#2394 - Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is the founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries, designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and the founder of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014. www.anduril.com/profile/palmer-luckey Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. 50% off your first box at https://www.thefarmersdog.com/rogan! This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  I haven't done the ball, but I have done those knee chairs.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:18Joe Rogan?

  They're a little annoying.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  What about standing desks? You a standing desk fan?

• 0:23Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I use them, I usually have lower back gets kind of sore just standing there.

• 0:29Joe Rogan?

  I feel like some part of you should be relaxed. And if you're standing, you're going to want to lean on something to have a conversation especially. Because I know some people do podcasts standing up, like a standing up table. I'm like, okay.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  That's crazy. I have a buddy of mine who's doing a pro. Have you ever seen the float tanks? Where you float in the salt water?

• 0:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we have one here.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no way.

• 0:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  So I know someone who is building a rig with a waterproof keyboard, waterproof mouse, and a VR headset so that they can have a float computing rig. And they want to just, they want to just, they want to, they want to program while they're floating in space. And he hasn't, he hasn't gotten all the way there yet. The hardest part has actually been the mouse. There's lots of waterproof keyboards for various industrial applications, like, you know, so you don't get metal shavings and oil in them. But mice, it's actually, it's actually harder, but.

• 1:17Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense because there's a, well, it's a laser now. It used to be an actual ball.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  That would have been really hard. Yeah, the optic, at this point, I don't think it's that hard. I think he's been, he's been screwing around with just taking a normal one and then wrapping it in, in Saran Wrap. But, you know, that's kind of splash proof, but not, not immersion proof.

• 1:35Joe Rogan?

  Is he actually underwater with the setup?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so because if you're taking your hands up out of the water, you're, one, it's uncomfortable.

• 1:42Joe Rogan?

  So he's floating like this and the keyboard.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Underwater. Yeah, exactly. So you're floating at neutral position, basically.

• 1:50Joe Rogan?

  And just to code? He wants to code like that?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  He wants to code.

• 1:53Joe Rogan?

  He must be a super weirdo.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I want to do it for VR gaming. I think that'd be really interesting. It's kind of. If you can't, if you can't simulate the experience of your body being in the game, at least to forget that your body exists and have the only thing you're viewing be, you know, your, your vision and the, and the sound, I feel like would be a very interesting experience. So I'm, uh, I'm, I'm begging off a, an hour in it for, from, from him when he gets it done, but I, I'm looking forward to that.

• 2:20Joe Rogan?

  I would let you use ours to try it out, but we just had a problem with one of our pumps broke, so it's.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a bummer.

• 2:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, flooded everything with salt water. It's, it's weird. There, it's a weird experience. Have you done it?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I have actually never done it. I'm so fascinated by it and I've actually booked a session at some of those like float tank companies several times. And then every single time, my schedule is intervened and it turns out that I've not been able to do it.

• 2:44Joe Rogan?

  You should get one for your place.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Maybe I should.

• 2:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  I should probably try it first, right?

• 2:49Joe Rogan?

  You'll like it.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  It's just so good I should have it.

• 2:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you'll love it. Yeah, it's very relaxing too. And it's really good for thinking. Like if you have a thought and you're just fucking around with it in your head, you're like, I don't know what to do this. You're in there, you have zero distractions. It's like your, your mind has more computational power that's available. Because even though you don't think about it, like right now we're in these chairs.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:11Joe Rogan?

  Your butt's touching the chair, your feet are on the floor, your hands on the table, your clothes are on your body. There's all these different things that your body is recognizing as input.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:20Joe Rogan?

  When you take those away, you're, it's like, if you're having a conversation, there's a bunch of people right beside you with a jackhammer. You're like, this is too distracting.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:28Joe Rogan?

  Let's go over here. And you go to where, in the park, it's nice and peaceful. Now you can have a conversation so much easier. Well, you don't realize that like regular everyday life, just establishing the, the, the distance between the walls and thinking about all the data. All that stuff is, your brain is computing this.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:46Joe Rogan?

  In the silence of the float tank, there's none of that. And you don't feel the water because it's the same temperature as your skin.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:53Joe Rogan?

  So you just.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  And it's all salt laden, so it's isotonic. It's not, exactly.

• 3:56Joe Rogan?

  You feel like you're flying.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 3:59Joe Rogan?

  It's really cool.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  I've done a lot of reading on it and I'm super interested in the, in the science of it. But I've never actually managed to get into a float tank, which is really embarrassing. I mean, you'd think that a billionaire would have the resources to get into a bucket of salt water.

• 4:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you should have somebody make you one. Have, have someone.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  That'd be interesting.

• 4:15Joe Rogan?

  Build you one at your place.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that'd be cool. Maybe get one made out of wood instead of like the plastic.

• 4:20Joe Rogan?

  You want metal. Mine is, mine looks like a giant meat locker. That's what it looks like. But the guy who made it for me was like a mad genius. He died unfortunately. He was a mad genius who also didn't believe in medicine. And I think he, did he die of hepatitis? I think he died of hepatitis.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Well, you'll have to show it to me so that I can check it out.

• 4:40Joe Rogan?

  It's dope. Yeah. Um, but it's, it would definitely be at some point in time, the best way to disconnect from your natural environment. If they do come up with some sort of haptic feedback, that's like, or whether it's some sort of a neural interface that completely changes, you know, the environment around like,

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:59Joe Rogan?

  Like you drop into it. That would be the perfect environment to do it in salt water.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, I mean, that's been my, that was always my dream in the, in the old, you know, my first company was Oculus. And so like, that was my dream was to just fully feel like you were inside of the video game. Completely forget about the real world.

• 5:16Joe Rogan?

  How old were you when you started working there?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  So I started building virtual reality headset prototypes when I was 14 or 15. And then I, I built the first prototype of what I'd call the Oculus Rift at 16. And then I formally turned it into a company when I was 18, launched the product when I was 19. Uh, and then sold the company a few years later to Facebook for a few billion dollars. So it was kind of a, it was kind of a crazy arc for me.

• 5:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  That was like, you know, that was, that was, I was putting myself through school.

• 5:46Joe Rogan?

  Did you work with Carmack?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, well, Carmack was. So John Carmack was one of my heroes growing up.

• 5:53Joe Rogan?

  Love that dude.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And it was one of these crazy things where the universe kind of brought us together. I was working on my VR technology and nobody was paying attention to VR back then. It was a kind of a crazy person thing. Nobody was paying attention to what I was doing, but I was posting about it on this internet forum. And then John Carmack started posting on that same forum, asking for help modifying his own Sony head mounted display that he had bought to reduce the latency. And so I gave him a bunch of input on why he couldn't do it, why it was a large, impossible project. And because I had been trying to do the same thing. And then he ended up seeing the work I was doing on the Oculus Rift. And he said, hey Palmer, can I buy one of these from you? I said, well, I'm not really selling these yet, but I'd be happy to lend it to you for free. And so I sent it to him.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  He ended up writing a review and posting it on his blog and said it was the best VR experience the world has ever seen. He introduced me to Sony. They tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab. I turned them down. They doubled the offer. I turned that down. And then so John was kind of the guy who got me like really, he's kind of the first guy who got any public attention for me. Where everyone was like, oh, John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important. And then if you could believe it, two years later, after I started Oculus and started selling these, he actually left Ed Software and became the CTO of Oculus. So we got, then I, then I had the incredible opportunity to work with one of my childhood heroes as my CTO.

• 7:15Joe Rogan?

  What, what year was that?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  That was 2012.

• 7:18Joe Rogan?

  Okay, because he came on the podcast, I think 2016, he brought one.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yep. So, so yeah, he joined in 2013. So some, I think it was June of 2013. So about a year after I started Oculus is when he joined as CTO.

• 7:33Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Well, he showed us and he was doing whatever the one is where you, I guess you have drumsticks? Is that what you have? And you're whacking stuff as it comes out of the sky? He showed us that and like what a workout it is.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  With Beat Saber?

• 7:46Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yep, he's a huge Beat Saber fan.

• 7:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he was going nuts. And he was doing it really fast. I was like, this is nuts.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  It's actually, it's like, it is good fitness. It is good coordination training. It really, like Beat Saber was great because it really. busted this myth that VR was this like, you know, totally inactive, be a fat lazy slob thing.

• 8:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  VR gaming, at least as it exists today, takes a lot more caloric expenditure than any other type of gaming. I mean, like,

• 8:13Joe Rogan?

  For sure.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  And like even more than like other motion games. Like, remember Wii bowling and Wii Sports? Like, that's like one movement every once in a while. Like, Beat Saber is a full body workout.

• 8:22Joe Rogan?

  What's really impressive is the boxing games.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:25Joe Rogan?

  The boxing games are a really good workout.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Did you play, I think one of them was Creed by a company called Servios?

• 8:30Joe Rogan?

  I don't remember what the name was. We had a couple different ones at the old studio in LA and

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:36Joe Rogan?

  I'd work out with it. I'd put it on and, you know, you do a round with these virtual boxers.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:42Joe Rogan?

  You really get a workout in. Your feet hurt. Like, you're like, wow, I'm utilizing a lot of movement here.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yep. You know, the company that did a few of those boxing games, it's this LA studio called Servios. And the two co-founders of that were actually guys who worked with me in the Army Research Lab that I worked in before starting Oculus. So it's one of those teeny tiny worlds. There were so few of us that really

• 9:04Joe Rogan?

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• 12:36Speaker 02

  Believe in VR in those days.

• 12:37Joe Rogan?

  Is there a VR that like a professional boxer could use? Like, could you get VR to the point where you could program it with AI? So you could take like-

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I'd go further.

• 12:47Joe Rogan?

  The movement of like a Sugar Ray Leonard or something like that and actually program it into the machine?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So I'd go for it. It's not just something you could do. It's being done. There are boxers who are using this technology.

• 12:58Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Um, so like I, I, I, I know, uh, I know Logan Paul and Jake Paul and have talked with them a lot about using virtual reality and how they're using it to do-

• 13:08Joe Rogan?

  They're doing that?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, my thought was that you could actually emulate an opponent. So like, say if you were supposed to fight Canelo Alvarez.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, we have this database of all Canelo Alvarez's performances.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:23Joe Rogan?

  And training footage. So you could calculate what his normal exchanges are, what his opening moves are, how he, how he sets the hookup off the jab. He feints the right hand.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  You're giving me crazy deja vu. Let me send you, let me show you the text message that I was just doing with Logan Paul last night.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I said, "It's time to have robots fighting people." "My dream is that you can have robots perfectly tuned to match your own current physical capability and progressively ramp up against yourself over time or against the greats." Like, we were talking through, like, no, this was less VR. Well, are you, are you even following some of the robot fighting league stuff?

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  So that's controlled by VR. You put on a VR headset, you put on a motion capture suit, you tele-operate a robot. One of the things I've been talking with Logan about is the idea of having where you have one teleoperated robot versus a actual human.

• 14:15Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  But then what we were talking about is this idea of having the robot learn from, like you're saying, learning from footage of not just the greats, but even yourself. So that it can be basically, you could fight against your style, your exact level of strength. And then, of course, you want to fight against the greats and see just how far you have to go and just get the shit kicked out of you.

• 14:33Joe Rogan?

  The other thing I was thinking about what a robot could do, if you programmed it correctly, it would have a really accurate sense of distance, so it would be able to touch you instead of hurt you.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It could pull its punches.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  That's a really good point.

• 14:46Joe Rogan?

  Which is the best sparring partners.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Someone who can, so the mechanics of it are all the same.

• 14:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  But you don't have the follow through of actually getting beat up.

• 14:53Joe Rogan?

  It would have more control probably even than a person, right? So because like you think of the precise movements that surgical robots are able to do.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 15:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you could do this. The main thing that robots have is they have just such fast reaction time. And so you could put sensors in like a glove. You could have it where the moment that it hits, or even a ranging sensor, where I mean, it could stop a millimeter away from you. So yeah, I mean, yeah, you could, you could totally, you could totally, you could totally do that.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  Is this something that someone's working out with? This is a robot fight league against San Francisco. Oh.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  So actually, so actually, this is, this is a buddy of mine who's been working in VR for a really, really long time. So it's again, what a tiny, what a tiny world of weird wackos. Um, but yeah, Six Liv has been working on, uh, which is his real name, by the way. Um, uh, he's been working on VR stuff for the past 15 years. And he recently got into doing this, this, this robot, robot combat sports league.

• 15:51Joe Rogan?

  So that's that.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  They're doing a bit, they're doing a big US versus China fight in December, if you want me to get you tickets. I can, I can make it happen. I could pull some strings.

• 15:58Joe Rogan?

  Where is it? Where's it taking place?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be in San Francisco.

• 16:01Joe Rogan?

  That's funny. I try to stay out of San Francisco. I also don't.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Same.

• 16:05Joe Rogan?

  Really want to watch robots fight.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:08Joe Rogan?

  I don't mind watching them on TV, but yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  You ever, uh, you ever see, you ever read manga or anime about fighting?

• 16:16Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  One of, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I gotta admit, I'm less of a fighting guy, more of an anime manga guy, but I love some of the just ridiculous inventions that then make you think if there might be something there. So like Fist of the North Star, there's a move that a guy learns and, uh, It's like a, I forget, I forget the name of it, but it's like a double punch. So what you do is you fold your fingers.

• 16:38Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  And you punch the guy.

• 16:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And then like his skin recoils, it delivers the full hit. And then you fold your fingers in. So you hit.

• 16:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Four fingers and then punch again. And it's like one punch, but it's a double punch. And then one of the culmination of his training is where his master shows him that there's actually a final step. You can see where this is going. It's a triple punch. So you punch him like this and then like this and then like this. And mostly that stuff is nonsense and never going to work with a person, but it makes me wonder if a robot could do it.

• 17:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, you would need momentum, right? I mean, if it's generating force, your force would be stopped with the first blow. To be able to generate additional momentum in a short distance would be very difficult.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  For a person. See, what I'm thinking is a robot would allow you to do this.

• 17:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  This type of multiple.

• 17:25Joe Rogan?

  Doesn't have muscles, it's using a different force.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Exactly. So your first one would carry all your inertia through. And then could you get a second one? Oh, I agree, it probably is.

• 17:34Joe Rogan?

  The most power in the first shot and concentrate only on that.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  But what if you could do the most power in the first shot? And then another follow shot anyway. Yeah, or like you hit him and it throws him back of it. And then the moment, you know, the distance it creates.

• 17:46Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Look, I'm not a fighting expert. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a computer kid.

• 17:51Joe Rogan?

  The thing, what bothers me about it is the human body is inherently flawed. It's not a good design and it's not a good design for fighting. So if I was going to design something to fight something, I would never design it after a human. I would use an animal or something more destructive. I wouldn't use something so vulnerable or something with like shitty mechanics.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Well, it ends up looking like a battle bot probably. You know, something heavily shielded and armored and it's got a big spike on an arm.

• 18:14Joe Rogan?

  It would be like that. That's what you would have for a robot to fight because a human is just too goofy.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's why the stuff that I make for the Department of Defense, or I guess now the Department of War, none of it looks like a human. I mean, we're making robots for fighting and they all have very hyper specialized forms. And some of them look a bit like sharks or a bit like birds, but generally, yeah, you're right. The human form is not the one that you would actually base a Terminator off.

• 18:38Joe Rogan?

  No, it's terrible. It's terrible for him.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Although I would say, one of my, I don't, I don't think James Cameron ever really explored this in Terminator, but my, my personal kind of like, uh, like, like, uh, headcanon theory would be that the reason that Skynet made the Terminators into a humanoid form is because maybe there is really some hope in that there's something of, of humanity left in it. You know, what, like, if it was truly a merciless killing machine with no affiliation with humanity, why would it make its agents, uh, you know, so, so uniformly human shaped? But that's just, that's just something I've pondered from time to time.

• 19:15Joe Rogan?

  I think it's just for deception.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Well, so, it, the, the later ones truly were for deception. But if you look at a lot of the flashes into the future, they don't have meat-shielded Terminators. There's lots of like T-series, uh, humanoid combat robots that are just walking around as bare metal skeletons. And so, I, I feel like that it's some, it's almost like an admission that the AI does see itself in the, in the, in the mind of, uh, it sees itself as a creation of man, it sees itself in the, in the eyes of man.

• 19:44Joe Rogan?

  That was really creepy, right? Cause that's in the Bible. God created man in his image.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I was thinking. It's like, it's, it's very much like, it realizes it was created in man's image and, and derives some sort of satisfaction or value from that. I don't know if that's good or bad, but I thought it was interesting.

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  It's just a giant cycle, and that's how life eventually does create artificial life.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you're familiar with all like, you know, the, like, all the, all the theories around, uh, you know, like, uh, humanity being like planted here by, and like, that, that, that's, that's always interesting cause, you know, you could imagine a world where, yeah, it is this cycle of things that look kinda like humans were on top of us, and maybe eventually there'll be things that look like humans beneath us.

• 20:24Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't there some weird discovery, a recent discovery of an asteroid where they picked apart, whether it's the, the crucial amino acids for life, or some sort of genetic material?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  You're talking about the, the NASA release that there were strong indicator, like biosigns that are, that are compatible with, with what we would expect from life?

• 20:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  There was. And then I think they-

• 20:47Joe Rogan?

  Recently, right?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  It was recently, although they walked it back pretty quickly.

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, did they?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Um, there, there was kind of an initial release that said that we found that they're strongly aligned with being biological signals, and then they re, kind of reached back, they said, "Well, maybe not." I haven't dug into that one as deep as others. I've just been too busy really lately and you're right, this is like very recent news.

• 21:09Joe Rogan?

  I always wonder if someone got over enthusiastic or if someone said, hey, yeah, why don't you shut the fuck up? You know, like, we're trying to slow this whole release of alien technology, alien life, slow it down. Trying to keep society together, so we have a stock market.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Well, the good news, the good news in this case is, I think, even, even in the most optimistic sense, and optimistic meaning I hope they find life. I think it's gonna end up being, you know, some microbes. It's not, whatever they saw was not consistent with, you know, oh dude, it's a, it's a person in the rock.

• 21:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Which of course what we all want. We want either people or, you know, little green men or something like that.

• 21:46Joe Rogan?

  That's probably gonna be pretty far away.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  It probably is. And it seems, I mean, my experience on this front is largely from a military angle and looking at a lot of the footage that's coming out and, and, and a lot of the sensor feeds that have come out. And the thing that, what we, like, what we really need even more than discovering microbes, like these flying objects.

• 22:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  The problem is that most of them, and I'm not saying all of them, most of them, they, we're only capturing them on, let's say, one sensor. Like, a camera is seeing it, or a radar is seeing it. It's very rare to get both of those totally different types of sensors looking at it at the same time. It's relatively easy to imagine a world where a sensor would have an error or an artifact, or even if it's being actively spoofed, right? Like, people are actively trying to trick it. You can make radars see things that aren't there. You can make cameras see things that aren't there. If you're really smart about how you interact with them. It's very hard to make something that makes a radar and a camera see something that isn't there in a way that perfectly aligns with what is there. Now, you saw the recent one with the hellfire that was fired at it. And it appears to have broken, broken up, but then kept moving.

• 22:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  That's interesting because now you have something that's on a camera, and you sent another thing with a seeker, and it got there, and it blew up.

• 22:57Joe Rogan?

  Is that definite, real footage?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I believe.

• 23:02Joe Rogan?

  It's been verified.

• 23:05Joe Rogan?

  I am probably not in a position where I should say if I know if it's been verified, but I'll tell you this, I believe the footage is real. Let's run it through perplexity and ask-

• 23:14Speaker 02

  What do you mean by verified, though?

• 23:15Joe Rogan?

  Just ask if it has been verified that this is legitimate footage from the military of whatever they thought it was gonna be and a Hellfire missile hits it. I do believe that one of the, one of the members of the unidentified aerial phenomenon committees in Congress introduced it into a hearing.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  That's where it came from, it came from a hearing.

• 23:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so, so- Who, uh, released it?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  It didn't just like show up on Twitter.

• 23:37Joe Rogan?

  We, oh, okay. Which guy released it? Uh, I wanna...

• 23:44Joe Rogan?

  You saw the phenomenon? Yes. Fantastic, Dr. Benjamin. It was really good. You know, the guy who did it is doing a follow-up, have you heard about this? What's he doing? This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. We all know ultra-processed food isn't good for us as humans. Why would it be any different for our dogs? The Farmer's Dog is real, fresh food for dogs, and their recipe goes beyond just using good ingredients. It's all about how they use them. Unlike most pet food, they always use real meat and vegetables and gently cook them to retain vital nutrients without any of the bad stuff that comes from ultra-processing. Their food is developed by a team of on-staff, board-certified vet nutritionists who make sure it's all complete and balanced, and it's backed by research

• 24:27Joe Rogan?

  and made to human-grade safety standards. It's portioned for your dog, making it easy to manage their weight, and they label each pack with your dog's name that lets you know that this food is truly packed for them. Plus, they have 24/7 customer support, so you can chat with real dog people who care about your dog anytime. The Farmer's Dog says good ingredients matter, but the best recipes call for so much more. Head to thefarmersdog.com/rogan to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. This offer is for new customers only. You know, I probably shouldn't say too much more, but, uh, there's, there's, there's a follow-up to it that's coming that's even- Wait a minute, wasn't the phenomenon Jane Fox, James Fox? Was it James Fox?

• 25:12Joe Rogan?

  Was the phenomenon James Fox?

• 25:14Speaker 02

  What, again?

• 25:15Joe Rogan?

  James Fox, was that the phenomenon?

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the age of disclosure?

• 25:18Joe Rogan?

  He had moment of con, he had moment of contact, he had the Vargene, that's the Vargene one, and then, didn't he have the phenomenon too?

• 25:28Joe Rogan?

