The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 464: Palmer Luckey—The Department of War Has a Mullet

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Tech founder, defense disruptor, and founder of Anduril Industries Palmer Luckey chats with Mike about the strange haircut on America's military bureaucracy—all business in the front, chaos in the back. Luckey explains how Anduril is trying to bring speed, accountability, and modern technology to national defense, often in spite of layers of red tape. Along the way, they discuss why Palmer got into defense contracting, who was pivotal in the Department of Defense becoming the Department of War, and why he donated to AOC.

Hello, friends, it's Mike Roe. This is the way I heard it. My guest today is a young man who I had the pleasure to meet serendipitously some months ago at an energy summit sponsored by our podcast's good friend Alex Epstein. Chuck, you were there as well, as I recall. I was, yes. I was quite fascinated by Palmer, and I was so glad. I've been trying to get him on the podcast ever since. And thankfully, he was able to be here today. Palmer Lucky, if you're unfamiliar, I think he's 33 years old. Yeah. He was just a boy, like many boys, obsessed with video games and computers, and his hobby got out of hand, and he came up with this idea called Oculus, and Mark Zuckerberg bought it for $2.2 billion.

And so young Palmer wound up with a lot of ready cash. A lot of Jack. A lot of Doc San Jingoa. Ooh, shekels raining down, and he was just a young man. I think it was like he was 20 or 22 when that sale went out. And then they fired him. Yeah. You know, he, well, he was a young man and he heard some things he liked coming out of the mouth of one Donald Trump, of all people.

And donated a modest amount, like $9,000, I think, to a pack. Anyway, yeah, Facebook hated that. Fired him. Yeah. And I believe he got even though. Well, you know, it worked out for him. And, you know, he and Mark are friends again, and he doesn't seem to hold a grudge with anything. But what this guy has done is launch a company called Anderil.

And this company is a part of the industrial military complex. They're worth billions of dollars. And he makes drones and uses AI to create autonomous weapons that the Department of War is seriously enamored of. So obviously I wanted to talk to him about that, but as you'll hear, it doesn't much matter what I want to do when Palmer Lucky is in the room. He comes in hot. I'm so glad and really grateful that he came at all. He's as busy as you might imagine a defense contractor would be. He flew himself here in a helicopter. Right, with a giant bodyguard, a giant of a man. I won't use his name for security reasons.

Nice guy. That was my second time meeting him because, you know, they did in advance last week. Oh, they came here? Well, he did, yeah. Yeah. Palmer doesn't skimp when it comes to security. And when it comes to this country's security, he's deadly serious. He's not serious about a great many other things.

In fact, this episode is called the Department of War has a mullet because Palmer Lucky does. Man, he rocks that mullet. I'm serious. That's a good head of hair. It's, I mean, honestly, If I had a head air like that, I'd probably go with a mullet for a while. Why not, man? Why not?

Luxurious locks in the back. His standard uniform is a Hawaiian shirt and like board shorts, usually with sandals of some kind or flip-flops. Today, because he flew his helicopter, he's got these special shoes with individual spaces for each toe. Yeah, it's like a glove for your feet. I don't think I'm overstating it. It's certainly a stream of consciousness, but it's one of the most, one of the more intelligent conversations that I've had. I knew it would be, but I had no idea the zigs and zags it would take from the ring of power

to the aforementioned gloves for your feet, to homeostatic risk, to the very clear and present dangers that we face as a country and to the absolutely deadly weapons this guy's making. And he's dead serious about protecting this country. It's obvious he really loves this country. And as serpentine as the conversation was, don't be fooled. He's a deep, deep thinker who really, really considers things. He has a lot of very interesting ideas, and he gets them like that.

That's not to say you'll agree with every single thing you're about to hear. But in the aggregate, if you don't walk away liking this guy, well, I don't know what's wrong with you. Palmer Lucky, the Department of War has a mullet right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss a rotary phone? Well, get over it.

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I think he's currently on Jeff Bezos. Oh, wow. Well, that must have been three presidents has got to be a pretty interesting time. Oh, my God, dude, his stories, you, I'm surprised your paths haven't crossed. He's about 70 now, and he's sat here a couple times. And he's one of those guys, you just say, how's it going? And then two hours later, you're like, you've got to be shitting me. Yep.

You did that. He guarded Elizabeth Taylor. I mean, this is a story after story after story, wrote a great book called The Gift of Fear. Interesting. How long did you write it? 25 years. Okay. Yeah. So before has Jeff Bezos time?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He just wrote another one though that's blowing the freaking freaking people out. It's called a forbidden facts. And it's just all the stuff around childhood vaccines that is making people's heads explode. Interesting. Forbidden facts.

I've got to check this out. I've got a whole category of stuff that I follow that are different forbidden facts. Oh, I bet you do. Yeah. Like, did you know that it is illegal to market devices that use electrical stimulation as burning calories? It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an, it's a rule that goes back to the, to the 1960s, 1970s. And the problem is that there are lots of devices that use electrical stimulation that burn lots of calories. And so it's like, if you ever used like a tens unit, you know, like where we're going to, oh, yeah, yeah, sure.

So that's burning calories. And remember, it's triggering your muscles. And that's illegal. And so, of course, they're burning calories. And there's people who use similar things to do various like rehabilitation, muscle toning. But if you were to say, here is my product. Here's my advice. And it burns this many calories per hour when used in this way.

Here are 100 peer-reviewed clinical trials that are, that prove that this is the case. the government says you can't say that. That's not allowed. That's forbidden because it is illegal to market electrical simulation devices burning calories. Now the reason that is there were devices that were scams back then and they didn't really work. But even then they were burning calories,

but they weren't really safe or, and so it's like, well, wait a sec. The safety or efficacy of those devices shouldn't have impact on whether you're allowed to say something that's true. Well, that's the double whammy, safe and effective. Right. And then, just like the vaccine. That's exactly it.

Well, but almost every, every controversial thing has some combination of those two terms. That's right. Over top of it. Well, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's things that are already, are we, are we rolling? Yeah, we're rolling. Okay. Okay. Could you just, yeah, he's, he's, he's very interesting.

That's just like, you are not allowed to state that true fact. It is, it is a true fact that is you are prohibited from saying, uh, because they think it might lead to bad things happening. And I've always wished that one of these companies would pursue this not on, like, They should pursue it on First Amendment grounds. Yeah. But see, that's the magical part of the language, right? Right. Words, phrases, it's like the, we all know it, but the act of uttering the thing, saying the thing.

Well, another interesting example is you'll have, you know, in California, you're not allowed to take certain factors into your hiring. And without getting into all of them, like one of the most interesting ones, to me has always been age. And, you know, I'm playing with fire here as someone who. What is 33? You're hired. For my age, it's fine, but I'm in a hiring, firing authority running a company and running here in California. And without getting into the specifics of it and without me making any particular claims,

suppose that science showed, not that old people are better or young people are better, let's just say it demonstrated that old people have superior performance at certain tasks. And suppose that young people showed superior performance at certain other tasks. Now, if you were to say this in the context of a baseball team, everyone would agree with you. Of course. Everyone would say, oh, I mean, this is like the easiest kind of commentary. Oh, man, you know, this is his last year. He hasn't been keeping his numbers up.

His contract's not getting renewed. Why? It's his age. And his age, it doesn't mean. And they'll talk through. They'll say, he's got the strategy. He knows what to do. He knows how to get people's head.

But he just doesn't have the footwork that he used to. He doesn't have the arm strength that he used to. Right. But then all of a sudden, you do this in the context of it. an engineering firm or really any other business to even imply that perhaps there are certain areas where people of one age would do better. You can't. It's illegal. They would say, well, this is indicative of illegal hiring practices. I might be able to say, I believe this is the case, and the science showed this is the case. And then when they say, and have you ever made a

hiring decision on the basis of this information that is scientifically confirmed and proven in factually? You have to say, no, of course not. I would never act on this information. that is inarguably true, and everyone knows it at a common sense level, at a scientific level, at even social commentary ever understands? You ever heard this guy says, oh, man, I can't pull these long nights like I used to. People themselves realize this. I mean, I realized that I'm weaker at things that I used to be better at. When I started my first company, Oculus, when I was 19 years old, there's things I could do then

that I can't do today. Not that I would ever make a business decision based on that fact. But this idea of forfeiting facts, it's so expansive. If you're the employer, you can't point that out. You can know it, but you can't say it. No one can say it. And anyone can throw it in your face, and you can't acknowledge it. So you're familiar with the concept of like a lot of Soviet propaganda, where the point

wasn't really to trick people into believing it. It was to force them to acknowledge propaganda that was obviously untrue. In fact, that was how you showed the power. The power of the state propaganda apparatus was such that you couldn't deny these things that were being said, even though everyone knew that they weren't true. It's a similar thing. They can say, oh, so are you saying you've ever acted in this obvious way that you would on these obvious facts? And you have to bend the knee and say, no, of course not. That's Hans Christian Anderson. That's the emperor's new clothes.

Yep. What do you mean he's naked? You can't say he's naked. That's right. And the thing is, there's people who know it. It takes a kid. They could throw it in your face and force you to perform the ritual. Perform the ritual for us. Say that you refuse to acknowledge the reality. And I want to stay in business. So the more you can get an otherwise sensible person to say that the clearly naked man isn't naked, the more of something truly fundamental you take from that person, you whittle them down to a single dimension. Until pretty soon, you're saying, yes, the man who just won that medal, who's standing on the podium, whose fallas is clearly visible, is not a man, I'll admit, I'll say it out loud. Did you see the...

You see the South Park about the transgender sports issue? And this was before it was really actually a pretty big issue. Greatest satire, I think of all time. It'll surely be remembered that way at some point. For people who aren't familiar, they have macho man Randy Savage before he passed. And he gets on. He's just macho man, Randy Savage. And he just beats up a bunch of women and beats them bloody.

And then the reporter is going up to all the women. And he says, and Randy Savage, that's a real woman, right? They're like, yes. Yes. And you don't have any concerns. Because he's a real woman, right? She says, yeah, yeah, he is. Yep.

And, you know, it's the act of. Well, isn't that, it's, you know, but hold on. I had not even. You came in hot too. And Randy Savage says, I'm not here to talk about my transition. I'm here to kick some fucking ass. Palmer Lucky came in hot. I appreciate it.

A helicopter brought you to my modest. I flew in in, um, I own a. a few helicopters, but today I flew my Eurocopter EC 120, although now it's owned by Airbus. You flew it? You flew it? Yeah, yeah, I flew it. So I'm a, I flew it with a co-pilot. I'm a... So you're still under some level of supervision? I'm on, look, when you get to a certain level of responsibility, it's irresponsible to not spend a little money and have somebody who's a lot better at it than you. And I'm, look, I'm an okay beginner helicopter pilot. I am not competent enough to be flying around on my own. If I could, I'd bring a co-pilot on my motorcycle, but I can't.

See, that's the level of disclosure and honesty I'd like to hear on United or American Airlines. As I'm strapping in, you're right, I'd just like to hear the guy up front or the woman. Just level with me, you know. This is my second year. I feel pretty good. I think I've got room for improvement, and I appreciate you guys letting me work through some of the bugs here. It's helpful. And they can say in the guy, and I'm the co-pilot, and the captain has, you know, 40 years of experience.

