Aliens, AI Weapons, China & Global Conflict: Palmer Luckey Sounds the Alarm | EP #169

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://bit.ly/METATRENDS Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR and Anduril Industries. 0:00 - Exploring Non-Human Intelligence and Congressional Hearings 15:05 - Digital Superintelligence (ASI) 35:32 - China vs. USA 48:06 - Design Philosophy at Anduril 53:17 - The War of 2030 1:14:44 - Autonomous Weapons 1:30:03 - The Future of Firefighting Technology 1:39:38 - Palmer's Thoughts On Bitcoin 2:08:33 - Palmer's Billionaire Group Chat ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Learn more about Exponential Mastery: ⁠https://bit.ly/exponentialmastery⁠ _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Newsletter _____________ Learn more about Anduril: ⁠https://www.anduril.com/⁠ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots ---- Recorded on May 1st, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  Over the last two years, there have been an unprecedented number of congressional hearings about NHI's, non-human intelligence and alien craft. What are your thoughts?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I've probably seen things that I can't talk about. It's hard for me to have an open discussion about it. I think I can plainly say...

• 0:20Speaker 01

  So my name is Palmer Lucky. I started Androl because I wanted to work in the national security space for a variety of reasons.

• 0:27Peter Diamandis?

  PPTO3 just came in at a 135 IQ.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm not betting my company on superintelligence, but I do believe it will happen.

• 0:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's not US versus China. It's US and China versus the rogue actor.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  China is not going to purposely build a tailored bioweapon that wipes out all the Jews, for example. But at the same time, China's made real material threats and said they are going to reunify with Taiwan by force if necessary within this generation.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:04Peter Diamandis?

  So Palmer, you've been on moonshots like four times in the last two years. And as a friend, there's a bunch of questions I'd love to ask you that I truly deeply want to know the answer to.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:18Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So here's the first one. Over the last two years, there have been an unprecedented number of congressional hearings about NHI's, non-human intelligence and alien craft. By like the highest level generals, admirals, air force. It's crazy. What are your thoughts?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I want to believe.

• 1:41Peter Diamandis?

  You want to believe.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  It's... This is a tough topic for me because I've probably seen things that I can't talk about. And if that was the case, it's hard for me to have an open discussion about it. I think I can plainly say I have not seen evidence of anything that is conclusive, obvious. Like, you know, I haven't seen, I have not seen recovered craft. I have not seen, you know... The programs that are analyzing alien wreckage. But I have seen things that are not necessarily public that are very hard to explain.

• 2:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  What makes it difficult in the public eye is that there are dozens of examples of very strange things that can be explained in one way or another. There's really only a very small handful that even when you really dig deep, there is no explanation for the combination of human eyes on sensor data, the behavior, the activity, the timing.

• 2:39Peter Diamandis?

  The brain makes a lot of things up.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  The brain is very, very trickable, you know. And it's not just people. Different animals see the world in different ways. Our perception of reality is, for example, constantly actually lagging behind what we perceive. What to you feels instantaneous is actually as far as a second in the past.

• 2:57Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I mean, like when you clap, you feel like it's instantaneous. In reality, your brain is basically filtering to know that anything that it perceives before you should be perceiving it is not real and it filters it out. And so, you know, it's really interesting. The conscious, I once wrote a sci fi speculative short story about an alien species that it's like that, but taken to the extreme. What if their, what if your perception was actually hours behind what you observed? If you had something that kind of reacts to things well enough, sees a snapshot, reacts to it by predicting what's going to happen next? How long would it take for a person to figure out that the person on the other side or, you know, an alien spacecraft, for example, is actually operating under completely different

• 3:43Speaker 01

  principles of consciousness, awareness, perception, reality?

• 3:47Peter Diamandis?

  It's like having a conversation with someone on the moon and you've got a two and a half second time delay.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  But, but, but what if the alien was so smart that it was able to predict what you would say in response to it? And then vice versa? And then back again, such that it seemed instantaneous? You know, what would it look like for a being to exist where its consciousness doesn't let? Cause we get a long lagging by a second. Well, what if the lag was 100 times more? Is that really conceptually impossible to imagine? I don't think so.

• 4:15Peter Diamandis?

  Just makes for a boring conversation, though.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Well, but maybe. So in the story that I wrote, people don't figure this out until bad things start happening. Basically, they don't understand that the perception of these alien beings is much, the instantaneous perception is much slower, but they're so smart about reasoning forward that a person can't actually tell that they're not responding to what you're doing. They're responding to what they predicted you were going to do five steps ahead. Now, once you understand that gimmick, you can now do things that take advantage of it, you know, doing things that are completely unpredictable, that are outside of what they would expect. And when you live outside of social norms, you can do things that are very unpredictable. And so from time to time, I write these short stories just to entertain

• 4:58Speaker 01

  myself. I've never published any of them. But getting back to the topic, I've not seen anything. There's some weird stuff. There are at least a handful of examples that are very impossible to explain. And I think we've talked about this in abundance a few years ago. But I suspect that in the end, it's going to come out to be something that's different than what we all expect. So probably less likely that it's aliens from a nearby planet. I suspect it'll be something like some natural phenomenon we have not yet begun to understand.

• 5:28Peter Diamandis?

  But you hope it would be super cool.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  I, it is going to be something that is beyond our current understanding. I think it's more likely, for example, I'm not saying that this is what it is. It is more likely that some of these craft are somehow traveling through time than coming from a nearby galaxy. If you kind of look at what's more, what's more possible. By the way, I don't mean traveling through time necessarily backwards. People say Palmer, you, there's no, how could they go forward? Perhaps they're coming from the distant past. You know, like there's, there's a lot of ways to look at this. I don't know what you.

• 6:00Peter Diamandis?

  I wonder, you know, so what's interesting is.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Wait, I got to ask, what do you think it is?

• 6:07Peter Diamandis?

  I believe life is ubiquitous in the universe. I truly believe it is.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Probabilistically, it seems likely.

• 6:13Peter Diamandis?

  Probabilistically, and I think even in one sense, almost thermodynamically, I think that life is the end result of a series of processes.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And where do you fall on dark forest theory? You say the proud nail gets hammered. Life, life, life, life, life doesn't make it.

• 6:28Peter Diamandis?

  I, I don't have an opinion, but.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I haven't figured out my opinion. I'm an agnostic on dark forest theory.

• 6:35Peter Diamandis?

  So the question I have is if in fact it proves out, what I mean, what I find fascinating isn't the UFO sightings from the 40s to 80s and the blurry photographs. It's all of the testimonies that have been had over and over again congressional by seemingly extraordinarily credentialed individuals who have a lot to lose and very little to gain.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:00Peter Diamandis?

  In this regard, so I'm curious.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Decorated war veterans.

• 7:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Politicians who their career is, is everything and their credit and their credibility is all they have.

• 7:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's, it's extraordinary. And so the question is, what would be the public reaction if in fact it plays out to be true? And I'm, you know, I've always, you know, you're in the warfare business and I've always thought the only thing that could bring sort of unified peace to the planet besides a massively dominant force.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:29Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, which, you know.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And it's, it's an external threat.

• 7:32Peter Diamandis?

  It's an external threat.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  An external threat.

• 7:34Peter Diamandis?

  It's like an asteroid coming towards us with, you know, 10 years of, you know, it's a planet killer that we have 10 years to organize a response to, or an alien saying, hey, we're going to come and eat you. And it brings all of our differences vaporize in the process.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do think that that's, that that is, that that is, uh, I do think that is probably, probably the case.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Historically, it seems to bear out too. Like, it's not just that we're unified with the people that we don't care about. Even bitter enemies or ideological enemies can be unified by a common threat. I mean, you look at the Japanese and the Germans during World War II. Culturally, they couldn't have been more different. Ideologically, the Japanese were subhuman to the Germans. And the hilarious thing is that the Japanese believed exactly the same thing of the Aryans. And yet, they allied and worked together and smuggled controlled materials, controlled chemicals, back and forth, things that they uniquely had because

• 8:39Speaker 01

  they had a common enemy. And I think that that could... You asked how people would react. I think if they were an enemy, I think we would unite. I think, assuming that they weren't necessarily an enemy, maybe I'm crazy, but I feel like I often feel like people wouldn't respond the way that you expect. Like, I almost feel like culturally, we're so inoculated. Like, you believe that life is proliferated in the universe. I think so does the average person. And I think that if we found out that, you know, Alpha Centauri, there's some guys living over there who, you know, are kind of like us, I think a lot of people would be like, wow, that's really interesting, really fascinating. I'm not sure it would even be the top trending topic on Twitter by day three. I think you'd

• 9:23Speaker 01

  get a day or two, and then it would retreat into the background.

• 9:25Peter Diamandis?

  Get back to Housewives of Hollywood, right?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I mean, people are focused on the things that are in front of them. You know, can I get food on the table, the price of gas, the price of eggs, raising kids. I think that the existence of aliens is probably going to be as important as the context of those aliens. Are they coming to burn us all down? Okay, then that's going to threaten my way of life. Are they just out there in the world? I think it would prompt a lot of navel gazing from the media class, the academic class, certainly the religious...

• 9:54Peter Diamandis?

  And the religious institutions, yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it'd be... Forget about selecting a new pope. I want to see what the Catholic Church does if intelligent life has proven to exist elsewhere. I suspect, actually, they would probably be one of the faster moving entities to say, you know, the Catholic Church has been pretty clear. But I'm not Catholic by any means, but I do appreciate that, at least for the last couple centuries, they've said, look, anything new that comes to light that violates our understanding before is proof of God's plan further revealed to us and needs to be incorporated into the doctrine. And I would love to see how they would deal with that. That'd be very, very interesting.

• 10:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  A lot more unprecedented than a pope. You know, there's been a lot of popes, not a lot of doctrinal changes on the order of a new species of sentient beings.

• 10:40Peter Diamandis?

  And of course, the current folklore, and it's all that can be said, is all our microtech technology emanated from UFOs. And then the question is, if the UFOs are real, does China, Russia, India, US, all vine?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Well, I will take-

• 10:57Peter Diamandis?

  Vying for advanced technology there.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I will take a stand there. I don't think our current microelectronics technology came from alien wrecks. I think that's one area where we deserve the credit. We made it happen. We figured it out.

• 11:09Peter Diamandis?

  Gordon Moore worked hard for his-

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I think that we really did make that happen from scratch. And so, you know, semiconductors, microprocessors, I think we can take credit for that. If there is technology that's been derived from alien wrecks, I suspect it's more likely to be related to fission or fusion or advanced metallurgical or ceramic compounds.

• 11:34Peter Diamandis?

  Though, gravity shielding would be awfully convenient for your vehicles.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  It, well, yes, yes, that is, that's true. But, but on the other hand, I have not seen any gravitic drives. I've kept my eye out. I think it's one of those things where people say, well, we're just holding it in reserve for the right moment. Looking at how the government operates, it's just hard to believe that they're capable of having made it through the last half century of conflict without ever feeling like that moment was the right moment. Maybe I'm wrong, but and I think also people understand you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want. And so if you haven't started a program to implement gravitational drives in an aircraft, you know, look at how long the F-35 has taken to get across the line. The F-35 was conceived during the

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Cold War. People think of it as a much more modern thing because of how long it was delayed. Remember that the Cold War ended December 25th, 1992. The F-35 program had already started. And so if you were going to get a gravitational drive into a bunch of fighters out, apparently it takes 30 years to make it happen. So I don't really buy into this idea that there's a secret vault of technology that's going to be busted out the moment that the threat level gets high because reality suggests it'll take us decades to make use of it.

• 12:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, at least for the traditional air defense contractors.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, and then there's the quiet here at Androl. Yeah, well, Androl's doing things differently, but I mean, now the government's been what? You know, betting that companies like Androl would exist? I think that was a crazy bet eight years ago. It's maybe a crazy bet today.

• 13:07Peter Diamandis?

  I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology. And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at diamantis.com/subscribe. That's diamantis.com/subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. So there's a different alien race that's landed on the planet and is emerging right now, and that's the whole AI world.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:50Peter Diamandis?

  And so let's jump into that. You know, I saw Eric Schmidt recently saying that AI is being underhyped, that if you truly understood the power that we have today and what's going to emerge on the back of recursive, you know, self-programming of AI models that we're in the midst of this intelligence explosion and it's about to get really crazy really fast.

• 14:19Peter Diamandis?

  So, uh, obviously lattice and everything you've built has been a beautiful platform of AI. How much are you thinking about digital superintelligence just to define that as orders of magnitude more intelligent than human systems?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  So Andorall was an AI company back when it wasn't cool to be an AI company. I mean, the name of the company is Andorall Industries. The acronym is literally AI.

• 14:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  But back in 2017, AI was kinda like how VR used to be. Oh, it's always in the future, never in the present. It's the thing for the wacky, crazy people to waste their lives on, not a serious doer to build a company on top of. And I, I knew that AI was imminent because the smartest people that I knew were telling me that and illustrating it in ways that were very believable, showing how a bunch of schemes that had been improbable for decades were clearly scalable. Uh, one of those people was John Carmack, who was the CEO.

• 15:22Peter Diamandis?

  I love John.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  John is, he's, he's, he's one of the smartest people in the world, definitely the smartest I know.

• 15:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I remember, so years and years ago, uh, when the original X Prize got one.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Just so they know who John is.

• 15:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, he basically invented 3D gaming, also started a rocket company.

• 15:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Later became the CTO of Oculus. He created Doom and Quake and basically the modern 3D game engine. I mean, he's, and he deeply understands hardware and software. Sorry, just because a lot of people might not know who John is.

• 15:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I know, he's, he's amazing. And, uh, he had one of our teams in the original Spaceflight X Prize, Armadillo Aerospace.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And they were doing vertical takeoff and landing rockets way before SpaceX. I mean, like, like a decade before SpaceX.

• 16:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we, we had this lunar lander challenges where you had to launch, hover, translate a hundred meters to a soft landing and come back. And I remember back then, it was like, he had on the side of his rocket, this thing, how do you pronounce this? N V I D I, Nvidia thing. And Nvidia was a sponsor back in, uh, 2005, 2006, had I only known.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Nvidia, there was a, there was a time where Oculus was acquired by Facebook. And there was a point where we were considering acquiring Nvidia. And I know that sounds crazy.

• 16:41Peter Diamandis?

  As Facebook? Facebook was considering.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Oculus was consider, Oculus was part of Facebook. So it would have been Facebook at the end of the day. But I mean, you got to remember, that sounds crazy, but remember that when you go back to that point in time where we were acquired, Nvidia was worth like $4 billion. I mean, like, it's not that crazy.