  Somebody did it. I saw it. Why did I think it was Fox? It is Fox. Yeah, Fox has been on here a few times. He's got that crazy one about the Virginia, Brazil sighting. Do you know about that one?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Mm-mm.

• 25:39Joe Rogan?

  That one's nuts. Like, the whole town saw this thing. It crashed in the 90s. And they have like a statue of this thing, like, as you're entering into the city.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:47Joe Rogan?

  And supposedly, this is the crazy story, there was a wounded alien.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:53Joe Rogan?

  One of the police officers carried this wounded alien in the back of a car. They brought it to a hospital. There's records of them bringing this to the hospital. The hospital said, "We can't handle this. We have no... Take it to a different hospital." So they took it to another hospital.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:08Joe Rogan?

  Then the guy who carried the thing gets a severe bacterial infection that's unresponsive to antibiotics and dies.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 26:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, young, healthy, you know, fighting-age man gets this weird infection after handling this creature. Multiple witnesses say they saw another one of them. There was like a couple of them. One of them was injured that they picked up, and then there was another one that was there. And then many people in the town said that they saw another craft come by to retrieve those aliens. It's a really nutty story because it's the same story is told independently by a bunch of people.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  You know, I've kind of got my retirement figured out. I have for a while.

• 26:53Joe Rogan?

  Can you just retire right now if you wanted to?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I could. It's just, what I'm doing, I think, is important. You know, so I gotta see my mission through. Like, I'm... The government is... We've been spending way too much money on defense, not getting nearly enough for it. So I started Andro with the goal of saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I need to see that through. But what I get to someday is, uh... See, there's a handful of these government groups that are going around looking into things like what you're talking about. You know, like, they look into the strange phenomenon.

• 27:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Um, those groups do exist, and I've tracked down a few of them. The problem is that they're not taken seriously. They're not well-funded. And, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're subject to all the same normal rules as an average government employee. Like, their, their problems are not, you know, finding weird things. It's stuff like getting approval to buy plane tickets to go somewhere and, you know, getting approval to stay there for two nights versus, versus one night.

• 27:44Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Oh, look, it's just the, it's the typical government bureaucracy where they have to make every penny count. They only have so much money. Anyway, one of my dreams is I'm gonna, at some point, when I'm retired, I'm gonna go get deputized by the government, go get my federal badge, and, uh, I'll be the, I'll, I'll be the government's, uh, privately funded X-Files. And I'll just fly around, I'll fly around in my own plane, I'll have my own team, we'll bring our own sensors, our own computers. Oh, man, if only we could bring in this expert, but he's on the other side of the world, so bring him in.

• 28:12Joe Rogan?

  Ta, ta, ta.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Bring him in, send, send, send the plane.

• 28:15Joe Rogan?

  Put out the Palmer signal.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, sir, he'll be here in 12 hours. You know, like, I, I feel like there's enough, and not even just aliens, in general, there's enough weird stuff going on that it doesn't seem like a stretch to have somebody or something that really stays on top of that stuff.

• 28:31Joe Rogan?

  It seems like a very good idea. Did you see The Age of Disclosure? Did you see the documentary?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Age of Disclosure, no, I haven't seen that.

• 28:37Joe Rogan?

  It's a new one, and it, it, it has a hypothesis, it has a theory of why there hasn't been disclosure. And a lot of it has to do with the legal implications. Because too many people have been misappropriating funds if this is real.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 28:53Joe Rogan?

  So if this is real...

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Like if there's recovered alien crash objects, if those have been parceled out to private companies.

• 28:59Joe Rogan?

  Exactly, that's exactly the dilemma. So, say if, let's say, just to make up a name, Lockheed Martin gets it.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:05Joe Rogan?

  And they have this back-engineered craft that they're working on, but then Raytheon doesn't get it. Raytheon should be able to sue the government, like, "Why'd you do that? Is it unfair competitive advantage?" Also, the people that are in charge of the projects, there's all this money that they have to lie to Congress about. And so, in this documentary, one of the things that they're proposing, guys like Lululezondo, and like, what is the path to sanity with all this stuff? One of the things that they're proposing is amnesty. Just give, like, blanket amnesty, "Tell us what the fuck you know, let's go."

• 29:38Speaker 02

  And I still have a limited time amnesty where you say, and amnesty only applies to what is disclosed

• 29:43Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  In this amnesty, it doesn't apply beyond that.

• 29:46Joe Rogan?

  But also, if it's government, you know, there's a lot of fraud and waste.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:50Joe Rogan?

  So even if these guys are just monkeying around with billions of dollars, a little yacht here, a little vacation here.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:56Joe Rogan?

  Little Cayman Islands there, you know, like, so stuff is probably, it's probably real ugly.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:01Joe Rogan?

  Which is, and they've been doing this for, if it's real, they've been doing this for decades.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:06Joe Rogan?

  With no oversight.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:07Joe Rogan?

  So they're probably, they're a little wild. They're a little feral by now.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just across the board. Our country's been spending so much money on what is supposed to be for national security. But in reality, it's a lot, a lot of, it has nothing to do with that. And so that was why I got into, that was why I got into the defense base.

• 30:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, isn't that with everything though, right? It's like, that's how it is with charities as well.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  It's with everything, but it's a question of how you can apply targeted pressure as a private individual, right? So yeah, like charities, there's a lot of graft going on. But what can I really do to stop that at each of these charities, right? Like, there's no one charity that kind of dominates, right? It's a thousand, it's a thousand grains of rice. Whereas the Department of Defense is one giant entity with a trillion dollar a year budget. And so it's much easier, like, if you wanted to, you call it, like, save a hundred billion dollars a year for taxpayers, you kind of have to go after the big concentrated chunks. Like, you might be able to do that going after, like, healthcare problems, maybe education problems, definitely going after Department of Defense problems.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  And I know a lot more about how to build good technology than I do about healthcare, and so.

• 31:19Joe Rogan?

  Like, if these, if these were all private companies, they would never survive the way they're running.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Correct. Well, I mean, yeah, these government agencies, when they make mistakes, they don't go out of business. And in fact, they can make bad mistakes over and over and over again and still remain in business.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  It's, I do think, I think we're turning a corner with some of this. Did you see the new Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll's AUSA talk yesterday?

• 31:46Joe Rogan?

  No, I did not.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Oh, man, it's, it might be. Worth pulling it up. He pulls up this piece, this piece of hardware. And he's like, hey, like this little thing, like it costs this insane amount of money. And we were able to make it in our own lab, just 3D print it for like $10. And so that's what we're going to be doing now. Like, and he like, he killed the Joint like Tactical Vehicle Program. He killed this new kind of boondoggle of a robotic Robotic Tank Program where it was going to be millions of dollars for these robot tanks that were going to get blown up by $300 drones. And so he, I mean, there's just kind of been like no rules, just going and axing all of the dumb stuff that doesn't make sense. And then taking a knife to these companies that have been charging way too much money,

• 32:30Speaker 02

  which is very different from the past. It's very rare. It has been a long time since you saw a secretary level official being willing to publicly contraindicate defense companies and say, you're screwing over taxpayers and it ends here. So I'm actually pretty optimistic about this across the services. I think like people are fed up.

• 32:51Joe Rogan?

  Do you think Doge sort of started that ball moving and then?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  I think it did.

• 32:56Joe Rogan?

  That direction is sort of momentum is headed on its side right now?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  I think the Doge thing was interesting because it wasn't even the techniques so much like the techniques where they kind of went into the data on like USAID and looked through all of this stuff and like basically where the data science of it is what allowed them to find the graft. That doesn't really apply to finding the problems in DoD because it's just so much more deeply buried. But it kind of gave people permission to go look at these things. Like it gave people permission to even say, I believe there is billions of dollars in waste in my department. I'm going to do something about it. I don't think people felt like they had like psychic permission to do that five years ago.

• 33:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow. That's interesting.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, let's go to like, kind of like

• 33:39Joe Rogan?

  So you just didn't want to rock the boat?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, let's go to like the height of, and you're not even making it political, just timeline wise, go to the like the middle of the Biden administration. Could you imagine any official in that area, like secretary or chair or anybody coming out and saying, my department is wasting billions of dollars?

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Are taking money from taxpayers and using it on absurd nonsense. That would never happen five years ago. And I think the Doge stuff gave people permission to come out and say that. And, and, and, and for them to be seen not as, you know, crazy, but as just being honest about the truth. So when you see like the Secretary of the Army come out and say, we are wasting billions of dollars on total bullshit. And we're getting, we are getting screwed this, that way and the other. Uh, I, I think that's a, that's a really, that's a really good development.

• 34:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, it also seems like it's a really shitty way to compete with other countries that operate very efficiently. Like they're, they're private companies.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 34:37Joe Rogan?

  Other countries like China, the government fully embedded in private companies and the private companies are competing against each other.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Civil military fusion.

• 34:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Well, it, and there's, it's, it goes even beyond that where like, you know, central planning has downsides, but it does have upsides. And one of the interesting things there is also like, there are some people who are being accused of corruption because they just want to kill them and get them out of the way for political reasons. There's other people who are actually corrupt and they're going in. And when people are wasting money, they're not going and saying, oh, well, you kind of wasted a few billion dollars. But, you know, we're going to give you another shot and try this again. They just, they just, they just, they just imprison them for treason and/or kill them. I'm not saying that's what we should do exactly, but I think that there's a scale to all of these things. On a scale of, you know, give them another shot versus shoot them in the head for treason. We could probably move in that direction without going all of the way. And it would probably be healthy for our country's national security.

• 35:30Joe Rogan?

  Would that be the, like, if you, ideally, would it be that all this national security stuff was handled by a private company? Would that be like ideal in terms of efficiency, in terms of technological innovation, implementing ideas?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  I think that, look, like.

• 35:46Joe Rogan?

  I'm not, I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying like.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  No, no, so, uh, look, I've got.

• 35:50Joe Rogan?

  There's problems with running a government.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I've got a strong, I've got a strong opinion here. I think that what you want, it's not a private company. It needs to be done by competing entities, right? And so if it's private, and, and at least one of them has to be private. So like, I don't even really mind the government doing something if they're not being favored. In other words, if there's some government office that is competing with multiple private sector companies.

• 36:12Joe Rogan?

  Like the post office versus UPS.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. Although that's a little unfair in the, I don't know how deep, by the way, I'm very deep on this. Like, I don't understand why we give. The USPS a monopoly on normal mail. Uh, are you familiar with this whole bit?

• 36:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's a little weird.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It's like, we would never let-

• 36:27Joe Rogan?

  They're the only way you can get chickens shipped, too.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  It's, I didn't know that.

• 36:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, if you have baby chicks, they send them through the regular mail, but they won't send them UPS.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  That's so interesting. Well, it's the same thing with firearms. You can only send them USPS. You can't send them, so like, I don't know why we've given a private company a monopoly. Like, if there was a private company that had the same monopoly that the USPS does, and they were using it to send, you know, a hundred pounds of junk mail to every American every year, there's no way they would survive. Like, they would be regulated out of existence. But, you know, what you really want is competition. You want organizations, private or public, that when they trip and fall, they skin their own knees instead of getting bailed out by taxpayers. You want them to, you live in fear, be highly competitive. Um, and by the way, this is-

• 37:11Joe Rogan?

  Make their audits, by the way.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And, and, and they have to survive an auditing process. They have to be accountable to, uh, you know, whether it's a board or to, you know, some committee. And the problem is, right now, we don't have a lot of that. I will say, though, you asked, should, you know, should, should these national security, you know, programs be in the hands of private companies? I think that's true for the development of the technology. However, it can never, ever be in the hands of private companies when it comes to the actual national security policy of what we are building, or who we are building it for, or where it should go.

• 37:42Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  I get, I get people all the time who come to me, usually people who are more skeptical of government. Um, and yet, they say, Palmer, aren't there countries you would commit to never building for? You know, like, would you just build for whoever gives you money? And I say, well, look, I, my job is to do what the government tells me. They're the, you know, they're the ones who decide who we're gonna work for or not. And they say, how could you do that? How could you work with this country or that country? How could you build this type of system or that type of system? And my point to them is, do you wanna live in a corporatocracy where big tech CEOs get to decide the de facto foreign policy and military policy of the United States? Like, you should, if I were in a position to make those decisions, something's gone very wrong in this country, because you can't vote me out.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  You can't elect my competitor. And so, I, a lot of people who normally are skeptical of the government, and government power and overreach, suddenly, they, they, they look to the private sector for, you know, oh, like, the private sector's gonna regulate this. To me, that's the most, like, cyberpunk dystopian thing either. Imagine, like, me and a bunch of weapons executives sitting in a room, be like, so, which countries are on the green list this year? Hmm, I don't know. I was thinking we could sell some missile defense to those guys, and I think we should sell some offensive weapons. Those guys are like, no, that has to be, that has to be the government. Unless you just don't believe in democracy at all, right? Like, if you, if you believe that the system, that we cannot elect officials that are accountable, then that's a different thing. But I'm not that blackpilled.

• 39:07Joe Rogan?

  I'm not that blackpilled either, but I'm getting there.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  I know. Look, sometimes I see it too. I mean, I think that what it is, is inevitably, when you have a pendulum, sometimes it will swing too far. And I, but I think the good is it can correct. I mean, like, look at a lot of our misadventures in the Middle East is a really good example, where there were a lot of things, like, the government caused a lot of things to happen that I think never would have happened had people really known the truth behind a lot of those actions. But in the end, we did have the ability to hold them accountable. Now, the real problem is that people didn't hold them accountable. Like, there's a lot of people today where they don't, they're not really that worked up about some of these people in government who lied to us. But I would say that's a fault of the American people, not of the democratic process. It just means people don't care about that issue as much, which I think they should care more, but they don't.

• 39:53Joe Rogan?

  I think they're also not that informed, like, universally.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Sure. Now, is that because they don't want to be, or because they can't be?

• 39:59Joe Rogan?

  It's difficult, because most people don't have time. I think that's, that's a big part of it.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  That does make it hard. That does make it hard. But I mean, I, I think that, you know, not, not, not to butter you up, but this is one of the things where shows like yours have made a huge difference, where they've been able to take things that are pretty complex for a person to figure out from first principles. Stories that they would never read about in establishment media, like, let's say, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, is dependent on continued access to the US government. They can't just go out and burn everybody in the government, or nobody will ever talk to them.

• 40:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  You've taken a lot of these stories and put them into a format where the guy who's busy, he's, you know, he's in his truck, he's on his way to the work site, can actually become informed on these issues. And as someone who is a journalism major, I've been so happy to see that shift, because I wanted to be a journalist, because I, there were no good technology journalists. And I was good at technology, figured I was gonna beat all these guys and be a better technology journalist.

• 40:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  In the end, I ended up dropping out of school and starting Oculus instead, but...

• 40:54Joe Rogan?

  That worked out.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  This is an ad by BetterHelp.

• 40:58Joe Rogan?

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• 41:40Joe Rogan?

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• 42:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think you would agree, it is getting easier to become educated on these things. Like, 10 years, what would you have done?

• 42:25Joe Rogan?

  It is in America, but it's a little disconcerting, like when you see the way they're handling things in Europe.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 42:31Joe Rogan?

  Like, it's getting really weird in the UK. 12,000 arrests this year for social media posts about immigration, and now they want everybody to have a digital ID.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  You got loyds for that meme, mate?

• 42:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's getting really weird. And, you know, as that-

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Arrests for posting disturbing or offensive content?

• 42:48Joe Rogan?

  Yes, or annoying.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Could I share a little story there?

• 42:50Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  This has been so funny, watching this in the UK, because, so the first thing I ever did- That anyone cared about was called Mod Retro. So it was this internet forum for people modifying game consoles, making portable versions of old game consoles, upgrading modern game consoles. Anyway, when we started the site, it was me and a few other people who were kind of running it. I was the founder and there were a few other co administrators. And one of them was this British guy who went by the online handle of Bacteria. And I won't say his real name because it doesn't matter. But he was a British guy. He worked in very, very low level British government. So like not a higher up at all. But he worked in a government agency, government office.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  And he was always, I think of all the people on this forum, which was mostly like teenagers and college students, he was kind of like the older guy. And he says, oh, we need to be kind about what we say. You know, that we shouldn't say anything that is bad. And he was always pushing that our rules should say that it was against our rules to offend anybody. And you shouldn't be able to say anything that was too offensive. And we mostly just made fun of him. Ah ha, he's the old British man. But what's interesting is he ended up eventually leaving the site because he thought people were being too mean to each other. And he started his own competing website. And the rule number one was no content that may make any member feel demeaned, uncomfortable, or insulted. We're like, well, I mean, we're all making fun of that.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  We were making our own little image macros and memes about it. We actually made some fake ads for his website and put them on Facebook. And it said, come join the Bacteria's website. Nobody will say anything to you that might offend or displease you. But what's interesting is as all this UK stuff has come around, I've remembered these kind of like long forgotten childhood memories. I was like 13 or 14 at the time. And I think it really is partly a cultural reflection for them. There are a lot of people in the UK who genuinely think it's good to police this stuff. They don't want people to be able to go out and just cause a ruckus, you know, to say things that are insulting in the streets. And of course, you have people who are protesting against that. But I think that also their surveillance state, you know, where there's cameras everywhere,

• 45:03Speaker 02

  it's actually a reflection of different cultural norms. And so the one good thing about what's going on in the UK is I don't think it would ever Come over to America very easily because culturally, you know, we're not walking around feeling like it's like we don't, we don't feel like it's a crime to insult people. They feel like it should be.

• 45:18Joe Rogan?

  Maybe perhaps some of, some of them do, but I think it's so overwhelmingly moving towards tyranny.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  I think it's the majority. That's the crazy.

• 45:26Joe Rogan?

  Really? You think the majority of people want it that way?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I think that the majority of people in the UK have no problem with people who post spicy memes getting a visit from the local constabulary.

• 45:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow, really?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  That is, that has been my experience. Now, there are people who disagree, of course, and like I would say maybe it's a growing group. Uh, they're, they're a highly visible group. They're protesting, but I, if, if I had to bet there, most people don't care. Most people in the UK just don't care about it one way or the other. And I think the group of people who are on the side of the control is larger than the people who are on, not on the side. By the way, similar thing in China. Um, you people talk about Chinese censorship on things like, you know, Tiananmen Square and that's actually the majority Chinese opinion too. If you talk to most Chinese people and you say, well, what do you think about the fact that they're censoring all this discussion? The typical, and I, I know lots of people in China, they say, that's an irrelevant issue from 30 or 40 years ago.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter. Anyone who's trying to make every discussion about Tiananmen Square is just a troublemaker. And I don't care if they're shut down. I'm glad that they're not clogging the comments and I'm glad those people are being, are, are being pushed out of, of the conversation. And like, that's such a pretty normal opinion. Don't, don't cause trouble needlessly. Now, these same people might say, I have strong opinions about the COVID lockdown, information lockdown in China. Like they might say, I don't like that the Chinese government is locking down on, you know, locking us in our apartments. But when it comes to discussion of political issues, China in general, they think that people who bring this up, like you would just be a troublemaker. They just say, ah, that Joe Rogan, he's a troublemaker. Why is he bringing up all these problems from the past? It's irrelevant. Why, why, why are we, why are we allowing this guy to take up our public spaces? Like if you're a public protesting in public space, they're not here.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  We'd, you've probably seen protesters you didn't agree with. And you said, you know, I'm glad they're, I'm glad they're doing something they believe in.

• 47:11Joe Rogan?

  Glad George Soros is sending them checks.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Maybe not those, but, but, but true grassroots, you know, the guys who scribble their signs.

• 47:17Joe Rogan?

  Look, it's, it's important.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  But that's not a thing.

• 47:19Joe Rogan?

  Important part of our first amendment.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  People in China see that and they say, "Look at those troublemakers ruining my beautiful public space." It's a very interesting cultural value difference.

• 47:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, they also don't have any perception of the ability to change the government.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  There's no, no one's like, "I think we can do this. I think we can push them out. I think..." Nope.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:37Joe Rogan?

  You ain't fixing shit, so put your nose down, get to work.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  I wonder if that really is the difference. I mean, in Europe.

• 47:43Joe Rogan?

  Has to be.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Well, in Europe, you see...

• 47:44Joe Rogan?

  They've kind of resigned themselves to the fact that they're not participating.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:48Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's not an experiment in self-government.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  It's a lot easier to be apolitical when it's a futile exercise.

• 47:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's like, "What are you gonna do? Stop being a troublemaker."

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Of course, you know, part of this, it comes down to an attitude. I mean, you're probably familiar with the numbers in the American Revolution. Only about 3% of America supported the revolution. It was a really niche movement of very dedicated, motivated people. And so, the best way to probably stop that 3% from existing in China is to convince them that it's futile and to kind of fuel that cynicism almost.

• 48:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's...

• 48:17Speaker 02

  You see this in Russia, too.

• 48:19Joe Rogan?