That's what people want to hear. Yeah. Somebody's, we want the warm milk that says, you. You know what? It's going to be okay. Somebody's got an eye on you. Ignore the sirens outside. It adds to the verisimilitude. But it's funny, the first time I met you, I think it was, it must have been nine months ago. Alex Epstein in Newport. It was the energy conference. That's right. Now, I don't know if you remember this. You arrived at that event on a motorcycle.

I did. I do remember that. Dude, you were wearing what I think may have been a jacket made of copper. That's right. Actually, it's so far. funny, I don't even wear it all that often. And I wore it on Joe Rogan and I wore it on that motorcycle. I'm actually not sure I wore it more than once or twice between those events a year apart. It's funny that that jacket comes up yet again. Well, I mean, it's really cool, though. It's what they call sui generis, right? It's a one-of-a-kind, I would assume, unless you shop at a copper store. Now, there's a company called Volubach, V-O-L-L-E-B-A-K, and they make a bunch of really

interesting, like, think of it as like clothing from the future out of really novel materials. And a lot of those are very novel performance characteristics. Like they make one out of like carbon fiber and dynamo thread. And it's like, it's like an ultra light set of pants that weighs nothing. But it's as strong as any motorcycle suit sliding on the ground. They make a jacket out of the same material used for the supersonic parachutes that landed the Mars rovers on Mars. So like really, really strong. Kevlar-backed stuff and there it is yeah so this is yeah this is some new thing the Martian arrow gel jacket let's even let's read what the aero gel jacket is I don't even know what this is arrow gel so arrow gel is a compound that was invented by NASA that you do a hydrated silica and then they remove all of the moisture and you're left with a basically a gel with no moisture and it is one of the strongest per unit weight things there is most because it's so light but mostly it's extremely good at insular

It weighs nothing and it has extremely powerful insulation. See, I'll scroll down. What does it say about it? Built with the same advanced air gel and parachutes that land rovers on Mars. So there you go. They do some really cool stuff like that. Look at the expression on this guy's face, Chuck. Scroll up a little more.

I don't know what to make of a model who assumes such an odd mix of insouciance, confusion, deliberate 5 o'clock shadow, and malaise. Well, you know, when you get into the world of fashion, there's a lot of things that are hard to explain. But one of the things I like about this is, like, clearly there's some momental that it's like a fashion play. It's just cool. But I do like that all of it is also driven

by the actual technical material science. These things are actually better. I've never liked fashion for the sake of fashion, nearly as much as fashion for the sake of functionality. Like, I'm wearing these, my five-finger shoes. Well, at least they're not. I mean, I was expecting flip-flops. That's the standard.

So this is the thing. I normally do wear flip-flops, but in this case, I had to fly my helicopter. And so I want to get some, I want to wear shoes that are fire retardant in case I crash. Sure. I want my shoes melt into my feet in case, you have to step through some fire. I needed something that is really flexible, really thin, so I can feel the pedals really well. It's important to be able to operate the foot controls in a helicopter even more so than an airplane.

And so I'm not wearing these for fashion reasons. I'm wearing them for for function reasons. And that's the best kind of fashion I think. Well, it's the more type of disclosure I'd like to hear, again, from the average pilot. getting me from here to there. You'll be relieved to know folks that my footwear is made out of a space age polymer material, so if I have to walk through fire, I'm going to be okay. Oh, I would love that. Do do do do do do do do do. My guest today, Tomolbenese, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining

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Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant American Made. This is another one of the things that edges on the idea of forbidden, but, you know, you could, you could look at statistical averages on, you know, who gets into crashes, like, you know, like based on their flight hours and their training and where, you know, where they went to school. You could probably build a pretty decent statistical model of which planes are safer to fly on. And I mean, don't mean, I don't mean the aircraft.

I mean, literally, like, which flights? Now, that would be. Because I'd pay more to be on a flight that was. at the upper limits of what's the safest aircraft, the particular one in the fleet that's never had a grounding error. So if people could book based on the safety record, both of the equipment and the pilot that you know you're going to get,

well, you'd have total chaos because that would mean every single thing in the experience is ranked. Right. And you would have to adjust the price, I suppose. You get the crappiest equipment with the worst pilots, Well, you know. You know it now, and you paid less.

You know, honestly, now that you've said it out loud like that, I know what the outcome would be. It wouldn't be that people pay for the safest. They would just still what they want today, which is the cheapest flight. The cheapest would just roll the dice. Oh, I mean, like one of the thought experiments I've always pondered is... All the available pilots are drunk, so it's $9. Hell yeah.

From here to the East Coast. One of the things I've always pondered is, what if TSA was optional? Like suppose that you said, hey, you can either go to, you know, the TSA process or you can do the no TSA process. And it's somewhat cheaper and a lot faster to get onto the plane without TSA. What would people choose? And what I've found is that it tends to be, it tends to be that most people would, would be just fine with danger error. Well, I, remember, we did this for a long time. You know, it's like, the question isn't so much, do you think that, do you think that it's

to have security or not? It's, do you think the security is there is going to catch any of the bad things that actually do happen, right? You have to, you have to believe, you have to believe that you should have security, and that also the security will catch things. Because I know people who say, oh, yeah, there should be security. Yeah. I just don't think TSA can catch any of the things that matter. And so it's basically a, you know, it's a waste. It's a different argument. You're saying one extreme or the other. Yeah. So let's say guns, right? Would you rather be in a stadium where everybody was armed. Yep.

Or nobody was armed. Now, in reality, there's never been such a stadium. That's right. Which is why you've got anxiety and uncertainty. Yep. I'd take my chances on the plane where nobody went through TSA because every single person on the plane basically was weighed and measured. Yep.

In the same way. That's what the TSA tries to do now. But the price for that sameness involves endless humiliations from your shoes to the gropings and the cavity searches and all of it. But don't you think in the end it's the squishy middle that always jacks us up, leaves us disappointed and frustrated, and also creates opportunities for guys like you to capitalize on some sort of inefficiency? I think it does create opportunities where it gets tricky, of course,

is where it's tied to legislation, especially where it can get very prescriptive. There's certain areas where you can innovate, relatively freely. And those tend to be the areas that see the most innovation, right? There's a reason that I think the internet and social media and all these things got so much investment. It was partly because those were nascent technological spaces. It was also because there were basically no rules. You could just do anything. Whereas one of my one example of this is with, is with like automobiles. There's a lot of safety devices that are legal in other places, like automatic steering, headlights and they're just not legal here in the United States yet. And eventually, usually we

catch up with these things. Automatic steering. You mean headlights? Headlights. As you turn. Yeah, exactly. So they can basically, you know, keep more, like imagine if you're going around a tight turn. Your headlights are pointing forward. Now you can't see anything in the inside of the turn. They solved this in Europe a while ago. I don't usually give kudos to Europe, but this is one, the one thing. Croscants. Yeah, croissants are good too. Well, that was a done a long time ago. I've got a whole theory that a lot of these European nations are kind of living in graveyards where they're like monuments to their forebears who invented the croissants. But like another example is seatbelts. People wonder why seatbelt technology hasn't advanced and why we haven't

had something that like replaces seatbelts. And the answer is that when seatbelts were being first introduced, there were actually active research and development programs around things like total immobilizers based on airbag technology, on cars that had that had just, you know, different schemes for protecting someone in a crash. But then Congress passed legislation that required all cars to have a seatbelt and a seatbelt is defined in extremely specific way. It's a three point harness. It does this. It does that. For example, this is my favorite example, race cars. Those guys are not using three point harnesses. They're using four point five point harnesses. Seven. And why are they doing that? Because it's safer. And I've heard people say,

well, so I have a buddy of mine who has a car and it has a five point harness in it. and it has a three-point seatbelt in it. Why? Because if he gets pulled over on the highway wearing his inarguably, scientifically proven to be safer five-point harness, well, that doesn't meet the definition of a seatbelt. You're supposed to, on the highway,

be wearing that three-point harness. And so this is one of those things that kills innovation. Why would GM or Ford invest billions in a new safety technology that would replace a seatbelt when the law says you have to have a seatbelt and here's exactly what a seatbelt is? It's anyway, but the point is, these highly regulated spaces, it's where you see the least innovation, which is why I'm crazy for starting a company in the defense space because it's so highly regulated. And yet, well, right, but look, it's that you're talking about the trap of doing it right. Yep. In other words, just because you're in compliance doesn't mean you're out of danger. Yeah. The theory, as I understand it, goes back to something called homeostatic risk or risk equilibrium or compensatory risk.

right? And this, I'd love to get your take on this, because it's anethma to OSHA, but it basically says that everybody in that same stadium, I just hypothesized, has a different capacity for risk. Yep. They process it differently. Yep. And a lot of this is subliminal, but the unintended consequence of introducing various mandates and safety protocols will make you safer environmentally, but emotionally, you will compensate. So now you know you're safer because your seatbelt's on, your helmet's on, you're locked in five points. Every study indicates that the driver who feels that way will accelerate, corner more tightly.

That's right. And take more chances, not on purpose, but because your brain is trying to get back to some sort of equilibrium that is only pegged to your individual tastes and everybody's protocols are different. Well, there's a, there's a pretty good proposal on how this should be handled that's been proposed at the NHTSA, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration level. So NHTSA and DOT have had this idea proposed before, and I actually, I'm a supporter of it. It's that you should measure the safety of vehicles based on the actual observed

outcomes rather than hypothetical compliance to the points you just made. In other words, right now, they say, do you have a safety backup camera? Can you survive a crash of this speed in this way if such a crash occurs? And they say, well, you have the seatbelt, you have the crash test safety rating, therefore this is a safe car. Well, what if for unrelated factors, other factors, some of the factors you're talking about, what if people take more risk in these cars? What if, for example, one of my favorites. What if in building an SUV to survive a crash event better, you make it more likely to get in a crash

because it has worse handling, less ability to break? Well, you don't get penalized for that. NHTSA doesn't give you bonus points for being able to avoid a crash. They only give you points for being able to survive a crash. So naturally, you'll have cars that are designed to hit this checklist. Now, what would cars look like

if they were designed to, you know, kind of this homeostasis theory that you're positing? What if you said, we're just going to look at the total outcome, total. And what are the fatality and injury rates associated with this model of vehicle or, you know, like even literally like, we're going to look at a Honda Odyssey. Like what, what are the risks associated? And what if they paste regulations on that? I think that'd be a lot healthier. And like the theoretical win here in the long run is, imagine if I as an innovator could make a car

where it has terrible crash test safety ratings, right? It cannot survive a crash at all. Right. But I prove that through psychological changes and maybe better maneuverability, maybe automated braking systems or even steering systems that get you out of accidents? What if you could prove that it gets in a tenth of the accidents and therefore still has a higher survival rate

than this big giant beastly tank that survives more crashes but also gets into more? But nobody looks at this way at a regulatory level. And so this is, it's just another area. If they look at it that way, we go to where we just were,

which is to say, wait, wait, wait. Now everybody has to have this fundamentally unsafe car. Because then everybody will realize that they're not going to survive a crash. Therefore, you don't need speed limits anymore because everybody is going to compensate their risk equilibrium. But same argument, NFL, take away the helmets, more or less brain injury. Well, right, because the theory is you give them the helmets and they're doing these, you know, they're using the helmets as weapons basically. Yeah, they're slamming each other.