• 17:01Peter Diamandis?

  Very affordable.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And remember, you don't have to buy the whole company. They were publicly traded. So you just need to take a dominating, a dominant position. You don't have to necessarily buy out every share. And so, I mean, we were like, you're looking at like a low, single-digit million investment to have control of it. Now, people, people have often looked back and said, oh, my God, imagine if we would have done that. Imagine how, what a big deal that would have been. My point to them is if we had bought Nvidia, they never would have turned into what they are today, right? They wouldn't have bet on, on, on, it would have been focused more on like ARVR processing. They wouldn't have focused on cluster computing. They wouldn't have focused on, on crypto. And then they wouldn't have gotten extremely lucky in that their crypto architecture happened to be exactly what you need to scale large language models.

• 17:42Peter Diamandis?

  Extraordinary. And we've talked about this, that your kids playing video games at home.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  But, but in terms of superintelligence, John was, John, so John ended up leaving Oculus, long after I was fired, actually, in order, because he wanted to work on, on AGI. And he, he told me and now has said publicly that even though he thinks it was relatively low probability that he would crack the nut, that the impact on humanity would be so fundamental that even a 1% chance of succeeding, made it on a risk, you know, kind of cost benefit and weighted analysis way of looking at it, obviously the right thing to spend his time doing.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And so that was one of the reasons I had such confidence starting Androol and saying, I'm going to build a company. Basically, the whole premise of the company is, okay, take for a given that AI is finally going to work. Take for a given that autonomy is here. What would that mean for the military? And then we've gone about building all the things that assumed it was true. That was really our early advantage. Other companies were not running their programs and their research and development programs as if AI was a real thing. And so a lot of these things we've broken into. It's not that the people in the air force were dumb or the people in the Navy were stupid. It's that they were making decisions assuming that AI wasn't going to be real. And once it becomes real, well, that changes everything.

• 19:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and there's a there's a vast difference between an AI native startup and an old school company trying to retro.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Trying to ram it in, yeah.

• 19:19Peter Diamandis?

  Right, and there's also a difference.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Very different. Very different if the company is premised on AI versus just helped by it.

• 19:26Peter Diamandis?

  And a founder led AI premise company. I mean, the advantages that you have and Zuckerberg has, Elon has as a visionary leader able to say, no, no, no, I know this is the way we used to do it. We're changing it. We're going this way now because it's the right way to go.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:45Peter Diamandis?

  It's impossible for a large scale public company in the in the defense industry to make any kind of shifts like that.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, Zuck had an AI research lab of significant size back when all this stuff was considered crazy. So when they opened up their AI research lab where they were doing integrated AI and robotics. I mean, we're talking about like 2014, 2015, they were doing this. And a lot of people, including in the public markets, saw it as a folly. They saw it as Mark working on this ridiculous thing, burning money, totally, you know, totally a waste of time. And what it really is, is it's what it's what you're saying. These these founder led companies can make bets that a, you know, hired executive would never make. You would never, you would never have a hired CEO from the outside who's also thinking about what his next job is going to be.

• 20:36Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  He's not going to say, you know what I think I'm going to do? I'm going to burn billions of dollars on this technology that everyone thinks is a total waste of time. And I'm going to be punished for it quarter after quarter after quarter. And eventually someday it's going to come to bear and everyone's going to say, right? Because none of those guys are usually even around long enough to see the fruits of that labor. And even if they were, there's probably safer bets they could make. Yeah, founder-led companies can afford to do that. They can afford to say, you know what? I'm gonna do it anyway because this is my company and I care more about it than anybody. And I'm gonna do the right thing for it in the long run. It's, it's, it's a powerful thing.

• 21:12Peter Diamandis?

  It is, it is powerful, especially when the founder is so technically literate and has

• 21:20Peter Diamandis?

  the, his teams revere him and I'm not saying you ever said that about yourself, but your teams do as they do for Zuck, as they do for Elon and others.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Well, you attract people who will. I think that's true because the real, maybe revere is not quite the right word, but if they didn't believe in the company, they probably wouldn't have joined. And if they didn't like what they see, they probably won't stay. And so you end up building a, you know, if you're a founder-led company, you're going to attract people to, to a certain, a certain extent, reflect the vision of the founder. You, because you want to attract people who believe in that vision. And then equally important, repel people who do not, do not like.

• 21:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, equally important.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Well, you, you saw that ad campaign we did, don't work at Andorol.

• 21:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  You know, the, the whole point was, hey, here it's, it's, we work hard. This is a real job. You're gonna be in the shit.

• 22:05Peter Diamandis?

  This is 8-hour work weeks, guys.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And we have a lot of people coming in and say, like from the outside, oh, this is a bizarre campaign. This seems like, like, why would you do a campaign about how hard it is to work at Andorol? And the point is, guys, this is going to attract exactly the right type of person. And most importantly, repel anyone who wouldn't enjoy working here once they get here. And by the way, our applications went up 3X the week after that campaign. And they're all exactly the type of people we want.

• 22:33Peter Diamandis?

  That's beautiful. So one of the challenges a company has as it matures is deciding whether to go public or not. And I don't want to get into whether Andorol is going public or not, but eventually my guess is yes.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  We, we actually do. So we are, we are going public. We have to at some point. You can't win an F35 scale program without doing it.

• 22:52Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about that. So you've got, you've got Elon saying, I will never take SpaceX public, right? I don't want to have a shareholders telling me whether I can spend money to go to Mars.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:03Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And I don't want to disclose all of my secrets in a 10-Q and so forth. Then you've got folks like Bezos, you know, I've known Jeff for 40 plus, 45 years almost.

• 23:15Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, Jeff famously says, don't invest in Amazon if you're looking for me to maximize near-term returns or shareholder. It's like, I'm going to build, build, build.

• 23:28Peter Diamandis?

  How do you balance the benefits of going public so you can enjoy these large contracts at the same time of the agility that you've survived and you've thrived in?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So, I've never run a publicly traded company, so take this with a grain of salt. It's as valuable as what you're paying for my advice, which is nothing.

• 23:46Peter Diamandis?

  Now, you have a CEO.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  We do, we do. So, our CEO is Brian Schiff.

• 23:50Peter Diamandis?

  And you've done an amazing, he's an amazing individual.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  He is, and I think we're totally agreed. Everyone's in alignment on this. When we become a public company, we have to keep doing what we've done in the private markets. It's really no different than hiring. We need to attract people who believe in our vision and repel people who don't believe in our vision. A lot of people imagine that if Androl goes public, we'll become like other public defense companies because the less risk, not willing to invest in the future, not paying out dividends rather than investing in RD.

• 24:23Peter Diamandis?

  Maximizing quarterly returns.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  But that doesn't have to necessarily be the case. Even when you transition to the public markets, you can take action through your communications, through your filings, through your decisions that scare away people who want you to be like a traditional company. You want to attract investors who believe in your vision of the world, and if you, if that's your whole investor base, they're not going to force you to be something different. I think Elon's other company, Tesla, is actually probably the strongest example here. Tesla has an extremely high price earnings ratio. Why? Because their investors believe that they are going to win across the board on a multi-decade time scale. They think they're going to win at robotics, they're going to win at energy,

• 25:05Speaker 01

  they're going to win at, and I think they have a very good shot at winning on all or most of those items. And you could ask yourself, but wait, what, they're a publicly traded company. Why aren't they like one of the more traditional automotive companies? Why, why, why weren't they forced to be more like a traditional company? And the answer is simple. Because they've cultivated an investor base that believes in what Tesla is.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And they've repelled everybody else. Many of the people they've repelled are now shorting Tesla because they don't believe in it. I, I, I think it's the same way for us. We're going to need to attract people who believe in what we are, repel everybody else. And if we ever start getting enough of an investor base that is pressuring us to do the wrong thing, I'm going to need to go in the press and say some crazy shit to scare them all away. Because I do, I don't want those guys voting at my quarterly, at my quarterlies. I don't want them, I don't want them picking my board members. I want all the Anduril haters and people who want Anduril to be what a defense company used to be. I want them to be running for the hills.

• 26:07Peter Diamandis?

  Nice, nice. All right, let's get back to AI. And you are an AI-first company. I mean, your, your software is the majority of your workforce and the majority of your products you're developing. Digital superintelligence, let's define that as, yeah, so very famously,

• 26:27Peter Diamandis?

  we saw AI reaching IQs just above human levels of 101. This was Claude 3. And then GPT-03 just came in at a 135 IQ. And so the prediction is that, well, you know, Elon's prediction when he was on our stage at, at the Abundance Summit a couple of years ago is as smart as all humans combined by 2029 or 2030. So that's a vastly accelerated curve.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:59Peter Diamandis?

  How do you, are you skating to that, where that curve is going to be? How are you thinking about it?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I am.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Am I skating to where that curve is going to be? You know, I, I'm actually probably running my company a lot more pessimistically than that. To bet that those most optimistic predictions will come true is probably not a responsible way for me to run my company.

• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, but a billion fold, a billion fold, eight billion fold, let's just say, you know, a million fold smarter than a human.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I think, I, I think we are operating under the assumption that will happen. Yeah. And you could pick almost any point in even the last, let's say, two years. And people say, well, AI might be getting smarter, but it'll never be able to do this. And then within weeks or maybe months, it's doing it. And they say, well, but this video has this problem. You see, the man has six fingers. And so that proves that he will never be able to replace a real illustrator. And then, of course, you know, you wait a couple of weeks and all of a sudden that's no longer the case. So I'm not going to be one of those people who bets that we're not going to get there.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  At the same time, I have to, I would say Andrel's thesis makes sense, even if AI doesn't get smarter than a person. You know, I, I need it to have fast reaction times. I need it to be able to do things, to think much faster. So for example, processing what would have taken a person a month to process. If I can do as good as a person would have done in a month, but do it in a minute. That's a superpower in and of itself for, for military operations. So I, I don't actually need things to be super intelligent. I, I just need them to be better than people at speed and latency. Also, you know, if I've got a truck and I need a truck to drive itself around, I don't need it to have 135 IQ.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  100 IQ is more than enough to drive a truck sufficiently well, especially if it's, you know, 100 IQ. That's not distracted, not sleep deprived, never going to be abusing substances like that. That's actually pretty great, especially when you can duplicate it 100,000 times for free on like a trained truck driver. So I'm not, I'm not betting my company on super intelligence, but I do believe it will happen.

• 29:10Peter Diamandis?

  And Cause I have to imagine that super intelligence in the warfare game is just a small advantage.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  It often is.

• 29:21Peter Diamandis?

  A huge

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Well, so I often tell, I often tell people like, what, what would you rather do? Would you have an airplane that is twice as fast or an airplane that makes decisions that are twice as good? Or put another way, would you rather have an airplane that can carry twice as many weapons? Or be twice as smart about which targets to use them on and when? Would you rather be able to predict the next five minutes of combat better? Or would you rather be able to, uh, would you rather be able to have sensors to see more? Like, would you rather predict the battlefield or actually sense it? And in most cases, It's the software advantage that you'd rather have. Yeah, sure. I would rather.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  And which, by the way, scales much faster than the hardware advantage ever will. It scales faster. Every copy of software you duplicate is free once you've invented it. And it can often be applied to many hardware systems. If I make one aircraft better by investing in that one airframe design, it's not nearly as useful of an advantage as a piece of software I can deploy to 10 different kinds of aircraft. And so, I mean, that's really the core of Anduril. Our core product is Lattice, which is the AI engine that powers everything we do. The reason we've been able to pivot into so many different industries is because we invest so much in that AI platform that runs all of our products. So, much of the world paints the... I do have to tell, actually, going with this, I haven't thought about this in a while.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  But have we ever talked about kind of the philosophical origins of Lattice? I don't know if we have. No, I'm going to guess Skynet. Sorry, Skynet is the fictional example everyone thinks. But there was a, there was a French mathematician and philosopher, Pierre-Simon Laplace. I've used his equations and... Best known for Laplace transforms. But he had this thought experiment known as Laplace's demon. And it was a thought experiment around whether free will exists or not. And this was before anyone was talking about simulation theory. We didn't even have computers. But he posited, well, to think about if free will exists,

• 31:32Speaker 01

  suppose that there was a supernatural being, this demon, that was so perceptive of the world that it could perceive every particle of matter in the entire world and the energy contained therein, the motion contained therein. In the whole universe, he could perceive it all at once. And also suppose that this being were so intelligent that he could, in an instant, reason about the reactions that will occur as they collide with each other and physics occur and chemistry occurs. And he could reason so on and so forth, all the way until the end of time. Suppose that such a being could derive an equation that describes the actions of every person in the universe until the end of time.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  And his question was this, if that being can even exist theoretically...

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Doesn't that mean free will isn't real? Isn't everything deterministic, just physics playing its way out? And so the question was also, are there things that change this idea? Are there non-deterministic elements in our universe? Are there supernatural effects? Are there spiritual effects? Are there things we cannot observe, that nothing can observe? Could it be that the act of observing it, in fact, changes the outcome such? Enter quantum. This is long before quantum theory was in play, but he was asking these questions. Could it be that such a being is not possible? And I think he posited that if such a being is even theoretically possible, free will definitionally does not exist. And that if such a being is impossible, then at least free will is a possibility.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And most people get in deep into the philosophical side of this question. When I became familiar with Laplace's demon as a thought experiment, my first thought is, who's going to build Laplace's demon? I mean, who, like, what would that look like? What would it look like to build something that is as close as you could get? It perceives as much of the world as you can. Omniscience. Omniscience, and not just on the present. What if you, this idea of gathering enough information to be smart enough to reason about where it's going to lead? It's the same as seeing the future or even traveling into the future. If, what if I could predict what my enemy was going to do 10 seconds into the future with a high degree of certainty? What if I could predict what he's going to do for the next week with reasonable certainty?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It won't be right every time, but you spread across enough bets. You take 10,000 guesses and 9,000 of them are right. That's a, that's a superpower. I mean, that would seem superhuman. And so in terms of superintelligence, that is actually what lattice is supposed to eventually become by tying enough sensors together. You can build a model of the world where you can react not to what the enemy's doing, but what they will be doing. And, and I think that that's the type of capability where I'd, I'd rather be able to predict where my enemy is going to be and what my best response is than be able to have a jet that goes ever so slightly faster. I mean, what if I can start going to where I need to be, skate to the puck? Because I've predicted that's where I need to be. I'd, I'd rather have that.