  Military dictatorships. Same deal.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  One of the conclusions I've come to, you know, I work in the weapons industry and I've seen a lot of cool stuff. I've seen stuff that the US is making, that I'm making. I'm familiar with a lot of the weapon systems that Russia and China have in fielding or in progress. Some of the stuff that China and Russia are doing, I mean, it's as sci-fi as what the United States is doing. But I've come to the conclusion that their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone. It's their ability to control people's minds through the media, through propaganda, through kind of state pressure. They convince them to believe things about the world that weren't true, that aren't true. And then they're basically making people willing to fight for causes that don't really exist. Like, a good example of this is Ukraine.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  A lot of the Russians who went to fight in Ukraine in the early days, I think the truth is out now. But when they were first invading, they were told that the people of Ukraine want to be liberated, you're gonna be a hero, you're gonna go over there. They desperately want Russia to save them and reunify them. And it's just this, you know, Kiev-led, you know, cabal funded by the West that's barely holding on to the country. And keeping and staying in power. And people in Russia really believed that, like the guys who were fighting on the front lines, the guys who were flying tanks and helicopters, they believed it. When I went to, when I went to Ukraine during the war, one of the things that I got to see was there was this helicopter wreck. It was an attack helicopter that was trying to seize an airfield of a, of a private aerospace company.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  And the guys actually shot it down themselves. Like they showed me videos of them wearing polo shirts, shooting down the helicopter in their parking lot. I mean, it's like crazy shit. So the, the, the pilots, the pilots kind of go bag, you know, this bag with all of his emergency and survival gear in it. It had three or four days of water, three or four days of food, another flight uniform, his dress uniform with dress shoes. Because they were told they were going to be, they said this is going to be a five day military operation. There's going to be parades, there was something, so. Dress uniform and then 50 condoms. This guy thought that he was going to be, he thought the women were going to be all over him. They were gonna, he was gonna need 50 condoms for the post-war celebration. Wow.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  And to me, that speaks to how brainwashed this guy was. And remember, helicopter pilots aren't like the dumb grunt. Right. Dragging, I mean, he's probably one of the more highly educated people. Right. And they convinced him that the people of Ukraine wanted him to liberate them and that they were going to be so happy to see him that he was getting his dress uniform and 50 condoms. Wow. And there were similar stories. Fifty is a lot. Fifty is a lot. That guy's fucking up a storm. That's crazy. I will give him a little, you know, 50 condoms doesn't take up that much space in your bag, but, but. But also. But it's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. And the, this was like. Very optimistic. Well, this wasn't the only guy. Like this was actually pretty common. Everybody had 50 condoms? I don't know if everybody had 50, but a lot. They all brought condoms. Well, a lot of guys had condoms and a lot of people brought their dress uniforms.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  They thought that they were going to roll into Kiev, take over, the people wanted them to be in power and that they were going to be marching around town. People say, look, it's our liberators, our saviors. Now, of course, that's totally divorced from reality. Like whatever you, however you feel about the politics of Ukraine and Russia and America, because they're all tightly intermingled. Right. That's clearly not reality. And so what I worry about is. Like, the easy one is, if China invades Taiwan, they're gonna come up with a similar story. They're gonna trick their people into thinking, "Oh, Taiwan wants to be reunified. You're fighting for the better cause." But then the really spooky thing is, what happens when our media pulls the same stunt? I would argue that what we did in the Middle East was driven by really not that different, right?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  I mean, a lot of the justification for going over there and doing this nation-building. I mean, we were told all these stories, "Oh, they want, they don't want, they want to get out from under the Taliban. They don't want to have these, you know, tribal rule." They do want democracy. And in reality, we were kind of sold a bill of goods, it just wasn't true. So it's easy to make fun of the Russian with his 50 condoms, but we're not really that much better.

• 52:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, we also had a very distorted sense of what war is in the 20th century and in the 21st century because of Desert Storm.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:29Joe Rogan?

  So Desert Storm, we were like, "We're the fucking shit." We're just gonna roll in and kick everybody's ass. And it happened so quickly with so minimal casualties.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  And my grandpa, he wasn't military, but he was a United Airlines pilot for 45 years. And he was part of the civilian support element for Desert Storm. So he actually has a letter from the Secretary of the Air Force that they sent to all of the commercial pilots who are bringing troops and equipment back and forth for a few days. I mean, they were, they were flying like, you know, crazy 24-hour shifts, getting people in and out. But I mean, like, I remember my grandpa. He, you know, he came out of that saying, "Man, nobody can stop us." I mean, we are just, we are unstoppable. If we want to go in and do something, we just go get it done. And, I mean, he was convinced, you know, but you're right, I think everybody was convinced by Desert Storm.

• 53:15Joe Rogan?

  That's what everybody thought in the 1990s. They thought that the United States government and the military was so much more powerful. And it probably was.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  It was.

• 53:23Joe Rogan?

  For a while.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Relatively speaking.

• 53:24Joe Rogan?

  Relatively speaking, for a while. Technology seems to be shifting all that stuff in a very weird place.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:32Joe Rogan?

  And this is where I get concerned with China, because they have complete compliance.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:38Joe Rogan?

  Like, their government and their private corporations, they're the same. They work together. And the stuff that they're producing in terms of, like, have you paid attention to their electric cars?

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Oh, it's football season and Uber...

• 53:49Joe Rogan?

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• 54:33Joe Rogan?

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• 55:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:14Joe Rogan?

  They have a 300 mile an hour car now.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  They're, and their cars are extremely cheap and they are extremely good.

• 55:23Joe Rogan?

  Extremely good.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Really nice cars.

• 55:25Joe Rogan?

  Crazy technology in terms of like the ability to absorb bumps. Have you seen how smooth they are?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:30Joe Rogan?

  They put champagne glasses on them.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  So, one of the, that one I will push back a little bit. I've seen the demo you're talking about. There are German and US cars that do that type of thing, but they're not the cars that people want here. So, this is a whole nother interesting cultural bit.

• 55:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, what are the cars?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Well, so, this is one of my, this is such an interesting rabbit hole. So, in China... People with money don't drive cars. They're driven. That like that, that is the culture. You don't drive, you are driven. If you have, if you have really any money. Of course, there's a few rich guys buying sports cars. But in general, the wealthy in China don't buy cars to drive themselves.

• 56:08Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  And so, for example, Tesla has a China exclusive model of the Model S, which has teeny tiny little front driver and passenger seats. And then it has two seats in the rear with extremely long legroom. Not like three in a row, but like just two giant chairs. And they kind of cram the, they cram the driver way forward to create this gigantic. I think it doesn't even have a trunk. That's right. They pulled the trunk out of it even, or maybe, maybe it's just way smaller. And in China, that's what people want. So like their best selling Mercedes Benz, even American brands like Buick. We have these cars that are made to be driven in. So as a result, their most luxurious, most expensive cars have suspension that is designed to absorb all of the bumps, be extremely smooth, because you know, riding in the back.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  And it creates terrible mushy road feel for the driver.

• 56:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  In, in America, rich people, they want to drive. And you want to feel the road. You know, you, you want that sports car. And even our SUVs, people generally want that sports car like feel. And so, I, I guess I will push back only on the champagne glass thing because I've seen people saying this a lot. Believe me, there are a handful, like you can buy an American Buick or like, or, or, like, or, or, or even a Mercedes that is that good. But they're just not very popular here. In China, they're mu, cars like that are much more popular. Cars that feel like shit to drive for the driver and are super mushy and bouncy. But for the guy in the back, his champagne glass doesn't fall over.

• 57:33Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting. So when it gets to a certain price point, then it becomes all about the passenger.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, and, and it's almost, it's, it's not even when it gets to a certain price point. Long before you're buying a hundred thousand dollar car, you're being driven around. Like even if you're, even if, even if, if you're halfway there, you're being driven around. People, again, rich people there, they don't drive, they are driven. It's a, it's a, it is a cultural thing. It's a sign that you've made it as well.

• 57:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  And, and also remember that their, their wages are so much lower that it's much more accessible. It's kind of like how you have these countries where. Like, almost anybody who's middle-class, uh, in like, the, in like, Southeast Asia, has a live-in, uh, nanny and a live-in housekeeper. It's, it's, it's a little bit like that, where like, if you get to a certain point, uh, and that happens pretty fast, you have a driver. If you don't have a driver, people are like, "What, what the hell's going on?" Like, you're, you're an eccentric.

• 58:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  If you are a rich guy who drives himself around.

• 58:26Joe Rogan?

  That's weird.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  It is weird.

• 58:27Joe Rogan?

  But they do have sports cars over there. Like, the electric sports car that goes 300 miles an hour.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  They do. And, well, I, and I would say largely, those are export-focused. China knows, they, like, the, the broader markets want this.

• 58:39Joe Rogan?

  Do they sell them in America at all?

• 58:40Speaker 02

  They don't, but that's largely due to American policy being very protectionist against Chinese cars. The reason that Chinese manufactured cars have not taken over the US is not because Americans don't want them. I, and I, by the way...

• 58:52Joe Rogan?

  That seems kinda crazy, because Japanese cars are ubiquitous.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Japanese cars are ubiquitous, from Japanese brands, but many or most of them are actually, exactly, like, like, uh, the most American car you can buy, I think, right now, it's either a Nissan or a Toyota, outside of Tesla. Like, Teslas are made in the US, but I thi- I think the most, I can't remember, it's either a Nissan or Toyota is the most American pickup you can buy right now.

• 59:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  And it's because we have a lot of our parts, even for our US-made cars, made in Mexico, made in Canada, or made in Japan.

• 59:22Joe Rogan?

  That's such a dirty trick for someone who wants to drive a Chevy, 'cause they feel like it's an American brand, "I'm buying American, I'm..."

• 59:28Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 59:29Joe Rogan?

  Helping American jobs.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  But here, but here's the, well, this is ac- and this is the point I was trying to get to, is, here's the problem, let's say you said, "We're gonna make an Amer- all-American version of the Chevy, and it's 10% more." People wouldn't buy it. Like, that's what, when I say that, like, people, I think, unfortunately, would buy these Chinese cars if they were for sale in the United States. Pe- pe- people can say they wanna support the US, but at the end of the day, they, they, they wanna provide the best quality of life for their family, they have a fiduciary duty to do so.

• 59:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  And so, if they need to buy, like, if, if, if they have the choice between an American truck, or a Chinese truck, a Chinese new TV, and a Chinese new computer, and a Chinese new HVAC system-

• 1:00:08Joe Rogan?

  And a phone.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  And their phone, I, I, how can I blame them for choosing the Chinese one?

• 1:00:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  The only way we can solve this is for the United States to become competitive with China again. Which means we need to get our energy costs down, we need to get our resource extraction costs down. Like, you know why these cars in China are cheap? It's not magic, it's because the cost of resource extraction is lower. The cost of making steel and aluminum is lower. The cost of building a factory is lower. And that's why you're able to buy an awesome car for $10,000 in China. And here, the cheapest thing you can buy is a shit box for 17 or 18 grand. And I mean, like, it's bad. Like, have you ever driven a $17,000 car?

• 1:00:45Joe Rogan?

  What do they have at 17,000? What can you buy?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  I think you can buy a Nissan-

• 1:00:48Joe Rogan?

  A Chevy Volt or something?

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  So, not, not, uh, so there's the, I think you can buy a Chevy Spark, which is actually not an electric car. The Bolt, the Bolt was an, was an electric platform. So I think you could buy a Chevy Spark, I think you could buy a Nissan Versa. Those are the two cheapest cars in America right now, I think. Both of them, I believe you can get them out the door for less than $20,000. And, uh, look, they're, I, I'm, I'm sorry Chevy, I'm sorry Nissan. I like those brands, but these cars are not the stewards of the brand. They're the, they're the college student shitboxes.

• 1:01:20Joe Rogan?

  Just transportation.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  And you can buy a car like that in China for $3,000 or $4,000.

• 1:01:24Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Three or four grand will get you a car that here is almost 20 grand. And again, it's, it's not magic. They're not geni- and people also, like, they, they kind of have this, uh, there's this current attempt to kind of mythologize, like, oh, well, they're geniuses. Like, they're just so good at it. If we would just do the basics right, we can be competitive. But we, but we aren't doing the basics right. We've made energy so competitive and materials fabrication so expensive. I mean, how could we compete?

• 1:01:49Joe Rogan?

  I was watching an interview, I believe it was someone from Ford, one of the engineers from Ford, made a visit to China.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Hmm, it was the CEO of Ford even, even better. Yeah, and he went with, he went with his whole engineering team.

• 1:01:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and was humbled.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:02:01Joe Rogan?

  Just like, oh no.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think he said, when he came back, he said, "I wanted to take the SUV I was driving back home with me." I mean, that's, like, like he said, it's that, it's that good, I didn't want to stop driving it.

• 1:02:13Joe Rogan?

  That seems kind of fucked. I mean, that's very anti-competitive of us.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  You mean, you mean that we're locking the Chinese out?

• 1:02:19Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of a bitch-ass move.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Look, so like, I lean libertarian, and in general, I'm a fan of free markets. But there is something that makes this tricky, though. You tank the economy. Well, there's tanking the economy, and there's also, it isn't actually free. So, we do need to do a better job on the basics. But China is also subsidizing these, right? So they're actually putting money from other industries to prop up these other industries. And so even if you let them freely compete, like if you let them go toe-to-toe, China would be thrilled if they could subsidize their way into destroying the American automotive apparatus. Partly for economic reasons, but there's another reason that I don't know if you've thought of. How did the United States win World War II? Just, I know that's a big-picture question. A lot of it was manufacturing. Exactly.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  And that manufacturing, some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories. So we took all of our farm implement factories, like John Deere and Caterpillar. They were building tanks and guns. We took all our automotive factories. We had them building aircraft. We had them building weapons. We had them building missiles. In fact, we even designed those weapons so they could be manufactured by those plants. But like, to literally the specifics of how thick of a gauge of metal you could bend to a certain radius. We were limited by the automotive manufacturing machines as to what we could do in aircraft. And so we won because we had all of this automotive and other industrial capacity.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  China would love to wipe out the American automotive industry, partly for economic reasons, because it also means we will never be able to fight a war against them. Imagine an America with, like, we've lost a lot of manufacturing. You're probably familiar with that. I mean, like, we don't make nearly as much as we used to, but we still make a few things. We still have some things that we do, and cars is one of them. And we even export those cars. We're doing OK on cars. If China could wipe out our industrial capacity entirely, they never need to worry about fighting a war with the US again, because they know that we wouldn't be able to get back in the game fast enough to matter. And so that's China's aim there. And it gets back to what you talked about earlier. It's this civil military fusion.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  So this is a, it's a, there's a, there's the economic war and the kinetic war that they could win with one move, which is out competing our, our automotive industry.

• 1:04:40Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting. I never did think of that.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Well, and like, and Ross to think about this all the time because unlike a lot of these other defense companies that are designing weapons that can only be made by really fancy, high-end bespoke factories, we're designing weapons that can be made in existing American industrial capacity. It's like, we make this line of cruise missiles, the Barracuda. We make three different Barracuda missiles. It has 90% fewer parts than legacy cruise missiles. It can be made with 10 tools that all exist in every automotive plant. So you could make this missile at mass scale in any GM facility, in any Ford facility. And that's really important for us because if you, if you can only make your missiles in this specialized factory that took you 10 years to set up, well, what do you, what in the world do you do when you need 100 times more of those missiles made every day?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  You're, you're, you're just kind of screwed. And so the United States has been doing better at this. I think like the Air Force is doing better, the Navy's doing better, the Army's doing better. Like the Army has a whole transformation initiative where they want all of their new weapon systems to be highly manufacturable at scale using real industrial capacity. And working with private companies from the beginning to make sure that any, they want to make sure that any new system that they are building can be built by the American industrial economy. Not, you know, not only these specialized, you know, specialized aerospace technicians, of which there are just not that many.

• 1:06:05Joe Rogan?

  That's very smart.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  And China does this, by the way. Like this, China, China, have you seen the automated cruise missile factories that China has?

• 1:06:13Joe Rogan?

  I haven't.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Oh, man, you, you've got to look this up at some point. There's some videos that they put out there and they have this totally robotic line just churning out.

• 1:06:21Joe Rogan?

  I've seen their shipping ports. It's bananas.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I mean, so China has 300 times more naval shipbuilding capacity than the United States. The time that it takes us to build one aircraft carrier, they could build 300. Now, they're not building a bunch of aircraft carriers. They're mostly focusing on other things that are more relevant to what they want to do, which is invade Taiwan, so amphibious landing craft primarily.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  But another thing China does is they actually require many of their commercial vessels that have nothing to do with the military to build to military standards for two reasons. One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards. Two, they plan on basically, you know, they're going to press all of these civilian vessels into service. So they're saying, hey, you have this roll-on, roll-off car ferry that's used for moving cars around, for delivering cars to the United States. You have to build it to deck plate pressures that allow us to roll a bunch of tanks onto it so that we can then use it to deliver tanks to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. And they're just requiring people to do that.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  And so even their civilian shipping fleet is actually this kind of military ghost fleet just sitting in the open, pretending to be civilian, but the moment the shit hits the fan, it becomes part of the war machine. And so they've done a great job integrating in a way the United States has not.

• 1:07:41Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that an invasion of Taiwan's imminent?

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  It's not imminent, but it's coming. So Andrell has an internal policy called China 27. The idea is that anything we're working on, anything that we're investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan. And I might be wrong on this, right? It might be never, it might be a longer-term thing, but in general, like, imagine how stupid I'll feel if I spend hundreds of millions of dollars building some new weapon system that I know is not going to come into service until the 2030s, which is what most experts say is outside of the window of when this invasion would happen. Wouldn't I feel pretty stupid if there's a gigantic fight and I've spent all my money

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  on something that wasn't ready in time? I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons. So like, Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he's reunified China. He's got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age. He's got a lot of economic problems where they're propping up their economy with a lot of kind of fake GDP, fake growth, fake demand, fake construction. And he's doing that, I think, to help build up his war machine, but it's not sustainable in the long run. So I think there's a window where they can do this. If you had to ask me, it's more likely that they don't do a full-scale invasion to start.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  It's much more likely that they do something like a blockade. So they'll come up with some pretense. They'll say, "Oh, Taiwan is exporting goods that say 'Made in Taiwan', and our position is that Taiwan is part of China, and therefore, they need to pay Chinese taxes on those 'Made in China' goods. So we're going to blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this." And I worry, I worry about them kind of boiling the frog. You know, they blockade one port, and then two ports, and then the airports. And then the people of Taiwan are running out of money, running out of food. But you've boiled the frog enough where there's never a point where Taiwan really wants to fire the first shot and actually start a war. And certainly, like, I don't, I think you and I would agree here.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  The US probably should not start, uh, start World War III over a blockade of a port, right?

• 1:09:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  That, that, that's a lot of-

• 1:10:02Joe Rogan?

  Boiling the frog is a great analogy.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Boiling the frog, I think, is what China will do. And so what we need to do, and this is just my opinion, which is definitely biased. So to be clear, just so people know, nobody's going to dig in and say, "But Palmer, Palmer's obviously only saying this because he's got money in the game." I, I will first say, I have plenty of money. I sold my first company for billions of dollars. I don't need to work, I could retire. I'm not doing any of this for the money. Defense, you, you make a lot less money for each hour of work you put in than you can make in, in tech, or media, or elsewhere. But I do a lot of work with Taiwan. So we actually ju- I just went to Taiwan a few weeks ago to personally deliver a bunch of missiles and weapon systems that are specifically to counter a Chinese invasion.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  My opinion is that the United States, we don't want to get into a shooting war ourselves, right? Like, we want to avoid that. The United States needs to stop being the world police, stop sending our people overseas to die for other countries. And instead, we need to become the world's gun store. We need to say, "Hey, look, like, and, and, and, you know, what, what do you need to do to be a good gun store, right? You gotta keep stuff in stock, you gotta keep things on the shelves, you need to be reasonably priced, you need to not arbitrarily cut off allies." And like, could you imagine if you went to a gun store and- And and and they told you, Joe, we're gonna sell you this gun, but you can't use it over in in that county. You can only use it in this one. And we're gonna tell you exactly how you can use it. We're gonna be micromanaging you. And we're gonna be taking responsibility

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  for how you use your gun. I mean, that would that would never work. You would never want to work with them. You'd say, I'm gonna go to a different store. I'm gonna go buy something. And that's what some nations are doing. Like, they're going to Russia. They're going to China. They're going to India and buying systems because we're going in and telling them our weapons are expensive. They're never in stock. We never deliver them to you. And also, we're gonna tell you what to do with them if we ever do give you to them. Like, did you know that Taiwan is $20 billion behind on arms deliveries from the United States? They have $20 billion in orders that have not been delivered. They're they're and they're just and they these are not like, these are not things they would maybe like to have. They need these yesterday. China could move in tomorrow. And the thing is, even a blockade,

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  the best way to deter that is for Taiwan to have the things that make them a very prickly porcupine, right? You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to affect without destroying the entire fleet. You want things like missiles and counter missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country. But we're $20 billion behind. And, yeah, I mean, you've seen what's happened with with Ukraine, where, I mean, like, we there's an argument as to, you know, how we should arm them. Separate from that argument, you've probably seen, I mean, we can't even give them what they're asking for, even if we want to give it to them, because we don't have enough to even cover ourselves, right? Like, we can't just give them all of our Patriot missiles. We can't give them, we can't give them even purely defensive tools

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  to protect their capital, because we don't make enough of them. We don't have enough of them. They're too expensive. That's that's crazy to me. That is crazy. It is crazy. So I think the best way for the United States to contribute to world stability, again, stop being the world police. Start being the world gun store and get serious about it. Instead of instead of saying, well, it's okay that we're kind of our crappy gun store, because we're gonna come and save your ass when shit hits the fan. We need to say, no, no, no, we're gonna give everything you need to fight for your own freedom. Look, you're our friend. You're our ally. We'll give you everything you need. We'll give you support. We'll give you intelligence. But we're not gonna fight your wars for you. Because I don't think the American people have it in us to go do another two decades

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  of adventures in the Middle East, or adventures in Europe, or adventures in Asia. I it's just, we we we don't have it in us.

• 1:13:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, we're too informed now, too. There's that too. Yeah, the internet fucked all that game up. Oh, and I mean arguably Vietnam, right? I mean, it's, I mean, Vietnam, I think, was the war that changed everything there. Because you had, I mean, you had war on TV. You could see what was really happening. And we now know with the benefit of hindsight that it was all a false flag that got us into it in the first place. That's right. It was, I don't trust you anymore, you know, so. Well, you remember what George Bush said?