100%. Well, something else that people probably don't. Would you do that? Like, would you favor that knowing that? Like the way, I'm trying to figure out how your brain works. Well, look, I lean libertarian. So what I would say is that that be a voluntary contract that you could enter into. I think if somebody wants to enter into a contract that has a 50% chance of them suffering

brain injury over the course of their career, they should be allowed to do it. And I have people who fight back on this. They say, Palmer, how could you be? Everyone's life is sacred. And shouldn't we protect that? Say, okay, but, I mean, you look at the fatality rates for like EMS helicopter pilots. It's something like one in 30 of them. will die over the course of their career.

And I mean, that's insane. That's an extraordinarily high rate. And it's not because these are crazy people. It's because it's a dangerous job. And so then the question, and people say, well, that's to save lives. You know, that doesn't count. But my point is, look, racing cars is dangerous. Racing motorcycles is dangerous.

And people, I guess what I'm really getting at it, here's how I think about this. These players are making tens of millions of dollars a year, some of them. If they want to enter into a contract to do that, knowing that there's risk of concussion, what they should do is they should try to mitigate that risk. They should advocate for things that are meeting their risk tolerance. And if people don't want to participate in that, that's fine. But with all the problems that exist in society, the long-term health impacts of people who sign up for what is effectively a combat sport and then to have other people advocating for these combat athletes on their behalf, I've always thought rings a bit hollow,

given all the other problems you could fight for. I'm just interested, though. But look, that fundamental problem that I think we're talking about and around gets applied from the sublime to the ridiculous. And it's certainly applicable in defense contracting. It's certainly applicable in the fact that the most dangerous intersections in the world are the ones with the little man who tells you when to walk. The ones with no lights are very safe. Do do do do do do do do dumb Is it weird to love people but despise human resources?

If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves.

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been, ever been to the Shibia Scramble in, in, in Japan? It's this five-way intersection. It's a famous insanely large intersection. It's got all the, you know, little walking man lights. And it's actually totally fine. It's totally fine because it's in Japan. Because it's in Japan. Okay. Have you been in the Kaiser's GROC in, in, uh, emperstance? No, I haven't. Okay. So two-way highway, fine, in between tram car. That's interesting. On either side, bike lanes. Wow. It takes a high trust society to make that work. You have to be blessed and lucky to cross all six of these, right? Because each one, it's half a dozen ways to die. And they're all moving at vastly different speeds. I imagine. Totally different. So it's impossible to handicap or anticipate. It's so bad that there are no signs. You just have to figure it out. Yep. There's no way anybody could try and take the

responsibility to say, okay, now is good. You just can't. So look, all of this, it's like the unintended consequences of force compliance. And where we started, if I remember, was basically how that impacts language. That's right. And in a jokey way, we talked about what would happen to the state of mind of a passenger on a plane if he or she was confronted with the blistering truth of the pilot. Because right now, to your point, we're being lied to. Like, when I sit down and strap in, as I will later, my pilot's going to tell me that safety is our priority. Yep. Now that's bullshit. If it were, we wouldn't be, you know, in an aluminum tube flying 550 miles an hour defying gravity.

We simply wouldn't do that if the most important thing was to be safe. But he's going to tell me it is. And then he's going to serve a bunch of warm milk designed to make everybody, you know, feel a special way. If he told the truth, on the other hand, if he said, look, my name's Jack McGillicuddy. I've been flying for this airline now for 20 years. And I'm a big fan of everybody on the plane. We're so grateful for your business, but in the scheme of things, I love my wife more, and my kids are super, super important to me.

So here's the good news. I'm going to get my ass home to them tonight come hell or high water. You guys, you just sit back, strap in, don't give the flight attendants a hard time, and you're welcome. I would feel so much better. Because, of course, his selfish self-interest is obviously much more compelling than a corporate value written where they say, he doesn't care really, you know, United Airlines or American Airlines is the safety party. I mean, I don't know if you know this. My grandfather was a United Airlines pilot

for about 45 years. I'm a shame to say, I'm not up to speed on your Pops curriculum to T. It's all good. And so he ended his career flying Boeing 747 400s, which incredible, incredible plane, really sad that there's no commercial passenger flights on them anymore. To your point, he's flying to go home and see his family. Yeah. He's not, he's, you know, he's, what is he looking at when he takes off? It's a picture of his family out of his wallet, not the United Corporate Safety Guidelines. No, and look, if you're on that plane, but it's not what he's, it's not what's driving him. And he's no different than anybody on the plane. You know, we're all creatures of self-interest. In the, see, let's, before we pivot, I think maybe the truth is always out there. It's just not the thing you're allowed to say. But if you root around for it, you'll, you'll, find it on the carriage of travel. You'll find it on the back of your ticket in the finest of print. Now, on the front, like on the back of the seat in front of you, it will say safety first, your safety is our priority. On the back of the ticket, it says, by purchasing this thing for

an indiscriminate amount of money, which will in no way comport or match with any other tickets sold on this same flight, welcome to randomness, you understand that we are defying the laws of gravity. You understand there's great risk in this. activity and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's inherently risky and you understand that. The truer it gets, the smaller the print. The bigger, the lie, the more color is employed and the splash year it seems.

My favorite waiver is that a, have you ever been to go-kart world in Los Angeles? Yes. I love their waiver. You know, it's actually, we've talked a lot of dishonesty. That's actually probably the most honesty I've seen from a business. They say, go-karts are extremely dangerous.

These vehicles are, these vehicles are not designed to comply with highway standards, they are controlled and unpredictable in severe ways. There is a real and substantial risk of death or dismemberment. And I'm like, yeah, that's like, that's completely- Where do I sign? Where do I sign?

That's interesting that there is honesty. So why is the Go-Cart World can do it? And United can't. There you go. That's it. I've signed between three and 400 waivers in my life. My favorite was for shark diving. I was testing a stainless steel shark suit.

That's cool. With the guy. Like a chain mail one? Yeah, the guy who invented it, Jeremiah Sullivan. The job was to make it with him. So we don't know the Bahamas and we make it. And then, of course, he's like, well, let's see if it works. And then we're on a boat and then we're chum in the water.

Yep. And then we jump in and then the sharks bite us. And the thing I signed before I did that basically said, I understand I'm engaging in a self-destructive activity. What follows will hurt. There will be blood. I could lose a body part and quite possibly die. That makes you like snort.

It's so not because it's funny, though, because in a way it's so bracing to be confronted with the unadulterated truth of a thing at a time when the facts are forbidden. And we dare not articulate that. That's interesting. The bizarre nature of the humor is that they're telling the truth

in a time where you can so rarely find out. Have you been to Mount Washington? Have you ever climbed? This is in... Where is it? Taylor's in Vermont? Or is it Mount Washington famous up in New England somewhere? Not Maine. I think it's... Oh, no, it's New Hampshire. It's New Hampshire.

It's the worst weather in the lower 48. Like, it can literally go from... Yeah, it's in the White Mountains. It can go from 70 degrees to negative 10. the signs as you climb. What do they say? Stop. Turn around.

Don't be an asshole. Honestly, you are approaching a place where the weather is so volatile. This is going to be unpleasant for you. They just get increasingly... That's great. It's like a mildly drunk, irreverence subversive was asked to just lay out the truth on the way up. I love that. Does it work?

No, but it makes life better. It makes it better. It's like you mentioned seatbelts. I had a neighbor, a guy named Gans. He's 99 years old now. He invented the thing that allows it to catch, like the most critical part of it, which didn't exist in the original model. There was some mechanism.

I believe it was a fixed mechanism. So you had to adjust it perfectly. But what this is is this drove people to just not use them. And also they are very uncomfortable. Yeah. Yep. Yep. You couldn't like lean forward slowly and get something.

No. Yeah. So, yeah, that was what made it really usable. All right. Let's conclude the rhetorical, linguistic, vernacular part of the conversation. And try and if we can explain to people, oh, there it is. Stop. The area ahead has the worst weather in America.

America, many have died. They're from exposure. Even in the summer, turn back now if the weather is bad. That's the first one. That's really good. Later, it's just like, you again, you're still here? You're still walking? In Hawaii, there's a number of beaches where they have a death count on the sign.

Those are good too. And it says, you know, there's one that says something like, there are 38 people who thought they could out swim the current. Don't be the next one. one. And it really puts it into stark relief. There's a, there's a highway in the Outback. They literally call it the road to Cooper Pedy. And it's the most dangerous stretch of road, I think, anywhere. But my God, the billboards there. They're just guys with toothpicks literally holding their eyes open. They're memorials all along the way where people have died. And it's the same sort of thing, man. Does, is, is any of the support?

applicable in the business of defense? You'd be surprised. I think so. I mean, one of the interesting things about the defense industry is that we've built kind of a similar set of fictions around our capability and how we're safe and we're secure and we're spending all this money on on defense to good end. I think it's started to fall apart slowly, first as we just spent more and more and more. And I think people realize we're just spending too much on it. Wait, man. Are you talking about you or the Big Five? I'm talking about big picture of the United States of America.

Just big picture, the United States, really since the end of the Cold War has erected these ideas, the things that we're spending money on are going to keep us safe and that they're going to help our allies win any potential war that comes along. And then we've been confronted with this stark reality, things like the Ukraine invasion, where we realize that actually a lot of these tools are sitting down. You're going to have $50 million bombers blown up by $500 drones. We don't have the tools that we need to stop them, that the globalization of our economy and allowing containers and ships and everything else to move around the world, basically unimpeded, means that you don't even have to use an ICBM to deliver a nuke into a port.

You can just put it in a shipping container and put it over on a ship, and it will go right up to the same place, and it only cost you like $600, too. I think people are realizing that there were all of these, underlying assumptions that just aren't true. We kind of assumed that a war would look like how we assumed it would during the Cold War. And we're realizing, actually, we live in a world where people are going to exploit every advantage they have and every disadvantage that you have.

And it probably doesn't look anything like the conflicts of the past. And that's actually why I got into the defense space. It wasn't because I thought this was an area that was ripe for innovation. It wasn't because I thought, oh, this is the place where I'm going to be able to just very easily come in and change things. It was because I was so terrified of what would happen if we didn't get people out of working on things like tech search engines and social media and put them to work on building the things that can stop the actual threats at the United States face, things that are being built by Russia, by China, by Iran, even by North Korea. And then really, whatever comes

next. There's a lot of, there's a lot of these things. You don't need to be a superpower to build small drones or cyber warfare tools or really interesting novel bio weapons. You don't need to be like a U.S. style hyperpower to try and build a bioweapon that exterminates your ethnic neighbors in Africa that aren't quite exactly the same type of African that you are. Those are the types of things that we need to figure out how to defend against. And the big five, but also the United States in general was not equipped to work on those problems. So who, just so people understand it, maybe me too, but general dynamics, Raytheon, uh, is Thial call part of them? Uh, or that's, that, that's more rocket.

It depends, it depends on the year, you know. It's a Northrop. Yeah. Northrop. Yeah. Northre. Yep. I mean, what, what happened post-cold war was a consolidation of about 50 companies of note into maybe five, six, seven, depending on, you know, how, at what point you count the mergers. Yeah. Um, there was a massive amount of consolidation that happened. And that was not an accident, and it wasn't even a free market thing. It was actually directed by the government. There was a dinner called The Last Supper, where they brought together the executives from all these top companies right after the end of the Cold War. This is the military

industrial complex writ large. Rit large. And there was a dinner. Literally one dinner. Called the Last Supper. It's known to this day in the defense industry as the last supper. And the quote, the quote from it, from the Joint chiefs was consolidate or die. They said, we will not support a defense industry of all these different companies. You need to consolidate. And I think the theory was, we're going to be spending less on defense. We won't be able to support all these large companies. Therefore, you need to become more efficient. The problem is that oftentimes consolidation in an industry leads to less competition.