• 34:34Peter Diamandis?

  You know, in the commercial world, I talk about this as a trillion sensor future where you can know anything you want because the sensors are there. You can predict a man's blazer color on Madison Avenue because you can ask your AI to look at the camera feeds and so forth. And if you can know anything you want, then what's interesting is it's important to ask amazing questions. The questions you ask are more important than what you know.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:59Peter Diamandis?

  At that point.

• 35:02Peter Diamandis?

  The world paints US versus China in the AI space.

• 35:08Peter Diamandis?

  I had a conversation with Eric Schmidt about this where

• 35:13Peter Diamandis?

  the concern in my mind, and I think in Eric's as well, I'm curious for yourself, is not US versus China, it's US and China versus the rogue actor. The individual out there who's using, you know, digital superintelligence to code up the next virus or code up the next hack, whatever the case might be.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:32Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think about that here?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I would probably take a bit of a counter position. I mean, look, I'm very worried about rogue actors because rogue actors don't necessarily act as rational actors. Nation states typically exist on a rational basis.

• 35:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And you could take kind of extremist theocracy like Iran and you could argue, well, they're they're not acting rationally.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  But those are few and far between. In general, nation states follow game theory. They act in their rational self-interest.

• 36:04Peter Diamandis?

  They don't want to destroy themselves in the process of destroying you.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Whereas when you bring that down to the level of an individual or a small group, you can have people who believe they win by losing. They could think that them dying is the victory. They could believe that bringing out an apocalypse is their destiny. And so I'm terrified of, for example, tailored bioweapons built by rogue groups. The idea, though, that it's that it's the US and China versus these rogue groups. I'm not so sure. I think that China on its own poses its own unique type of threat.

• 36:38Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  It doesn't terrify me as much. China is not going to purposely build a tailored bioweapon that wipes out all the Jews, for example. You know, that's, I don't worry about China trying to do that. But at the same time, I mean, China's made real material threats and said they are going to reunify with Taiwan by force if necessary within this generation.

• 37:02Peter Diamandis?

  I watched your most excellent TED Talk in the war gaming and it's chilling.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:11Peter Diamandis?

  To see how that plays out.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Well, and it's not just Taiwan. China has been, China, I mean, in living memory, China tried to invade Vietnam. A lot of people who want, they want to pretend, they want to whitewash China, largely because they're often working with China. So they have to carry water for them. And they say, well, China, Taiwan is a special case. There's this long history. I say, okay, well, what about when in living memory they invaded Vietnam? What about the fact that they are currently occupying huge swaths of territory in the Philippines? What about where they're illegally building artificial islands in the sovereign territory of other nations? What about the fact that you now have Xi going to conferences and saying that they think Okinawa, Japan is actually a territorial vassal holding

• 37:56Speaker 01

  of China? He's pretended to have this awakening. He says, well, you know, the Okinawan people used to be a tributary state to China. They gave us tribute and we failed them by failing to protect them from being taken over by the Japanese imperialists. He's laying the groundwork.

• 38:13Peter Diamandis?

  Revisionist, revisionist theory.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, he's laying revisionist history because he knows he can't motivate a bunch of young Chinese guys to go and take over a territory they have nothing to do with and absolutely no way of convincing anyone that is theirs. He has to tell them a story where this is actually part of the great Chinese empire. And so that is actually where I think China is their own unique threat. They are willing to reinvent history with their own population, much like how Russia has with Ukraine.

• 38:41Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  To justify death and violence at mass scale. I think they want to take. Elements of Japan, they want to take elements of the Philippines, they want Korea, they want Vietnam, and certainly they want Taiwan. Imagine what a world looks like where China achieves even a half, even half of that.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And by the way, a rogue actor is not going to do that. That's what makes it such a unique threat. A rogue actor might make a virus, but they're not going to take over a democratic nation and seize control of the semiconductor supply.

• 39:14Peter Diamandis?

  Having said, having said all that, um, my, what you said about being rational actors and being able to, uh, take actions politically and militarily to prevent that from occurring,

• 39:30Peter Diamandis?

  gives you a game plan.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%.

• 39:33Peter Diamandis?

  But the question I have, I mean, is our Anduril systems in, in the notice of, in the idea that Lattice is giving us a, uh, omniscient level of knowledge, you know, to prevent rogue actors, it is, I think, going to be critical to have enough data of what's out there and being able to track it.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  I think that.

• 39:55Peter Diamandis?

  Do you, do you, do you imagine that as part of your future?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's a part. Honestly, I'd probably have to give more credit to companies like Palantir. Like, I think they're building more of these non, you know, not quite at the tactical edge, real-time tools that allow you to find these bad actors. They've, they've been involved in apprehending and killing a lot of really dangerous people. Terror cells, multi-time violent criminals. I, I think Palantir and companies like them are actually probably doing that. I, like, if I had to split it, I'd say a company like Anduril is much more relevant to a more traditional hard power deterrence theory that stops a rational actor like China, less so a rogue nation-state group.

• 40:40Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. Let me flip to the positive side of ASI, of advanced superintelligence. There's a

• 41:19Peter Diamandis?

  lot of breakthroughs that are on the precipice, right? We just saw the first Nobel Prize given to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold. What are you hoping for out of sort of advances in physics and math and science?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Medicine. I think there are so many elements of low hanging fruit that we have not been able to seize, partly because of the regulatory climate, but also the cost of developing and testing new drugs is so high. Not just drugs, but new therapies. Therapies that require continuous intervention and monitoring. We've not had the resources to try everything. You have to pick very, very tightly what you're going to do. And even then, it mostly doesn't work.

• 42:04Peter Diamandis?

  I'm in the business, I know.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  And so automation at scale of those, I mean, what if instead of one lab, you could run 10,000? What if instead of running 10,000, you run a million simulations? So medicine, I'm very optimistic. I think energy is another area where, right now, like I think that AI assisted design of fission and fusion energy generating systems is going to be a massive, massive way, change in the way that we use energy. Energy is such a huge part of our way of life. It drives, it drives food cost. It drives the cost of material. It drives the cost of shipping.

• 42:49Peter Diamandis?

  The GDP of a country.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  That's right. And there's really no examples of high GDP countries that do not consume lots of energy. Not necessarily produce. There are ones who buy their energy from elsewhere.

• 43:00Peter Diamandis?

  Consumers, right.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  But it takes energy. It takes energy to build the future. And so I'm very excited there.

• 43:06Peter Diamandis?

  Do you ever see Andorl getting into the adjacency of the energy space or the biotech space?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  The adjacency, um, I, I think maybe, I, maybe we're already a little bit adjacent, but I, I think we're really focused on our mission of, of, of trying to modernize military capability.

• 43:24Peter Diamandis?

  And doing it, and doing it well. So let's get it.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  We, like with energy, we partner with a lot of these companies. So there's a lot of companies that are doing interesting things in the nuclear power space. We're partnering with them. I, I don't see any reason for me to try to compete with them. I want to be a customer of theirs and I want to use the DOD as an early customer that can help accelerate the deployment of these new ideas in, in how to split atoms and how to fuse atoms.

• 43:47Peter Diamandis?

  I want to talk about the speed of defense system innovation.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:54Peter Diamandis?

  And just a few metrics for comparison here, looking at the glorious days of World War II in manufacturing and innovation. So, um, the first, you know, Kelly Johnson brings on the first US jet in 143 days from clean sheet of paper to a jet flying.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:13Peter Diamandis?

  The Liberty ships got cut from 230 days per production to four and a half days. The P-51 Mustang fighter goes from concept to flight in 102 days. And one of the references you had was the B-24 Libertor bomber, one per, every 63 minutes by Ford Martin.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  That's insane. And like, these were not small planes. I mean, these are, you know, flying fortresses.

• 44:37Peter Diamandis?

  What happened? I mean, I, yes, there was a war footing. Um, but I know, I studied Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Skunk Works and his philosophy of, I mean, if I remember correctly, what, what he did was he had a single blueprint in the center of the workspace and any of his engineers could go and make a change on it, but they had to sign their name to it because they knew if they made a mistake, um, it was someone's life.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:05Peter Diamandis?

  And the rate of iteration was so rapid. What happened that killed that level of innovation iteration?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Look, you can blame a lot of things. I think actually it's probably the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War was what... I'm not saying that we should have continued the Cold War. It's just that that is what caused the change to happen. The United States government came in, and you may be familiar with The Last Supper. They brought together the heads for one dinner of all of the major defense companies, and they said, "There will be consolidation. Half of you should not exist by the end of next year." Like consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. The party is over. We are going to decide who the winners are. Musical chairs. And if you don't get with this program, then you're out and you're done. And it was very much a top-ground-driven thing. So you ask, why did the innovation go away? Why did the speed go away?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  It was because there was no longer a drive to move quickly. There was no longer a government directive to move rapidly against threats. And we moved into a peacetime posture that was willing to accept a high level of inefficiency because they felt like that was okay. And I think it went worse than they expected. I think they expected some level of inefficiency. They did not expect that reduced industry to then capture the political side and maintain that inefficiency for decades. And so it was one of those kind of okay ideas that didn't turn out so well.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And by the way, the argument that the people who architected The Last Supper would say is that we made the right decision. They'd say, "Look, we reaped a peace dividend. Look at what we did through the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s. Look at the economic growth in the United States." It's hard to argue with the results. They argue that we did reap a peace dividend on the back of this. But we can still recognize it was a problem for our military prowess. We had that huge explosion of economic development and technological investment elsewhere.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  To the detriment of our military. And one last thing I'll say is a lot of the smart people left. A lot of those people who helped build

• 47:18Peter Diamandis?

  Correct.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Things like GPS for the military, they didn't stay in government labs. They went into the private sector. And now we have a proliferation of things that rely on GPS. And look at the microprocessor industry. It was the same thing. These same people who built microprocessors for the DOD, they instead, we had, we had the explosion of Silicon Valley. And those people, that's where the smart people went. And so that that was definitely also to the detriment of organizations like Skunk Works.

• 47:45Peter Diamandis?

  And that's been your philosophy to pull that talent out.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Pull it back is the way I look at it.

• 47:50Peter Diamandis?

  Pull it back.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, we're just bringing them back to where they were. There's a long tradition of the smartest people in the country wanting to work on national security problems. And there was a time where that wasn't the case. I think that that's finally reversing.

• 48:06Peter Diamandis?

  I want to dive into your design philosophy here at Andro.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:11Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've spent a lot of time with Elon talking about his design philosophy at SpaceX. It's like, and it seems there'd be a very similar parallel. It's like, simplify parts count, simplify designs, but not overly too simple. So how do you think, you know, how do you think of your design philosophy and the systems that you're building?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Boy, this is a huge question.

• 48:39Peter Diamandis?

  If there is an overarching.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, well, I'm trying to think, what are some of the common threads? I mean, one of the common threads that I think is, is different about Andro than people would expect is that we generally do not vertically integrate. SpaceX, Tesla, and others have really fetishized vertical integration. And it makes sense for some of them. It really does. But when I get pressure from usually people who don't know my business that well, they say, oh, they kind of assume like, oh, when are you going to bring this all in-house?

• 49:08Peter Diamandis?

  I assume so as well.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Well, the thing you have to remember is that when you are building, let's say, space launch systems, your customer base is pretty well known months or really years in advance. You know what your schedule is, you know, how many rockets you're going to need. You can plan all of this very predictably. That's not necessarily the case for weapons production. You need to be ready for shit to hit the fan and to 10x or 100x your production.

• 49:34Peter Diamandis?

  Got it.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  I'm actually pretty irresponsible.

• 49:36Peter Diamandis?

  Ramping up and ramping down.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  If I, if I, if I build a vertically integrated capability where I build every wiring harness, I don't work with any partners on my fasteners, on my composites, on my casting. If I can only do that in-house, what happens when the DOD suddenly needs 100 times more of that system every single day? Well, that means I have to build what 100 times more factory space. I need to hire 100 times more people. How the hell am I going to do that? What's much more responsible is for my engineers to design a part that can be made by any machine shop in the country.

• 50:10Peter Diamandis?

  Everywhere.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, to, to, to pick up, to get adhesive where there's 10 suppliers in the country, not just one, and I, certainly not something we only make ourselves. And that means that if I need to ramp up, I can multi-source these things. I can ramp, I can outsource it to lots of other places. Or I can do what we did during World War II. I go to the industrial capacity that exists for, let's say, American automotive industry or the American commercial aviation space, and you take over and you say, hey, good news, our submarine can be manufactured by the same robot arms, the same plasma cutters, and the same assembly lines and people that were cranking out cars yesterday. That's how you build a resilient defense infrastructure. And I mentioned this in my TED Talk, we have to design for mass production using existing infrastructure.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  You, you, you can't assume that you're going to have the time to build an alien dreadnought to build your thing. And that's again, you know, Tesla with the Model 3 wanted, you know, they wanted to build this, this, this, this hyper optimized capability. But Elon's never going to have one year where he needs 100 times more Model 3s and then the next year, 100 times less. It's just not quite like that.

• 51:18Peter Diamandis?

  Makes sense. Going beyond that, and I completely, it's crystal now. In terms of how rapidly you iterate a product, how you focus on parts count.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:36Peter Diamandis?

  Materials and so forth. Is there, are there other design elements that you, so you have as a basis for the company? That you learned, that you learned perhaps when you were at, in Oculus and?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I mean, there's so much that I've brought from my Oculus days.

• 51:51Peter Diamandis?

  Because I mean, that's what makes this company different.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Well, what's interesting is so many of these things are, I almost don't want to, want to, if I, if I, if I belabor them, it sounds like I'm a...

• 52:03Speaker 01

  It sounds like I think I'm a genius for doing things the way that are just already done everywhere. I mean, what we're doing is taking the same approaches to design, design review, velocity of manufacturing from, you know, like the consumer electronics world and just bringing it to defense. I mean, you know, with Oculus, we were launching a new, a new product every single year. We had to manufacture millions of virtual reality systems and it's just, it's a totally different mentality than you see in the defense space. And so I'd say the main thing we brought here is just, just do it like that. Just do it the way that you do it in industries where you have to move fast, where you can't afford to, like, imagine if the iPhone was delayed by four years.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Like iPhones get delayed from time to time, right? You've seen this happen, but it's usually, oh, you know, we missed by a month, but, but, you know, we're, we're, they'll be over here soon. Or manufacturing was behind and so they couldn't send it over on a boat. They had to air freight it and they lost a little bit of money. Have you ever heard of an iPhone being delayed by four years? How about 20 years? Right? Have you ever heard of a consumer?