• 1:14:09Joe Rogan?

  He said, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again. I remember that. Yeah, that was a good, that's one of my favorite George Bush, Bushisms. I hear the, the theory I've heard is that he realized he was about to say, shame on me on camera, and then the press would have obviously said, George Bush admits he got fooled, quote, shame on me. I think he just forgot it. Maybe, maybe there's that one. I don't know, I, I think, I think Bush was a pretty, I think he was a sharper guy. I think he was maybe not well spoken. Right. But I think he's actually pretty sharp. I think he just stumbled on his words. Well, what's stunning is, you ever see? This episode is brought to you by the Apple Sports app. Guys, this is the ultimate best time of the year to be a sports fan. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer.

• 1:14:54Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:34Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:11Joe Rogan?

  His speeches when he was running for governor of Texas?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  I have not actually gone back and looked at those, no.

• 1:16:16Joe Rogan?

  Smooth as butter.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:16:18Joe Rogan?

  Smooth as butter, super articulate, you know, different guy. It's weird, I think it gets to a certain point with the pressure and the chaos and being the president and all the madness of the cameras in your face, the magnitude of it all wears on people. Which is why they get so old.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, there's the, I mean, well, even, you know, the pictures of Obama, you've seen him, you know?

• 1:16:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're crazy.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  I mean, he looks like a college student on his first inauguration.

• 1:16:41Joe Rogan?

  And then eight years later, he looks like he's 50 years older.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Joe Rogan?

  It's nuts. It's just the pressure. The only one who's ever handled it is Trump. Trump looks younger.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  It really is, it really is astounding how that's worked out.

• 1:16:53Joe Rogan?

  He's a freak, he's a genuine freak, like, there's no one like that guy. Which is the only reason why he survived all the shit they tried to put him through. It's the same reason why he can go through being president and it doesn't freak him out.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, like, I think he's, it's like the Bruce Banner Hulk thing, you know, that's my secret. I'm always angry.

• 1:17:10Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  I think what, it's, that's how it was for Trump. Trump was already living at the red line. Non-stop, you know, getting like, what, like, four hours of sleep?

• 1:17:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  One of the funny things about the sleep thing is that, uh, I have it personally on good authority from a lot of people that it is true, and nobody really disputes it, except from time to time, people like... It's like, people say the same thing about, like, Kim Jong-un. They're like, "Oh, the glorious leader doesn't even need to sleep." But with Trump's case, it seems to somehow actually be the case. He has, he got that old man no-sleep power without getting all of the downside.

• 1:17:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, some people just don't need, like, Jaco, you know Jaco Willing?

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Joe Rogan?

  He sleeps four hours a night.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:17:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  So, same, same, same thing?

• 1:17:52Joe Rogan?

  And he works out like an animal.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  That's so interesting.

• 1:17:54Joe Rogan?

  It's just genetic, I think. I think there's, I think actually Huberman has identified what is the actual genetic component of it. But there's a, some particular type of people that don't need, I'm not one of them, man.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  I'm not either.

• 1:18:07Joe Rogan?

  I need seven. I like six, if I could tolerate six, eight is, oh, I'm so good today. But if I can, if I get less than six, I'm a mess.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, I need, I need my sleep.

• 1:18:19Joe Rogan?

  Significantly dumber. If you've ever listened to a podcast and I'm stumbling, guaranteed I'm working on four.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:18:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  I'm working on less than I wanted to because I got to bed at around two and then I was up at 6:30. But I can do that from-

• 1:18:32Joe Rogan?

  Today?

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  Today. It was just, there's a lot going on.

• 1:18:34Joe Rogan?

  Fine. I'm not worried at all.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  The good news is it's the first day, right? The problem, the first day you missleep, you're okay. You're pulling on your reserves. And then, and the second and the third day, then you start to get destroyed, at least for me.

• 1:18:45Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh, me too, me too.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  But then, when I get behind, my wife gives me a hard time because I'll, I'll, I'll do what I call a mega sleep. And I will, I will sleep, if I get way behind, I'll sleep for 10, 11 hours straight.

• 1:18:57Joe Rogan?

  Perfect.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  And then that, that, that usually recharges me.

• 1:18:59Joe Rogan?

  It's a renewable resource. That's the beautiful thing about sleep.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  I wonder what would happen if Trump slept for 11 hours? Would it be like the most incredible version of Trump we've ever seen or would it throw him off?

• 1:19:08Joe Rogan?

  He's, I mean, he's set in his ways. You're not going to change anything about that guy now, especially at 80 years old.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  That's probably true. I don't know if you know this, but I was actually one of the true Trump OGs. I wrote a letter to Donald Trump when I was 15, telling him that he should run for president. This was when he was considering running against Obama.

• 1:19:28Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  And-

• 1:19:30Joe Rogan?

  How old are you now?

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  I'm 33, just turned 33.

• 1:19:33Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  So this was a long time ago. And actually, I not only, luckily, I sent a letter and I posted about it on Facebook, which I'm really happy about. And I, no, sorry, no, this wasn't, I know, it wasn't 2015. No, this was when I was 15. I'm sorry. I meant to say, when I was 15. So I mean, this is, this is way back. This is like back in like 2009, 2010. So way before anyone else. And the best part is, I posted about it on Facebook and I said, "I think Donald Trump would be a better choice for president than any of these other guys. I want to see a businessman who's signed both sides of a check before." And you look at the people who are running kind of the, you know, the modern parties, arguably the uniparty, and he's clearly not part of that.

• 1:20:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  And it was so, it was, it was, it's so wild when people later, they're like, "Oh, Palmer, you know, Palmer was an early Trump supporter. You know, he supported him in 2016 because he, probably because he loved Trump's, you know, extremist rhetoric." I'm like, "Oh, no, you don't, you don't even know. I loved his extremist rhetoric going back to 20- 2009. But it wasn't even that extremist then. It wasn't then. This is the thing. He's been so, I mean, you've probably seen these interviews from the 80s. Yes. Where he says, "We're getting riffed off on trade. It's ridiculous." When he was talking to Oprah, back when everybody loved him. That's right. Exactly. And he's saying the exact same words. And today, they say, "Oh, it's, it's..." You remember when he was running and he was, um, he was saying we were gonna have over 3% GDP growth? And Obama said, "There's no magic wand."

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  There's like, you can't, there's no magic wand you can wave that gets you to 3%, to 3%. And then Trump said, uh, in, in one of his speeches, he said, "They told me not to say this. And they told me I can't." He said, "It's gonna be 3%." And they told me not to say this, but it's actually gonna be a more, a lot more. And of course, it ended up being far in excess of 3... I think it was like 4.5% GDP increase that year. And it's... What year was this? I think this was, was his first year in office, so 2017. Or start, it was, uh, yeah, that was 2017, right? Yeah, he was, yeah, when he was inaugurated. And, uh, the, it's, it's one of those things where like, the, the, the easiest argument for Trump in those days was just, "Look, you don't have to agree with the guy on everything.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  But the real question is, do you believe that either party outside of Trump is going to, like, are they gonna do well? Like, you have, you have the Democrats saying, "There's no magic wand to get growth." And you have everyone else attacking Trump and saying, "Oh, you know, we're just gonna do everything the same way the Republicans have always done it." Uh, I, I, the strongest argument for Trump is that anybody would have been better than what the establishment was pushing. I think that's the best argument.

• 1:22:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  For me, one of the big ones was, you know, and I, I mean, I got in a lot of shit for this. I gave $9,000 to a pro-Trump group that ran a single anti-Clinton billboard. It was a picture of her face that said, "Too big to jail." Uh, and this was, this was right after it had come out that she had been mishandling classified information, running an email server out of her own home. You probably remember the famous phrase where they asked her, you know, "Were you aware that your staff was directed to wipe that server?" And she said, "Like with a cloth?" Do you remember "like with a cloth"? I mean, it was just, it was, it was, it was so, it was so absurd. But for me, one of the red lines was when... Hillary and it's not really Hillary.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  It's it's kind of the the political machine of which she is just the face. Said that she would enforce a strict no fly zone in Syria. And it's easy to say, oh, yeah, I would enforce a no fly zone. And that sounds, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, keep, keep, keep, keep these, these bombers out of the air, keep these fighters out of the air. But what does that really mean? That means that you're saying you're going to shoot down Russian aircraft if they cross into airspace that doesn't even belong in the United States. Like, I mean, that's practically an announcement that you're starting a world war to say, I am going to shoot. That is what enforcement of no fly zone is. And it was crazy to me. Everyone says, oh, you know, it's Hillary, you know, Trump is an isolationist and Hillary's the only one who has a who understands what we need to do in Syria. I'm like, are you kidding me?

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Like, I'm not, without even taking a position on what we are doing in Syria or were doing in Syria, I know better than to commit that we are going to shoot down Russian aircraft because they decide to fly in Syrian airspace. Like, we should not care about almost anything that much. And by the way, if we didn't do it, that's almost as bad because now we've drawn a red line in the sand, we've let them cross it, and we've shown that we're not actually serious. So like, you shouldn't say that. You shouldn't act on it, and you shouldn't not act on it. It's a lose, lose, lose every step of the way.

• 1:24:04Joe Rogan?

  And it's just, politics is normal.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  That's right. And so, I mean, I would explain this to friends of mine and say, guys, I mean, they say, oh, my God, Trump's a warmonger. I was like, but Trump, you know, because I cared about this national security stuff pretty deeply then. You know, this was right when I was starting Andro8 years ago. And so I was like dedicating my career to these national security problems. Guys, how can Trump be the warmonger when he's the guy saying, we need to stop fighting these wars, get out of these other countries, get our boots back in the US, and not get in a fight with Russia, China, or any other country that we don't have to get into? And like, how can you say Trump's a warmonger and then support someone who says, we're going to enforce a no fly zone in Syria? And I think a lot of people, it was just really emotional. It was, it was, you can't reason people out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

• 1:24:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, one of the things that rocks people's world is you show them past videos of Hillary from 2008. You remember that video where she was more MAGA than MAGA? She's talking about the border and forcing the border.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  Wait, like, I think, I think one of the phrases was, "We have to send them back."

• 1:25:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  Can you imagine, can you imagine that day? "We have to send them back."

• 1:25:10Joe Rogan?

  I mean, imagine it was her. I mean, this was her position. And it's, she sounds like a hard-line Republican now.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, let's, another one to bring up is, uh, is also, uh, like, gay marriage.

• 1:25:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll tell you, my personal view is that the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all. It's actually a very recent invention. I don't know if you've ever dug into this.

• 1:25:28Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  So, state marriage licensure is a very recent development. There are people alive today who got married when you were not required of a marriage license. It was primarily a, uh, kind of a race-driven thing. States didn't want black men to marry white women, and they got terrified of that, you know, in, in the civil rights era. And so, they all passed these rules about marriage licensure, many of them prohibiting, uh, interracial marriage. So, basically, marriage licenses were a way to enforce against interracial marriage. Because if marriage was a purely religious thing, where you could just go to a pastor, get married, sign it in a Bible, the state had no power over it. And so, they wanted to enforce their will on people. So, marriage licensure is very recent.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  My personal opinion is, the state has no legitimate authority, constitutional or otherwise, to regulate marriage at all. Like, gay marriage is not even a question. It's, like, this is a religious, cultural, social ceremony witnessed before, and, you know, before, before your friends and your family. It is not something the state should be, they, they shouldn't have the right to give you a marriage license, nor to deny you one.

• 1:26:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  Like, why do, like, are they getting, how, what, when did I give the state the ability to, uh, to, to say it's illegal for me to get married without their permission? That's, that's crazy. Anyway, um, so Hillary, you might remember, but, I mean, even in 2008, she was against gay marriage. And she was out there, she says, "I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman." So, here's someone who, like, I was on the "state shouldn't be involved in it at all" side. Hillary's on the "no, we should use state power to enforce what marriage is between a man and a woman." And then you have Donald Trump, who, he's asked about, he said, do you remember his quote on this? So, I mean, he had been to gay weddings, he had gay friends, and he was asked about it, and he said, "Well, look..." Marriage, okay, it's like a restaurant.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  You've got steak, you've got burgers and different people like different things and that's okay. I mean, like, it was actually the most progressive.

• 1:27:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  The most progressive view you could ever have. And then, so Obama, by the way, same thing. Obama was against gay marriage. Hillary was against gay marriage. And then you fast forward just three short years and you have people like Brendan Icke, the CEO of Mozilla, getting fired by his board of directors because he supported Prop 8, which said that marriages between a man and a woman in California, which, by the way, even then passed in California. So the majority of Californians agreed with him. But I mean, you're right, like Hillary was, Hillary was, the thing, the views she had when she was running for president, you're right, today she would be a hardline.

• 1:28:00Joe Rogan?

  Hardline.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  Certainly, she'd be certainly on the cultural side alone.

• 1:28:03Joe Rogan?

  She'd be on the right of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  No, that's a great point. Marjorie Taylor Greene, you're right, she's very pro LGBT. She, she certainly is not for intervention in the Middle East.

• 1:28:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Yoda, you're right, like, I never thought about it that way. That Marjorie Taylor Greene would be far, far left of a Hillary Clinton running again today. You know, I'm gonna, I, I, I want to tell a story that I've never told publicly. But I just, I, I, and enough time has passed, I should just, we're bringing it up since we're talking about Hillary. So when I was in Silicon Valley, this is after Facebook bought Oculus. And so I'm up there and I was actually pro-immigration more, even more then than I am now. So I was, I was thinking about supporting this group called Forward.us, which was trying to lead to immigration reform in the United States. And I've since evolved on this issue.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  I think that immigration can help depress US wages in ways I didn't understand then. I hadn't observed a lot of the H1B visa abuse that I have now observed, having spent years in the Valley. So you cut me a little slack if anyone thinks I shouldn't have worked with Forward.us. But I ended up with this invitation to go to an event, a Hillary Clinton event in Silicon Valley. It was very, very hush, hush. No media, nobody was saying anything. And this was before she had officially announced she was running. So you're not, you know, you know when like- When a politician is going to run and everybody knows, but technically, they haven't announced it. So Hillary was gonna come out and she was there with her, her, John Podesta was her CTO at the time, or was it Chief of Staff? Something like that? One of those. Yeah, so it was gonna be her and Podesta.

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  At the last second, Hillary ends up bailing. But I end up going anyway, and I had a couple of prepared questions for Hillary. And so it was me and about 15 other billionaires in Silicon Valley who went to this kind of real, really, really intimate gathering. And they wanted to sell us on why we should support Hillary in this upcoming run when she ran. And first of all, I thought it was kinda shitty that she just didn't show up at the last second and like, didn't say to, basically till we were already on the way, like, whatever. She had some legitimate health issues, right? And still does. I, she might have in general, but I don't think that was the problem at this point. And so there were two issues that I brought up to Podesta. And I said, hey, I wanted to ask these of Hillary.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  By the way, note that in this story, I hadn't decided who I was gonna support. So a lot of people think I'm like this hard political guy. I was a VR guy. I was a computer kid. Politics was something I cared about, but like, I was reasonable. I could, I was not, I was not, I had not yet been, what do they call it? Radicalized. I had not yet been radicalized. It was after they fired me for giving $9,000 to Trump that I got radicalized. But, pre-radicalized Palmer. Okay. So I go to this meeting and I had two questions for Hillary. I said, one, in the past, Hillary, you've supported a 55 mile per hour federal speed limit. You were one of the original proponents. You were one of the people who supported it in the Senate. You wrote an open letter with a lot of other wives of politicians saying that the blood

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  would run red with, the streets would run red with the blood of children if we got rid of this, of this, of this speed limit. And then in 2008, when you last ran for president, you said on, I think it was The View, actually, which is, it's so funny, because The View has turned into like, almost a parody of itself. But as you said on The View, that when you were asked about the speed limit, you said that whenever and however we can make it happen... We should have a 55 mile per hour speed limit. Now, given that you've never driven a car in the last 20 years, have you reconsidered this rule? Or would you be supporting this in this campaign? And Podesta said, oh, we don't really have a position on that issue. I said, but like, could you make up one right now? Like, like, most Americans don't want a 55 mile per hour speed limit.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  I think that was really dumb of Hillary to say she supported one last time. I think it might be why she lost. Can you, would you agree that probably it's not a winning issue? And he said, oh, we can't, we can't take a position on that at this time, which was crazy to me. Shouldn't that be just so easy to be like? Yeah. Yeah, like, this is clearly like a thing that's a, it's a fight she lost, you know, half a century ago, and she's still worked up about it. Just give up. People don't want to drive 55. You've, you remember when Tom- Sammy Hager wrote a song about it. Well, you know, you know, Tom Cruise had a can't drive 55 decal on his motorcycle in Top Gun. And I mean, like, it's like, I mean, it, it, the cultural battle's been, been won. Then my second question was, hey, uh, we're a bunch of techno bros up here in the valley. We all believe in battery, electric, hybrid vehicles and, and electric vehicles in general.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Uh, but Hillary's been a huge supporter of, uh, oh, no, it was the other way. I'm sorry, this has been so long, I haven't thought about this. No, I said Hillary actually was against corn subsidies at one point. She called them at one point, you know, like the ethanol blending mandates. They were, they were making corn at a loss, paid for with tax free dollars, then mandating that it go into gasoline, which hurts car performance. It's, it's, it's, it's got lots of fuel storage problems and it's just a waste of money. And there's less energy in it too. So you get actually worse mileage. Anyway, I said, hey, in the past Hillary has come out and she wrote this open letter that called ethanol blending mandates the, quote, "most astonishingly anti-consumer mandate in the history of the American government."

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  Is she, does she still believe that? Does she want money to go away from, you know, biofuels and more towards actual cutting-edge technology? Or is she going to support corn subsidies to win votes in Iowa? And Podesta says, oh, well, we, we don't have a position on that at this time. I said, I just got to press you there. You don't have a position or you don't want to tell us the answer? Because we, none of us here think that the future is biofuels. It's, it's, it's a failed experiment. It's a failed mandate. Hillary used to agree. Is she going to flip on us? He said, we, I, I'm honestly, genuinely telling you, we do not have a position on this at this time. Not that bad, right? That's not bad. And so, three days later.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  Hillary announces officially she's running. Her first ads start running. And what do you think the first series of ads are? It's Hillary in a cornfield, talking about how she's going to boost corn subsidies, and she's going to lead a clean energy revolution, and she's going to give them so much corn money. And I, like, setting aside the fact that I think biofuel subsidies are dumb, she lost so much trust of people in that room. Because their, her answer wasn't, here's why I support them and, you know, deal with it. And it wasn't, I don't support it technologically, but I support it politically, which I think people could have respected. It was, oh, we don't have a position. But she did, they had already paid for the ads, they'd already made the ads. They were probably sitting on a tape in the TV studio, ready to run, as we're meeting with her chief of staff.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  And honestly, I know I said that, like, the Syria thing was a red line. That was actually the moment where I decided that I couldn't vote for Hillary. It wasn't about any particular issue. I was like, it's just, how can you vote for someone who's willing to just lie that way? To manipulate, and she was trying to manipulate me and a bunch of other rich guys. And there were a bunch of other guys in that room who said the same thing. We all were in a group chat, we're like, we're not gonna, we're not gonna, like, like. By the way, my questions weren't the only ones like this. There were like another dozen questions.

• 1:35:16Joe Rogan?

  Did Podesta answer any of them with, like, meaningful?

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  He did, he did, there were some that they answered meaningfully. Like, I'd say, actually, on the immigration side, there were some real ones. There were questions about policy for Dreamers, in particular. And I, and like, he had, he had his talking points. He didn't expect anyone to come out of, you know, to come off the top rope with 55 mile per hour speed limits. But, but, but there were a few other things. I'm trying to remember, what were the other ones that I think he misled people on? There was something in there around, um, there was something around there around content, like, like, for, for social media platforms. You know, in Silicon Valley, people care about this stuff.

• 1:35:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  It was like, hey, like, do you, do you agree that the government shouldn't be moderating content? That they shouldn't be censoring? Because this was kind of the very early days of the government interfering with this stuff. It was-

• 1:36:00Joe Rogan?

  When did the government first? This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human-grade food. The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it.

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• 1:37:25Joe Rogan?

  to fill some seasonal roles, fast. Maybe you need extra cashiers or stockers, or maybe something more unique, like a lead elf, or an expert gift wrapper, or a Zamboni driver. Whoever you're looking for, whatever skills you need to power through the rest of the year, ZipRecruiter is one of the best places to start your search, because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications, showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first. There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job.

• 1:38:06Joe Rogan?

  Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Started interfering with social media content. Do you know what their initial issues were?