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I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skills usa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.S. USA. USA. And there's another thing that it leads to, which is a lot of too big to fail type of decisions. When you have 50 companies, it's easy to let the one that trips and falls because they were running too fast perish. You know, if someone does a risk, if they're taking too much risk, and I don't even talk about technical risk. You have to take technical risk in research and development. I'm talking about things like they were paying too much of their profits out to shareholders

as dividends and so they don't have any cash reserves to cover the shortfall when a program is running long. It's, you know, that type of risk. But when you, what do you do when you only have one company in the entire country that can build fighter jets? What do you do when there's one company that is able to build submarines? you end up in a really gnarly situation where you either have to prop them up no matter how bad it gets, or you have to let them die,

and probably you're now just screwed for decades until you can restand up that capability elsewhere. And I think, unfortunately, the people who made this centrally planned decision, as people doing centrally planned government often do, they did not realize what that for the second and third order impacts of their decision would be. This consolidate or die. they didn't understand what it was really going to bring about. Well, it's like the indigenous, we're the invasive, non-indigenous species, you know, it's a,

they're brought in with good intentions. That's right. Like, there's a logic around that last supper. There's a logic to consolidate it. We need the cats to eat the rats. Oh, but now there's too many cats. Well, we're going to bring in coyotes. Oh, but now the coyotes have transmitted this disease to the, to the fox.

And now, now that's all dying out. This has happened over and over again. I mean, it's truly the story of our lives. It's the story of our environment. You tracking the mule deer problem on Catalina Island right now? Well, I live up there. Oh, on Catalina. Well, I'm sorry, I was thinking Sausalito.

No, Catalina Island, off the coast, Channel Islands. No, so what's happening with a mule deer? They've got about, people don't know exactly. It might be 2,000, it might be 4,000. We haven't figured out quite how many there are. But there are these, there's these non-native deer that were introduced a really, really long time ago. A lot, like there used to be goats on Catalina as well. I think those were brought by the Spanish for food and milk.

Classic, classic Spaniard movie. We wiped out the goats a long time ago after the goats wiped out a bunch of endangered species all over Catalina. And now you still have these mule deer. And this problem is that they eat all of the young, fresh saplings and young fresh flowers. and then they don't eat all the dry scrubby stuff. And so what happens is you have more and more of the stuff that wants to catch on fire. You have stuff that doesn't have deep roots over a long time. And so they've actually fundamentally changed the composition.

Yeah, and they've been trying, they were hoping for a while that hunters would just wipe them out recreationally. That's been kind of the theory was we're going to grant hunting permits and people are just going to shoot them. But they're, but they're they're reproducing like deer do. And there's so many of them they can't stop them. So now the Catalina Island is trying to figure out what to do. To save all these other species, they need to get rid of the mule deer. But actually what's happening now is a lot of people are saying, but the mule deer are so cute. They're so cute.

You literally just yanked us back to the beginning here with what you can say, what you can show, and what you can do. That's right. We went to a place once called. Although if I could, before you say that, I have to say I am on the wrong side of the issue here in one way. I think we need to get rid of the mule deer for environmental purposes. However, there are also a bunch of buffalo that live on Catalina Island that were left there by a movie production. And I am a big fan of the buffalo. And I don't want to get rid of the buffalo.

So even I'm captured by this idea. I'm like, no, Buffalo are cool. Don't get rid of the buffalo. You know what? You got buffalo guilt, man, because, you know. We killed them all. We can't kill these guys. They're the last handful.

Vomit Island is this little spit of. rock in one of the Great Lakes, I forget which one, but it's home to the comerance and all these sea birds. And it's, you've never seen so much avian life. The place is teeming with it. And I went there with my crew years ago because when these birds get, they get freaked out when humans come in and they're up in the trees, they throw up on you. I mean, that's literally their defense system. Wow. They throw up on you. So it's a great dirty job. And it was just one of these field good things. I was like, God, that was such a... I learned so much. And then one of the guys, one of the park rangers says, you want to see something really amazing, come back in two weeks.

I'm like, what happens at two weeks? He goes, I shouldn't tell you. Like, his boss is going, yeah, yeah, you don't tell that. Because my crew stars our cameras up and stuff. Yep. And I said, now down, just tell me, we'll keep it in the circle of trust. Enough time has gone by now. It doesn't matter. But a team goes back in two weeks later, because, there's so many birds on the island that it can't sustain them. Yep. These are rare birds. These are beautiful birds.

These are sea birds. And these are men with 22s suppressed and just... They have to call them. 70, 75% of them. That's a bummer. Now that happens. That cannot be shown. That probably can't even...

Certainly can't be talked about or written about. Well, to your point, he said, hey, don't talk about this. Same thing at the hatchery, Murray and McMurray. You separate the baby chicks, right? The pullets from the cock rolls. They're cute. You send them through the mail. It's amazing.

And then the cameras turn off and the lights go down. As it turns out, you really only need one cockerel for every 30 pullets. So thousands, thousands of adorable baby chicks go through a quezonard. It's just a giant grinder. and they come out and they're chicken food. No one sees this, no one discusses it. Which brings me to this question. The Department of War.

Yep. Did somebody just actually speak the truth? So I don't know if you know this either, but I was one of the people who was pushing for the name change Department of War. I swear to God I had no idea upon it. It was actually, literally, I had a handful of things on my list, but when I was at Mara Lollong,

right after Trump won, one of the very first things that I started pushing was that we need to be honest about what the Department of Defense does. And remember, it used to be the Department of War. Sure. For a long time. In fact, the Department of War as the Department of War has a better track record than the Department of Defense. I don't know if that's totally unrelated. Obviously, there's more factors than just a name. But when you should think of it as a sliding scale of possible names and possible meanings. Department of War is at one end. It's very, very clear what it is.

Your goal is to win wars. Not necessarily to start wars. Remember, the Department of War, they don't get to decide who they're fighting. That's up to Congress. That's up to the president. That's up to the civilian leadership that are accountable to leaders.

You shouldn't want the people in the Department of War to be people who are measured people weighing what might be right geopolitically. It's not the time for nuance. Their job is to win wars and to maintain a posture that will allow them to win wars so that the civilian leadership has that as, you know, the strength part of the peace through strength equation. They need to be able to say, hey, we can do this an easy way or the hard way, and we'd prefer to not

fight, but if there's a fight, the Department of War will win that war. And then there's, so on the other end of the scale is not defense, I would actually say it's peace. Imagine if you called it the Department of Peace. This would be very 1984, I think. Well, what is our business's piece? And of course, that's just hiding the truth. It's wrapping it in this.

It would be like farcical to do. The Department of Defense in some ways is worse, but it is maybe more back towards the middle of the spectrum. Because when you're spending on defense, well, is there ever too, how much do you devalue your defense? Can you ever spend too much on defense? And shouldn't defense also include things like fighting, you know, different? defending our country from climate change. Shouldn't it also be that we are, you know, that we are defending ourselves from misinformation? And these are things that the military intelligence community, that the military transportation

logistics are used for. And you end up with this kind of hugely expanding set of duties. And I think that it's way more honest to just say, the Department of Wars purpose is to fight wars, to be ready to fight wars. And every dollar that we spend on it is a dollar. that goes towards that purpose. I actually think it would have been harder for the defense budget

to grow as much as it has if you were more honest about it. Absolutely. You say you want to spend money on education or war fighting ability. And I think it's a different weight than if it's Department of Defense. And of course, imagine you said,

well, what do you want to spend more on? Education, health care, or peace. That would be like the ultimate lie. We're just spending more and more on peace. So I'm a huge fan of the name change. I think that it's better. to it's better to be one I think it's good to are the department's trying to get back to the basics they're trying to get rid of a lot of cruft and graft and overspending overdoing

even over training you saw they've removed a lot of training that is not required for particular occupational specialities I said no people need to focus on the things that they are doing not this long laundry list of other of other things sure and so in a department that's getting back to the basics, I think it's good to say we're going, it harkens back to that time. And then even independently of the history, I think it's better for the department to have an honest name. Well, defense, it, people get confused and maybe a little offended if, like in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Well, I think there's a corollary in language. If there's a department of defense, where's the department of offense? Exactly. Who do we call when it's time to be

offensive, belligerent, obnoxious, grabby, as clearly we have been and always will be. So it's a kind of virtue signal. I mean, Carlin talked about the general softening of the language. It attracts a different kind of person too, which then it's a self-reinforcing effect. That person comes in, they change the nature more. The more of the nature changes, the more of the type of person that attracts changes. And so the organism over time, it self-reinforces more and more towards whatever it's stated

purpose is purported to be. So did you, I mean, I think I know the answer, but to what extent was your interest in forming Anderil? Andderill or Andrel? It's constantly mispronounced. There's a, there's a, there's a, it's a, it's a philosophical and and and grammatical and, you know, it's a, here's the thing, pronunciation debates don't get settled by the company. They get settled by the general public. Eventually, people decide what something is called. Well, can't we, in this case, defer to Tolkien? I mean, I'm assuming this is the sort of power, right? In that case, it's probably something more like Anduriel. Anduriel, Anduriel, which is Elvin. And so this is why I've not, I'm actually a fan of Anderil, which is, which is closer to the Elvin. So you're a

Tolkien geek, I'm a huge token geek. But I'm also, I'm also, I'm a geek with a geek with a high enough charisma stat to know that you can't fight people to pronounce things the elven way and still walk out of the room being a well-liked guy. So I've had to learn that. Well, when you, when you crack open the Silmarillion as your reference, right? You have to, yeah, you have to recognize, look, I'll debate it with other, with other, you know, token nerds, but I'm not going to, I don't need to fight about it with, you know, like CNBC, when they call it, when they call it Andrill. Right.

I just say, that's just let it go. That's right. You bet it is. That's right. That's 100%. You got to pick your battles. I want to circle back to what the defense industry or the Department of War today can learn from the Ring of Power and all the Tolkien wrote about. So file that back there in a minute from now.

Can do. But. Ring of power. Why? To what degree did the inefficiencies that you mentioned before, especially regarding cost. motivate you, a guy who created Oculus Rift, sold it for a couple billion dollars, got himself fired from Facebook

for donating nine grand to Sumpac that supported Trump, to get back into this world, to what degree was your desire to save the country some money? A motivating factor. It was a huge motivating factor. And the way to look at it, you know, it's some combination of having better, having better capability because we desperately needed it, but then also saving money. And these

two things actually go hand in hand. If you don't have efficient innovation and you don't have efficient product creation, you'll never be able to build the right tools to move forward. In other words, think about it this way. Spending money is really just a proxy for something else. In theory, you could just spend more and more and more on defense. And if it was only a matter of money, I'd actually be okay with it. Like, it wouldn't be great, but I'd find it hard for me to become passionate about. It's hard for me to become passionate about and think something that's, you know, just saving taxpayer dollars, as good as that is. But you have to remember that money is a proxy for something. It's a proxy for someone's time working in a factory or for a building that had to be

constructed that took two years to build or for raw materials that had to be extracted from the earth, processed, turned into something else. And so when you're spending lots of money on something, ignoring, you know, like, you know, graft and fraud. Yeah. It represents in some way the efficiency of a product. When a product costs us twice as much, it's because you're probably doing, it costs twice as much as it should. It means it's twice as hard to build as it should be.