• 53:08Peter Diamandis?

  F35, yes.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's just, it's unthinkable. And so a lot of what I do is just doing things the way that they're done in industries that aren't subsidized by taxpayer dollars that can't afford to fail. When, when you, when you, when you skin your knees when you fall, you're a lot more careful to not trip. And I, I think that that's really what has helped Anduril in an overarching way. We hire people from consumer electronics, from the automotive industry, from the, from the maritime industry who are used to working in those kinds of conditions.

• 53:41Peter Diamandis?

  Do you ever expect the tech you develop in Anduril to go back into the consumer space?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Not really. Um, maybe it's even a breach of fiduciary duty, but I just don't have a, a big interest in it. Um, I started this company to

• 53:54Peter Diamandis?

  For a reason.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  To fix national security. And early in our company's history, we had the opportunity to do quite a bit of commercial work that I think

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Would have actually grown faster than our DoD work and that would have been a problem. Imagine a world where Androl has a product line where half of half of the team is dedicated to military and half is dedicated to, let's say, commercial like oil and gas security or, or, you know, or, you know, uh, critical infrastructure security. And imagine a world where the commercial side is growing three times as fast. What investor is going to allow me to continue to spend half the team on the thing growing at a third of the rate? I was terrified early on that that could become a reality. It was actually similar to our border security work. I was worried that that part of the business would put us in a position where we weren't able to invest in the military side.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And so there were times where we said, you know what? We think we could make money there. That is not our mission. We are going to vote, we need to stay laser focused on our mission. That's how we're going to get to where we want to be, which is being the, a next generation defense product company that really, you know, our first page of our first pitch deck said Androl will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions. I love that line. Love that. And that, that, that was the mission. So will it come to consumers? I don't know. And I'll finish off this bit by, by also noting anything that we sell to consumers is at the end of the day, going to end up in the hands of our adversaries. People have asked me over and over again, Palmer, you're building Eagle Eye, this new integrated vision augmentation system that's giving soldiers

• 55:31Speaker 01

  superhuman thermal vision, uh, night vision, uh, augmented views of the world. When are you going to build a consumer version of that? I would love to, except it will end up on the heads of Chinese commandos. And they'll say, oh, Palmer, there's export restrictions. Yeah, but if you have, if you're selling something to civilians, eventually you will sell to a trader and that trader will get that gear into the hands of your enemies. And so, you know, Russian special forces, they're not wearing Russian gear. They're wearing American night vision, American helmets, American armor. They're using the best and it's because they prioritize getting these things smuggled out of the United States and into Russia.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  And so, sure, maybe you can stop it from being on every Russian soldier or every Chinese soldier. But I mean, how do you think I would feel if I built advanced capabilities that we sold to civilians? And then In an invasion of Taiwan scenario.

• 56:32Peter Diamandis?

  That's what's.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  A bunch of Chinese commandos drop out of helicopters, kill all the top political leadership of Taiwan using Androil gear. I, I mean, that would be, that would be the, the worst reversal of intent in my life that I can imagine in terms of a tent versus effect. So I, that, that is my biggest problem with selling back to civilians. I would only sell tech that I don't worry about getting into the hands of that guy.

• 56:56Peter Diamandis?

  Makes a lot of sense. And that's not what you're passionate about.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  If I figured out how to do, we're not doing this, but if I figured out how to do, let's say, better biological defense, like I've, I've long been interested in long incubation antibiotics. So things like antibiotics that are encapsulated, live in your body for long periods of time and are only released when you have some biological trigger that causes them to be released and become active. Or, you know, like biological antibiotics, same, same idea.

• 57:22Peter Diamandis?

  Sort of a loitering defense system.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  A loitering defense system, but one that is only active in the bloodstream when there's a threat. Because if you just have it all the time, like if, if you just loaded people up with antibiotics all the time, you would create superbugs because they would continuously be active in people. So like, suppose I figured out how to do that and there was crossover to the civilian side, that I would be absolutely a fan of, but I would have, I'd have to make sure that I'm not inadvertently giving a tool of, of, of, of great power to an adversary.

• 57:53Peter Diamandis?

  I want to jump five years out. It's 2030. What does warfare look like in 2030? You've got AI far more advanced, humanoid robotics, and I know your position on humanoid robotics, but the ability to enhance super soldiers take on a brand new meaning.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:14Peter Diamandis?

  You know, drones have gone from zero to infinity in record speed. It's extraordinary. What, you know, what are you thinking?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I hate to be a cynic here, Peter, but. I actually think warfare in 2030 is going to look more or less the same as it does today. With a few very small exceptions where things are breakthrough capabilities getting in. I said earlier, you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want. The reality is the vast bulk of our arsenal was built a decade or two or three ago. And so even as companies like Androl move very, very quickly, like we're trying to build things that are relevant to a fight with a great power, whether it's Iran or Russia, or particularly China. But, but even if we move at breakneck speed, as fast as we can, we're going to end up being 1% of the fight.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  2% of the fight, right? I mean, like we can try our very best. It's, it's going to take years and years to replace these legacy capabilities with, with new things. So I think what will the battlefield look like? You're going to have a weird anachronistic mash of things that were built in the Reagan era. Like our tracked vehicles built in the Reagan era, operated by humanoid robotics that just rolled off the line a few weeks ago. But only like, only like one column of the, of them and all the rest are going to be crewed by people. You're going to have things like AI fighter jets flying alongside aircraft that were built under Bill Clinton. And they're going to be flying together in formation. And unfortunately, there's probably going to be a lot more manned aircraft.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  And the AI aircraft are going to be a tip of the spear. Valuable, a valuable component, they'll, they'll be the tip of the spear, making first contact. And they're probably all going to be blown up and we're going to say, shit, I wish we would have been building those for another couple of years. It's just 2030. I mean, it's close. It's, it's just, it's just so little time to build it, deploy it, and then train people on it. Remember, you can't just deliver these things day one. People have to train for years to become proficient in something. Imagine if you showed up with a new alien weapon system pulled straight out of the Roswell wreck today. And you handed it to a soldier and said, you have to go to war with this tomorrow. That won't work. You, you, you need to develop tactics. You need to develop doctrine. You need to have him trained with his squad for years.

• 1:00:36Peter Diamandis?

  Let's take it slightly different. Let's talk about the point oh one percent.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:00:42Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about the the elite Navy SEAL team or equivalent out there that will have the most advanced technology and

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Well, you're gonna see, you're gonna see, you're gonna see lower fatality rates. You're gonna see people who are acting as omniscient technomancers who are kind of acting as a central hub.

• 1:01:01Peter Diamandis?

  An AI surround, they know.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  They know where they know where the good guys are. They know where the bad guys are. I think to a certain extent, I think the future of warfare is going to look a lot more like like chess than dodgeball. If you if you understand what's happening and you know exactly what you're up against, where it is, when it is, you can kind of know when you can win and also know when you need to retreat. You don't necessarily get to the point where you, you know, win or lose the Battle of Midway. You know well ahead of winning or losing what the likely outcome is, and that drives probably better decisions. I think you're gonna see a lot less casualties, a lot less fatalities. You're not going to allow yourself to,

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  you know, wheel your way into a scenario where everyone gets wiped out.

• 1:01:54Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  And there and there's good and bad there. I mean, when you give people better visibility into what's going to happen, imagine this. Imagine a world where we get into a fight that we can't really afford to lose. And then we find out that to stay in that fight, we're going to have to send 50,000 sailors to the bottom of the sea. I don't think the United States has the political will to do that. We just don't, especially knowing that it will happen. And so they're like, it's a double edged sword, but I think in general, I'm on the side of having the information to make that decision. And that, I mean, it's going to make decisions a lot harder for these guys because right now, there's a lot of, I guess I'll end with this.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  In current warfare, fog of war allows for enough indeterminism that someone can make hard decisions without really knowing what the impact could be. You, you believe, hey, this might work. Everyone might be fine. It is interesting to ponder what happens when that uncertainty is removed. What happens when, when you order someone to do something? You're no longer sending them into a, you know, into a non-determinate, you know, liminal space. It's like, oh, well, they, they might live, they might not. What happens when you know that they are with a high degree of certainty going to die? Um, that will be a, a change in the nature of warfare at, at a, at a very high level. Now, of course, the flip side is, like I said, I think there will be lower casualty rates, better decisions

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  will be made, but it's going to make for a very hard set of ethical quandaries. But I don't think anyone, I, I, the flip side is I don't think anyone would argue that it's better to not know. I don't think you'd find anybody saying it's better to not have that information in your decision-making process.

• 1:03:36Peter Diamandis?

  So this Navy SEAL has, uh, is omniscient. They've got enhanced, uh, imagery, enhanced knowledge.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Probably a hundred to one ratio of autonomous systems to men. You know, every, every person who's going to be out there is going to be working in a highly networked fashion.

• 1:03:52Peter Diamandis?

  So they're, they're commanding drones and robots and, and basically they're

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Well, some of them are good. Some will be commanding and I think a lot of them are going to be just autonomously doing their jobs. You know, suppose that you have that Navy SEAL, he might be aided continuously by 10 drones that are sensing the world around him, looking for things that are a threat. He's not so much commanding them as consuming the information that comes in. And he's not watching 10 drone feeds. He's just seeing in his augmented view of the world where those threats are. And as things become a critical threat, the system is able to highlight that to him. He doesn't have to look at 10 drone feeds and say, huh, that guy's running. I, I think he might be going over there. The system's going to say, hey, this is the top threat. It's the only thing that might kill you in the next minute. You need to deal with this. What do you want me to do? So

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  it, it's going to be a little different than, he won't be commanding the drones so much Yeah, them feeding feeding him a view of the world and I it's a I I act like this is the future, but of course this is what we're doing with our customers right now. I mean, like, people are doing these things in exercises and in small level conflicts all over the world right now. It's just going to be a different thing when it's

• 1:05:02Peter Diamandis?

  So have you taken a time to dream five years out beyond? I mean, so you're building with

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Five years out, I know exactly what I'm doing. Five years is easy. Like, the things that are going to be relevant five years out, we're we're starting to build them today. Like, you know, we just, we just, we just started construction on a $900 million factory in Columbus, Ohio, to build our autonomous fighter jets. Those are going to be in combat before 2030. So 2030, easy, easy for me. I know exactly what we're gonna be selling.

• 1:05:30Peter Diamandis?

  So the question is, what are you starting to design and build in 2030?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that, that's, that's the interesting one.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  It's actually hardly anything. In in general, Androl is very focused on building weapons for that kind of immediate near term. It's it's leaked out through the press that we have certain teams working under a mandate called China 27, which is if you're if the feature you're building, or the the capability you're working on, is not going to be ready for a fight with China before the end of 2027, you can't be working on it. You need to you need to find something that is relevant to that. That's, I don't want to say that I'm not even thinking about 2030,

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  and beyond. It's just, I probably say I dedicate 1% of my time. Like, I'll tell you one thing, I think, I think you're gonna see subterranean warfare become a much bigger part of the future.

• 1:06:30Peter Diamandis?

  Really?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I believe it's the next major warfighting domain. I've said this many times and everyone thinks

• 1:06:35Peter Diamandis?

  What is that? What is that? Drilling machines? What does that look like?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, more or less. I mean, have you seen the movie The Core?

• 1:06:44Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  It was a while ago. Two thousand and six, I think.

• 1:06:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  It's about a group of guys who have to drill to the center of the earth to use nuclear bombs to restart the earth's core spinning to protect us from, from, from, from, from, from cosmic rays. Not a scientifically sound movie, but something like that. You know, the United States and the Cold War. Uh, sorry, the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War both had subterranean programs, building vehicles that moved through the crust of the earth, just like a submarine would move through the ocean. And the Soviets actually built a prototype and then lost it in the crust of the earth. Um, so it worked that well. It worked that it just went off and they, and they lost track of it, melting through the crust. Um, I, I think that that's going to become a very powerful part of

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  the future of warfare. And I'm not talking about, you know, just tunnels or bunkers. I mean, using the crust of the earth as a fully three dimensional battle space that you will be moving supplies through. Uh, you'll, you'll be doing electronic warfare, kinetic warfare, psychological warfare, you know, high end logistics. And that, that I don't think is relevant to China. The technology's just not quite there. I, I can't really build things at scale that are relevant by then. That, that's one of maybe the few things I think past the 2030 timeline, I think it's going to become a huge deal. And at some point, the same way you see a space force, I think it's very likely you'll see some kind of subterranean core. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like,

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  but you know, right now, the people who work on sub T, it's like, you know, a, a group in the army whose job is to deal with bunkers and tunnels. I, I think it'll become a large enough part of warfare that you're going to need a dedicated group that focuses on the unique challenges of the subterranean domain.

• 1:08:26Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. I saw your video posted on Pulse RL recently. Uh, that was, uh, that was a bit of magic. It felt, it looked like a bunch of mosquitoes flying out, dropping out of the sky.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Well, now, I mean, that was, uh, it's so funny. I don't know if you saw my-

• 1:08:39Peter Diamandis?

  Describe that for, for folks.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, yeah, we just launched this video that shows Pulse RL. It's, it's basically a thing the size of a, of a small cooler and you can carry it in the back of a truck. And it is an- AI-powered electronic warfare system capable of jamming, spoofing, hacking, targeted cyber effects, general cyber effects, doing things that make the motors of drones want to stop working, makes their navigation not do what it's supposed to do. It's things that don't just work against remotely piloted drones. It even works against autonomous attack drones.

• 1:09:13Peter Diamandis?

  It looks like an EMP being triggered and everything just falls down.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Well, we released this video where, and by the way, that was a real test event. So we had 25 autonomous attack drones. And then they're flying towards the target and you turn on Pulse RL and they all fall out of the sky, fall to the ground. This is a real capability. We've been selling it to real military customers. They're using it in combat right now. And we finally were able to start showing it publicly. It's so funny because we released this video and I don't know if you saw my tweet about this, but people were all saying, there's no way this is real. This is all totally fake. It's all CG. Andro wishes that it was this easy. What they don't understand and don't see is that we've been investing in electronic warfare at Andorl for the last five years, that this is the culmination of all of that work, that this is a real capability.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  And in fact, the video is literally an actual live test event. So I actually tweeted about it. I said, okay, fine, we'll, we'll release all of the behind the scenes footage. Like we'll just take all the video footage that we showed actually of it working. Now, we're not going to be able to talk about, you know, the specifics of exactly the, the, you know, the way that we're being clever with the electrons, because that stuff falls into the classified domain. But I will note too, things like Pulse RL, they're not the solution because it's possible to make a drone that can survive that type of attack. Their very useful part is a layered approach, right? You need to have directed energy. You need to have EW. You need to have kinetics. You need all these things working together.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  And it's very hard to make a drone that pass, makes it pass all of those things. Very hard to make a drone that can survive all of the ways that Andorl has for stopping a drone.