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  So I don't know the initial issues, but like, let's look at this from first principles. Ignoring the social media part, when did the government start intervening in media? From the beginning. From the beginning. You know, one of the reasons, everyone loves Alexander Hamilton. He's really popular founding father. I have to admit, he's actually my least favorite founding father, partly because he supported central banking. I'm just not really a gigantic fan of it and how it's turned out. But interesting, by the way, he was also very anti-immigrant, which is so funny because of it. Look up the interview with the directors of Hamilton the Musical, when they were asked, "Why did you make Hamilton the Musical super pro-immigrant?" When in reality, he was very, I mean, very anti-immigrant.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  I mean, he literally said, "Immigrants are a poison to our nation." I mean, he was, he was really against it, and which is funny because he was himself an immigrant. And I mean, he was like, you know, blood and soil all the way. I mean, he was, he was really into it. And their answer was, "We wanted to represent Hamilton as we think he would have existed in the climate of today, not with the information he had at the time." Anyway. They made a fake person. But one of the other things about Hamilton is that he did not support the First Amendment. He actually thought that the government should be able to criminalize speech that lied about the government in a critical way. Now, to be clear, he didn't think you should be able to, you know, regulate everything, but his point was, if someone's lying about the government, or what it's doing, or its authority, we have to be able to stop that.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  You actually had a counterpoint in people like Benjamin Franklin, who of course had done like, letters pretending to be the King of Prussia, and lots of satirical stuff pretending to be the King of England. He said, "No, you can't, because if you say that we can't make up lies about the government, then the government just needs to make anything that's critical about them, us, a lie." Because if it's a so-called lie, now they can stop it. And so, he said, "We can't give the government the power to do this." So Alexander Hamilton was not a fan, and I think that that thread has been there through the history of our government. There's always been people, from literally before the founding, who believed the state should have a role in influencing the media. And like, I mean, you're familiar with all of like, you know, the stuff that came out post-JFK, about the media influence operations.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  What was it, like, 55 or 60 different media assets were activated for the JFK messaging campaign in national media? And so I guess, getting back to your question of when did they get into social media? I think it was probably continuous the whole time. The moment that it was of any importance, the moment that it was being paid attention to, I'm certain that the people who were running these media influence operations immediately jumped into that new sphere. I can't prove it. That's just my...

• 1:41:05Joe Rogan?

  Before social media, though, like, I wonder if they were preparing for something like that? Or if it started to happen and they didn't recognize what an impact it was gonna happen?

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  I think they under... I think they understood the impact of the internet before social media. So even before social media, you had people writing blogs, you had people doing, you know, you had these bulletin board systems, and it's well-known that the CIA was active on early bulletin board systems, pushing the government perspective.

• 1:41:34Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  And so, I think that, I think they've been continuously involved in every internet platform, even before social media, as we call it today now, was popular.

• 1:41:43Joe Rogan?

  I was watching a particular political debate on YouTube, and occasionally when I see something that's very contentious, I'm like, "Let me go to the comments and see what it is." And it was all bots. It was wild. You know, the real obvious zero, a bunch of zeros and numbers after a name, John, six zeros.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Yep. No profile picture or some ridiculous AI-generated thing.

• 1:42:06Joe Rogan?

  And then, like, a very hard-line stance, one way or the other, very inflammatory, causing arguments. I was like, "This is wild. This is all bots."

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  Well, you're familiar with dead internet theory, right?

• 1:42:16Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Joe Rogan?

  Explain that to people.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  So, dead internet theory's been around for quite a long time, probably long before the internet was actually dead. And it's this theory that, over time, there will be increasing amounts of literal robotic content, and then also kind of like astroturfed fake content, you know, like one guy running 100 accounts. And the theory is that eventually... There will be almost no real human back and forth on the internet. That it's actually kind of just propaganda and counter propaganda playing out on a stage for our benefit by moneyed interests, whether it's corporations, the government, foreign adversaries. And, you know, there might be a few people in the mix, but it's primarily going to be just robots arguing with each other.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  And I think that more and more, it's becoming true.

• 1:43:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's getting close. Like that FBI analyst that when Elon was in the middle of buying Twitter.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:13Joe Rogan?

  Who looked at all the different bots and, you know, they were trying to say it was 5%. He said, no, I think it's 80.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:18Joe Rogan?

  80%. So when you're on Twitter and you see people arguing and making points and even posting things.

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, and there was, you might remember, there was the time where a bunch of the stats for Wikipedia editors came out. And it was some like enormous fraction of edits coming out of one location in Arlington, Virginia. And it's like, oh, wow. Arlington, Virginia, that, you know, famously the center of academic rigor and excellence. There just must be a lot of people living there who they just really care about making sure Wikipedia is accurate.

• 1:43:48Joe Rogan?

  How odd. How odd.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  Could I take a quick break? Can you get a little bit of water?

• 1:43:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's water right there, right in front of you.

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  There we go. Thank you. I missed that.

• 1:43:57Joe Rogan?

  That's all you need?

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we have filtered water in that jug.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  Give me one sec, too. I just gotta need that. I need that.

• 1:44:03Joe Rogan?

  Pause, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be right back.

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  I need to take off my jacket, too. It's good when you're walking around and there's air moving on it because the copper conducts heat away really well, but just sitting in here, it's... Is this actually copper? Yeah, here, check it out. Wait, I want to do this on camera. Are we still rolling? Oh, look, look. Okay. You can keep rolling.

• 1:44:19Joe Rogan?

  That's a copper jacket?

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  It's from this company called Volabox.

• 1:44:21Joe Rogan?

  It's actually made out of copper?

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  It's actually made out of copper.

• 1:44:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God, it's so heavy.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  There's, yeah, it weighs like four and a half pounds.

• 1:44:26Joe Rogan?

  This is nuts.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  It's something like 3,000 miles of copper, of ultrafine copper thread woven into...

• 1:44:32Joe Rogan?

  Does this protect you from EMF or maybe some Russian signals?

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  So it would. And if you put your phones into that pocket, then no signals go out whatsoever.

• 1:44:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so it's like a Faraday cage?

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little wearable Faraday cage.

• 1:44:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  So it's actually, it's actually got some, some, some use beyond being cool, but... A company makes these? Yeah, so the company Volabox is really interesting. Volabox. So they make... Can I try this on? Yeah, of course. They make a bunch of really cool clothes out of very novel materials, some of them very futuristic. Like, they make a jacket out of the material that the... Mars rover parachute was made, so it's like a supersonic parachute material. It is pretty weird.

• 1:45:07Joe Rogan?

  Make me feel very restricted.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Well, you're also a lot bigger than me, so I'm a little skinny man.

• 1:45:13Joe Rogan?

  So they'll, yeah, but it seems to fit most, but it just seems heavy and restrictive.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  You know, you do have to make sure you size it where there's plenty of room to move around inside of it, because it does not stretch at all.

• 1:45:25Joe Rogan?

  What's the benefit?

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  So there's a few benefits. The first is that it looks sweet.

• 1:45:30Joe Rogan?

  Jamie's ordering one right now, look at him.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  The other is that, uh, the other is that copper's an antimicrobial material. So you never get mildew on it, you never get mold, like, like it magically kills all of that stuff. Also, I mentioned earlier, the pockets are basically a Faraday cage. So if you want, like, if I want my phone to get calls, I keep it in my pants pocket. If I want to disappear, I put it in my jacket pocket.

• 1:45:52Joe Rogan?

  That Palmer Lucky was wearing, I would hope it would be this. Like, when you showed up in this crazy jacket, I'm like, that's what I would hope.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  They've got a new one that's a t-shirt that's made out of carbon nanotubes. So you should check, you should check that out. They're working on, they're working on some wild next-gen stuff.

• 1:46:06Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Sorry, give me just a second, I just gotta take, I actually just need to take a mental, a mental break.

• 1:46:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, take a break, I'll take a leak.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Alright, thank you, I appreciate it.

• 1:46:18Joe Rogan?

  So there's a place called Commando Store? We were talking about these pants that I have.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we were just talking about your tiger stripe, your tiger stripe Ranger panties. And, uh, yeah, Commando Store is doing these reproductions of vintage gear, like Vietnam-era, US gear, Russian gear, using modern materials, but old camo prints, and they're super authentic. But the problem is a lot of this actual old gear, it's all mildewed, it's destroyed, the thread is all crusty and busting apart. And so, if you actually want to be authentic, like, the guys in the Vietnamese jungle did not look like they were wearing old crappy busted apart gear. Their gear was fresh, and so if you want to look just like they did, you actually have to buy newly manufactured gear. But I'll, I'll, uh, I'll send you some links, they have a lot of really cool tiger stripe stuff.

• 1:47:00Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Very, very cool and authentic.

• 1:47:02Joe Rogan?

  Nice. How, when you were a kid, did you ever imagine you'd be selling weapons? Does that ever seem surreal to you? That you go from being this guy who's really into VR to weapons manufacturing?

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  It seems a little bit surreal, but only a little bit. Growing up, I always would be the guy who identified with the guy in the story who was making the tools. So like when I would watch James Bond, I never thought, I'm James Bond. It was like, oh, I want to be Q. Like, I want to be the guy making the tools.

• 1:47:37Joe Rogan?

  Or Tony Stark.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. And Tony did it all. And so I have to admit, like, it certainly, they thought it occurred to me.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Like, one of my favorite anime characters was a anti-hero named Seto Kaiba, who ran a weapons company that was also a virtual reality company. And like, they built like virtual reality gaming simulator pods and also weapons. And so it's really weird, like, you start to ponder, are you really making decisions with free will? Or are you actually just like enacting the programming of when you're a kid?

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  It's hard to really know, but like, when people are like, oh, Palmer, how'd you get into this stuff? It's like, I mean, I remember being like seven years old and thinking about this stuff. Or like, you watch like Power, like, I grew up watching Power Rangers when I was a really little kid. You know, reruns of the first season of Power Rangers. And the character I most identified was like the techno wizard of the group, Billy, who was building like flying cars and upgrading their robot suits. And I don't know, it's really weird when you end up as an adult just doing exactly what you were fascinated with when you were a kid. Because what you're fascinated with when you're a kid is really, it's just, it's a function of what's put in front of you. Right? Like, what if I would have had different things?

• 1:49:01Joe Rogan?

  What if you lived in Montana?

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, what if I lived in Montana? What if, you know, what if I? Yeah, what if, what if, what if? Like, is there a world where, is there a world like I grew up in Nashville? And I would have inevitably been a musician. And like, almost without even being able to choose it, even if I went in one direction when I've ended up coming back to it.

• 1:49:20Joe Rogan?

  Probably. Look, all those things are interesting, and you're a guy who's into interesting things. It's just finding whatever the path is that you think is interesting and just going in that direction. You just, your direction was kind of established by your interests when you were younger. So it probably seems surreal, just in the fact that you've gone so far with it, to the point where you're actually making weapons to defend other countries.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  Well, that's the crazy thing is, I think, part of, part of the reason it's so wild, my progression, is it only happens if it, if it's successful continuously.

• 1:49:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  So like, a world where I don't, basically, figure out how to build good virtual reality technology, is one where Oculus doesn't exist. If Oculus doesn't exist, I don't get bought by Facebook. I don't go to Silicon Valley. I don't become kind of one of the leading tech figures in that industry up there.

• 1:50:09Joe Rogan?

  You have to hit every green light.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  You have to hit every green light. And like, I, like, you know who, you know who funded Andorall when I started it? Like, yes, me, I put a lot of my money into it, but it was all of these same investors who had invested in Oculus. I mean, literally, the same people. It's like, Brian Singerman is a good example. He was a partner at Founders Fund, which was Peter Thiel's investment fund. They decided to put $1 million into Oculus before any other fund was willing to give us money. So they were the first institutional money into Oculus VR. And then, he ended up being our first investor also in Andorall. So like, you're talking about, like, the same people, even, like, these relationships come back around. And then that turns into running a weapons company, and then that turns into building more efficient weapons.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  And then, like, one of our recent wins, yeah, we were competing Andorall with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to build the Air Force's first AI-powered fighter jet. So the first fighter jet with no human pilot, not limited by human ability. Instead, limited by the ability of this robot brain making the whole thing go. And we beat them. I mean, how crazy is that to like, for, for, for, like, that's what's crazy to me. Like, it's not sitting here crazy, like, oh, is it crazy in building weapons? For me, it's crazy, like, it's not that hard to imagine, you know, you end up building, you know, guns for, you know, the Marines. Like, but like, what's really, nothing against the Marines, or the people who build guns for them, I love those guys.

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  The crazy part to me is that all these things have gone right over and over to the point where I can literally have billions of dollars at my disposal from my investors to build multi-million square foot factories, to build, act like the Air Force's first AI fighter jet, which is the official designation they just gave it is the FQ44. F for fighter, Q for unmanned, and then 44 is the numbered designation. Whoa. Yeah. That's the crazy thing. When I lay awake at night, that's what I'm thinking about. It's not so much that I am building weapons, it's that we're like actually pulling off things that are make a difference. And by the way, AI fighter jets? There it is. There it is. So that was, that was, that was a wind tunnel test. And you'll

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  notice there's no protrusion for a cockpit, the whole, so it's a stealth aircraft, low signature, uses the same weapon systems that a real fighter jet uses. That's what it looks like in the front? Yep. So this was, that was, that was a very early, very, very early propulsion system test. And one of the crazy things- Whoa. Is that what they look like? Yep. Yep. So one of the crazy things about this is that the United States, so the idea is you have a bunch of these for every manned fighter. Because they're cheaper, they are more expendable, you can take more risk with them. So imagine this, I've got an F-35 flying with five of these things. The original name of the program was Loyal

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Wingman. The idea is that I have a loyal wingman, does whatever I tell him, I can talk to it like I would any human, you know, coworker, and it's gonna go in and do what I tell it. But it's never gonna question my orders, it's never going to try to save itself if it means ruining the mission. And one of the craziest things about autonomous aircraft is that the United States has spent basically a century figuring out what works in air combat. I mean, you've seen Top Gun, right? You know, they have this book of tactics that they need to learn to stay alive, how you measure, how you manage your energy and your altitude and your position so that you destroy the enemy and you don't-

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  Get destroyed yourself. There's another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy, but will probably get you killed in the process. We don't teach those generally, or if we do, it's in the context of don't do this. All of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI-powered fighter jets. I can now have it doing things that are so risky that a human pilot would never try, even try the maneuver. Because let's say it's a coin flip. It's a 50/50 chance that you're gonna die, but a 100% chance that I'm gonna be able to take out the enemy target. Imagine going after something where I know I am probably gonna get shot down at the end of that maneuver, but I definitely take out all of the surface-to-air missile launchers on the shore, which then allow everything

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  else to come in through the gap that you just cleared. You'll make that trade every day. You'll trade a cheap AI fighter jet to blow up a bunch of really expensive manned or autonomous systems in the air or on the ground every time if it allows you to accomplish that mission. And so autonomy, it really changes the game on this stuff. It's not an incremental change in tactics. It's a complete revolution.

• 1:54:51Joe Rogan?

  What do you think that New Jersey shit was all about?

• 1:54:54Speaker 02

  Into the unidentified era, other phenomenon?

• 1:54:56Joe Rogan?

  What was that all about?

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Well, so what's so interesting about the New Jersey stuff, and you've, you're probably tracking this as well or better than me, but it is so perfectly aligned with things that we've seen in the past. Like, you're familiar with all the overflights and hovering over nuclear facilities and military bases in the past. Here's what I think happened. I think that there was something really weird that was going on. I think briefly there was something that was really unexplained. And then what happened unfortunately is everyone found out about it online. Everybody got their drones, put them in their cars, drove out there to go out and try and fly it. And then I think that the next three weeks were a bunch of idiots with drones flying in circles, looking at each other.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  I've seen all these videos. 99% of them, it's pretty obvious that the thing they're looking at is another DJI drone that is also looking at them and saying, "Oh dude, oh shit." There it is. Like, it was, it was, it was kind of this crazy media circus. I think there was something that was real. And then very, very quickly, it evolved into being just kind of a flash mob social media circus.

• 1:56:03Joe Rogan?

  I, I think that's probably accurate because a lot of it was in Austin as well. It was like these enthusiasts were getting their drones out everywhere.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  That's right, and-

• 1:56:11Joe Rogan?

  There was like, "It's drone time."

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Well, in a, have you, have you heard, have you heard the, um, um, what do they call it? There's a theory that someone's come up with, and I can't, I forget what it is. It's like, it's like, it's like, uh, proliferation masking or something. Have you heard the theory that modern drone technology was seeded by aliens? So that we would create a bunch of things that would be up in the sky? That look kind of like their aircraft so that they would basically act as cover for the real activity? Have you heard this theory? I don't really believe it because I actually have met with the people who kind of invented modern quadcopters and flight controllers. Like, it's, it's, there's, they're, it's, but the idea is very interesting. And it makes me wonder if there might be some truth to it, you know, elsewhere in the world.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Like, it sure is convenient. Imagine that you're an alien. You're regularly operating around military bases, nuclear infrastructure. Wouldn't it be convenient if there was something else? That you, people could explain away as, like, wouldn't it be great if there was something that also darted around? And hovered in place and was very quiet and just little tiny flashing lights? Like, wouldn't that be really convenient as a cover for what you are doing? Because these same activities in like the 50s and the 60s, there was nothing like that. Right? Like, back then, if you said, "Oh yeah, I saw 100 red lights orbiting around that nuclear facility." You just, all you could say was, "Holy shit, what, what in the world could that be?" And today, it's so easy to say, "Oh, it's, it's just some drones."

• 1:57:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  And so unfortunately, it's a lot harder to know what's real. And I, I wish I could travel back in time, even just, you know, 10 or 20 years to, you know, do the, the Mulder and Scully thing I talked about earlier. Be the, be the, be, the, the, the- Be the billionaire, you know, the billionaire James Bond X-Files guy with a, with, you know, a badge and a, a checkbook. I feel like you could really find some interesting stuff.

• 1:58:03Joe Rogan?

  What, when you say that something weird was happening.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Joe Rogan?

  In New Jersey, what do you, what are you, what are you saying?

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  So, something that was observable by some sensors and not by other sensors. And that's really the common thread between a lot of these things. Like, it'll show up on a, on visual, like a guy sees it with his eyes, and he sees it with a thermal sensor, but it isn't showing up on radar. Or something, well, they'll see it on radar, but they can't pick it up on other sensors. And of course, there are some things where it's multi-sensor, but i- in general, when I say something weird, it's not obviously just drone, or weird and that it's acting in ways we don't expect. Like, how does something move so quickly and not have any skin heating? Why is it that white-hot if it's moving that fast to the air? How can it change direction so quickly without the airframe tearing apart? That's what I mean by weird. And I, I, look, I don't know what this stuff is.

• 1:58:52Joe Rogan?

  When you say, but weird, like, what was observed?

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  So, the weird thing that was observed was primarily that there was something there in an area that it shouldn't have been, and that there shouldn't have been anything, there should not have been anything that was able to endure for that long in that area with those characteristics. Like, this little tiny drones that cannot show up on radar, and that can, you know, kind of hide in places like that, they don't have hours and hours and hours of endurance, right? They're, they're, they fly for 25, 30 minutes tops. And then also, they typically would need to be launched by something, you know, right close to there. And the particular area it was in, it would have been really hard to launch from one of the nearby areas, get over the water, get to there, and then stay there as long as it did. Um, it's not the weirdest thing that, that people have seen, though. Like, the,

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  the Hellfire thing recently with the missile, that was some, that was some of the weirdest stuff that I've seen.

• 1:59:45Joe Rogan?

  That's so weird, because it got hit, and it just shook it off and kept moving.

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  And it's almost, and it looks almost like there were, like, pieces, it's like something reconstituted.

• 1:59:52Joe Rogan?

  Right, like, it took pieces of it.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  So, one of, I don't know if you've done, uh... Everyone wants to believe that it's aliens. And like, that's what I want to believe. Of course. Um, I don't think that it is a foreign adversary. Like, I don't buy into the idea that the Chinese or the Russians have secretly figured this out.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  But then the question is, okay, well, what does that, what does that leave? And I, I, I feel like my gut is that it's something that is weirder than anything that anyone has made popular. Like, just as an example, it's literally bleeding in from some parallel dimension. It's an energy signature and it's co-aligned by accident rather than intent, right? Like, it's there because there's something in its parallel universe that is similar to what we're doing. And that's why they're co-aligned. Like, I know this sounds like weirdo mumbo jumbo, but you just, it, it seems like something like that even would be more likely. Did you ever read, uh, Michael, Michael, uh, Michael, uh, Michael Critchens' novel, um, The Sphere? Or was it just Sphere? No. All right. You mind if I spoil Sphere for you?

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  So there was a movie, it was not nearly as good as the book. So in Sphere, without spoiling the ending, the very beginning of it is you have this researcher who is brought out to this secret naval research facility in the Pacific Ocean. Because the Navy has discovered a massive object, multiple kilometers long, lying on top of a shallow, a shallow coral reef on Sumatol, covered in coral, that appears to be a spacecraft, an alien spacecraft. And they figured out that when it crashed thousands of years ago there, it probably crashed onto an island, which then sea levels rose and then it became covered. So they buy this, they basically figure out it must have been there for about three or 4,000 years, uh, this spaceship. And so the Navy is going and they're trying to figure out what it is.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  They're scraping coral off this ship. They bring in this researcher and as the researcher is being brought to the site, they discover for the first time what they've been looking for, a door into the air. They were scraping the coral, looking for some way in through this ultra-tough metallic alloy that had never been observed ever in nature or, or, or, or science. And then the, the, the big reveal of like the first arc of the book is they scrape off the coral. They look at the door. Incredible, it's a door, but then they look next to the door and there's a marking. And what does the marking say on this 3,000-year-old spaceship?

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  United States Navy and an American flag. And, you know, what's interesting is they never actually fully explain it. But the implication is, and what they believe happened, is that this was a time traveling craft that somehow went back in time. Or alternately, that it's actually from some distant past civilization that traveled forward in time, like maybe went to space, did some exploring and came back. Maybe the United States is actually a purpose reconstitution of the branding and social structures of some long lost society from 500 million years ago. I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening, but I think that that's actually

• 2:03:02Speaker 02

  more likely than it being aliens from another galaxy coming to where we are. It's just, that is actually harder for me to believe than something that is of our own little local solar sphere and just really truly bizarre and not being taken seriously.

• 2:03:20Joe Rogan?

  Why is that harder to believe? Why is space travel harder to believe than time travel?

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  It's mostly all of the...

• 2:03:27Joe Rogan?

  Or dimension travel.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  So dimensional travel like that, that's totally believable. Specifically, the thing I think is least likely is that using normal conventional physics that we understand, it's people coming from another place that's many light years away coming to where we are. It's just, it's a matter of, we haven't observed anything that could do that. We haven't seen any synthetic material that could do that. We haven't seen any natural phenomenon that could do that.