And that was the thing that I was really worried about. Because if you get into a war with another superpower, and let's say that you need to start making fighter jets fast enough to replace the ones that are being shot out of the sky. And you need to start building ships fast enough to protect not just us, but all our allies who are now at threat all over the world. Even if I have unlimited money, like let's say financially we can print unlimited money, there is not unlimited productivity in the country. Right. Even if you could somehow say Palmer here is a hundred trillion dollars for the defense budget, a hundred times more, well, that factory still takes two years to build. And that guy who was slowly building that wiring harness under a cost plus contract that in,

incentivized him to do it slowly, he only knows how to build harnesses in that way, slowly. And then the materials, maybe we selected materials that are really hard to process, really hard to mine. Maybe we don't have enough reserves of them. And so saving money really means that you're probably figuring, like, if I want to build something for a tenth of the cost, I'm figuring out to build faster factories, and figure out how to train people faster. I'm trying to, and now if I give myself that budget, I can actually do stuff. So yes, I care about the cost, but more as a, proxy for productivity total because that's what we

actually need is the ability to make this stuff if we need to make enough of it to win a war. And interestingly, regarding money on the other end of things when you run out of it, it sure seems like war follows. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy

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States that run out of money and collapse, war does tend to follow. You get strong men in power. You need people who need to seize resources. They can't do it through their own productivity and so they look outward. But I would go a step further. War can also happen through economic irrelevance. There's a lot of country. Here's an example.

I don't want to be too mean to the Dutch, but I'll bring it up an example. They ask for it. So the Dutch... With their wooden shoes. So the Dutch, the Dutch used to have, arguably, the world's most powerful Navy.

Sure. And there's a very reasonable question. Why is that not today? Why is this tradition of maritime prowess not continued in the modern day? Even through World War I, you still had the Dutch having a quite powerful navy.

And the answer is not that the Dutch have, you know, seen this economic collapse. It's not that their population has disappeared. It's that the world grew up around them so much faster that they became irrelevant. Nobody destroyed the Dutch Navy. They just made it not something you have to think about anymore. They were made irrelevant. Exactly. And so it's not even just that countries are in a race to not collapse and run out of money.

To a certain extent, they are in a race against everybody else, whether they like it or not. example, this is South Korea. South Korea has a rapidly declining birth rate. They're now down to about 0.67 births per woman on average, and you need to be at about 2.1 to meet replacement rate. And what that means is that North Korea doesn't need to fight South Korea to win. All they have to do is keep having kids and making artillery shells. And within about two generations, there's going to be eight times more North Korean military age males than South Korean. And I'm not saying military age males just because they're going to get into a fight. Military age male is a reasonable proxy for economic productivity, right? You know, these people who are going off

their starting businesses, they're running factories. And then you wait four generations. Not that long, right? You can do four generations inside of a lifespan. Inside of a lifespan, you're looking at something like 16, maybe 20 times as many North Koreans as South Koreans. So what happens when South Korea is like what happens when there's less than a million people in Seoul? And the answer is it doesn't matter how smart they are. And maybe they're really rich per person in Seoul, but they're economically irrelevant. And so you have to ask, is the United States going to be able to justify, let's say, fighting World War III over a country that has shrunk down to be smaller than a small town? Your country just turned into the Dutch Navy. Exactly. And so this is the real rat race that we're

all stuck in, whether we like it or not. But this is also the globalized economy has made it where you have to hit a certain level of growth or you will, even if you don't run out of money, you become irrelevant, you become a target. And people are, there's a nice idea like, well, I've heard, I've heard people say, I think we would still stick up for South Korea. I say, you can't possibly predict what the world looks like a lifetime from now. And I bet that Americans, a lifetime from now, are not willing to send their kids to go

die for a tiny enclave of people they've never met on the other side of the world who are economically irrelevant to our economy. Like there's a reason that we have such strong ties with South Korea today because we have incredible economic bonds in the automotive space, the resource space, shipbuilding, semiconductors, displays, TVs, computers, phones. Where's your phone made? My phone's made in Korea. If that's not the case, the world changes. Yeah. Both Gondor and Mordor. I mean, how much did they think about the Shire, really? It's an interesting question, actually.

There was this, I mean, what you have in the Shire, and actually, there's an incredible quote. I need to bring it up. Go ahead. So, you know, C.S. Lewis was a close friend of Tolkien. After Tolkien's death, he had a really interesting take on what he thought the story was really about. Give me just one moment to find this.

No, do it. C.S. Lewis, of course, one of the great Christian apologists. wrote, what did he write? He wrote the screw tape letters, I believe. Mere Christianity. Yeah, I believe. Yeah, yeah, he was something.

It's going to take me a moment. Give me a sex. One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. The lion and the witch in the wardrobe? One ring to bring them all end in darkness. Bind them in the land. Well, it's one ring to rule them all,

one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness, find them. There we go. There's my, there's my, there's my, there's my, there's my nerddum coming through. The shadow's lie. The quote that I'm looking for is I, I, I, I, he talks about how, about how they're fighting against powers that they can't understand. I'm going to find it.

I'm going to, I'm going to get it. It's, it's good. While you're doing that. I'm, I mean, that's, I'm going to find, it's such a good quote that I have to find it, even if we have to stop talking. No, no, that's fine. Do your thing. I'm just going to.

say some things out loud so I don't forget them. What do you really do in a world where most of the wars are so determined by the size of the populations? Well, you have to do what Andrew is doing. You have to figure out a way to fight them autonomously. Well, I mean, an important point that I often make to people is we have this time advantage on China where we were prosperous before they were. It's only an advantage in time. It's hard to imagine. Even talk to the most anti-Chinese, most racist guy you can think of. Chuck. But let you know, go find him and ask him, do you think, and he'll say, well, America's, you know, better per person than any Chinaman. And so that's why we're going to beat them in the long run. And what I would argue with them is, it doesn't matter how convinced you are of American exceptionalism and superiority. How can a country of 500 million people in the long run, out-compete economically and militarily, a country of two or three billion people. You'd have to believe that each American is six times as productive or useful as each Chinese

national. That doesn't seem likely. Even the most anti-Chinese person is not going to say that they're that different from us because they aren't. I talked to Jim Farley the other day over at Ford, you know, who had just come back from China And it's just they're they're kind of stunned. The factories, you know, these dark factories. Oh, yeah. You don't even have people. You don't even have people.

I found the quote. Here we go. By the way, I brought this up recently on Twitter in September because there's a lot of people who, they look to Tolkien and they say, oh, I can't believe Palmer named his company after something from the Lord of the Rings. He doesn't understand the novel.

They don't understand that Tolkien hated war, blah, blah, blah. But so do I. That's the whole point. Tolkien was not someone who, he was not someone who was pro-war by any means. The things he saw in World War I, he made that very clear. But he did believe in good and evil, and he did believe in wars that needed to be fought. And he made very clear that those are the wars you need to focus on fighting. So here's the quote, this is from C.S. Lewis. when someone asked him about this, like, how could, well, he didn't support war.

And he said, almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the hobbits or the Shire and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called. The terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which the hobbits forget against powers which the hobbits dare not imagine. And I think that describes a lot of Americans and a lot of American allies. They're being protected against powers that they forget against forces they dare not imagine. And they forget that it is a local and temporary situation. And you look at the map of Middle Earth and you see where the shire is.

That's right. It's far behind lines. And so you have you have you have you have the men you've the men of Gondor, basically holding the line, fighting every day. And one of the interesting themes also that I think that Tolkien understood, he didn't, you know, by the way, Tolkien hated allegory. I don't know if you know this. So it's very difficult to say, this is an allegory for this. It's more some of the themes around universally what is good and what is evil. You can tease out his worldview to some degree.

We take the times we live in and immediately juxtapose it to whatever the story is. And it's not quite so simple. Right. It's like, they're not really Nazis, right? But one of the interesting things that he does call out is how you had this human nature for the people who live far away from Mordor to basically not believe any of these things. They literally don't believe in this invasion. They don't believe that these monsters exist.

Contrast that with the men who are living literally on the front lines of this conflict. They are the last line of defense for the entire kingdom of man and everyone who lives behind them. they're not, they don't have the luxury of wondering if these things are real. They don't have the luxury of thinking that maybe evil doesn't exist. They're confronting it every day. And I think there's very similar analog to our modern military. You'll talk to people who say, oh, well, you know, I don't think that anyone's truly evil. And I think that nobody deserves to die.

Nobody deserves to die as a result of their actions. You know, we need to bring these people, you know, at worst, we need to try them and bring them the justice. There are a lot of people who have been on the front lines of conflicts who could never, they don't have the luxury of that. Someone who's looked evil in the eye can't pretend, well, I think it doesn't exist. And really, we shouldn't be killing anybody. There's nobody who deserves to die.

It is a luxury belief. If you get to believe it because somebody else, it doesn't have to. You get to be an isolationist. That's right. Because you're isolated. That's right. That's right. There's no isolationism in, you know, Habsburg or the World War I, Europe, right?

You're like, hey, you're sharing a border with everybody. That's right. And the knives are out all of the time. Well, and I think, too, in World War II, we got a really good, you know, not to use the vaccine analogy, but I kind of have to. We got a good, we got a good bit of immunity. to these problems in that every family had someone who fought. I mean, almost without exception. The draft was so extensive and the number of volunteers

was so broad. There was a home front. Exactly. And so people understood that we were fighting for something that mattered, that we were fighting for allies who mattered, that we were fighting a just war against a real foe. And I think that as those people have died off, we now live in a country where less, I think,

think it's something like, I don't want to get this wrong, but I think it's less than a third of families in the U.S. have a family member who is in the military. And you wonder, what does that to do to the character of a nation? It becomes much easier for a whole family of people to become anti-military, not anti-war. There's a difference between these things, to become anti-military in their pursuit of being anti-war. And it's because they don't know anybody who's actually been part of it. They don't know anyone who's been part of that, at least not directly. Maybe they did in their past, but they forget. There's a lot of kids today who can't remember 9-11. Do you really think that they're going to be remembering the lessons of World War II or World

War I? Unfortunately not. I'm looking at the results of a recent election in New York City. And I'm looking at the primary demographic that got this guy elected. Well, the question people said is, how could New York City elect someone like that? And the best response I said, they said, how could the New York City that saw 9-11, elect someone like this. I said, it's not the same New York City. It's a different New York City. And I think that it's the same and, you know, it's, this is why it's such an incredible quote where it really is, you know, a sort of local and temporary accident really describes the relative piece we've had since the end of World War II till now. It is a local and temporary

accident that comes as a result of Pax Americana, this post-World War II era. Well, riddle me this. How do you square? I've heard you say in various interviews that, um, you'd much rather have our wars and battles being fought with the kind of hardware that you're creating. Better to have the gear over there than our blood and treasure. That's right. But you've also made the point, and I certainly agree with it, that if the country itself becomes disconnected from its military, either consciously or unconsciously, then we're not in the fight in the same way. the more disconnected we get from the fight, the more likely it is, the fight will come to pass. And the goal is to avoid the fight in the same way that our goal with cars is not to crash or get TMI's playing football.