• 1:10:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it looked like the kind of device that I'd want in every Jeep on the war, on the war battlefield.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  I mean, every Jeep and I would love to see it at every airport. I'd love. To see it at every sports stadium. The biggest obstacle is actually regulatory wise. It's it. Pulsar L is completely illegal in the United States. For for for for non military use. Either there's there's there's nobody in the United States who's allowed to use something like pulsar L. The only guy who's allowed to push that button is someone with very special authorizations via the military. And I think that's going to change. I've I've I've been spending years now talking with members of Congress who understand. We can't afford to have our airports shut down by drones. We can't afford to have our military bases surveilled by drones. We can't afford.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  I suspect inevitably, there will be someone who commits a large scale terror attack or series of terror attacks using drones. And it's cheap enough to get ahead of these threats that we should at least try.

• 1:11:49Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out.

• 1:12:31Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning.

• 1:13:07Peter Diamandis?

  When it's solvable, you're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire

• 1:13:52Peter Diamandis?

  family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. You mentioned recently that we need to look at the ethics of using AI in warfare on a case-by-case basis.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:21Peter Diamandis?

  And the examples you gave were compelling, and I agree with you. And I'd like to scratch that a little bit. Where does that case-by-case ethical review happen? Do you guys, do you have that kind of conversation inside of Andorol? Is this something that's happening with your DoD customers?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:44Peter Diamandis?

  How do you think about this?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  The good news is that the DoD actually already has these processes in place, and they have for decades. The reason that so many people are freaking out about autonomous weapons is because they think that it's a new thing. I mentioned in my TED Talk, people think that they're keeping Pandora's box from being opened. What they don't realize is that every US military base and aircraft carrier is protected by autonomous weapons that shoot down incoming boats, incoming missiles, incoming aircraft. They don't realize that destroyers are all capable of operating in a fully autonomous mode, even if the bridge is completely destroyed and not a single person is living on the top side of that ship.

• 1:15:26Peter Diamandis?

  And you go back to World War I and World War II.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:15:29Peter Diamandis?

  For all of, you know, all of the landmines that were, those are autonomous weapons.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:33Peter Diamandis?

  Triggered on their own.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  We go back even further. I, I've given a couple of talks where I argue about this idea of building weapons that execute the intent of the designer, even when the person is not immediately physically present, that goes back thousands of years. Spike traps, pit traps, you know, but poison wires. All of these are autonomous weapons. Now, AI allows you to do new things, but I mean, also like in Vietnam, we were using missiles that would be fired from a jet, fly into an area, look for, for example, surface to air missile launchers and then destroy them. Those are, those are fully autonomous weapons. They're deciding which targets to hit, which to destroy, and they're discriminating between one type of

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  target and the other. And so, yeah, what, what I mentioned is that you have to look at these on a case by case basis and not have a blanket prohibition on AI autonomy for any, you, you, you can't have a blanket prohibition. Imagine if you could say, hey, I can make, take this, I can take this landmine and it's an anti-vehicle landmine. It's not set off by, by, by people. It's set off by vehicles. Right now, it can't tell the difference between a school bus and a tank.

• 1:16:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:16:48Peter Diamandis?

  Would you want that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Why would you want that?

• 1:16:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  There are people who are fighting for that. They want a UN level resolution to condemn the use of AI in weapons to make it illegal for a robot to pull the trigger. And my point to them is if you're going to use landmines, shouldn't they be able to make that difference? Shouldn't you be able to use every tool to achieve the most precise, most surgical, least civilian casualty attached outcome? And they'll say, oh, here's why I don't believe that. And my point to them is if you have a problem with landmines, ban landmines. Don't ban landmines from being as good as they can be at not killing civilians. And it's the same

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  thing with a bomb. If I can make a bomb that using autonomy does not kill the person who's 100 yards over to the side of the guy that I need to get rid of. If I'm taking out the head of Al Qaeda.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Isn't it better to have something that kills that guy and doesn't blow up the building next door? There are people who would argue, no, it's such an ethically fraught problem. They can't deal with how icky it feels to have a robot decide who lives or dies. And my point to them is, guys, the DOD has a process for this that they've been applying for decades. The key is to never abdicate human responsibility. A person always needs to be responsible for how force is used. When that AI weapon kills the wrong person, there needs to be human accountability as if there was a person pulling the trigger. That is the thing we cannot afford to compromise on. Banning AI wholesale is just going to ensure that, one, we lose, and, two, that we're fighting with our hands behind our

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  backs and a lot of civilians are going to die as a result. That is not a moral outcome, in my opinion.

• 1:18:33Peter Diamandis?

  I have to admit, I mean, you've been on my stage at the Abundance Summit twice now, and the first time you were on stage, I was a bit nervous about how the audience was going to react.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:44Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And it was like just standing ovation. People were completely won over by that argument of if we're going to, if we're going to get into a war, if we're going to aim to kill somebody, let's make sure that the collateral damage is completely minimized.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:19:00Peter Diamandis?

  And let's have, you know, focus on the intention. And there's very, what arguments have you gotten against that? Because I can't imagine one that would, would win.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  It's different since in philosophy, like, I, okay, there's perhaps, perhaps I could steal me on this. There are people who will usually argue one of two things. Either they'll make a purely philosophical argument, but like, it is not the place of tools to rebel against man. You know, we cannot, there are certain things we cannot outsource, no matter the cost of life. They would rather civilians die today than...

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Outsource these decisions to AI models and it's just a difference in philosophy. It's not, it's, it's, I, I think that minimizing civilian deaths is really important. There's other people who I think take a more existential risk approach. Like you're, you're familiar with the X risk people in the AI community. They say, I have no problem with the landmine. Okay. The landmine doesn't blow up the school bus full of kids. I have no beef with, but first it's the landmine and then it's the gun and then it's the nuke. And then it's Skynet and it wipes out everybody. And so, but my, my point to them is, look, that just isn't how the DOD looks at these things. It is, these are usually people who are not familiar with how the DOD actually makes decisions.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  It's hard enough for me to get AI into that landmine. Like that, that's actually hard. There is such an extraordinarily stringent review before they deploy new weapons. I, here's a great example. There was a new landmine that was capable of a fully autonomous mode that was developed during the nineties. It was developed by the United States Army and it was capable of basically, it was basically a sensor that could trigger remote mines around it and it would detect what kind of vehicle was and, and, and blow up if it detected it. They actually disabled that capability in the final version of it because they couldn't figure out how to attach responsibility for malfunctions. They couldn't figure out how they were going to say who's responsible. Is it the guy who ordered the, the mine, mine deployed?

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Is it any time that the instructions to it are updated or the categorization is updated? That it's responsibility? Is it the contractor who develops the differentiation model? Who's liability for civilian casualties?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  The military is actually fundamentally very conservative. They, they don't take these crazy risks. And so people imagine there's a slippery slope to Skynet. Remember that our nuclear arsenal until a few years ago ran off of floppy disks. They were so conservative, they didn't even want to move to, to digital circuits controlling these things and they kept it all analog. I, I, I'm given that, I'm just not that worried about the slippery slope. I think the people who are in charge of these problems are very sharp. And if you don't believe in the process that puts these people in positions of power.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Then you just don't really believe in the democratic process, period. I mean, look, the the alternative is you have people who are making all of these decisions.

• 1:22:06Peter Diamandis?

  Flawed as they are.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Well, and and my point is, look, if you trust a 19 year old kid to not nuke uh you the wrong people.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding. That's a ridiculous. Sorry. That's a little ridiculous. 19 year olds are don't get the don't get the nuclear keys. You know, it's it's people who are a little more senior, but you you you get my point. If we are trusting people, young men with decisions of great life and death import, uh it seems a bit strange to me to say, oh, well, I I think that uh I think that the system as a whole, though, is is is just going to trend towards irresponsible use of force and the machines are going to kill us all. I I I understand the ex risk people, but similar to you. I don't know how you feel. Like, it's the same thing where people say this about AI. That has nothing to do with weapons. They say we shouldn't develop AI to help us with physics, because what if

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  it develops new physics and then it uses those to exterminate humanity? And I I just I I'm a lot more worried about evil people with with existing AI.

• 1:23:10Peter Diamandis?

  It's not artificial intelligence. It's human stupidity I'm worried about.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Yes, the the AI part is the part I'm least worried about. I'm worried about bad people using good AI, not super AI, turning against everybody.

• 1:23:25Peter Diamandis?

  All right. A lot of people don't realize that the tech you've been developing has some significant non warfare applications. And here I'm pointing directly at uh the prevention of perilous wildfires.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:43Peter Diamandis?

  So, uh, two years ago, two and a half years ago, very proud we were in DC together. You were the first registrant for our $11 million wildfire prize.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  You really pulled together a lot of people. You had the Lieutenant Governor of California there, the head of CAL FIRE, a lot of people from the US Fire Service, Forest Service.

• 1:24:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was. It was a great. It was a great event. And I, you know, you know, it was valuable to have you step up as uh as our first registrant and even more valuable for what you said, which is these in God knows, six months ago, we were all, you know, front row seats to the Palisades Fire.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  That shouldn't ever happen again. It shouldn't have happened then. It shouldn't. I mean, the really, the really crazy thing is, and you, and you know this, but, but, but not, not all your listeners might.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Andrel started working on firefighting technology right at the start of the company. We built the Sentry firefighting tank. It was a tracked autonomous firefighting vehicle that could continue to fight fires even after a fire had overwhelmed an area. So continue fighting long after all the people have shipped out. And the problem we ran into was actually purely political. It's that people were afraid it was going to replace jobs, automate jobs. And they were saying, if you fund this, then we're going to come out against you politically in the upcoming elections. And that, that, that was really a, that was really a big problem. I, I, I think we should have been working on, and I think that the similar things for, for, for, for even that you, the whole point of that, for people don't know, the wildfire X prize.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  It's to end destructive wildfires using autonomous technology, build things that can detect and react to fires. Instantly. Instantly. Yeah. And the problem was people, not everybody wants things to work that way. They, they, they're, there are, there are people who don't necessarily want to stop wildfires because their job is tied to fires continuing to exist at scale. And that, that, that's the hardest part of this. Well, look, I mean, if you, if your whole job is to do, let's say, large scale firefighting tanker operations, you're not going to be excited about giving money up in your budget to build something that stops that from ever happening. It's, it's.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  It's a perverse set of incentives. Yeah. I don't think any of these people are, you know, waking up in the morning saying, ha, ha, ha. I, I, I can't wait for there to be more fires and more deaths so that I can get my budget. But they're not going to ever want to take risk if even a successful outcome is one that is probably, probably, probably bad for them. But I, I, I mean, I said it at the event. I'll say it again. We can do this. This is not a distant future. This is not a super intelligence problem. This is a matter of product execution. The tech to detect and exterminate destructive wildfires.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Maybe not in all of them, but like, let's say 95% of them, it exists today. We just have to put the pieces together and demo it. And like, yeah, I mean, I think the, I think the, I think the evaluations for the prize are coming up in October. So not that far away, but your whole, whole, whole bunch of companies are put like the most And you've seen, and you've seen the companies. I mean, you're a registered right now. And we're, and we're teamed up with some of them. The coolest part about this prize is unlike maybe some other X prizes where there were a bunch of people trying to figure out if it was even possible and pushing the limits. In this case, I think there's actually lots of companies that are proving that it is very much possible. It's now just a matter of, of, of, of cost and effectiveness. How much will it cost to do this? And so everyone's trying to drive down the cost, increase the effectiveness.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Nobody, I don't think, I, I think all the teams are in a place where they've proven it can work. Have you publicly come out to say what tech you're going to use? I don't think we've publicly gotten into too much. The, the, the plan right now is, uh, we're going to use, we're going to demonstrate multiple things. So, and this is how I think it'll be in the real world. In the real world, you're not going to have one type of solution. The thing, you know, the aircraft that will respond to a fire that's on a hill out, you know, a hundred miles out in, you know, in, in, in the brush. Very different than one that is, let's say, going to start in a power substation right next to a bunch of trees. It's just, you'll, you'll need different tools for each job. And so what you need to do is detect fires, classify what kind of fire it is, and therefore what kind of firefighting agent you need. Like, you know, even

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  And what the environmental conditions are. Exactly. Exactly. How, how you can approach it. Exactly. Yeah. How far is it? What's the closest asset? What type of compounds do you need to fight that fire? And you actually need a system that then autonomously decides which of these available assets is the best to stop this particular problem? Then deploy it and then see through, did it work? Did I slow the fire? Did I stop it? Do I need to continue to deploy assets? Do you, do I need to actually have the big guns come out while I try to just camp this down? And so I think our plan is we're going to have multiple andural assets, different types of assets with different type of capabilities. And then demonstrate how different types of fires trigger a different response from the system. I also think that's How it's going to work in the real world.

• 1:28:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Androl, like if Androl were to deploy, let's say a lattice instance with sensors and fire watch towers and, and, and space-based layers. And people say, why not just do it all from space? The answer is sometimes you have weather that makes it impossible to, you know, to, to see what's going on. You might have a lot of fog. You might have a lot of clouds. And so you probably need some terrestrial layer as well. But if you were to build all that, I think Androl's probably not going to be building all the vehicles that respond. I think you're actually going to see a lot of different companies focusing on their niche. You'll have some people building a vehicle for, you know, more urban type environments. You'll see others building it more for long range, you know.

• 1:29:27Peter Diamandis?

  And what I love about an X Prize is it's a Darwinian evolution where you have hundreds of different approaches.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:29:32Peter Diamandis?

  All competing. And at the end of the day, like you said, you probably will collaborate with, with a number of them.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  I think, I think, I think that in the end, probably a half dozen of the teams that are competing, like if, if Cal Fire were to award a multi-billion dollar contract to deploy these systems at scale and stop wildfires, I am very sure it would not be any one of us getting all that money. It's, it's going to end up being, you know, a distribution of money to people, to people for, for a lot of different, different things.

• 1:30:03Peter Diamandis?