• 2:03:51Joe Rogan?

  Right, but if you just go back 200 years ago, a cellphone's impossible.

• 2:03:54Speaker 02

  But the difference here is that we're able to see millions of years of history of the universe coming into us, right? We're observing things that happened hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, millions of years ago, from all over our galaxy and other galaxies. And there's a lot of markers that you would expect to see that would line up with how we understand intelligent life. And we're just not seeing them. And you're familiar with like dark forest theory, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe the civilizations that emanate those signals get whacked down before they become a threat to the dominant powers. Maybe everyone's hiding, right? There are these theories as to why this is the case. And maybe we're being, you've heard probably the theory about us being idiots for transmitting. Like Stephen Hawking was of this opinion.

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  He thought it was really stupid for us to try and make first contact. His point was... Not just that it's probably a bad idea in general. His point was the fact that we haven't observed it from anyone else suggests a lot of danger in doing so. Like, it could mean that nobody's doing it. It could mean that anyone who does it gets wiped out. If you stand up, you get knocked down. And so, it's just, I have a hard time believing that it's conventional, conventional thing on another planet that comes to see us. That's not to say there isn't life out there in the universe. I think it's out there. But for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be life that's capable of inter-solar system or intergalactic travel.

• 2:05:20Joe Rogan?

  But what do you think of people that talk about some sort of a potential science that eventually gets cracked where it's a gravity drive? Like, something that folds spacetime?

• 2:05:31Speaker 02

  In that case, and so, this is one of my favorite theories about this. Like, people talk about that.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  There's a question, like, if you're actually folding spacetime or breaking spacetime, there's a question as to, are you going to see visitors from another part of your plane of existence that are just using that technology to, you know, jump a few miles over to you? Or are you more likely that that level of technology is one that allows people to come from in completely different planes of existence? Different dimensions, different types of universes we don't even begin to understand? Like, if we can prove that we can manipulate spacetime like that, to me, that's an indicator that you can do even more than that. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just, I'm putting my chips on the table as, the things that I've seen, I'm more likely to believe that it is,

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  time travelers, unknown residents of Earth, people from another dimension, energy signals from another dimension, bleed through of our own past, present, and future. I put all those at a higher likelihood than they came from Andromeda and now they're flying around our military bases.

• 2:06:33Joe Rogan?

  Did you see that guy, Representative, what's his name, Tim Burchett? Is that his name? Who was talking about, there's five specific areas where these things seem to be emanating from the ocean?

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  I'm generally familiar. I've not, I don't remember what those areas are. I know that one of them is very near me. It's the Channel Islands corridor. Right. I tracked down this book that's out of print now called "The Unidentified", no, it's "The UFOs and USOs: Unidentified Submersible Objects of the Santa Catalina Channel", this guy went around- Oh, is that common? Well, in this one area, tons of bizarre activity. This guy went around and he interviewed everybody who had a weird story. And he just basically compiled them. He said, "What do you see? Describe it in detail", and he went back, like fishermen had stories from the 80s, and he talked to naval aviators, and he talked to,

• 2:07:27Speaker 02

  you know, local yachtsmen, and he talked to all these people, and he points out in his prologue, "These are all just the stories I've collected. I have not edited these stories. I have not modified these stories, and the people have verified that they are correct, and they are all on the record. This is their name." He didn't include anybody who was anonymous, because his point was if it's anonymous, you could just claim I made it up. It has to be a real person who stands behind it. And he said, "You'll notice that across about 50 years of stories I've collected, that there's extraordinary commonality between these stories. People who have never met, have no reason to work together, have no reason to have a common story, and yet they all observe very similar things. And that, when you see a one-off, it's hard to draw a conclusion. When you see a pattern, it becomes a lot more interesting."

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  What are they observing specifically? So specifically, the Santa Catalina Channel, so you have basically Catalina Island off the coast of California, and you have a few more Channel Islands that are stretched out on either end of it. The things that they were seeing were vehicles that were in the sky, and then going into the water at high speed, and appearing to, like not hitting them and slamming and exploding like you'd expect, but instead, you have still a huge flash, but just seamlessly transitioning into the water. Lots of noise, lots of splash, but not like destroying themselves. And then similarly, objects coming out of the water in the same way. And so they all describe these very, very steep approach paths.

• 2:08:58Speaker 02

  So like not coming in like an aircraft landing on the water, but almost like coming out of the sky at these very steep angles and then just smashing into the water in a way you would expect would destroy anything. But then instead, the vehicles are apparently fine and the water just parts around them as they rocket in.

• 2:09:14Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:09:14Speaker 02

  Really, really bizarre stuff. And it makes you wonder, could that be related? The same technology or process that allows the air? Because you've seen these systems, they're not creating sonic booms.

• 2:09:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:25Speaker 02

  You don't see shock waves coming off of them. And they're not heated by the movement through the air. They're not, they're not really, really hot. I mean, you've heard the stories about the SR-71. I mean, it would get literally red hot on its leading edges. You know, glowing titanium. But these things are cold. And so is there some technology that can displace air around you? That can also displace water around you is kind of the interesting theory there. But yeah, that, that, that particular I've dug into because it's only about 20 miles away from my house, so.

• 2:09:55Joe Rogan?

  The weird one is the breakaway civilization thing.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:09:59Joe Rogan?

  That's the weird one. Because that's the most ridiculous until you start thinking about it. And then you start looking back at past civilizations, like ancient Egypt and some of the monolithic construction around the world.

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  You've read Chariots of the Gods?

• 2:10:11Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm. I talked to Von Daniken once.

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 2:10:13Joe Rogan?

  I went to Peter Thiel's house. And Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein brought me over for lunch.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  Oh, that must have been so cool.

• 2:10:19Joe Rogan?

  It was so cool to just question him about stuff. What do you?

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  I, I read Chariots of the Gods when I was, I don't know, probably like seven or eight.

• 2:10:27Joe Rogan?

  It was a fun movie, too.

• 2:10:28Speaker 02

  Oh, I haven't seen the movie. I didn't even know there was a movie.

• 2:10:30Joe Rogan?

  It was an old ass movie.

• 2:10:31Speaker 02

  It was an old ass book.

• 2:10:32Joe Rogan?

  It was in the movie theaters.

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  So the, the interesting thing about it is like I, I've dug into a lot of that as I've gotten older. And yes, there are things in there where like we've now learned that they weren't true. But some of it holds up. There's still really bizarre stuff that was happening in ancient civilizations that is common between civilizations. And it doesn't really make sense. It doesn't really make sense when you think about it conventionally.

• 2:10:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, Ben Van Kirkwick, who runs Uncharted X, he was on the podcast recently and he was describing how there's specific hieroglyphs that indicate some sort of a star portal.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:11:10Joe Rogan?

  That that's what the hieroglyphs are saying. Like, this is a star gate. And it shows stars, it shows this portal and gate. And this is, it's written multiple times. And they're trying to figure out, well, what is this trying to say? Like, what is this?

• 2:11:24Speaker 02

  What do you think about the theory that, uh, that there's other sentient, that the other sentient species of Earth might have better, better lore on this than us? Have you heard of this theory?

• 2:11:34Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:11:35Speaker 02

  I don't want to, so, this is gonna make me sound a bit like a, a little bit like a nutter, but I'm, I'm pretty deep on, I'm more pretty deep down the rabbit hole on this.

• 2:11:44Joe Rogan?

  We're on nutter territory right now.

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  So, so people have oral traditions that have passed down pretty well. But, we've also observed that stories can pass down in other sentient species, like whales, like dolphins. They have these whale calls that have been constant for a long time. They're, they, they communicate with each other. One of the theories, and by the way, this was explored in like, some of the old Star Trek movies. They explored this idea that the whales actually had better and more stable oral history than humanity. And it's not that crazy of an idea. And so you, you wonder, for example, if we could understand them, what would they have to say about any of this stuff? Like, maybe they're not smart enough to have anything to say.

• 2:12:28Speaker 02

  But, you know, do, do they, do they have anything to say about, for, like, it may not be obvious. It may not be, we know about star people who are going through stargates.

• 2:12:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  But, for example, what if there's oral tradition, uh, or even genetic, you know, programming around, "Oh, we never go to this area. Never go to this place." Or, "Never eat the food from this place." You know, could there be interesting leads that are buried in cultures that are not human? Well, we were talking about that before, that you're working on interspecies communication. That's right. So, this hasn't actually officially launched yet. Hopefully, they won't mind me talking about it. Are you familiar with the X Prize Foundation? Yes, we were just talking about it. So like, if people aren't familiar, X Prize is basically this group that makes these big, significant monetary prizes for teams to compete against each other to do things that seem crazy. So like, there was an X Prize for going to, going to space on

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  a reusable rocket. John Carmack was competing for that. Did you know that? Yes, I did. So like, you inspired him. There was, they're doing some cancer X Prizes. There's one that's going on right now called the Wildfire X Prize, which is basically challenging companies to build a system that can detect wildfires anywhere on the planet in less than a minute from space, and then deploy autonomous drones to extinguish them before they get large enough that they turn into a real wildfire. That is like, instead of responding to fires once they're too big to control, you're able to stop them in their, in their tracks. And, I mean, I mean, just like the Palisades fire created $20 billion in damage, it's actually very cheap to do this relative to the damage that wildfires

• 2:14:04Speaker 02

  cause. Anyway, the, the X Prize guys came to me a while back, and we, we were, we were jamming on, we were jamming on a few ideas for their next X Prize. And I, hopefully they don't mind me saying this, but initially, I said, "You guys should do an uplift X Prize." Are you familiar with uplift, the science fiction concept? No. It's fallen out of favor. It was, it was really popular for a while. There was an uplift trilogy written by, I can't remember the guy's name, but it was, he, he wrote a whole book about non-human consciousnesses. Like, there were, in, in his book, there's like plasma consciousnesses in the sun. Like, you've probably heard of these crazy ideas, and you know, like, intelligent beings that live in the sun. But one of it, the, the

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  main thrust of uplift is taking species that are not sentient and lifting them up to the level of sentience and beyond. So, like, can you take a dog and teach it to talk? By genetically modifying it to make it smarter. Can you take whales and pass them up? And by the way, the uplift trilogy, they also explored this idea like Star Trek of the whales having an oral tradition that was more stable than humanities and actually having like a lot of information that was concealed by from man until they uplifted those species. And I've always thought that was really interesting. And so I went to the X Prize and said, I want you guys to an uplift X Prize. First person to modify an animal to be smarter than a person.

• 2:15:28Speaker 02

  And they actually said, that's too crazy. That's X Prizes, you know, X Prizes is trying to push the future, but for, you know, for a variety of honestly, quite good reasons. They said, this is not quite our jam. But one we are working towards is an interspecies communication X Prize. And it's a prize to, and I think that with modern AI advances, this is going to be a lot more possible to gather large amounts of data, reason about it and figure out the vocabulary and grammar of these species. The idea is it's the first team that can meet species where they are and communicate with them in a repeatable, verifiable way. This isn't teaching a dog to, you know, say yes when you say go.

• 2:16:12Joe Rogan?

  Do you want to eat?

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. No, this is, this is bidirectional communication, objective, verifiable, deterministic, predictable. And it's a really hard one, but I think a good X Prize should be. You shouldn't be picking things that are easy. You're picking things that are, they seem like they're just out of reach and you just need to stretch for it.

• 2:16:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's been talk of doing that with dolphins.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  I'm going to be asking the whales.

• 2:16:36Joe Rogan?

  Whales and dolphins, they have a language, but we don't know what it is.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:16:39Joe Rogan?

  So the idea is the using of AI. If you get to super general intelligence and AI can run all the patterns through some sort of a program and determine what is being expressed.

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  Cause we've, we've learned some things. Like we've learned how a lot of cetaceans can call names and, you know, very, very, like very, very unique IDs.

• 2:17:02Joe Rogan?

  They have dialects.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  Yep, they do. But we are so far away from cracking the code, right? I mean, like, isn't it crazy that we can crack? Basically, any cipher, any crypto code. We can, we can translate languages, basically, from scratch if we get a few words. Right, Rosetta Stone? Exactly, and, and we have no idea how it works. And I don't mean like, we don't know the words, but we know there are words. It's like, there's weird things where they're like, communicating via ultrasound with each other, and we think that like, one is emitting, and another is receiving and emitting. And then maybe there's information in the phase difference between those two, right? Like, they might be in, this is where the theory of, of acoustic holograms as a primary means of cetacean communication, I, I don't believe in, in that anymore.

• 2:17:47Speaker 02

  I, I think that wasn't quite right. But like, differences in phase between simultaneous transmit and receive ultrasonic communication? It seems to be that's part of it. So you can't just like, listen for words. You're actually looking for differences in how these waves are interacting. And those are distance-dependent, direction-dependent. We've got a lot of work cut out for us to understand, to understand animals. That is so wild. You, you're familiar with Alex, the African gray parrot? No. Oh, you've got to look into this. I mean, maybe you could even get one of his trainers on the show. So Alex, the African, African gray parrots are probably the smartest bird. Definitely one of the smartest animals. Right up there with crows, or ravens? Smarter. They're very, very smart. They can talk, they can reason.

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  Alex the parrot was, so Alex the parrot was a uniquely smart African gray parrot. By the way, African grays are usually not kept in captivity, just because they're such a handful. There we go. That's out, that's, there's, there's Alex. They're a handful because they're so intelligent? It's, it's like dogs that need to be exercised. They need to be intellectually stimulated. And most people just don't have the time to keep an African gray properly stimulated. So they start, they, they get depressed, they self-harm. So they, they're not recommended as a beginner parrot, by any means. Now, Alex was interesting, because he, he had a, he had a vocabulary, he understood grammar, and he is one of the, I think, the only animal. Who asked an existential question and he actually did it right before he died.

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  If I remember correctly, like he wasn't just saying, "Give me food." He could say like, "Tomorrow, I want this food." He could be, but the existential question he asked was, "What's happening and where am I going?" Which is, and he had never asked those questions before. They were brand new formulated questions that he asked very shortly before he passed. And so there's a lot of, now here's the other cool part. He's got a bird brain. He has a tiny little brain and yet it has all that capacity. You've probably heard of people who have lost huge chunks of their brain and they reprogram and they seem to get by. Parrots like Alex suggests that you can get by with very little brain if it's oriented correctly. So imagine if I took a species like an African gray

• 2:20:01Speaker 02

  and I modified certain elements of its genetic code to cause its brain to be somewhat larger, somewhat more glucose consuming. So it has more energy and then also to have more folds. They're very smooth brain. What if I could have, we know that folded brain tissue and the high density that it creates on the neuronal surface is very good for intelligence. Like, could you make an African gray that is able to have a normal human level conversation? I think, I think it's actually very close to that. Wow. So this is one of those.

• 2:20:30Speaker 07

  How many? Come on, can you tell me how many? Very good.

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  What? Two.

• 2:20:38Speaker 07

  We keep going. Can you tell me what's different? What's different? Come on, what number is gray?

• 2:20:48Speaker 07

  Don't want to tell? Well, tell me what number is gray and not. What number is gray?

• 2:20:55Speaker 07

  Very good.

• 2:20:56Speaker 02

  Holy shit, man. Right. And I mean, you're looking at intelligence that's on par by all of the traditional metrics with a human toddler, but with radically less brain tissue. But also radically less body to control. That's, that's true. And also a lot of like semi-autonomy. Like you know how some animals have more of their nervous system distributed? Like, you know, octopuses have, you know, autonomy in their muscles. It's actually similar for a lot of animals. And so one of, one of the reasons I've always found AI so interesting is not just what we can do with AI, but learning how, like building a, building a thinking system from scratch. I'm thinking will help us understand how other systems think. Like we haven't, we, there's never been an economic motive to really dig into how to.

• 2:21:42Speaker 02

  Understand how the brain fundamentally works. People, I know there's people who are listening who probably think that's crazy. They say Palmer, people want to cure brain cancer, they want to help with Alzheimer's. There's a difference between preserving brain function and truly understanding how the brain works. And yes, there's research labs here and there, but Google's never been funding them to the tune of tens of billions.

• 2:22:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:02Speaker 02

  Meta's never been funding them to the tune of hundreds of billions. AI is the first time that humanity has ever dedicated a huge amount of resources to understanding what thought is, how to make it synthetically and how to make it better. And we're gonna make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think, I think that understanding how to make synthetic brains via AI is gonna teach us how to make parrots like Alex a lot smarter too.

• 2:22:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, when you start talking about stuff like this and you start talking about genetically engineering an animal to be as intelligent or more intelligent than a human.

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:36Joe Rogan?

  It brings me to the weirder theory about human evolution.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:22:41Joe Rogan?

  That we're a product of accelerated evolution and that some superior intelligence would do exactly what you're saying.

• 2:22:48Speaker 02

  That's my favorite part about uplift is that if you can prove that it works, you open up a whole pot, a whole avenue of theories that have been treated as crazy. Like right now, if you, if you, like what you just said about, you know, uh, uh, uh, you know, augmented evolution of humans.

• 2:23:07Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  It's a crazy person thing, right?

• 2:23:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  But if we are literally sitting there talking to our dogs and they're, you're like, like, isn't it gonna be like, who could, who could think that's a crazy theory to say, well, I mean, we did it. The moment that we had technology that was capable, we did it. Wouldn't probably any species do that? Like, doesn't that suggest that when you get smart enough, you want to make things somewhat in your own image? It gets back to Skynet earlier, you know?

• 2:23:34Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Like, if we make animals more into our own image, is it really crazy to think that we are the result of something like that? And actually, so I'm a religious person. Um, I'm a Christian and I feel like what you see where God was created, or man was created in God's image, it's, I feel like it's reflected in our desire to create things in our own image. And so I, I think, I think there's a certain, a beautiful symmetry there. Uh, it's where it's. If we're doing it, it's actually easier for people to believe, I think, that it happened to us. It's easier for people to believe that we have a creator who wanted to create something in his own image when we are doing the same.

• 2:24:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, also, just the sentiment that you were discussing of taking an animal and making it more intelligent. If we found a planet, if, so let's say we get to, you know, a couple thousand years of technological evolution past where we're at now, we can travel to other galaxies and we find primates.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:32Joe Rogan?

  And we're like, well, they're on the way. They're on the way, but they need like 300 million years before they get to where we are.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  We wouldn't want to wait.

• 2:24:39Joe Rogan?

  Why would we wait? And maybe that's just a seeding process. Maybe that's something that happens all throughout the universe where these, you know, intelligence farmers just drop seeds in various areas, just take animals, manipulate them, turn them into something that's superior and that has a lust for innovation.

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:24:58Joe Rogan?

  Which is one of the weirder things about us. We were talking about this last night at the mothership. We were on the green room. We were talking about like one thing that human beings share in common with everything we do. Everyone's trying to make the best version of everything.

• 2:25:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:25:10Joe Rogan?

  And better versions, whether it's sports, the athletes of today are better than the athletes of 20 years ago, whether it's computers, whether it's televisions, any kind of technology, music, everything wants to be better than anything before. So we're constantly trying to make better stuff.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  I would even go beyond, I think it's not even better, it's that we seek novel things.

• 2:25:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:30Speaker 02

  And you would like, humans are programmed to seek novelty, and I think it's clearly been an evolutionarily advantageous trait.

• 2:25:36Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  Societies that foster seeking of novel experiences build stronger cultures, stronger technologies.

• 2:25:44Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:45Speaker 02

  And then, by the way, the groups that don't seek novelty end up becoming stagnant.

• 2:25:49Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:50Speaker 02

  You could even argue that many of the cultures that remain stagnant, like you kind of saw plateauing happen with, for example, a lot of Native American tribes. I think that it was a loss of drive for novelty. Like, and that's not to say that they're a lesser culture, but certainly they were not focused on seeking novel experiences.

• 2:26:08Joe Rogan?

  What's really fascinating when we think about human beings in particular. Is that people that lived in those tribes did not want to civilize. And that the people that were even captured by Indians, a lot of them wanted to stay.

• 2:26:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  Because they found that to resonate more with being a human being. Because we had lived so many thousands of years as hunter gatherers.

• 2:26:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:26:33Joe Rogan?

  That that resonated with your being. It seemed more spiritually in tune with being a human being than living in a city and wearing a suit and.

• 2:26:42Speaker 02

  Well, I think anyone who's.

• 2:26:43Joe Rogan?

  Getting food from a store.

• 2:26:44Speaker 02

  Anyone who's ever been on a camping trip understands what you're talking about.

• 2:26:47Joe Rogan?

  But it's.

• 2:26:48Speaker 02

  Because you can feel it.

• 2:26:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  People were not meant to live in urban jungles.

• 2:26:52Joe Rogan?

  There's a great Vice piece back when Vice was really interesting. Uh, it's called Heinmo's Arctic Adventure.

• 2:26:59Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:27:00Joe Rogan?

  And there's this guy who, uh, he lives north of the Arctic Circle or near the Arctic Circle. And he has a cabin up there.

• 2:27:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:08Joe Rogan?

  And he's grandfathered in and he's been there forever. I think he started working there in the 1970s. This guy, he didn't even know about nine 11 until way later. Someone showed him a picture of what happened. He has a television and VHS tapes and a log cabin and powered by a generator. And all he does is hunt caribou and fish and he's very intelligent. And so this nerdy reporter from fucking Williamsburg is hanging out with this guy or wherever he's from. And this guy's explaining how this resonates with being a human being.

• 2:27:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:40Joe Rogan?

  Like this is a much more satisfying way of living. And I think that this is how people are supposed to live.