Yep. vis-a-vis all the unintended consequences and language that we've talked about, how are we to think about the positives of all the tech that's allowing us to fight without being there? So I think that these things go hand in hand. I've often said, and, you know, I've, I kind of beat it, beat, I'm beating a dead horse on this because I've been saying it for like eight years. But I've been saying the U.S. needs to stop being the world police and start being the world's gun store. In other words, we shouldn't be sending our own people to die for other country's interests.

We should be giving them the tools that they need to maintain, you know, their existence as a nation that the U.S. wants to be allied with. My analogy I prefer is to turn them into porcupines. You give them tons of surface-air missile defense systems, tons of local, local defense systems, and offensive weapons that make it where you just don't want to put this guy in between your teeth. Because even if you could win, it's going to be so painful you're not going to want to. What you're talking about, you know, the perils of becoming more and more likely to become involved in these wars as the people are pulled out. I think that's one of the reasons it's so important to stop being the world police and instead leave that decision as to whether to fight up to the people who are dealing with the consequences. So like somebody in somebody in Ukraine, for example, they're not thinking about whether or not they'll fight on the basis of whether or not it's a robotic system or not, whether they're on the front line of the back line.

For them, it's much more fundamental. It's actually a little bit like the pilot analogy earlier looking at his family. They're fighting so that their country exists. They're in it, man. They are in it. they are in it. I think that that's actually a very healthy motivation to fight. If you are fighting for the existence of your country and your family and your business and your culture, that's the person who should be deciding whether or not this is a life or death fight. It shouldn't be

another country on the other side of the world fighting that for you. And then also, how does that country know when to stop fighting too? Right. I think this is what we saw in the Middle East. We fought these wars in the Middle East long after the people we were supposedly helping, wanted to be fighting them. And that's, of course, why the Taliban was able to come immediately back into power in Afghanistan, like within weeks of the U.S. pulling out. It's because the Afghani military that we were propping up, what were they fighting for? Nothing. Nothing. They were, I'm not saying nothing, nothing at all. Obviously, like, you know, I've, it sucks that all of these all-girl schools got shut down. We can't want your sovereignty more than you do.

Exactly. And we shouldn't be making that decision. And so I think these things go together. If you give people the tools that they need, I think that they're going to be motivated, not by the fact that they have robotic weapons to fight or not fight. It's going to be about the existence of their countries. I think countries should generally not be making decisions about the prolonged existence or fighting decisions of another nation that is not their home. Like the U.S. shouldn't be deciding if Ukraine continues their war or not. And the U.S. shouldn't be deciding if Taiwan is going to defend itself or not. That has to be their decision. Sure. And I want to give them the tools that they can use to make that decision. I want to talk about, and I forgive me, I don't want to pull you out of your lane. I'll say one more thing real fast. I believe this partly is a moral thing, but I can make a very practical argument that I've had with like, you know,

the kind of real politic, GOP side of things in particular, where they say, oh, you know, well, Palmer, sometimes we do need to go abroad. And sometimes we do have interests that we have. And my point to them is, we don't have the political capital to do that as a nation anymore. America is done with it. We are, we, we, we, we, we burned all of that credibility that we built up into World War II. We burned most of it during Vietnam. And we burned up the rest of it in the Middle East, fighting this war on terror.

And you will not convince Americans to go fight another war, even if it is just. This is not a judgment on whether we should. I would argue, I don't think that America. could work itself up enough to go fight the Nazis again. I think that if it came to us, they said, we're going to have to lose a few million people and we're going to have to mobilize our whole economy, I think we literally don't have it in us.

And whether it's spiritually or morally or politically, whatever you want to call it, we will not be able to muster the political will or capital to make that happen. And so this is kind of the remaining solution, whether you want it to be or not. Well, that worries me. Oh, it worries me too.

It's worrisome. I want America to be in a world where if there is a just reason to rise to the occasion that we're able to. But I just don't think that we have it in us. I don't think the kids coming out of modern schools are ready to go down. I don't think that the kids who are look at the kids who are on the beaches in Normandy on D-Day. Do you think that we have a few million of those? I do not. That's the problem.

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That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support MicroWorks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Two things. I think all that was true in 2019. I think it's doubly true now because along with the death of the things that you, you know, you're you mentioned, our trust has also died in the very institutions that we used to immediately defer to.

Sure. And so building that back is way outside my pay grade. It has to happen, but I suspect it won't happen until things go splat first. Sometimes, it's Churchill, right? When you're marching through hell, keep going. You've got to get through it. Historically speaking, you're right. It's very rare that when, it's very rare that something with a lot of,

lot of inertia stops without a sudden impact. Well, that's just... Because it takes... It's very Newtonian of you. That's right. Now, but here's the thing that I think... Politics is very Newtonian. And linguistic and so forth.

The thing I think we can control, but I'm not quite sure how. And I really want to get into it with you. I know we've been talking about an hour, 20 minutes or something, but you're still late. I mean, the helicopter is not leaving... without you. No, I'm totally fine. Okay, and I know you've got, I know you've got like national affairs to attend to. But why were you at that energy summit? How important is our energy policy in enabling you to make the tools that we need to prevail in this coming

population collapse world? And skilled labor, We have to reinvigorate the trades somehow. That's why I was at that conference. And you made some remarks with Alex that makes me think that we might be singing out of the same hymn book in this regard. 100%. So these are two other things that go hand in hand. So if you want to have skilled jobs in manufacturing, making goods, processing minerals, I mean, you can pick almost anything.

it has to be competitive. And I look, this is another one of those things where we live in a globalized world. And so in a world where the U.S. only buys stuff that's made in the U.S. and we're not competing against anyone overseas and we don't need to export overseas, you could maybe choose a different strategy. But let's say it's a given, right? We live in a globalized world. Other countries get to sell to us and we are selling to them.

If that is the case, you have to have low energy cost because it goes into everything. It drives the cost of everything. If your energy costs are too high, there won't be any jobs for skilled labor because the products that would come out of that energy cost will be too expensive to compete against foreign options here in the U.S. And they'll be too expensive to export to other countries. They're just going to choose other people. And so if you want there to be skilled jobs, and if you want there to be jobs for people

to, like, there has to be an economic impetus for that. And that only happens if we're competitive on energy. Ideally, much cheaper. The interesting about energy is you can be competitive, which means, like, let's say you can be competitive with Asia and Europe, but it's also a bit of an easy button

to be hyper-competitive. If I can drop my energy costs down to near zero and other countries can't do it, now they're the ones that are screwed. Now they're the ones that are saying, oh my God, how do I compete with American automobiles?

Their cost of energy is so low that they're able to extract metals easier, process metals, easier, weld metals easier, run their factories so much more easily. And then as a result, there's all of this demand for skilled labor. They have this economy built around all these people do this. How can we compete with them when our energy costs are five times as high? And I think that America is one of the few countries that is actually well positioned to turn that knob to zero. This was the dream of the early age of atomic power. It was power that was too cheap to meter.

It was so cheap to make electricity. It wasn't even worth keeping track of how it was being used. And I think that that dream maybe is not going to be viable on like an industrial scale. Like an aluminum smelting plant draws a lot of power. It's definitely worth running it through a meter. But I think that we actually will get to the point where things like residential power consumption are going to be such a rounding error that it literally isn't even worth billing people. I just walked through a data center for the first time. Yep. Big tour, Plano.

Our buddy's over at Aligned, right? Man, I talk about metering a thing. Like the amount of energy that it's going to take to run those things. And we need to make that energy. And the thing is, like, it's going to take everything. Like, we're going to need oil. We're going to need gas. We're going to need nuclear.

I'm a huge nuclear fan. I think we should, by the way, US has great reserves of uranium. This is another thing we have that other countries don't. We were blessed with incredible farmland and an incredible river transatlore. transportation system. Isn't it just incredible as we move into the atomic age? It turns out we also have more of the stuff you need for the atomic age than anybody else. What a what a what what what a stroke of luck that we've just kind of thrown away and in California we're shutting down our nuclear plants just like Germany is shutting down their nuclear plants. We need more and more and more energy. It's just been really discarded for largely political reasons. And you know, there was a there was a great there was a great bit that a OC did when the Green New Deal was going through.

And originally it didn't include any subsidies for nuclear power. And somebody asked her, hey, why are there no subsidies for nuclear power? Isn't that lowering about lowering carbon emissions? And she said, the Green New Deal isn't about lowering carbon emissions. It's about fundamentally restructuring the power of energy generation, power and energy generation away from private corporations into the hands of the government. I was like, oh, my God. You just said the quiet part out loud.

She said the quiet part. And actually, she's the pilot who just leveled with the crew. I actually maxed out to AOC. I wrote a, I guess it was like a $5,400 check to her campaign. They ended up returning it. But my thought was, you know what? I want more people who are honest about what they're doing in politics. I'd rather have someone who's honest about it than somebody who's talking out both sides of their mouth

and concealing their true intentions. Also, she's from the Bronx and nobody from my favorite political party is likely to win the Bronx. So it's kind of a free donation. Well, look, I mean, six years ago, she told me and the rest of the world that, we had 12 years and then, you know, life, you know, that's the end of the earth. And Bill Gates just, what, four days ago, did you read that? I did. Well, holy crap, dude.

Well, he's, I mean, he's, he's admitting that things will generally be fine. I mean, you know, what Bill was saying is we should focus on mitigating, you know, the changes that will occur. Humanity will still do better. It is going to prosper and we need to make a lot more energy. But one of the things I talked about at the conference, I think, was, this whole concept of climate change is predicated on the fact that nobody wants it to change. But that's not really true.

This is actually, I think, one of maybe the great conspiracies of the modern time. The reality is the global South has basically no political power globally. And they are the people who will be most negatively impacted by temperature going up a few degrees. I'm not saying it's going to be like a catastrophe that destroys the world. I'm just saying if you count the impacts positive and negative, they probably come negative. However, for a huge chunk of the world, the temperature going up by a degree or two is actually really good for their economy, massive for their economic stability. Look at all the land that China is going to unlock for agriculture. Look at all of the northern European nations

that are going to have somewhat more agricultural independence. Russia don't even have to get into it. It's just obvious. Siberia? Exactly. And so my theory here has been, like, as I've looked at the things that you can do to control climate, it's not actually that hard. If you want the earth to get warmer, that's not hard. If you want the earth to get colder, that's also not hard. It's the type of thing, one country with a geoengineering program could just do it unilaterally on their own. Now, what would happen is they would probably be stopped by other countries, but technologically, the U.S. could do it. Japan could do it. Russia could do it. If they want to make the Earth's temperature go up 10 degrees, they can. If they want it to go down 10 degrees,

they could. And so my working, my working hypothesis here is the real reason nobody's doing anything to so-called stop climate change is because a lot of people realize actually we don't really have an interest in stopping it until it gets to a certain point. And then all of a sudden we're going to care. All of a sudden we're going to do all these things. And I wish we could be honest about this. I wish someone to say, you know what, we're just going to pick a temperature that we think we want to be at. And we're not going to, we're not going to try to stop change. We're going to actively engineer the planet to be whatever we think the thing is that will lead to the, you know, the least loss of life, the most economic productivity, the most reliable agriculture. You can,

you can pick what your values are. Everyone, different people will have different values. Are you saying, and do you really think we can control the temperature of the planet to that degree? I am absolutely confident. And this is something where I, I differ from the Republican Party. There's, The Dems have basically been saying climate change is coming or global warming is coming and it's going to destroy the world. The Republicans have been saying, oh, it's not really going to be that bad, no matter how bad it gets and we're not causing it anyway. I set all that aside and say, no, no, we should actively be changing the climate to be exactly

what we want it to be. And it's crazy to say we can't change the climate because we very, very easily can. There's meant, and this isn't like a crazy conspiracy. There's maybe a half dozen very real technologies that could allow us to, in the climate, instantly modulate the temperature of the planet. Like one of my favorites is called cloud brightening. So more sun reflects off of white clouds than dark stuff underneath, right? Like if you have a cloud over the ocean, a lot of sun hits that cloud, bounces back into space, never makes it to the ocean. It's really, really easy to just take salt water, shoot it up out of big giant

pumps up into the air, and have it make big giant clouds that attract moisture around the little tiny salt crystals, and you can just make big giant clouds in the middle of the ocean. It would take a handful of nuclear-powered ships to raise, sorry, to lower the Earth's temperature by two or three degrees using cloud brightening. You could just go out to the middle of the Pacific, make a big giant patch of clouds that's there all the time, and you would do it. Did you follow the, cargo shipping cloud effect? Yes. So this is another example. The tiny amount of sulfur allowed for nucleation sites to occur that then caused artificial clouds. We've been basically been running this experiment for about 30 years.