  And yeah, the thing that, that is insane is when you have these, these Malibu fires, these Palisade fires and, uh, over, over the years, and then it's impossible to get insurance.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:15Peter Diamandis?

  For your home.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Well, and the cost, because the cost is so immense and the requirements California's putting these insurance companies is also so immense. What, what, what blows my mind is when people, we've talked to people in like, you know, Cal OES, Office of Emergency Services. And, um, you, they, I'm not, I'm not putting them down. They've got a lot of constraints they have to work under. But what's so fascinating is when we talk about the cost to deploy a system that would detect every fire and put out many of the fires, they say, oh my God, well that, it's billions of dollars. Where are we going to be billions? And my point is if you stop even one fire.

• 1:30:47Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  You've already made the money back.

• 1:30:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  You've already done it.

• 1:30:50Peter Diamandis?

  It's insane. And the lives, lives lost, property lost, time. It's crazy.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  And the lives are irreplaceable. But even if you look at it just in dollars and cents.

• 1:30:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  It, stopping one of these fires would pay for the whole system in terms of the economic damage. And so it, it's one of those things where it, it seems like a lot of people are being penny wise and pound foolish. And we, we have, we have, we have to fix that.

• 1:31:15Peter Diamandis?

  I'm going to ask you a rapid fire set of AMA questions from my Twitter audience.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:31:20Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  I'll be efficient in my answers so that we can hit as many of them as possible.

• 1:31:23Peter Diamandis?

  Can a drone fly in formation, hit the land, transform into a robot, two or four legs or wheels, recon and attack on land? Do you imagine sort of a mixed mode set of drones?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Such a thing is definitely possible, and I've actually seen companies that are building exactly this. I've seen companies building quadcopters with legs, for example, where they land and most of them, they land on their legs so they can loiter for long periods, like as a watch capability. I've seen people building robot dogs that basically have jet packs.

• 1:31:55Peter Diamandis?

  I love that.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  I've seen the gamut. The thing is, I'm not going to say any of these don't make sense. It's really a matter of how many situations.

• 1:32:06Peter Diamandis?

  Need both.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Need both, exactly. Like, why not just keep flying? Why not get there just walking? Or here's another example. Why not put the robot dog onto a flying vehicle that drops the vehicle in place? And then you don't have to carry all of that extra parasitic weight. It is always possible to come up with some niche scenario where, you know, oh, I need it to fly, land, walk into a cave, jump over a hole, fly out the other side. Those do exist, but I, here's the good news. Making these different niche robotics, I think it's going to be a big part of the future. There's not going to be one form factor that dominates everything, right? You're not going to see C3PO style humanoid robots doing literally everything.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  There's going to be hundreds of different form factors, and I bet some of them will have wings and legs, just like in nature.

• 1:32:56Peter Diamandis?

  All right, next one, a serious one. Between US military tech and Chinese military tech, is America behind?

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  There's places where America is behind, there's places where we're ahead. It's hard to give a universal answer. In general, I think the United States has a strong lead in a lot of the areas that people would consider critical. But at the same time, you have to look at the fact that China has about 300 times more shipbuilding capacity than we do.

• 1:33:24Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, that it's insane.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  It's on people can't visualize.

• 1:33:28Peter Diamandis?

  I saw your tweet.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  And by the way, that's not during wartime. They say, oh, well, in America would just scale up during wartime. Well, so will China and they've proven that they can do it. They've also like, I'm not saying we should do this. I'm not saying we should copy every movement of authoritarian centrally planned state. But China has made it a law that many types of boats, for example, passenger ferries, can be car ferries. They can be commandeered and they have to build every passenger ferry to military specifications so that it can be used for a Taiwan invasion. All of their car ferries have to carry have me a certain deck plate load standard so that they can move armored vehicles onto them and move them to Taiwan. That's an advantage that they have. And so are they ahead of us on like amphibious landing capability? Immeasurably so by orders of magnitude.

• 1:34:14Peter Diamandis?

  You had a tweet that I found particularly interesting about

• 1:34:23Peter Diamandis?

  the importance of a Navy.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:25Peter Diamandis?

  In projecting global domination.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Yep. Protect and also protecting freedom of movement, freedom of trade. It's just our Navy is kind of the backbone that allows global commerce.

• 1:34:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. All right, here's one you may or may not want to answer. What are your honest thoughts about Mark Zuckerberg?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  What are my honest thoughts about Mark Zuckerberg? Uh, well, I mean, the, the, the subtext there that people may not be picking up is that, uh, uh, Facebook acquired my company in 2014. I worked there for a few years on VR. Um, you know, my company was Oculus VR and then I was fired after giving money to the wrong, the wrong political group.

• 1:35:03Peter Diamandis?

  The libertarians.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  But, but I think people, people need to realize that what

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  look, I'll put it this way.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  I took every single liquid dollar that I had and bought into Meta stock the day that they announced they were changing their name to Meta. Mark is the number one VR fan in the world. It's a title I wish I could have. I wish I could be the world's number one VR boy, but I'm not. Mark spent $60 billion on AR and VR. He beats me handily, and he's done so through immense pressure from people who don't understand his vision or where he's going. And so, look, whatever beef I might have with Mark over other items, in general, I think

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  he understands the future. He's resisting extreme and severe pressure from people who don't understand his vision. I think he's been very practical, and he's been very pragmatic in his engagements with the government, even to the detriment of his press coverage and the attitude that people show towards him. And the thing that I've had to come to terms with is, it wasn't Mark who fired me. It was the apparatus that was under Mark. And one of the things I've had to come to terms with is that the people who ousted me, the people who orchestrated my destruction, who seized my baby from me, they're not even

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  at Meta anymore. It's been eight years. The people who conspired to stab me in the back, they're gone. And so, can I really be upset at the corporate structure that remains behind people? Am I mad at their ghost? Am I mad at the ghost of the people who once walked the halls of Meta? And so, I'd say my opinions have varied over the years, and this is probably more than I even should be saying about it. But in general, I have a lot of respect for Mark. And there's been times where I've been a lot more upset with him.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Than the present and a lot of that came down to through a series of unrelated unrelated litigation, it became very clear in the discovery process that it was not Mark who had stabbed me in the back. It was people who were much closer to me.

• 1:37:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, some could say that Andor exists now because of that action and the world is a better place, or at least the United States is a better place because of that.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  That's an argument that's been made. The point that I make to those people is if a guy got shot in the head by, you know, by, by, by, by, by a burglar and then he gained superpowers, he became supernaturally intelligent, the guy still shot you in the head, right? Like, I'm not gonna say, oh, but, but, so, so, I understand that, but the point that I would make is look like, the thing is, yeah, Mark was in charge of the company at the time, but imagine this, you're the executive of a major company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The people who you trust come to you and say that the people that they trust have come and said, we have to fire Palmer, there's no other way around it. This is the only way to handle the situation. What are the odds that you're gonna go and

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  say, you know what, I think that the people that I trust are being lied to by the people they trust. The entire thing is a farce and that they're doing it for purely political reasons. I reject you and I override this decision two levels down. That's not how the real world works.

• 1:38:42Peter Diamandis?

  At the same time, you got a thousand other problems going on that you're dealing with.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  A thousand other problems. And I hate to say it, but that's probably the decision I would make in my company. If, if I, if I had people coming up multiple levels through and they said, this is the only way that this is going to work. Here's what's going on. My first instinct is not gonna be, I think that you are all lying to me. You know, and maybe, I'm not saying the people who talked to Mark are lying. I'm saying, you go far enough down the chain, it's, it's hard to say, I think everyone is actually engaging in an orc, in, in, in an orchestrated coup based on false information to run Palmer out of his company so that we can seize power and get more money out of the performance bonus fund that he will not get access to if I blow him out. That, that's, that's, that'd be a crazy thing for you to perceive from the top. And so, I, as someone

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Who's now running an organization with 4,000 people in it, almost 5,000 people. I'm very sympathetic to the realities of of of of large companies.

• 1:39:38Peter Diamandis?

  Bitcoin, how much you love it? Do you own it? What are your thoughts on it?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  I'm a big time Bitcoin guy. I have been from the beginning. I have been mining my own Bitcoin since before there were. People have often asked you, when did you buy in? I didn't buy in, I mined in.

• 1:39:53Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  And and I've been doing that since before there were any exchanges. I was on the Bitcoin Talk.org forums. I sold a banner ad on one of my websites for 700 Bitcoin. I remember very vividly in my and my website was like a little crappy internet forums and I still did that. I remember very vividly going to an online Bitcoin slot machine and betting 60 Bitcoin on one pole.

• 1:40:15Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Didn't work. And and, you know, I I was part of the Mt. Gox hack. I lost all of my coins that were in Mt. Gox and then 10 years later, I got like 13% of them back, you know, through the recovery process. So, I mean, I've I've been in Bitcoin since the very, very beginning.

• 1:40:31Peter Diamandis?

  Of course you are.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan of Bitcoin relative to other cryptocurrencies. I've often said, there's two kinds of crypto. There's Bitcoin and shitcoin. And it's it's a long discussion as to why I believe that. But I'm I'm a I'm a big fan and I I actually originally got became interested in cryptocurrency because of a SI by Jim Bell on his website, The Outpost of Freedom, called Assassination Politics. And it was about how he believed cryptocurrency would reshape world politics, the insurance industry, the military, governments across the world. Jim Bell was arrested and sent to prison for being a terrorist later and also didn't pay his taxes.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  So, a very interesting guy. I'm not saying he's my hero, but I am saying he did predict Bitcoin and many of the impacts back in 1996. That's when he wrote Assassination Politics in 1996. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to read what someone who is very ahead of his time, though on the fringes of society, was thinking about crypto before anyone else was.

• 1:41:39Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating. All right, here's a fun one. Would you ever consider or would you ever buy a Defense Prime, Northrop Lockheed?

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  I won't rule anything out, but I suspect it won't make sense. We are in the same industry, but we're very different businesses and our investors are very different. I talked earlier about how you have to attract a certain type of investor, repel another. Their type of investors compared with our type of investors and in terms of what they want us to be, I think it's a bit like oil and water and we'll team up with those companies. We do frequently. There's like, we're selling rocket motors to some of those companies. They're supplying payloads into some of our systems. So we'll work together, but I think to actually bind our fates in that sort of way, it would be, it'd have to be, it'd have to be exactly the right mix. And I think that only happens if the world changes a lot.

• 1:42:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I'm going to put you on the spot here. It's a conversation we've had over dinner on a couple of occasions. We just awarded $100 million prize that Elon funded for carbon extraction, which was amazing. The winning team had some brilliant approach.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  I didn't see that.

• 1:42:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I was at time 100 last week.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Is the carbon that's recovered just stored or turned into some kind of, can you turn it into a synthetic long chain hydrocarbon?

• 1:42:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So there we, we had 1300 teams enter that competition.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:03Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, from 88 countries, we awarded six of them, uh, part of the 100 million. One team called, uh, Matty Carbon got 50 million. I handed the guy a $50 million check on stage. Now, this guy's amazing. He's, uh, living in Houston, born, uh, and spent much of his life in India. Um, and, uh, they're actually using a technology for, uh, uh, rock weathering.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:31Peter Diamandis?

  So it turns out that

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:32Peter Diamandis?

  That basalt.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it absorbs.

• 1:43:34Peter Diamandis?

  It absorbs the carbon, but what he, what he's done.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  It's crazy. You just bust up the rocks and they absorb.

• 1:43:39Peter Diamandis?

  It's a refined powder.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Are they, are they doing it with an atmospheric process or an in water process?

• 1:43:43Peter Diamandis?

  They're, they're basically spreading it on farmland.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Oh, fascinating.

• 1:43:47Peter Diamandis?

  And

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  I was mostly familiar with like maritime weathering projects that use ocean as the carrier for, for, for the carbon, but atmospheric weathering is interesting.

• 1:43:55Peter Diamandis?

  It increases crop yields by 20 to 30%.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Oh, because you're pulling in all of that carbon, which

• 1:44:01Peter Diamandis?

  And also water retention and it's, so he's been building it out in a number of nations and he's just gonna spend the money and I just introduced him to an incredible philanthropist. It's gonna just hundred X what he's doing right now. So it's a beautiful one-two punch.

• 1:44:21Peter Diamandis?

  The 100th anniversary of Lindbergh's flight is coming up, 1927 to 2027.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  I'm a huge fan of Charles Lindbergh. I have a, I have a signed portrait of him that my grandfather gave me before my grandfather passed away. He was a, he was a airline pilot for 40 years and Charles Lindbergh was his hero and I've been to, I've been to Lindbergh's grave out on

• 1:44:38Peter Diamandis?

  In Hawaii?

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  Up out in Hawaii.

• 1:44:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Well, Eric Lindbergh, who's one of my trustees at the X Prize, I'd love to introduce you to him. He's amazing.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  I had no idea.

• 1:44:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, grandson. And when I announced the, so the original X Prize for spaceflight came out of the Spirit of St. Louis book. Right? I was reading about this $25,000 prize and it sparked, you know, the aviation explosion and Lindbergh, the most unlikely guy pulls it off. Long story short, we're looking for Eric Lindbergh and the Lindbergh Foundation want to fund a or put together a massive X Prize again. So we're looking for, what's a big, bold idea?

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  A big, bold idea.

• 1:45:24Peter Diamandis?

  Idea that we should build an X Prize around.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah. So I'm, you, you last asked me the same question, I think four years ago.

• 1:45:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to remember what I said then. Tuna farming was one of them.

• 1:45:35Peter Diamandis?

  Tuna farming was one.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  Basically, large-scale aquaculture of species that are on the precipice. And what, what, what else did I say?

• 1:45:42Peter Diamandis?

  You talked about upleveling animals.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Uplift.

• 1:45:47Peter Diamandis?

  Uplift, yeah.

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  I'm still a hu, I mean. I mean, can you bring a non-human species to human level sentience? And I'm not sure what the right bar is. Like, it's probably not the Turing test, because even an intelligent species was probably going to think so differently.

• 1:46:04Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you and I are both fans of Ben.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  If I could get an octopus to an IQ of 100, which is the human intelligence measurement.

• 1:46:12Peter Diamandis?

  And it's not far off, probably.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  It's maybe not. And there's a lot of.

• 1:46:16Peter Diamandis?