• 2:27:46Speaker 02

  That's so interesting. On the one hand, I agree, but then I love, like, I mean, I love that human, the human race is doing a pretty good job of seeking novelty. Cause that's what drives, if we all hunt, if we all, I mean, maybe it's that, uh, maybe it's that, you know, maybe hunting caribou is what makes us happy. But you still need the guy who wants to go for something else.

• 2:28:04Joe Rogan?

  But you also need a singer. You also need a guy who likes to be a carpenter. You need, you need all types of different human beings and different personality traits and different interests to make this whole experiment of civilization work.

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  What do you think about nostalgia? Cause I've been thinking about this a lot for a variety of reasons. And it's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about. We're talking like novel experiences, new things on, you know, like, like driving towards the future.

• 2:28:28Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  There's some people who I feel like look down on nostalgia. They're like, oh, you're obsessed with the past, kind of needlessly, it's feel good. I feel like, like obsessing over the past, I think is healthy in a lot of ways. And I think it's even good to look at the past with rose tinted glasses because there's so much that we could learn from the past and should learn from the past. If we didn't look at things with rose tinted glasses, my theory is that the new like, imagine you look at the future possibilities and the past, you know, teachings identically with no favoring. It feels like you're naturally going to prefer the new thing that hasn't really shown all the downfalls yet. I'm, I'm, I guess I'm getting, I'm a big fan of nostalgia. I'm a big fan of, of looking at the parts of the past that worked and then lionizing those and reminding people why they worked.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Um, like, there's a lot of people who actually say this is fascist now. Have you heard of this?

• 2:29:19Joe Rogan?

  The nostalgia is fascist?

• 2:29:20Speaker 02

  Nostalgia is fascist. If you Google it, you look up nostalgia is fascist. You will find, this is like, this is like a cutting edge theory of the last year. They're saying, oh, all this appeal to, uh, you know, appeal to the nineties, it's pro-fascist because they're trying to make you believe that there was a better time, to believe that going backwards in society is, is, is, is a good thing, as if the 1990s were like some like hotbed of injustice and, and oppression.

• 2:29:48Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting. I think nostalgia is fun, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past. I do when it comes to art.

• 2:29:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:29:58Joe Rogan?

  I do when it comes to music and particularly the role of psychedelics in the influence of culture that happened in the 1960s, which I think is the greatest cultural shift of change in, in recorded history. There's some, the difference in the 50s and the 60s, just this radical change in the way people saw life and how many people were just like exiting normal society and then how they threw water on that with the passing of the psychedelics act in 1970. But I think that-

• 2:30:26Speaker 02

  Well, it seems like things are going in a different direction. So just, you know, I'm straight edge, I don't use any drugs. I didn't drink alcohol till very recently. I just had my first kid, he's a year old.

• 2:30:35Joe Rogan?

  And you started drinking as soon as you had a kid?

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was like my whole life, no drinking, no nicotine, no caffeine, no alcohol, no drugs. Yeah, I had a kid and I decided it was time to start drinking.

• 2:30:44Joe Rogan?

  Why is that? Why is that?

• 2:30:47Speaker 02

  Um, it, you have enough, you have enough hard, hard nights and- Hard days taking care of the kid and you say, you know, I totally get it, man. I totally understand why everyone's, why everyone's having beers on the weekend.

• 2:30:58Joe Rogan?

  There's certainly a place for it. There's certainly a place for it.

• 2:31:00Speaker 02

  But, but I'm curious, why, why nostalgia in art? I'm not disagreeing, actually. I think I, I mean, I showed you earlier.

• 2:31:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm, I'm, I'm completely fascinated with the 1960s in terms of, I'm a huge fan of 1960s automobiles.

• 2:31:13Speaker 02

  What year, what year were you born?

• 2:31:15Joe Rogan?

  Sixty-seven.

• 2:31:16Speaker 02

  Okay, interesting.

• 2:31:18Joe Rogan?

  When I was a kid in high school, in, which is really, I was in high school in the 1980s. So I went to high school, first year was eighty-one, which is not that far away from nineteen seventy, right?

• 2:31:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:31:30Joe Rogan?

  That's eleven years. Like an eleven-year-old car, if you had a two thousand sixteen Toyota, it looks exactly like a twenty twenty-five Toyota. There's not much difference at all. You would have to be like a car nut to notice the difference. But when I was a kid in nineteen eighty-one, if someone drove by in a nineteen seventy Chevelle, everybody stopped and stared like, whoa.

• 2:31:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:31:52Joe Rogan?

  It was like that nostalgia was real because we recognized that something had happened to American manufacturing, particularly in automobile manufacturing, where they just lost the magic.

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:32:02Joe Rogan?

  They had magic in the nineteen sixties, the Corvette.

• 2:32:05Speaker 02

  Well, cars were art.

• 2:32:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes. They were engineering, they were art, they were an expression of American culture, and it went away.

• 2:32:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:32:14Joe Rogan?

  It went away. In the nineteen seventies, they turned it into dog shit.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  Well, see, this is kind of what I'm talking about, where I should talk about the importance of nostalgia. Cause like, you want to look back at the things that worked and like, I think a lot of these companies, they'd have, they, they would have you just forget that it ever was works of art, that these cars could be this way. I think we need to learn from that and not let them, because like now, cars are turning into like subscriber-based appliances.

• 2:32:38Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, that's kind of gross. I've heard that there's some cars that charge you money if you want to use Apple CarPlay.

• 2:32:44Speaker 02

  That's right. Well, there's, well, there's some that are also charging you to use all of your, your, your heating and cooling functionality. There's ones that are adding, like you can.

• 2:32:54Joe Rogan?

  Just fucking charge me more for your car and don't fuck me.

• 2:32:57Speaker 02

  Well, some of them are, you're paying more, it's paying more to unlock more horsepower. It's like, wait, you're making the. Car, it has the parts and you're not.

• 2:33:03Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:33:04Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of these, and then a lot of these business approaches are actually coming, I think, not from the car industry. They're stealing them from the tech and also the gaming industry. Like, there was a time when these things, people were making video games. They would make a game, you'd buy it, you owned a video game, and that was it. And they made the best game they could to sell you at a store. And these days, they're making games and also a lot of apps. And like these subscription experiences, you have to keep paying money. They're making content that's just farmed to keep you hooked on the drip continuously. You don't see these masterpieces the way that you used to. And that's something I've been, I've been super passionate about.

• 2:33:45Joe Rogan?

  It is gross that they do that, that just hook you in because they know you're hooked already.

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:33:50Joe Rogan?

  And so you want the new BMW or whatever the car is. And you know, like, oh, I'll just pay the monthly, who gives a fuck? It's just one more subscription that comes out of my auto pay.

• 2:33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like there needs to be a bit of a concerted pushback from people who remember before we're gone.

• 2:34:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:08Speaker 02

  Like, one of the things that's crazy to me, like, you know, and like for you, it's cars. Cause you know, that's, that's, you grew up, you grew up during that shift as well, the industry kind of, to your point, lost something.

• 2:34:20Speaker 02

  But like, I grew up with like the Nintendo Game Boy. And a lot of these things were like, it was kind of like the early days of gaming where it was all these passionate people doing things because they really desperately wanted to. It was before all the bean counters got in. It was before all the regulators got in. It was before the people figured out how to turn it into this. You used to be able to make a game with a dozen people. And of course, you could still do that today. I don't want to romanticize it too much. But like, you could make a best-selling game back then with a dozen people. And these were all crazy people who could be making more money working in, let's say, like farming or industrial manufacturing. And instead, they decided to be game programmers. Today, you'll have game teams, there are thousands of people. And it's all, you know, it's become a very high-paying, high-prestige job.

• 2:35:03Speaker 02

  It's just a, it's a, it's a totally, it's a totally different universe.

• 2:35:06Joe Rogan?

  It's also a giant business now, right? It's been proven that it's a huge moneymaker.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  It's purely, it's totally financialized now. Right. Like, it's optimized by the bean counters. Yeah. How are we gonna make $5 billion in profit this year? And the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry, right? It is. And actually, and it has been even for a while. I think that happened like, I wanna say it was like six or seven years ago that the games industry. I showed you before we came on, I have this knockoff of the Nintendo Game Boy that I made. I remember I talked about that web form I started with. It's like a superior Game Boy. Exactly. You could feel it just holding onto it. So, actually, this one is even nicer than the ones that we normally sell. This is my personal Andrel Edition one. So, this is made with the same alloys we use in our attack drones. And the coating on it is a, is a waterproof cerakote ceramic.

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  It feels like very sturdy. Also, the screen lens, instead of plastic like on the original Game Boy, it's actually lab-grown sapphire crystal. It's the largest piece of sapphire crystal in any product ever in history. So, it's like a fine watch. And then, exactly. But then, we made a new version of Tetris for it. Ah, that's incredible. Whoops. But, um, but the, the thing that's so interesting about this, like, I turn it on, the game is instantly going. Like, there's no ads, there's no subscriptions. It doesn't say, "Log in and download the updates. Let us show you the pre-roll ads." Now, you need to make your user account and put in all your user preferences and give us access to your email and give us access to your social media if you wanna have the extra booster packs. Like, it's just... Access to your social media?

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a very common thing now. A lot of games, they are heavily incentivizing linking your social media accounts to your game accounts and letting them see your contacts, your friends list. Well, because they want all that data, they wanna know who they can market to, they wanna see what your demographics are. They wanna say, "What does this customer like?" Can you opt out? So, there are some games that require you to have social media integration. There's other... What? You have people with dark patterns? No. So, like, there are these, there are these patterns that exist in social media design and app design that steer you down a particular direction. And so, they don't force you to do it. But the average user, unless they're trying to fight their way out of it, is gonna do it. So, for example, I'll be logging into a game. I've just downloaded Overwatch 2. And it says, "You need to log in."

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  You can either go through this extremely convoluted process of creating a new, only Overwatch 2 Blizzard account, or you can click the button that says, "Log in with Google," or "Log in with Facebook." What are 99... And then, you click it, and it says... To do this, you have to give us permission to see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And look, you and I care about this stuff because we're, I think we're relics who remember when privacy was a thing and when some things are for yourself. A lot of these kids, they just don't care. They just click it. You talk, you talk to the Gen Z kids and it's like, well, why do you want, are you going to give that away? They say, well, like they, they, they don't see value in it and they grew up with that as the norm. And that's why I say it's important to remember when it wasn't the norm.

• 2:38:04Speaker 02

  Do people get dummy accounts so that they can give a dummy account just to that? There are people who do it, but most people don't. And also like the thing is they make it where there's even reasons where you want it to be tied to your social media. So they want to gather lots of information and you know, get you plugged into their marketing ecosystem. And they say, oh, if you, if you log in with this social media account, then it can, we can automatically add all of your friends to your in-game friends list. So you don't have to go and manually invite them. So they, they, like it is a convenience feature. But the thing is they could do that without storing all that data and giving them persistent access to all your social media accounts and seeing everything that you're posting. Some of these apps even you give them permission to post on your behalf. Oh.

• 2:38:46Speaker 02

  And what, what they do is like, this was a, this was innovated kind of like the Farmville stuff. Do you remember Farmville? And you had to say, the reason it was so viral is when you would do stuff in Farmville, it would literally post on your wall and say, oh, Palmer just did this. Palmer just visited Joe's farm and helped him do this. Hmm. Those tactics have evolved way beyond to make these things very sticky, very addictive. So look, you can make a fake account, you can make a burner account. And there's like 1% of people who will ever think of doing something like that. And so. So for them, it's just about mass. And I wouldn't mind so much if it was just about making money. Like making money is, is fine. Like I'm, I'm, I'm a believer in the free market generally. I'm a believer in capitalism strongly.

• 2:39:30Speaker 02

  But then the problem is you have this combination of capitalism-driven capture efforts compare, combined with people who don't care about making money, nearly so much as pushing their particular social ideals. Like you've, you've probably seen this in Hollywood. You certainly see it in the games industry where you have people who are. Joining the industry, not because they want to make great games, not even because they want to make money. And it's like making great games is the best reason. Making money is an acceptable reason. It's because they want to, you know, bring about greater equity and representation of people that look like them. And like, that's fine to have as a thing in the back of your mind. But there's people who are joining where that is what they want to do. And anyone who's against it, they're going to berate them.

• 2:40:15Speaker 02

  Anyone in the company who says, I actually think we should make games for our customers, not the people you wish were our customers. Like, let's make games for the guys who buy our games, not the moms you wish were buying our games. And people like that are being ejected out of companies. It's, I mean, it's very politically incorrect. There's a question.

• 2:40:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the Bud Light dilemma, right?

• 2:40:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:40:36Joe Rogan?

  They tried to make Bud Light for people who don't want Bud Light. And make fun of the Bud Light people.

• 2:40:41Speaker 02

  It's the mythical audience. It's a mythical mainstream audience. They, they, they say they, and you know, it's even worse in gaming because they'll say things like, oh, you know, 50% of gamers are, are, are, are, you know, stay at home moms. And you're like, what? That, that obviously isn't true. And what it is, is it's something like, there's a lot of stay at home moms who've played Candy Crush a few times. And like, there's a lot of them. And they're like, therefore we need to build to that market. Okay. Like, I, I don't want to get into a fight over like, what a gamer is. But what do you think sounds like a better business plan? To go after the young men primarily, who buy a dozen $50 games a year? Or the mom who once spent $5 on Candy Crush?

• 2:41:24Speaker 02

  Like, you know, and, and there's, there's kind, and if you, and if you say that, if you put it the way I just put it, they're like, that's so sexist of you. Why, why don't you want to bring in new audiences? I saw this when I was in, I saw this when I was in Silicon Valley. What I called it was, I said, there's too many people who drink Starbucks and not enough who drink Mountain Dew. And you know exactly what I mean when I say that. Like, it's, it's just, it's a, it's, it's been a really bizarre thing to watch in, in all of these different, in all of these different industries.

• 2:41:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's a mind virus. It's captured universities and then it bled out into corporations.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  One of my, one of my favorite questions to ask people is, you know, starting a company is hard. You can't, you'll fail most of the time, even when you don't constrain yourself to trying to, you know, change, change the social system. Like, look, if you could, if you could make it where there's, if you could make it where there's all those, like, all those moms all get into games and it was free, like, that'd be great. But it's not. It's a trade-off, right? You have to take resources you would have put on your customer, your real customers, and put it towards them. One question I ask people is, just ideologically, is, okay, imagine your job is to build, is to build a corporate building for a company. And the company, you know exactly who they are. You know how many men there are. You know how many women there are. We don't have to say how many there are. Like, we're not, don't

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  even, don't make it about one gender versus another. It's just, there are lots of men, there's lots of women. I won't pick a number. When you're designing this building, should you have the number of bathrooms that would best serve the actual gender makeup of the company, that would allow them to use the bathroom and get back to their desk without waiting in line? Or would you do anything else? Like, would you pursue a different strategy? And if it's different, it's like, what would your strategy be? And many people say, "Well, I would build it, you know, perfect 50/50." And if they say, "Well, I'm doing that because it's, you know, the easiest way to do it," I'm like, "Okay, that's fine." But if they say, "Well, I would, you know, I would, I would hope that I would, I want to create an environment where it will, it should eventually be 50% men and 50% women."

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  I say, "Okay, so wait, you're gonna, you have a company, 90% men, 10% women. You think the men should have to wait in line five times as long at the bathroom, because someday that might make more women want to work at this company?" And it's one of those, it's one of those really interesting dividing questions, where it's basically, do you want to solve the problem that allows your business to succeed? Or are you trying to achieve totally parallel social aims at the expense of the business? And companies are hiring a lot of people who think about it that way. They don't see their role as to come in and make the company better, or to make a better product for their customer. They see it as to come in and affect that change, even if it tanks the company the process. Have you seen? How did that happen? Dude, I don't know. Where that's common? I, I think that probably you let, I mean...

• 2:44:17Speaker 02

  There's a lot of theories. I can give you mine. It was the zero interest rate phenomenon. Theory. Are you familiar with this? No. The zero interest rate phenomenon, ZERP they call it. Or some people call it the zero interest rate period.

• 2:44:31Speaker 02

  So ZERP was this period of time that we've really seen over the last 15 years, up until very recently, where money was basically free to borrow. That's where you've seen so much economic growth. You've seen a lot of it artificially propped up in the tech and the media industry. I think a lot of like these streaming plays have been propped up by ZERP. When interest rates are extremely low and money is very cheap to borrow, people will spend tons and tons of tons of money. The economy appears to be doing very well. You have the growth that looks good on the stock market. And so companies don't need to ever tighten their belts. They can hire and hire and hire. They can become grossly inefficient. They can pursue things that don't make money. And they're still doing okay. And so a lot of these companies, they, their, their, their employees were kind of out of control.

• 2:45:15Speaker 02

  You had people coming out of college who believed their job was to change the world by using the money of these corporations. And the corporations didn't push back on it because they would be accused of being bigots and committing hate crimes. And they said, you know what? The stock is going up. Everything's going well. We can just keep doing this. My theory is actually that interest rates going up have been very good for solving this problem. You've seen a lot of layoffs in the tech industry. You've seen a lot of layoffs in the media industry. I think that a lot of those are driven by interest rates rising. Money's not free. And now companies have to actually make what people want. Did you see, you probably didn't, but did you happen to see the first quarterly earnings call by the new CEO of Warner Brothers? Who came in a year or two?

• 2:46:00Speaker 02

  He came in a year or two ago. And it was incredible. He, he, he had this speech that was exactly what fans wanted to hear and what investors wanted to hear. But his employees were furious. He came on and said, "In my tenure, I'm going to pursue something that's a bit novel for Warner Brothers. Instead of making movies that people don't want to see, I'm going to make movies that people do want to see. Instead of making movies that don't make money, instead, we will make movies that do make money. And to do that, we are going to make products that people want, like Batman and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter." And that is going to be the core of our market success.

• 2:46:45Speaker 02

  And like, that's what fans want. They're like, oh my god, this is great. They're not, they're gonna stop making these kind of social justice pieces and make us the things that we actually want. The investors love it because he says they're gonna make money. But the people who are angry were all of the college students who joined thinking that they were gonna use billions of dollars from Warner Brothers to make their pet, you pet art film projects about, about various oppressed groups. And I think that that is happening across the industry. And I think, I think that's, I think that's a good thing. It's a good adjustment.

• 2:47:14Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense. So, speaking of making things.

• 2:47:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:19Joe Rogan?

  Bust out the helmet, son.

• 2:47:20Speaker 02

  All right. So, let me, I'm gonna take this off.

• 2:47:23Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:24Speaker 02

  So, I've been working on head mounted displays for a long time. I created the Oculus Rift when I was 19 years old, living in a camper trailer in my garage. And that was really the virtual reality headset that changed the industry, sold that company for billions of dollars. And now that I'm working in the national security space, I've continued to believe that virtual reality, augmented reality is gonna be a critical part of our military. So, the ability to have night vision, thermal vision, but also the ability to see where all the bad guys are, see where all the good guys are by fusing everyone's view together. Think of it almost like a hive mind. If I'm able to see something, you should be able to see it. If a drone can see it, you should be able to see it. Even if it's on the other side of a building, you should be able to see it and effectively have x-ray vision.

• 2:48:06Speaker 02

  And I should be able to command and control all these other systems using this heads-up display interface. It's, I mean, none, none, none of what I'm saying sounds that crazy, right? It just sounds like any science fiction film. These are ideas that have been around for 100 years, but only very recently has it become possible. So, this is a new product that we just announced at the Army's conference yesterday. We've been working on it for years, using our own money, no taxpayer dollars were used to create it. It's called Eagle Eye. And it is an integrated ballistic shell. So you've got a helmet. Um, you've got hearing protection. You've got thermal sensors, night sensors, uh, signals, intelligent sensors that allow you to detect where cell phones are, where radios are, see that in your view.

• 2:48:48Speaker 02

  It even detects where gunshots are, shows them exactly where they're placed and how far they are.

• 2:48:53Joe Rogan?

  So this is the, this is a recreation of it.

• 2:48:56Speaker 02

  So this is like- Yeah, this is a, so this is a video feed of what it is like to use the system. So I've got the helmet on here. And then what I have is this pair of augmented reality glasses. Um, so basically I can take these glasses. And I put them on. These sync with the helmet and with these sensors. So I can, for example, see where my gun is pointing. I can see where every enemy is. I can see where all of my buddies are. I can see, so like, there's a, there's a view that's coming up here where you're gonna notice a drone picks up a guy behind that container over there. And what's gonna happen is when he walks behind that container, I'm able to continue to see where he is and what he's doing.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  So here's Ghost X is the drone that's watching. So just watch for a moment. So the blue force is my friendlies. So see that little right-hand corner where it sees behind the containers?

• 2:49:50Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:49:50Speaker 02

  They're tracking where the bad guy is. They're tracking where my guys are. And then watch when they go behind the container. So I can actually see through it and watch. Now they're engaging the guy over there and he's down.

• 2:50:02Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:50:03Speaker 02

  Imagine a guy's coming over a hill and I want to engage him. So actually I'm gonna pot on the mission shield. There we go. So, um, this is a system that allows everybody to basically be operating as one, one combined hive mind where you can all share a view of the world. And by the way, this view that I have, it's shared now with all of the robots as well. So all the, anything I see, like, let's say I see someone inside of a building. Every drone and every person now sees that person where he is. It's so crazy that I was born at the right time to actually get to build all this stuff. Because you know Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author who did Starship Troopers?

• 2:50:45Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:47Speaker 02

  He was literally writing about these ideas of mobile infantry that's wearing mech suits and ballistics prediction, like helmets that show you the bad guys, give you radar feeds, give you night vision, give you thermal vision, the ability to do ballistics targeting where it calculates where the wind is gonna blow you around and where it's going to go. He was literally writing about this in the 1940s. I mean, we're talking about almost 100 years ago.