Is this a chem trail thing? Is it related adjacent? It's a little bit. Chemtrails are usually similar in technology to the theory, but I don't think anyone thinks chem trails are for climate change. They mostly think they're for drugging people or changing their minds or vaccinating them or something like that. I think that the vast and overwhelming majority of chem trails that people have identified

are just normal atmospheric effects and aviation related effects. It's condensation wakes in engine trails. There are a extremely small, vanishingly small handful of situations where there clearly have been things that have been dispensed. I think most of those end up being things like antibacterial agents or pest control agents. I've also seen one where there's like, it was an ag, they were like, oh, my God, they're spraying, they're spraying this town. And what it ended up being was it was a plane that was going to crash. It was a crop sprayer. And it needed to dump its stuff before it crashed because it's so it's so heavy that you don't want to, you know, crash a plane like that.

So, but like we're talking, that's like 0.01% of the cases. So I have to admit, I'm not a chemtrails guy. I think as a guy who does a lot of flying around in planes, everything that someone sent to me that was a chem trail, I'm like, no, man, that's just how airplanes work. That's, that's just what they do. What kind of security clearance do you have? I think. I am not supposed to get into the details in a public forum like this,

but I have a security clearance and I'm and it's appropriate for the level of information access that I have. I can say I do, I have a security clearance. I mean, how big is your company? We're about 4,000 people kind of like full-time, truly internal people, actually maybe closing on 5,000.

And then if you count contractors, people who are people who are like people who are working with us part-time people if you count everything it's it's over 6,000 people where will you be in the in the in the in the pathion of Raytheons well I mean they're there are a lot bigger than us but this gets back to what I talked about earlier which is that you know but you know money is a proxy for productivity and so is people you know how you it's possible for a company to have 10 times as many people and still be slower

than the first company. And so I think we're definitely a lot smaller than the big guys. I mean, they have tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands of people

if you count all the contractors working for them. But the potential for you guys to scale. The potential for us to scale is there because I don't need that many people to do what I do.

A lot of what I do, for example, on the manufacturing side, a lot of it is automated. And it's not that it's not that we don't have any people already manufacturing. We have thousands of people doing it. It's just we're augmenting them with

technology so that each of them can fight with the strength of 100 men. Or in our case, build wiring harnesses with the strength of 1,000 men, or build composites or sensors or rocket motors. But that's going to be the key. I guess what I would say is I don't measure the progress of my company that much in terms of the people. It's in our output. Like what are we making? Are we successfully making AI fighter jets, robot submarines, rockets, and rockets, and munitions and missiles and self-aiming rifles and force fields. Like if we're making that stuff,

I'm okay if my company isn't growing, if those people are becoming more and more and more capable. You know, the Bill Gates thing, I just, as we start to land this. The energy thing? Metaphorical plane. Yeah, like, we started with forbidden facts. And we started with the idea that, you know,

when you understate or overstate a thing, it's only a matter of time until the people catch up to your smack. That's right. Right? So here's Bill Gates, you know, six, seven years after Alexandria at all told us we had 12 years. He comes out and he says, no, I don't think that's true. I still think it's an issue.

But, and 3,000 words later, he's basically walking a lot of stuff back, right? And so all of that kind of happened because people who genuinely cared about the future of the climate and the planet, it overstated it. Right. They abused the language. And they certainly understated the benefits, too. This is what Alex makes the point. Yes.

They don't talk about, you know, the millions of people in India who will die if fuel becomes more expensive because they already don't have enough to heat their homes. You know, he doesn't, there's three billion people burning dung and wood. People like to, yeah, and they don't talk about like the deaths caused by all the particulates. when they burn that dung because they can't afford fossil fuels. So, yeah, it's simultaneously overstating the negative impact and then understanding or even ignoring the positive impact when really these things need to be taken as a balance.

And I think the reason people haven't done that is because it means taking responsibility. Imagine that I'm a, imagine I'm like a, you know, I'm a Euro politician. What's an easier position for me to take? I'm a politician. Maybe I'm the politician. prime minister of some small European country that isn't relevant anymore. Dutch, the Netherlands.

I can't pick a particular one because I like some of those guys, small or not. But suppose, what's an easier position for me to take to say climate change is a huge problem? It's not our problem. It's being caused by the United States and by China and by Russia. But it's a big problem. And it's kind of this act of God that we just have to try our best to stop. Who knows if we could stop it or not. Well, we're going to do our best to be good moral people and fight the good fight. Or imagine a position where he says, I believe the global climate should be exactly this. The average should be, you know, the average, the average should be 65 degrees Fahrenheit right along the meridian at exactly this point. And that should be our climate target because that is what I

believe will harm the right number of people and hurt the right number of people. And people, the thing is, If you said this, think about what happens next. It's the back of the ticket. It's the truth in the fine print. And they say, but wait, if we do that, those guys who live on the equator in Africa are going to be destroyed agriculturally. And what's easier to say, to say, I hope those people make it. Or to say, I am willing to trade the prosperity of that African nation for our agricultural

security and doubling the number of crop yields that we get from our marshy fields. And to do that takes response. You have to own it and take responsibility. responsibility. And so I think the real reason that people have been talking about climate change as this, you know, huge problem where everyone's causing it and all we can do is fight it together is because nobody has to take responsibility for the winners and the losers. And I wish we would just be honest and say, you know what, we're going to pick up temperature. That's what's going to be. There's going to be winners. There's going to be losers. We can fight it out in the UN. You know,

that African nation can come and make their case. Maybe we pay them off and we say, hey, you know what, you're, you are going to get turbo screwed here. We'll give you some, some, some of the surplus profits of what we're doing here and you can use it to subsize your economy. I don't know the answer. I'm not a politician. But what I do know is that pretending that we can't control the climate

in both directions is only possible if you ignore the wealth of reasons. I have to say one more thing about forbidden truths. Did you know that geoengineering is prohibited research at many universities? You're not even allowed to research it and you can't get any funds to do it.

You won't get any approval. And they say because it's irresponsible. Explain what it is. It is exactly. So geoengineering, you're filled with terraforming. Let's go to other planets. Sure. It's just the same thing but on Earth.

Let's make Earth more habitable. Because by the way, if you were coming to Earth from space today and there were no people on the planet, the climate of Earth today is not what you would probably choose for optimum human habitation. So if you were to look at it and say, what should it be? What's the optimal? Where we are is probably not it. It's just where we happen to be right now.

And humans have been, we've seen a lot. lot. We've been through ice ages and we came out okay. But the, the, oh, what was a point that I was, that I was making? A forbidden fact. Oh, that's right. So a lot of these universities, what they've done is they've said you cannot research geoengineering. And they're saying, well, because geoengineering is dangerous, like what if we use geoengineering and then because it's able to keep the climate perfectly stable, we start using too many fossil fuels and we cause ocean acidification? So, let's say temperature is constant, but there's more carbon dioxide in the air, and so the oceans were acid. No, I agree that's a problem. I care a lot about marine life. I've spent a bunch of

money conserving marine life and researching marine life. But the way to do that is not to prohibit people from learning about the problem and examining it. But the real reason they don't want to do it is because it's a forbidden fact. And politically, they don't want it to even enter the equation that perhaps climate change isn't about cutting back on consumption. Perhaps there are other levers we can pull. It's, as AOC said, it's not really about changing the climate. It's about moving the levers of power out of the hands of private industry and back into the hands of the people, which of course means the bureaucrats.

Sorry, Charlie, I can't let him go. It's too good. How about this one? Fracking. Yep. Right? I mean, this is the ultimate F word in the energy game. That's right.

My friend, Harold Hamm, more or less pioneered it. In the old days, if this were an oil field, there'd be 50 wells. That's right. Today there's one. It goes down a couple miles and it goes out. And I don't know. I believe fracking was the proximate cause, horizontal drilling, the proximate cause of energy independence in this country. Right.

And we still, that was such a failure of communication. And there's still so much misinformation around the reality of what that is. I'm thinking now about, since you mentioned the oceans, polymetallic nodules. I have. Oh, my deep sea mining. God. I mean, look, we just got to go get them. We've got to get them.

We've got to go get them. What is it? A $16 to $20 trillion industry. You got every, this is copper, nickel, cobalt, and manganese in a single potato-sized nodule. And also a lot of rare earths as well. And they're there. So Trump signs the E.O.

in April, there's this, I think, by this time, a few months from now, it's going to be headline. We're going to have the same giant conversation about the ethical moral dilemma of going down 5,000 meters and scooping up these rocks. That's right. Meanwhile, there's the rainforest. Well, what's left of it? That's right. Well, actually, here's another thing that's there is, so we're going to be doing all this.

We're going to be doing all of this, you know, debating whether or not we should do in this mining. Meanwhile, Europe and America are going to keep paying for Russian minerals that are only in Russia that we could be getting off of their supply. Same thing with oil and gas. I mean, Germany is given tens of billions of dollars to Russia. They've given them more oil and gas money than they've given Ukraine's arms support. And so these things have a real trade. When you say, we're not going to drill from more oil and gas, what you're really saying is,

we're going to fund Russia's war in Ukraine by giving them money for their oil instead. That's actually the real trade that's going on, but it's kind of out of sight, out of mind. That's another country. I need your opinion or maybe even your advice if you want to give it. I've been at this 17 years now. Trying to reinvigorate the trades. That's right. And we've had a huge amount of progress.

In fact, this year we had 10 times a number of applications as we did the year before. Wow, that's extraordinary. I'm not doing anything different. Something's tipped. Now I look at the maritime industry. You know, they need $250,000. thousand welders and electricians for submarines. There's going to be another 100,000 for the deep sea mining. Automotive, energy, AI, so forth. Like, the stakes are really real. And I'm a little

freaked out because after that conference where I met you, I went to a few others. Yep. And, you know, the people who are helping us with this national campaign are not the people who I thought would call. It's, it's, uh, it's Wells Fargo. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's Larry Fink, of all people, BlackRock. It's Fisher investments. He's big investment. The whole ESG network. It's crazy.