  I've stopped eating octopus because of that.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  And there's a question, you don't have to do this naturally. We understand what, octopus is actually one of the hardest, because we understand them so little. But like, for birds, we understand what the common traits of the smartest birds, even in a local population are. You see more brain folding, higher, you know, higher, higher surface area on the brain. And we also know, I mean, you mentioned colossal, they, I mean, they know how to modify animals to produce exactly those effects. And so it's not like we need to come up with from scratch. We just take the things that we know make animals smarter. Another example is like dolphins, they have very high glucose brains, very similar structurally to humans.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  If you were to make a few choice modifications, you could probably massively increase their intelligence with just a few edits. And people say, well, how come they didn't evolve that way then, Palmer? And the answer is because there was, that's not how, that's not how evolution works, right? It's, you need to reproduce to be fit, not necessarily be smart.

• 1:47:19Peter Diamandis?

  Give them some time.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, and there were no natural environments that would favor them necessarily dedicating even more calories to being more intelligent. Humans have developed in a very complex environment where using tools, working as social animals is critical. The ocean is a relatively sparse environment. And so there's a question, as like, one of my favorite ideas is what would happen if you took even existing marine mammals? Like, if you took a whale and you put it in a VR headset and trained it to teleoperate a humanoid robot? Like, could you train a mammal to interact in a much richer environment that that requires tool use and collaboration at a manual, physical level? It's, I'm not so sure it wouldn't work.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  And there were some NASA projects back in the 50s and 60s where they tried to have, where they tried to have various animals interact with people and raise them from birth around people to see how smart they could get them. And if that would be relevant for spaceflight. And I would not, there's quite a bit of sci fi that suggests this fun idea that maybe humans are not the optimal earthbound species for spaceflight. It's not a crazy, it's not a crazy thought.

• 1:48:33Peter Diamandis?

  Well, your homework assignment is keep thinking about this challenge.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Keep thinking, keep thinking.

• 1:48:38Peter Diamandis?

  What is a challenge?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Come up with another challenge?

• 1:48:40Peter Diamandis?

  That would, that would spark people to take risks, but is not. So one of the people say, well, how about New York to London in, you know, in 60 minutes? Or hypersonic flight?

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:48:51Peter Diamandis?

  The cost for a team to take that on as an X Prize challenge is just a fundraising competition.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  I mean, another one is probably like, maybe you guys haven't done an interspecies communication prize, have you?

• 1:49:01Peter Diamandis?

  We've been, we have talked about it and we've been trying to raise the capital for it, but I think that's a great X Prize.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Cause one of the things that you've seen.

• 1:49:09Peter Diamandis?

  The Palmer X Prize.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Well, what's interesting is you're getting to that team idea. The money to tackle something like that 10 years ago would have been just unthinkable.

• 1:49:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, now it's two guys in a.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some clever ideas in a GPU and an AI model. You might've seen, uh, Google just released, uh, I think it's Dolphin Gemma, which is, so they've adapted their Dolphin Translational, and they actually, they're working with the, with the Wild Dolphin Project. And I've actually given a lot of money to those guys over the years. It's.

• 1:49:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, if you want, if you want to do that.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  That would be, that would be a great one.

• 1:49:43Peter Diamandis?

  If you want to do that X Prize, we're ready to run with that one.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Now, here's a question. Are you guys gonna prohibit me from using the dolphins we translate? Is there gonna be a prohibition from inducting them into the United States Navy?

• 1:49:58Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  The Navy has a large dolphin program. Not even a large. They've spent a lot of money over the years and have a small dolphin program that consumes a lot of money. But probably the best experts in the world in terms of dolphin psychology are actually in the United States Navy.

• 1:50:13Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I do think an interspecies prize for dogs, for birds, for...

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  Could you imagine a commercial, a potential of being able to talk with your dog?

• 1:50:21Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  It'd be a trillion-dollar company, just like that.

• 1:50:24Peter Diamandis?

  It'd be huge. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So, another AMA question here is, will aging warriors be able to keep fighting using robotic technologies?

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things about special forces is that they actually tend to be much older than the conventional forces. And people often don't understand that. They imagine that these must be like the youngest guys at the peak of their athletic prowess. It turns out that what you more often need in the special forces operations is people who have unique experience, a lot of hard-fought, hard-won lessons implanted in their brain. And the thing that takes them out is that you do still need a certain level of high physical competence and excellence to survive on the battlefield. I think it's almost inevitable as you have more and more resources shift to robotic systems, remote systems.

• 1:51:52Peter Diamandis?

  Exoskeletal systems.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's exoskeleton systems, but I mean, I'm not even... Sure that it's, you know, putting old guys into exoskeletons. I think you might have more like the wizard approach. A wizard doesn't fight through strength. He doesn't, he doesn't imbue his limbs with force so that he can use a sword. He fights through other means. He fights at a distance. He perceives the battlefield well enough that he can act in other ways. I suspect that if we do our job right at Andorol, we should make physical prowess, maybe not irrelevant. I mean, you still gotta be able to walk around. You still gotta be able to, you know, get in and out of your car. But I don't see a reason you couldn't have someone who's much older or who has, you know, a missing limb or missing limbs.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  People, people who today can't operate effectively, I would not at all be surprised to see them be able to stay in service much longer. The question then becomes, how do we keep them in? Because right now it's really hard to keep people, especially who have had life changing injuries, people who are, who are getting much older, who, who maybe want to focus on raising families. So it's two things. We're gonna need, if we're gonna keep that experience in the military and keep those guys in maximize utility, we need to make tools that allow them to safely keep operating into later in life. And we also need to figure out how we can pay these guys and give them good enough benefits that they don't depart the armed forces

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  for very practical pro, pro-family reasons. Cause at the end of the day, most people, they wanna do, they wanna do well by their families.

• 1:53:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  And we can do a much better job of keeping and retaining those people. We just gotta give them better benefits. We gotta pay them more. You do that, you'll keep them.

• 1:53:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Uh, next question, uh, from the X is could a neural linked trigger finger fire faster than your nervous system?

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's without question. There's, there's an enormous amount of latency in the link from your brain all the way through your peripheral nervous system out to your finger. Um, I actually, I've talked about this several times, but years ago, I actually built a peripheral nervous system bypass to test exactly this. And I wasn't going directly to the brain, which is what would be fastest enough. I was just, uh, basically triggering it off of a muscle that was, uh, basically a jaw muscle. And it turns out that your jaw and tongue muscles are much lower latency than your fingers are all the way out at the end of your hand. The nervous transit, uh, velocity is much higher to here and the, and the, literally the physical length of the link is just much shorter. And so you actually need very good control of your tongue and your mouth to not bite your tongue like.

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  Try chewing sometime. Notice how crazy it is that you're basically opening your mouth, shoving food into the hole with your tongue. And then as you bite down, your tongue pulls out just so. And you do it hundreds of times in a meal without even thinking about it. That coordination is crazy. So what I did is I made a system that would, I could click my mouth by flexing a click, sorry, click my mouse on my computer as a proxy for your trigger finger by flexing a muscle in my mouth. And in doing so, I had greatly reduced latency in playing first person shooters. And it turns out that that just totally works. You can trim a lot of your reaction time right off by just using different muscles. And that's not even directly to the brain. It's also worth noting, you don't just have

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  to go to the brain. It turns out that nervous signals are, they're kind of a mix of chemical and electrical signals. And those of you who've been in high school chemistry might remember that most chemical reactions happen at an accelerated rate when you up the temperature. And so one thing you can do to reduce peripheral nervous system latency, it's just heat up your arm. The whole thing, if you soak your arm in hot water to a very uncomfortably high temperature, it will be very uncomfortable and your, your reaction time will actually go up for clicking a mouse or pulling a trigger. So I've actually pondered the idea for years of like, a product like the magma sleeve or something. And, and, and like you're, you're playing your game. It's down to the last round. You're like, oh no, I really got to pump

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  it up. And it would just superheat your arm to the point of getting first degree burns if you did it for more than a minute, but it would give you that little last bit of extra edge. I, I think that'd be a really interesting product for somebody to do.

• 1:56:05Peter Diamandis?

  Another question related to video games. A lot of kids are playing a lot of video games today.

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  They sure are.

• 1:56:12Peter Diamandis?

  How do you feel that, how do you think about that for the next generation's coming? Good thing, bad thing? Was it valuable for you? Is it distracting from education? So the parents who've got, like me, you know, teenagers who are loving their video games and it's, it's the focus and obsession. What's your advice?

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  I struggle with this because I love video games. You know, I started the mod retro forums, game console modification community when I was a teenager. We just launched our first product after 17 years, which is a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. I love, I love, I love games. I spent a lot of time as a teenager playing games. I mean, thousands of hours. And on the one hand, it makes me worried when I see the current generation spending all this time playing Fortnite and Minecraft, when they Roblox, when they could be doing more productive things. But then I remember, I mean, I did the exact same thing. And so it's hard to know where is the value. There's, there's

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  connections being created that are valuable in other contexts. Are they more valuable than things they could be doing if they were doing sports or books? I feel like I'm just becoming the old person, right? On the one hand, I said, oh, man, I'm not going to let my kid play games like I did. You know, all of these kids today, they're all iPad babies. But then, you know, Socrates supposedly said, you know, what are to become? Look at the children today. They have no respect for their elders or their society. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions, pursuing their own desires. What is to become of them? And I, and I realize, you know, people have been saying this for like 2000 years. They're like, oh, man, this new generation, what's going to become of them? And, and, and they seem to generally turn out fine. And so I

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  don't feel like I'm in a place to be able to speculate beyond saying, you know, it's probably going to be fine. It's probably going to be fine.

• 1:58:11Peter Diamandis?

  So you're up on the TED stage giving your most excellent talk. And for those who haven't seen it, they should go take a look at it. And you're wearing these glasses. And there's a lot of speculation about whether or not your speech is being fed to you in the glasses. Are you?

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  I was, I was cheating. I had my notes up on my glasses. The hardware in particular is made by a company, company called Even Realities. So I was wearing a pair of Even Realities G1 glasses. And it's a really remarkable product. They've done a great job of making smart glasses that really do look like normal glasses. I mean, the arms are very, very thin. It kind of hides the battery and interface back in your hair, which I have huge hair. So I hide most of that bulk. The lenses look like normal lenses and it's giving you not just in one eye. It's giving you a full stereoscopic little window that's green only.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  So it's not full color, but it can, it has a really great function that can show you your notes. It can show you your script. You can pull up critical information and messages. If someone were to tell you Palmer, slow the fuck down. You could, you can have that message pop up and then you just see it. Oh, okay. I'm not saying I got a message like that, but if I had, I'd be able to. And so for people who don't know, TED doesn't allow any teleprompters. They, they, they, they, they want you to memorize your whole talk. They want you to just memorize the whole thing. And I'm, I'm pretty good at this stuff when I prepare, but I have to admit I, especially when you talk about like specifics, you know, like the number of bombers that were built in this specific year per minute,

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  or you're talking about the, the, the specifics of some, of some technical item. It's really nice to have your notes up so that you can refer to that and make sure you don't say something that has everyone making fun of you for a year and pointing about, oh, what about Palmer? Where he said that China has, you know, 200 times instead of 300. This guy barely knows what's going on. It's, um, yeah, it was, it was, and I'm a huge fan of augmenting human capability. I think that when you expand your capabilities beyond what you were born with and you can, you kind of extend yourself out into, you know, your phone and into your wearable glasses. You augment your vision, you augment your haptic perception.

• 2:00:31Peter Diamandis?

  You're living what you, what you preach.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  I'm living what I preach and it was, uh, it was, uh, it was especially funny where, uh, there were people who were like, but why would Palmer, why would Palmer wear, you know, where, where, why would Palmer wear something like that when it makes him look so dumb? And

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  All I could think when I was reading these criticisms are, have you seen me? Have you seen me? Do I look like the kind of guy who wakes up in the morning and says, "Okay, first things first, what will people think of my outfit today?" I'm blessed with-

• 2:01:06Peter Diamandis?

  I'm glad you're wearing flip-flop shorts and a Hawaiian shirt on stage. I mean, you know-

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  Look, here's what I've realized. I've been doing it for so long, and I get away with it now. And I think the point that I usually make to people is, look, when you achieve success, you earn a certain level of eccentricity that is allowed. And so if I want to be eccentric, that's okay, to a certain level. And I've decided that I'm going to put all of my allowed eccentricity points into my mullet and into my clothes so that I can focus on other things and look how I want. And I've, you know, when I got this mullet, I'd always wanted a mullet, my whole life.

• 2:01:50Peter Diamandis?

  How long ago did you-

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  How long did I want one? My whole life?

• 2:01:53Peter Diamandis?

  How long? When did you start?

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  A few, a few years ago. My mom would never let me get one. And then I started dating my wife, Nicole, when I was 15. So we've been together for a very long time. We met at a debate camp at a law school in Maryland, Virginia, as teenagers. And she didn't want me to get a mullet. And then, when we got married, I realized that there's nothing she could do. I was like, oh, I can get the mullet. She can't leave. And I, so I got the mullet. And luckily, she actually, she actually likes it now, although I'm way overdue for a haircut. It's out of control. I've transcended mullet man to homeless man. But again, that's the eccentricity that I've, that I've earned.

• 2:02:36Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. Is there a favorite principle or mental model that you live by that is sort of like a guiding set for you?

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  A guiding principle?

• 2:02:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so many. You know, Marcus Aurelius had, had a whole bunch of stuff in meditations that speaks to me. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say I'm, I wouldn't say I'm fully in his philosophical camp, but you know, you can pick and choose a lot of-

• 2:03:02Peter Diamandis?

  You've quoted a few on stage with me.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  I have.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  What else? I mean, I probably the one that I like most recently is, you know, what Roosevelt said about it's not the critic who counts, it's the man in the arena. It's the one who actually bets it all. It's the one who actually sacrifices and gives and inevitably will fail and he will get beaten up and bruised, but it's his contribution that counts, not the people who stand on the sidelines, not risking anything, picking apart everything he might have done wrong, whether it's wrong or not. And I, I like to remember that especially when things do go bad because they don't always go well. Sometimes you flip a coin and you get tails.

• 2:03:41Peter Diamandis?

  Along that line, one of my pet peeves has been so many incredible people who have created on a, you know, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:03:55Peter Diamandis?

  Who are sitting on the sidelines and not betting it to make the world a better place.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  You talk about the people who are cruising the Mediterranean on their yacht.

• 2:04:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've always wanted to take out a New York Times page, I hate the New York Times and all, all traditional media, but you know, these are the people who are working to make the world a better place. These are the people with the biggest yachts.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Brutal.

• 2:04:19Peter Diamandis?