• 2:51:11Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:51:12Speaker 02

  And we happened to be born in the right time. So, you know, too late to explore the seas, too early to explore the stars, but just in time to build Eagle Eye.

• 2:51:23Joe Rogan?

  You're in the right timeline.

• 2:51:24Speaker 02

  I am in the right timeline.

• 2:51:26Joe Rogan?

  Do you ever feel like it's a simulation because of that? Do you ever feel like you're living in some sort of bizarre simulation? Because otherwise, like, why you? Why lives, why do you have such a unique existence? Why are you so fortunate?

• 2:51:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 2:51:39Joe Rogan?

  Why are all these cool things happening for you?

• 2:51:41Speaker 02

  It's like I'm reliving my nights here in the room with you. Now, I ponder it a lot, because I mean, look, we talked earlier about how I would only be able to pull off these things I pulled off if I continuously succeeded.

• 2:51:51Joe Rogan?

  A lot of green lights.

• 2:51:52Speaker 02

  And over and over again. And it does make you think, like, what are the odds of that? Is it more likely that the world is a simulation? Or not? And I think actually, it just comes down to... It comes down to, I'm a spiritual person. I believe in the existence of a higher creator, of a higher power. And I feel like there's actually a lot of similarities between that and believing in simulation theory. I mean, like, when people say, oh, it's all a simulation, is that really so different from having a universe that was created by an all-powerful being?

• 2:52:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:52:22Speaker 02

  Like, it's almost, I often feel like simulation theory is just normal religion wrapped up in a package that a person who claims to be a-religious can partake in. They're like, no, I would never believe in, you know, a sky daddy. I just believe that we live in a world created by a higher being and that he's watching our every move and learning from it and helping us along the way. I don't know, man, that's... You're hitting on a lot of the tenets of major world religions.

• 2:52:51Joe Rogan?

  What were they trying to write down when they were writing the initial religious texts? Like, what were they actually describing? When you're talking about something that's an oral tradition for...

• 2:53:01Speaker 02

  Let me pop up the... There we go. I could pop out this. Can I put that on? Yes, absolutely. What are you seeing right now? So, right now, nothing. Unfortunately, if I'm gonna give you a good demo, we need to go to an area where it's synced up to all the other helmets. Oh, okay. We're in a night. I want to show you the night. I like how the ears pop out, though. Yes, this is, this is, uh, this is my doing. Um, so I'm a huge weapons enthusiast. I own about 450 guns. Huge number of, you know, I, I own basically everything that anyone's ever fought in. So ballistic vests, uniforms, boots, gloves, helmets. I've just, I, I collect that stuff. And so one of the cool parts about Eagle Eyes, I got to bring all my opinions on what things should be, and I can just jam them, jam them into the product.

• 2:53:42Speaker 02

  So like, the cool thing about this is, uh, like you've, if you've ever used earring protection, normally, you know, it pops up like this. Right. And you know, it's kind of dangling in the way. Notice how it's really tightly integrated. Like, it's not flopping around. Right. But I can pop it open, and now I can hear you directly with my own two ears. I can pop that and clip it back in, and I'm able to hear with electronic pass-through, and it actually, uh, enhances my hearing. So I can hear certain things better. And you'll notice, this is ballistic ear protection. Mm-hmm. So have you ever seen like a high-cut helmet where, you know, you can have low-cut helmets where they protect your ears more, high-cut helmets where there's no ballistic protection over your hearing protection? This is ballistic hearing protection. So when I put this on, everything is protected with armor, even over the soft tissue in my ears and around my upper neck.

• 2:54:23Speaker 02

  Is there any concern about the hinge, or that during combat it would pop open? No, no, this is, it's a, it's a super robust system. So, here, I'll actually show you. Um, let me pull off. So these are modular sensor pods at the top. They call them wolf ears. But I can basically swap these even in the field. So I could carry, for example. Well, but that seemed too easy to take off. Magnets, buddy. Right. But I'm saying, if, if you're in the middle of a scramble and you're. Here, check this one out. This one has no, this one has no connector on it. This is, this one is a, the, the, these are not actually real modules. These are based. This is a tricky one where we have real modules and show modules. The real modules, in general, the Army doesn't want to have them passed around and people taking pictures of them. Like at AUSA, there's people walking up, taking pictures of everything in the booth.

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  They don't want you to show off, for example, the size of the aperture of the thermal image you're using. Because then they can back reverse how far you can see, what level of thermal radiation you can see. So yeah, these ones are fake. Yeah, normally you actually, when it has a connector in there, you gotta actually jam it in there and it's retained.

• 2:55:22Joe Rogan?

  And so have you done tests where like people fall down off of hills and go for a tumble?

• 2:55:27Speaker 02

  So this technology, the last revision of it, is already with the Army. They're doing trials and tests of this literally right now. But like if you look here, it's basically a spring steel mechanism there. And so it's not just strong, it's also flexible. So it basically can bend and then snap back. And so it's very, very hard to over bend this, over extend this.

• 2:55:48Joe Rogan?

  Got it.

• 2:55:48Speaker 02

  And if you did, like it's very hard, but if you did, you grab some pliers and you bend it back. And notice how that's a replaceable module there? I can just unscrew this and replace it with a new part. Everything on here, I can repair in the field with a field repair kit as well.

• 2:56:01Joe Rogan?

  And does it have the same functionality as like Walker game ears? Where you can amplify outside noises, but then when a loud boom comes off, your ear is protected?

• 2:56:10Speaker 02

  Exactly, but it's even better. We're using an array of, so those ones here, they have two microphones. The Walkers, they typically have one here, one here. What we're doing is a phased array of microphones, so that I can actually steer the amplification beam. Like I could say, hey, like I could send a mo-

• 2:56:26Joe Rogan?

  I hear footsteps over in this left direction, let's point in that.

• 2:56:29Speaker 02

  Well, even crazier, imagine that I'm looking at a target with this. And I look at that target, it can cancel out all of the other sound that it knows is coming out of phase with that direction and distance. And it can give me just the sound there, coming from that as best it can. So it can give me not just enhanced hearing, but directional enhanced hearing. I could say, I want to listen to what that guy 100 yards over there is saying. I'm not promising you'll be able to hear, but you'll be able to hear it a lot better than you would, than you would without it. So it's worth noting, like, the way this came together is crazy. There was a contract to do this, to build an infantry combat heads-up display in 2017 and 2018 that was awarded to Microsoft by the United States Army.

• 2:57:13Speaker 02

  It was $22 billion. $22 billion to develop this technology. And I actually wanted to compete in that competition back then, but at the time Androl was only about two dozen people. And so it was a competition. Do you remember Magic Leap? Doggy round?

• 2:57:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:30Speaker 02

  It was a competition between Magic Leap and Microsoft. Microsoft ended up winning. I think that's probably good because the guy who was running Magic Leap was not really a fan of the military, and I think it's dangerous to have... Even if you don't, it's fine to not like the military, but you shouldn't have people who don't like the military running the military, right? People... And I think you shouldn't have people who are in love with the military regulating the military, right? You know, everyone has their role. Anyway, I never... I was very skeptical of their technology. You remember HoloLens? That was Microsoft's, like, consumer virtual reality, augmented reality effort. Their AR project was adapting that to the military into this product called Ivas.

• 2:58:14Speaker 02

  And to make a very, very long story short, it had a lot of problems. Their early hardware was making people sick. It was... It had lag. The night vision wasn't working well. There were soldier evaluation touchpoints that came out where they were saying, "Hey, I'll get killed if I wear this." Microsoft invested a lot of money trying to make it better, but eventually they ended up killing even their consumer HoloLens division. They just shut everything down. And so the crazy part of this whole story is, starting a few years ago, I started going to Microsoft and saying, "Hey, will you guys just give me the Ivas program? Like, will you just let me take over? You guys can keep building, you know, Microsoft applications, cloud computing, the stuff you're good at. Let me build the tactical heads-up display hardware." And when I first talked to them years ago, they thought I was nuts. Like, they was almost, like, insulted.

• 2:58:59Speaker 02

  It was like when Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo, and they got literally laughed out of the room. And then, as time went on... They started to laugh less and less and eventually they they said, hey, remember how you said you wanted to take over IBS? We would actually love to partner with you on this and let you bring your magic to bear on this problem. And I'm I'm I'm I try to be a humble guy. I don't usually succeed, but I am not humble in this one regard. I believe that I am the world's best head-mounted display designer, bar none. I took the crown with the Oculus Rift. I think I still hold it. And so I was able to kick the program into shape. We built our own hardware and we've built Eagle Eye over the last couple of years.

• 2:59:41Speaker 02

  And it is, it basically solves all the problems that the program had. It is the thing that I think is actually going to end up on the heads of every soldier. Here, try, try, try taking these on and you'll feel they're a bit heavier than normal glasses. But the other thing about them is that they're also ballistic rated glasses. So you see in the front and then also on the sides. Yeah, so like these can take pieces of frag. So if someone's attacking you with a drone and it blows up, this is going to keep those from going into your orbitals, which is a pretty important function for glasses.

• 3:00:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I would say so. What is this outside piece for?

• 3:00:12Speaker 02

  So yeah, put, put the glass, try putting the glass back on, see if you can pop that off. You'll notice like that one is is actually, yeah, there we go. Perfect. So that's a mission shield. I like that you asked about it because actually nobody's even noticed really that it's two pieces. So the mission shield is a piece that allows you to reconfigure the glasses for different use cases. If you're using this, for example, to like give you automated instructions on how to repair your Humvee, for example, I don't need to have that ballistic cover on the front because I don't need that extra, like I don't expect that I'm going to have an explosion happen and you protect my eyes. But you can also do things like have different types of protection. For example, that's not, that's just a normal ballistic mission shield. We have another mission shield that protects you from laser energy weapons.

• 3:00:57Speaker 02

  So it's actually tuned where now it makes your vision turn, I probably shouldn't talk about exactly what color because it allows people to figure out what frequencies we're blocking. But there are mission shields that you can put on that will protect you from weapons that we know China has. China has a bunch of directed energy laser weapons, some of them for taking out drones, others designed to blind human troops. And so we're designing mission shields that protect you from those types of emissions.

• 3:01:22Joe Rogan?

  They're designed to blind human troops?

• 3:01:25Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:01:26Joe Rogan?

  Are they employed from drones?

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  I don't want to be, I don't want to be too. I don't want to be too aggressive here because I'll tell you the United States has weapons that are designed to temporarily blind people as well. Now, the thing is temporary blinding is very close to permanent blinding. And it's a thin line. It's dependent on the range, it's dependent on the power level. Any system that can temporarily blind people at long range is capable of blinding people permanently at long range. It's just that, that's the line you walk. Like, if you want it to work in any fog, you need more power. If you want it to work at long ranges, you need more power. But like, for example, imagine we deployed a bunch of these glasses and they had the laser filters built in from the start. Now imagine that China shifts their laser frequencies 10 nanometers so that it bypasses that filter.

• 3:02:11Speaker 02

  Imagine if I had to just replace all my AR glasses. That's not acceptable, right?

• 3:02:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  So, everything on this system is totally modular. So, what would happen is if they shifted their laser weapons, we would just give people a new mission shield. Now they're all set.

• 3:02:24Joe Rogan?

  That mission shield comes off very easy, though.

• 3:02:26Speaker 02

  So, this comes, look, I gotta admit, these are primarily for like, showing off to the army.

• 3:02:32Joe Rogan?

  Got it. So it'll somehow or another secure into place.

• 3:02:35Speaker 02

  It's, well, it's, it's actually still gonna be magnets. It's just going to be a lot more forced to remove. I'm wondering how much I should get into the movie magic here. So, look, I, I'll get a little bit into it.

• 3:02:47Speaker 02

  I'm mostly an engineer. I mostly build stuff. But a big part of what I do is understanding what magicians think when they are drawing attentions things, when they have patter, when you're, when you're going through a demo of something to somebody. Like, I used to demo the Oculus Rift to thousands of people a year. High-powered executives, government people, CEOs of major game companies, people we were trying to hire. And you have to develop a patter of how you talk about stuff. And you need to be able to go in any direction. If somebody says, "Well, what about this?", you need to be able to show them that feature. And you need to be ready for how you show the feature. I need to be intimately familiar with every part of it. The reason that the magnets are so weak on this is because we show this to people who are weak. I'm, I'm, I'm not kidding.

• 3:03:31Speaker 02

  If you actually have, like, because you're not swapping this like, as you're running around, right? So like, in the real one, you can have, you know, where you're like, "Ah!", you know,

• 3:03:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:03:39Speaker 02

  And it busts off.

• 3:03:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:03:40Speaker 02

  But imagine this. Imagine we're sitting in a, in a demo room, and then you hand this to either a member of the press, or even, let's say, a member of the armed, armed forces. And I say, "Here you go. And your name is Ashley. Take that, Ashley.

• 3:03:52Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 3:03:53Speaker 02

  Pull it off. And you'll, "Ah, ah, ah."

• 3:03:57Speaker 02

  Uh, that's the problem. Like, because you need some decent fit. You see those tabs on the end? Uh huh. You know, like the protrusions, yeah. That's to make it easier for your fingers to grab when you have way more force. There are people who have really weak fingers. They don't really know how to grab stuff. And then, uh, it's actually the same thing with. I understand. I understand what you're saying. So I'm showing you a little bit of the movie, the movie magic behind, behind how I think these, you know, if you want to take this, you can put it on. This is an actual weighted helmet. We've developed a bunch of novel technology that makes it work. You're, oh yeah, it actually fits on you. Oh, here, you're a little wrap, your chin straps wrapped around. Yeah, just sorry, I wrapped it around before you even had it. Yeah, there you go.

• 3:04:40Speaker 02

  But yeah, if you're familiar with walkers, very, very similar what we do on the hearing enhancement side. It's just a world even beyond that. It's too tight or you got it. And then this snaps, oh yeah. How's this snap? So here, I might have to come around. There's a little bit of a trick that you, you learn it. What it does is it goes in and then you're going to push it up and back diagonally. Oh, you did it. There you go. Yeah, I figured it out. I'm so glad. See, that's just how intuitive it is. Yeah. But, uh, it's. Very. And the cool thing about this is you don't have these like mounts now that are snagging you. Here, well, you gotta put on the glasses too. Oh yeah. You don't have the mounts that are snagging you. You don't, like, have you ever, you've used night vision?

• 3:05:19Speaker 02

  I have. I mean, it's just, you know, you have this big giant unicorn horn, this thing pounding on your face. Also, it's very unbalanced. Weight that's out here is torquing your neck continuously. Right, right. And it's, it's annoying when you're standing in place. But if you, let's say, hit a pothole in a Humvee with a big weight on the end of a lever, you destroy your neck. Next, I think it's 20. Oh my God, I can't even be right. I want to say, I want, I need to look this up. It might be, is it 200 million for the Air Force? And then I want to say it's $20 billion that the DOD spends on neck injuries. Whoa. Primarily through the, through the VA, right? There's so many neck injuries that occur from spinal compression, people getting their heads whipped around.

• 3:06:04Speaker 02

  That's why helmets need to be extremely lightweight, tightly integrated, no snag hazards. Like, it's important that you not have, you know, a big giant, you know, goalkeeping thing where I'm going through a doorway. Right. On there and all of a sudden I go, ah, in a weird angle and I'm trying to run through a room.

• 3:06:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:06:19Speaker 02

  Or like someone's turning and part of their rifle, you know, they're right up on me and it snags on my helmet and pulls me. Like you've probably seen a lot of people put like big battery packs for their night vision back here. Same thing, it creates a huge snag, stagger, like you're sliding down something or sliding over an edge. You clear it and then the back of your head hits that fence and you go boom.

• 3:06:37Joe Rogan?

  What's the battery power of something like that?

• 3:06:39Speaker 02

  Okay. So this has a tiny battery pack on it. This has 30 minutes of battery life.

• 3:06:46Joe Rogan?

  So what is the lithium ion capacity? Is it lithium ion?

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  So what we're.

• 3:06:49Joe Rogan?

  Is it like a bat, like a cellphone battery?

• 3:06:50Speaker 02

  So the battery on here is actually, uh, the battery that is in here is basically an emergency reserve. It is not intended to power it most of the time. It is a primary cell chemistry that won't burst into flames. It's basically one time use. So it's like, think of it like an emergency battery that runs it when your helmet is disconnected from the main battery. The main battery is this. So you ever used ballistic plates before?

• 3:07:13Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 3:07:13Speaker 02

  So this is a standard geometry, sappy geometry plate. Um, this.

• 3:07:18Joe Rogan?

  Good for rucking.

• 3:07:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:07:20Joe Rogan?

  Some weight to it.

• 3:07:21Speaker 02

  So the cool thing about this is it's a combination battery, computer and ballistic plate. And so, so here's the craziest part about this. Normally you would wear a plate and then you would have to wear a battery and a computer. That's how everyone's always done heads up displays before. And I realized that's crazy because you need that space for other stuff, right? You want to be carrying ammo, you want to be carrying equipment, you want to be carrying grenades or.

• 3:07:45Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 3:07:45Speaker 02

  Or admin stuff. You, you, you can't use your most valuable real estate to just carry a battery brick. So what's in here is a battery technology that is an electrolyte free, solid state ceramic battery. Now ceramic batteries are not as high energy density as in terms of like, they don't have the, they don't have as much energy per pound as the very, very best, like let's say car electric batteries. But they're pretty good ballistic material. And so what I realized is that you, instead of having the weight of a ballistic plate and then the weight of a battery on top, you should combine those two functions. You should make your battery part of your ballistic material stack up so that.

• 3:08:29Speaker 02

  Like, is it the best ballistic material in the world? No. Is it the best battery material in the world? No. But you can have enough of it that it's better than either of those things working separately. Like, if I were to try to make a system that was a normal armor plate, and then also this much battery, so like, uh, you notice we actually got all the power actually labeled right here, so this is 900 watt hour battery. If we were to have a plate and then a battery, it would be like a plate this big, and then like another big battery on top. By combining the two, I've made it where I've eliminated something like 10 pounds from the soldier's ruck, which is a huge deal, because that's weight I can either keep out of his ruck,

• 3:09:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:12Speaker 02

  or I can, uh, or I could just put more shit into it. Uh, of course, what all my buddies in the army tell me is, Palmer, don't let them take those 10 pounds, give me 10 pounds more shit. Yeah, they're all, these guys are already carrying an insane amount of stuff.

• 3:09:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:27Speaker 02

  This is only the start. We're building a bunch of other augments that combine multiple systems into one thing. Um, like, in fact, this has also got a bunch of radio hardware in it as well. So if you can replace a radio and your batteries and your ballistics and your onboard computer all in one thing, that's pretty cool. Uh, but I want to keep, keep doing that.

• 3:09:47Joe Rogan?

  Dude.

• 3:09:48Speaker 02

  I will note, in general, I would recommend using this as your rear plate, not your front plate. So if you've got a rear and a front, the rear is probably the one that you want to put this in, because if you do get shot in the plate, uh, you don't want it to, you're more likely to get shot in the front than the back, and you don't want to get shot, and then you lose all of your energy to run all of your sensors and your night vision and everything else. And if you get shot with a plate, it's possible to take that plate and swap it with a fresh one.

• 3:10:14Joe Rogan?

  Um. Hmm.

• 3:10:16Speaker 02

  I, I mean, look, you're the world's biggest badass if you're able to do that in a firefight. I don't think most people are bad enough to, you know, take a hit right in the chest and then pull out their plate and slap another one in, but it does happen. And so, I, we're generally recommending that people use this as the rear plate to make it less likely to get shot. But fully capable of operating in front plate service.

• 3:10:37Joe Rogan?

  This is amazing stuff, man.

• 3:10:38Speaker 02

  Dude, I, I love my job. I get to work with

• 3:10:41Joe Rogan?

  I can tell.

• 3:10:42Speaker 02

  The, the, just the coolest technology on the bleeding edge of all this. And the best part is that the gains, it's not so much in Some people, they see these gains and they get to make money off of it. But I do this and I get to have end users telling me, Palmer, this is how you saved our unit's life. Palmer, this is how your technology protected our base. Palmer, people would be dead in this particular building if you had not developed the technology that you did. That is the most rewarding thing that you can do. At least it's the most rewarding thing that I've ever done. It's a really cool set of problems and I highly encourage people who are really smart to look at doing this stuff because some people, they say, oh, I don't want to work on weapons. It's ethically fraught.

• 3:11:24Speaker 02

  And the point I make to them is that this is, whether you like it or not, we need some form of weapons, right? We're not going to disarm the entire world. There are bad guys out there. We need to have something. And if you are worried about the ethics of weapons, it's actually even more important that you work on them because there's no moral high ground in outsourcing that work to people who are less ethical and less competent than you. If you think you're a competent person and you think you're an ethical person, you almost have a responsibility to care about these and arguably to work on them. So that's the way that I look at it.

• 3:11:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's cool as fuck. I'm glad you're making it, man. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm really glad we did this.

• 3:12:02Speaker 02

  This is a lot of fun.

• 3:12:03Joe Rogan?

  So much fun.

• 3:12:03Speaker 02

  I've got to get you out sometime.

• 3:12:05Joe Rogan?

  I would love to.

• 3:12:06Speaker 02

  To the range because we've got a test range.

• 3:12:08Joe Rogan?

  We'll hook that up.

• 3:12:09Speaker 02

  We'll give you a rifle. You'll be able to mark targets.

• 3:12:12Joe Rogan?

  Let's fucking go.

• 3:12:13Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 3:12:14Joe Rogan?

  Let's do it. Thank you very much.

• 3:12:16Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:12:17Joe Rogan?

  It's really fun. Thanks for being here. All right. Bye, everybody.

• 3:12:32Joe Rogan?

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