out.

They are still very manpower intensive. What if that is an advantage that we could build? And what if things became cheaper to build in America than in China? That would basically just solve the problem right there. I mean, you would cripple their economy, you would starve them of all of their productivity, and we would get all of that money instead. So that's my dream. Where's my fully automated communist factory, et cetera, et cetera, robots in America? Closely related question to the AI topic that you just brought up, and it will be our last one. Chips, and we were talking about semiconductors a moment ago. The US has, I mean, we're sitting here talking about manufacturing capability and defense and

things like this. I don't see real serious effort to solve this broad effort in the country, but there are efforts. And we just saw the chips bill. There are people on both sides of the aisle who are at least talking about this, and there is now i mean i i looked i broke down the whole chips thing and most of it almost all of it was total bullshit um a lot of it went to just regional tech hubs education random tech hubs like random random like educational programs that you could just study whatever you wanted a lot of it was waste but some of it was not. There was a good chunk. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for chips manufacturing. Now, that doesn't mean that it's just going to happen because of the realities of how

hard it is to build these things, how expensive it is to build these things, and our policies that make these things prohibitively expensive. So I'm sort of mixed on this. I wrote at the time when the bill passed, I was happy to at least see us talking about a real problem and throwing money at it. I hadn't seen that in so long, an actual problem that was being addressed that it made me feel partly okay about it. How confident are you that we can get to something like Chip's independence?

Are you confident at all? I mean, and if not, how do we get there? I'm actually really confident on chips independence, not just using traditional techniques, which I mean, we invented them here. We mastered them here. And I think we could rebuild that.

And there's also a lot of new techniques, both on the lithography side for traditional semiconductors, but also people doing things in optical computing, which if it plays out, could make it way easier for us to do what we need to do. I actually feel pretty good on the high-end semiconductor side.

I think that's a place where the US can do it effectively because of the structure of our economy and our labor force. It doesn't take a ton of people. It's not necessarily hugely environmentally intensive. People complain about water use. Shut up. It's so easy. Just go to a place with water. It's totally solvable. I'm actually more worried about everything downstream of those semiconductors. So let's suppose that Chips Act is a huge success and we're making high-end computer processors, GPUs, you name it. We don't actually have PCBA capability, product manufacturing capability. If you actually want this to turn into laptop computers, for example, you need to actually send those chips back to China, or they will then be turned into laptops, which are then sold to us

a huge margin. And now we make $10 on the chip, and they make $100 on the laptop. Who's the winner there? It's not actually us. And then imagine that we end up in a place where there are sanctions on China, and we can't work with them anymore. You could end up with a chip factory cranking out tons of chips and you have chips in a warehouse and we have no ability to do anything with them because we can't build the support semiconductors.

We can't build the USB host controllers. We can't build the actual motherboard assemblies cost effectively. We can't build the batteries. We can't build the displays. That's actually my biggest concern is that we solve the chips problem and then we don't actually have the rest of the value chain. And so I would feel much better if we were investing in that as well. But it's currently not really the political priority, which maybe it's an idea whose time has not yet come, but it will. Well, the political priority, which maybe it's an idea whose time has not yet

come, but it will. Well, the last note then is just, because this was a sort of slightly more optimistic- Actually, I got to say one more thing. Go ahead. Americans suck because they don't care when people try. Motorola tried this. I think it was the Motorola X. Do you remember this, where they were making a phone in- They were making a phone in Texas. This was in the early 20-teens, I think. And it was only a little more expensive than the Chinese-made version. And they were making the whole phone in Texas. And guess what? Nobody cares. Nobody was willing to spend an extra $20. In the early 20-teens. I think that while a lot of COVID was memory old, I think that the concept of buy American as a silly thing is over. I do think people,

the average person, despite politics, sees utility in things coming from America. And there are all sorts of reasons. You have your labor people, like your labor, like socialist type people who really care about this. You have all the union guys, they care. Yeah, there's like a union component to this. There is a right-wing component to this,

a defense component to this. Like there is a reason that you can... So I want to believe... Maybe the time has come back around. I really hope so. I want to believe. Given the stuff that I'm working on. Give me a note of optimism to take us out on. What is something that makes you feel hopeful right now? I get asked a lot, and this comes back to the beginning. If I would ever sell weapons to China or North Korea or Russia, and of course, it's just a ridiculous gotcha question to fill time and put me on my

back foot and allow them to show me waffling and saying, well, I'll do whatever the government tells me to do. And they say, wow, you're such a stooge. It's a very predictable, annoying question. But the answer that I give, I actually think reflects my optimism. I actually hope that I do get to sell weapons to China. I hope that I do get to sell weapons to North Korea. And that sounds crazy until you remember the example of Japan. There was a time we were fighting a world war against these guys. And now we are the backbone of their defense strategy. They just doubled their defense budget. And most of that's going to come to the United States for our weapon systems. Germany, they're more into their stuff.

They don't buy that much of our stuff, but they buy some of it. And I'm glad that we're able to sell Germany weapons. I think that they're screwing up their country in a thousand ways. But generally, they definitely pass the bar of country we should want to win versus Russia, for sure. And so, I mean, I actually feel pretty hopeful about a future. The reason I'm never going to draw a line and say, I would never sell to China, I would never sell to Russia, I think that's born of my optimism that you're going to see a change there, whether it's a violent revolution, a democratic revolution,

a foreign war-driven revolution. I don't know how it's going to play up. I hope within my lifetime that China is able to get back to what they were pre-cultural revolution. And I can imagine a world where we're out there doing counter-narcotics operations and counter-bioweapon operations against terror cells with the Chinese military. That would be a really, really good reflection of the state of the world, wouldn't it? Same thing I would hope with Russia. I don't think it's impossible for Russia to become an ally. They've got a long way to go, but it's not impossible. You look at what we did with Japan and the way that it is turned around and the relationship we have today, it tells me that just about anything is possible.

That's amazing. Thanks, man. This has been great. Glad to have you again. And I'm talking to the real Mike Solana, right? I'm not talking to an AI. You haven't multiplied yourself yet. I'm just making sure.

You're not doing 12 podcasts right now. Not yet. Give me a minute. It's been real. We'll catch you next time. See you next time.