But I think what they've done is they've looked into their own portfolios. And they've seen a lot of companies who are just crapping up their backs, man. They're scared. They don't know where these people are coming from. So the question is, I believe we need a national campaign. certainly a series of statewide campaigns. I think I can get the money necessary from some unlikely places. But it's still, this is the Manhattan Project in my world.

Who do I talk to? How do I get the attention of the people who are truly at the grown-up table, who I know want to help but are having a hard time looking at the difference between a big persuasive campaign versus another. scholarship program. Sure. Program. Like where where do you think that communication needs to be best delivered? Well you're catching you're catching me you're catching me unaware so I haven't given a good thought so you're just gonna get you're gonna get you're gonna get a just

that initial first thought. So the part of the problem like what you're talking about a persuasion campaign versus let's say just another scholarship is actually probably a better use and more productive use of money. And you don't have to pay for someone's education so much has convinced them, hey, the U.S. is back. This stuff is real. The vibe shift is underway. The stock market goes up when the president says that he's going to hit 6% GDP growth, partly because people just psychically decide, well, if he's saying that and they're going to make policy that makes that happen, that means things are going to go well. People also choose careers on this. High schoolers decide what their degree is going to be in this.

Like, people, gold rushes are real, and you can create them by saying that they're going to happen. There's gold and then there are hills. Exactly. And so a persuasion campaign of what you're talking about probably makes a lot of sense. It's probably effective. However, my initial read is you're stepping into a poisoned environment. You're stepping into a world where one of the big problems that this government has been trying to solve is that there's been tons of money going out to these kind of softer, harder to measure things.

And it's to help convince, you know, it's like cultural, you know, like, cultural, you know, like, you know, like gender, gender awareness in Uganda. And, oh, isn't it good that we do this? Or helping kids learn to code in Rwanda. And the problem is those campaigns, so many of them were, they were just graft. Yes. Fraud. And badly executed on top of it.

Badly executed, you know, things that were meant to be built didn't get built. Things that were meant to happen, didn't happen. And there were a lot of things that we shouldn't have been doing. Like, I'm kind of glad it didn't work because they were. ridiculous propaganda campaigns anyway. So unfortunately, you're stepping into a poison. It's like a poisoned well problem. You have people who have made these things look like they're bad on its face.

And so I can tell you, there's people in government who would 100% agree with what you're saying. And there's others who on their face are like, no, we are not going to use government funds to do these types of hard to measure. A scholarship you can measure. Did the kid go to school? Did he get his degree? Did it work or not?

Yeah, but I could also measure. Do we want South. Korea to make our ships. Yep. Right now, it's an academic question. We need them to. That's right. We can't do it.

We don't have the capacity. We don't. Talk to Bollinger. Talk to, you know, I mean, these are your, you're, I'm asking you this question. My current theory there, by the way, is we should maximize our strengths. We do, for example, make some good power trains, electronic sensors. I think we should basically say, hey, let's work together. We're going to build parts of the superstructure.

We're going to build power plants. We're going to, like, the power plants of these ships. Like, we should be left the U.S. has a lot of friends around the world. Let's do stuff together. Of course, in the long run, we need to be building our own ships. It's crazy that we're not. Yes. I keep coming back to the electrician I ran into in Plano in a data center

who had been poached from four other projects in the last year. Yep. He's making $230,000 a year. He's 26 years old. He has zero debt. Yep. He learned the skill he has over like a 14-month period. And he's working.

And his first kids on the way. And this is a young guy. His career is only going up from here. Eventually he's going to, he's not even into his real earning years. Take your big brain on your next helicopter ride. If you got a few synapses to spare, I have to find a way to make that kid a household name.

Yep. Times 100,000. There are a lot of men and women who are prospering in and around your space as a result of mastering a skill. American manufacturing is really poised in a good way because I think finally, finally people have realized there is a cost to outsourcing and export. I mean, you've been on this for decades. So it's not new to you, but I'll think a lot of people are truly just now coming to terms with the cost of exporting all of your critical industry. around the world and what it looks like to be a country that can't make anything itself. That's it. And it's scary. And I think, look, if I had an alarm bell here, I would ring it.

And I was in the room with Howard Lutnik and Alex Karp and 36 other CEOs and the president of the United States in Pittsburgh. Yep. When they announced $92 billion earmarked and allocated for data centers in Pennsylvania alone. And there I am, like, just Debbie Downer going, hey man, you're, You're talking about creating two million jobs in manufacturing, and there are 482,000 open jobs right now. We can't fill. What are we going to do? Where are they going to come from?

Right. Now, you've talked about population collapse. You've talked about all these other things. And, man, it's all real. Well, it's all time together. I mean, I'm a big pro natalist, too. I think everyone needs to have a lot more kids. Congratulations on yours.

Thank you. I've got one so far, but I have not, I haven't even hit replacement rate. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, If I don't hit replacement rate, then I'm a real hypocrite. But yeah, like I said earlier, the U.S. can't compete with countries that have billions of people if we're only hundreds of millions of people. And so we got to keep up the pace. Dude, I just, I can't wait to see what happens next.

You're very interesting, as you know. But the whole Shire Hobbit, Ring of Doom, juxtaposition, industrial, military, complex. The complexities of our language. and our airline pilots and AOC and the ability. We've covered a lot of good stuff. We made good time across a lot of ground. I'll put this conversation against most. That was fun, man.

Really, really fun. I appreciate it. That was really fun. Well, thank you. It's fun too because usually people just, you know, they want to talk, most people they want to talk about, they want to talk about fighter jets. You know, and that's it.

It's fun to be able to talk about these bigger picture questions. I can't bear to ask you questions. that I know you've been asked a thousand times. Is this? This was a, so I've done two events recently where instead of sending me, I sent a robot and I teleoperated it using a VR headset. And I've been getting away with it so far.

Eventually the novelty is going to wear off and people are going to want me to start showing up in person again. But man, what a time saver when you can pull it off. And think how much I'm saving in terms of carbon emissions by not flying. Just clone yourself. man. How hard could it be? Look at that. So where is this creature? Where did you send it?

So there were two events that I've done. There was the reindustrialized conference and then this was actually here. Actually, at the Newport Beach Country Club for a recent Senate event. This is home for you, right? Yeah, this is home for me. I live in Newport Beach. If Alex does that thing again, are you going to swing by? Oh, yeah, for sure. There's a... He's going to do it. There's a lot of good people there. Yeah. And I mean, we just, there are so many things that the United States needs to do on the energy front if we're going to be competitive globally.

And we have all the pieces. And the good news is it looks like this administration is going to allow nuclear power to really come roaring back. Like that one piece alone is maybe half the puzzle. Do you imagine like small reactors everywhere? I do. So I think that particularly for things like factories, data centers, it doesn't make sense to have a grid that makes energy in one place and then ships it, you know, across the city to the building that uses it. They should just have

on-premises power generation. Like they should have small nuclear plants. And that way, they're also not degrading everyone else's grid. Like right now, if you pull from the grid, you're pulling all that power. That's power that you, like, you now have to overbuild the grid to handle things that it was meant to, like people's TVs or, you know, running their air conditioning. And then you add in this massive constant base power load that they were never designed or intended to take. In general, I think the grid, the other problem is the grid has also become a political vector. So like in California, most of our energy cost is not the cost of making the energy. It's all of the political pulls that have been placed on top of it in form of taxes.

So California has like, what is it, like 32 cents a kilowatt hour. The national average is like eight cents a kilowatt hour. There's some places that are approaching two or three cents per kilowatt hour if they've got nearby source. Not so different at the gas pump. Look, so like the whole point of a grid is that it's supposed to be cheaper to make power, cheaper and more reliable, to make more power at a central site and then distribute it to all of the end users. So why is it that I can run a gas generator at my house at a scale of just my house and it's cheaper than buying it from the grid? So this is another reason. I'm a big fan of factories and data centers building their own,

building their own power on board. And for people being okay with that, it means you can't have somebody temporarily get into power and say, all right, I'm going to basically put all of you under my thumb because it's not just the cost. It's also the threat. You can say, oh, I just want to tax energy more equitably. But what you're really doing is saying local data center,

if you don't do what I want politically, and if you support my candidate, I'm going to make your costs go through the roof. You're no longer competitive with the data centers in the next state. And so your whole company is going to go bankrupt because you can't compete with them on AI cost per token prices. Like that's a lot of power to give to a politician. So I think energy generation needs to become just like a lathe, just like a screwdriver.

It's just another tool you have at your factory that you use to get the job done. From your mouth to God's ears, man. What a pleasure. Thank you again. I know you got to run. but if I don't talk to you first, I'll see you. I'll see you at the Energy Summit. You bet.

Palmer Lucky, much obliged. Oh, so fun. Hey, finally, are you in a world now where people go to a thing to, like, get a book or watch a doc or something that you've done? I didn't even think to ask you. Do you want to hawk anything? Like any shameless pluggery? Yeah. If you want to, if you like video games, check out Modretro.

All right. This is my side project I've been running since I was 15 years old. And we are doing things like making modern heirloom grade tributes to the most important game consoles of all time. For example, we have a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy called the Mod Retro Chromatic. It plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color Games. It has a magnesium aluminum alloy shell. It's the same metal that's used in some of our attack drones at Anderil.

The lens on it is not a piece of plastic over the screen. a lab-grown sheet of Sapphire Crystal. It's the largest piece of Sapphire Crystal on any product anywhere in the world. And we're about to launch a new product of the M64, the Mod Retro 64, which plays Nintendo 64 games. We've got some other stuff coming. Anyway, it's $199. I lose money on it. So I've used my money to deeply subsidize it because I really like this type of stuff. And we've been releasing new Game Boy games, re-releasing old Game Boy games. And And even doing new releases of Game Boy games developed in the 90s that never came out. So GameStop just launched a new game in-house.

We just relaunched a Kroc back for its 25th anniversary. We're doing Rayman. We did a thing with Atari. We brought back three of their 90s classics. You can buy those in a set. And if you scroll down a little bit, you can see we have the chromatic available in a whole bunch of different colors. So if I'm going to get a shameless plug, this is my shameless plug. It's there's no economic reason for something like this to ever exist.

But I really wanted it to happen. And in fact, it even has a custom screen. This is the lowest resolution screen you'll find in the world right now. It's 160 by 144 pixels. So it's about 80 times less pixels than your iPhone display. 80 times less. What a delightfully shitty product, man. That's how you make it authentic.

Yeah, we didn't want to be scaling it on a modern screen. We had to recreate. that old screen. And so yeah, that's, that's, I wasn't even expected, but yeah, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's we're doing there. It makes a great gift for dads, makes a great gift for husbands, makes a great gift for boyfriends. Women like it too, but mostly, but mostly, this is maybe one of those hidden truths. I'll tell you, it's like 90% men that are buying this stuff. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you another hidden truth. You are some kind of geek, Palmer Lucky. I appreciate you. Come and play

Dungeons and Dragons with me and my crew sometime where we play every week. D&D night is tomorrow. So I'm a wizard named Nilrem 5 from Atlantis trying to figure out what happened to my country. Anyway, that's it. This is the guy with his finger on the button, creating the next generation of weapons to protect truth, justice in the American way. on behalf of 330 million of our compatriots much obliged. Thank you. When you leave a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two or just three, we were hoping.

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