  It is brutal.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  I've asked myself the similar question. I'm in, I'm in a group chat called the B-Boys Club. And it's all boys who have sold a company for at least a billion dollars. That's the, that's the, the membership criteria. It doesn't exclude women. Women would be allowed. It's just thus far only boys, only boys have applied. And so I, I've for years, like this goes back to when I sold my company, I got invited to the B-Boys Club and I've tried to shame people and said, guys, you have so much money. Why are you not doing what you know is the right thing to do with this capital? What, why are you not according to whatever your system of

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  values is? I'm not even saying do what I want you to do. Why aren't you doing what you know you should be doing? And some people, this is actually like they, they, I've had people tell me, you know, this really actually changed my thinking. Uh, I should be doing what I know is right. And there's other people who have said very clearly, you know what? Racing old vintage race cars is extremely fun Palmer. I've, I've, I've, I've paid my dues. I am not in it to, I, I, I'm not in it to, to, to, to stress like I used to when I started my company. And it's, my, my point to them is, are you, are you going to be, are you going to be Batman? Or are you going to be you? And I, I'm not saying you, everyone should become a vigilante crime fighter.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  But you don't, you, why wouldn't you use your resources to do the thing?

• 2:05:51Peter Diamandis?

  As well as your intelligence, right? Because money, giving away money is the easier part of it too.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  Well, money, intelligence and network and reputation. Why was I able to start Andor? Money was a small part of it. It was because I was able to raise further money. It's because people believed in me because I had, I was a proven founder. I had started a multi-billion dollar company. I had successfully exited. That makes it easier to recruit people. You're, you're right. These people, they're in a position that no amount of money alone could do. You could take some guy off the street, give him $10 billion and he won't be able to accomplish half of what some of these people would be able to accomplish. I, I, I, I don't want to pick anybody in the B-Boys Club, but, but like, but like, imagine what would happen if, oh, I don't know.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Who would, who, who, who would maybe be, be a good fit? Who's a tech founder who's, who's not really doing anything anymore?

• 2:06:45Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  Imagine that guy.

• 2:06:48Peter Diamandis?

  I've got examples. I mean, with

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  The thing is, I'm trying to

• 2:06:50Peter Diamandis?

  Hundred plus billion dollars and gone.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  What if they announced they were starting a new company to start, to solve some problem? And they were hiring the founding team and they were going to build another many billion dollar titan.

• 2:07:04Peter Diamandis?

  They would attract the greatest, you know, players on the planet.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  Instant.

• 2:07:07Peter Diamandis?

  Instantly.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's, well, that's almost a free resource. You don't even have to spend your money. Just you're, you're, you're just betting your reputation.

• 2:07:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:07:16Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the, the flip side of it is, what do you do? You leave your money to your kids to ruin their lives? Or what I love even, even more is the, is the irony of the giving pledge.

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:07:27Peter Diamandis?

  Which I, you know, I've had this conversation with Gates. I've not had it with others, but you're pledging to give half of your money to a nonprofit before you die. That could sit on the money and do nothing with it.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Well, you're, you're basically betting.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  I don't know, I might, I look, I hopefully I don't piss anybody off who's done the giving pledge. But the way that I look at it is when you pledge to give away your money, what you're really saying is, I think other people can do more good with my money than I can. I think that my view of the world will be more competently executed by others than myself. And on the one hand, I look, maybe there's people like that are like that for real. Maybe some of them, they are truly mentally not what they used to be, physically not what they used to be. But for many of these people, I think that they absolutely could achieve their goals better than handing it to a non-founder NGO to go and

• 2:08:28Peter Diamandis?

  Do a bunch of lawyers to go and

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:08:30Peter Diamandis?

  And so let me give you the, let me give you the

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  That's why I have, that's why I haven't done it.

• 2:08:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  My, my, my thinking is, look, I've, I've, I've got a view as to how the world should be. And I don't think that there's anyone else who's going to more faithfully execute on that than me.

• 2:08:46Peter Diamandis?

  So my proposal

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  When I'm all old and used up, maybe I'll change my mind.

• 2:08:49Peter Diamandis?

  Hopefully we'll have some good longevity products by then. But my view of the world is instead of that, I want people to, to do an impact pledge. Like I pledge to eliminate, you know, child slavery or, you know, hunger in this country and then

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Or dot or like, or, or, or bank, go bankrupt trying.

• 2:09:14Peter Diamandis?

  Or go, yeah, sure. And there are some amazing people, like, you know, Tony Robbins does this, you know, Mark, Mark Benioff does this and others. But where you, you call your shot.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:09:23Peter Diamandis?

  And then you invite others to come and join you. So imagine if you would sort of a list of all of the impacts around the world being taken.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  Well, you, and then you can measure the results by the quality of the outcome rather than the number of dollars put in. Right now it's, oh, well, he put, you know, a billion dollars into this thing. It's really hard to, it's really hard to track that outcome versus saying, I will end this disease. To be fair, I think Bill Gates has done

• 2:09:50Peter Diamandis?

  Bill Gates has done that for sure.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Despite being, signing the giving pledge, he has also gone and said, here's my stake. We're going to eliminate this disease. We are going to achieve this level of carbon capture per dollar. And that, that, that, that's actually, that's actually pretty cool.

• 2:10:05Peter Diamandis?

  It's very real. And for everybody else, for God's sakes, you know, and I know you'll do this and others, others have is commit yourself the well, I mean, because you can only spend so much money in your lifetime.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:23Peter Diamandis?

  You know, so we have the ability to do such extraordinary things as humans and solve so many problems.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Especially in the time we live in.

• 2:10:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  You ever, I mean, I know you do, like, it's so great to wake up and realize, wow, there are things that I can do today, almost trivially easily, that would have been the work of a lifetime, just a few decades ago. Isn't that, isn't that extraordinary?

• 2:10:46Peter Diamandis?

  The stuff you did between breakfast and lunch would qualify you as a god a hundred years ago.

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  Yep, it's, it's, it, it, it's so easy to lose sight of that when you fall into, you know, the human routine and, and, and you say, I have these, I have these problems, you know, I'm struggling, I'm struggling to deal with this situation, I'm having this family problem.

• 2:11:04Peter Diamandis?

  And those are all very true.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  It's all very true, it, it doesn't mean they don't, they aren't real, but, but it's, there are some people who feel like, oh, man, where I was born in the wrong generation. I can't imagine being born.

• 2:11:15Peter Diamandis?

  Any other time, this is, the only time more exciting today is tomorrow.

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Of course, you know, I have, I, I, I like to, you know, it's, it's fun to imagine, you know, what if, to be born in the age of exploration, you know?

• 2:11:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  What must have that have been, been like?

• 2:11:27Peter Diamandis?

  That's the only other time.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  But, but even then, I don't think I would make, I don't think I would make the trade.

• 2:11:33Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know, I could see you in an eye patch and a sword.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  I, I, I could, I, I mean, look, what, what guy hasn't watched Master and Commander with his bros and said, oh, man, that is, that is something else, just would, would, you know, imagine us on the high seas, having adventures, how great would that be?

• 2:11:47Peter Diamandis?

  True, true discovery, not knowing what culture would be on that land over there.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Well, my plan is to die on one of the moons of Jupiter, right now, I've, I've reserved the right to change my plan, it's not like my life drive, I'm not like Elon where I must get to Mars, but I just, the thing I would like to do, all things being equal right now, would be not die on Earth, die on a reasonably colonized, reasonably terraformed, uh, moon of Jupiter or elsewhere in our solar system.

• 2:12:15Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Um, I feel like, I feel like setting my sights on another solar system, it's, it's a bit much.

• 2:12:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the Jovi and moons have really high radiation belts there, so you might.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  Just, look, if you have enough nukes, it's not a problem, just generate a synthetic magnetic field, bam, you're all set.

• 2:12:29Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's that easy, but I'm just making, I'm just making it up on the fly. I'm sure people a lot smarter than me are going to figure it out, but I'm going to need to make a lot of money. If I'm going to need to buy Jovian real estate, I think, I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be a, I think it's going to be in high demand in our lifetime.

• 2:12:44Peter Diamandis?

  Pomeriville, I love it.

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, I want to live in a nice, a nice, a nice gated, nice gated Jovian community with a, with a nice HOA, making sure that the oxygen stays on, make sure that our, you know, make sure our plutonium prices aren't through the roof.

• 2:12:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  That's, that's the type of the world I hope I get to live in.

• 2:13:02Peter Diamandis?

  Bouncing around, flying.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I'm a one G guy, one G, I want one G, I want, I want, I want my full bone density. I want, I want my normal metabolic process, maybe like a point nine G, that could be kind of fun. But uh, having read up on the impacts of low G, I'm, I'm.

• 2:13:15Peter Diamandis?

  Have you ever, uh, you know Gerard K O'Neil and the work that he did at Princeton? So he designed these large rotating, um, uh, space colonies that were basically cylinders.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm familiar with most of the weird designs. You got tin cans on strings, you got the big rings, you got the big cylinders.

• 2:13:32Peter Diamandis?

  The beautiful thing of course is, uh, you know, at the center of rotation, there's zero gravity on the outside. There's one gravity. So as you get older, you could sort of move up a mountainside.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  That's a fun idea.

• 2:13:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  You know, I had a, I had a thought for a, a reality television program at one point. Um, it's called Fat Flight and it's, you've seen my 600 pound life. It's, it's, it's a show about people who are 600 pounds or more and, and they try to mode, it's, they're trying to motivate them to lose weight, exercise, get gastro bypass surgery, you know, like regain control of their lives. I had an idea for a, a show called Fat Flight and you would take really, really obese people and to give them motivation. These people who like are immobile, they can't even walk around and you would put them on one of those zero gravity flights.

• 2:14:16Peter Diamandis?

  I did that.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  You did this?

• 2:14:18Peter Diamandis?

  I did this. So.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:14:19Peter Diamandis?

  So, I mean, you know, I founded Zero G.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:22Peter Diamandis?

  Right? The commercial operator here. And there was a television show called The Biggest Loser.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  I'm familiar, yeah, okay. I don't watch it frequently, but I'm familiar with it.

• 2:14:31Peter Diamandis?

  And it was for people losing.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:14:33Peter Diamandis?

  And we took at the beginning of their season, we took, I think it was eight. Biggest loser candidates who are, you know, 300 pounds higher into zero G.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  Ah, so here's what I wanted to do. I want to put them in a zero G plane, build a living room in the plane, and then you would fly on a like 0.1G or 0.2G so they can stand up and they can walk around and experience normal life. Imagine what it would be like if you could walk again.

• 2:15:01Peter Diamandis?

  We gave them 16G.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Oh, that okay.

• 2:15:03Peter Diamandis?

  We gave them lunar gravity.

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  You already did this then.

• 2:15:06Peter Diamandis?

  You can go find the episode someplace.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  Man, see, this is, this is, this is, this is, uh, this is very much aligning with what I usually say, which is none of the ideas I've ever come up with or something that someone hasn't already done before. You've, you've already, you've already done it. You've already done fat flight. Bummer.

• 2:15:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, my favorite, my favorite flight of, you know, I did hundreds of flights. My favorite flight was taking Stephen Hawking up into zero G.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  That's gotta be fun.

• 2:15:27Peter Diamandis?

  That was, that was extraordinary.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  How did it end up? How did it end up being a 727 that you guys bought? Cause that's always, that's my favorite airplane. I, I wanna, I wanna fly around myself in one someday, but haven't figured it out yet.

• 2:15:37Peter Diamandis?

  So it was interesting. We, um, we looked at 737s, we looked at 767s, and the wide bodies were too expensive for us. The 737, uh, was, the problem was that the fuel lines between the wing tanks and the engines were very short. The 727 had three advantages. It had the rear air stairs, right? Which I love them because we could load and unload there.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  And you don't need any infrastructure wherever you're taking off from.

• 2:16:07Peter Diamandis?

  Wherever we go. Uh, we had centerline thrust, so three engines in the 727, so engine one, two, and three. So when we're going into a parabolic flight, we'd take engines one and three, take it back to neutral, and we would just throttle engine two to have the perfect amount of, uh, of thrust overcoming drag. And then the third thing was that the fuel lines.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  It would be a huge control problem when you're especially like in descent to have two 737 engines and match them up just so.

• 2:16:35Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. And then the fuel line between the tanks in the wings and the engines were long enough that during the zero G portion, the fuel in the lines fed the engines and you didn't run out.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  I see.

• 2:16:50Peter Diamandis?

  And, um, so all those three things. And then the final thing, our original business model was we were going to be using, uh, Uh, we call it sort of cargo airplanes and palletized interiors. So cargo airplanes fly, you know, FedEx, DHL were flying at night.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:17:08Peter Diamandis?

  And the airplanes were sitting on the ground during the day.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  Well, and in fact, I think like UPS, I think has a whole fleet of seven, uh, seven two sevens that sit at Ontario airport, not used for most of the year. They only use them during a holiday season. So they're just, they're sitting unused.

• 2:17:22Peter Diamandis?

  So I went to try and negotiate with all of the, all of the players out there and, uh, and finally said, no, we gotta buy our own plane. So we fell in love with the seven point seven, the same way you did.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful plane. It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's kind of like.

• 2:17:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's a brick shithouse.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Well, and it's, it's, it was made by a Boeing that knew how to really make airplanes for pilots. And I mean, it's fast too. You can cruise at Mach point nine seven.

• 2:17:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it's a great airplane.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  What, what, we have one, what an incredible plane. I'm, I, it's my, it's my dream to own a seven two seven. And then put Volvo RM eights on it, which was a licensed built derivative in Europe of the Pratt and Whitney, I think JT 18D.

• 2:18:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  PT 18D? No, I can't, I, anyway, there, there was a version of the engine in the seven two seven, the, one of the later engines. And it, the difference was it was built by Volvo with an afterburner on it.

• 2:18:13Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  And so it would be a direct one-to-one swap and I could have a seven two seven with triple after burning engines. I, I, I think that would be the.

• 2:18:21Peter Diamandis?

  A fire plume out the back of a rocket ship.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  Wouldn't that be the coolest plane ever? And that the only runner up would be a, I don't know, but, but air, uh, uh, Aromex or Air Mexico. They had seven two sevens with real FAA certified rocket boosters. Have you seen these?

• 2:18:37Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  So when they would take off hot and heavy out of Mexico City and an engine went out, they wouldn't be able to maintain altitude. So what they did is they actually built, they solid rocket boosters only to be activated by an emergency pull in the cockpit. And they could pull them. And I think it was four boosters would allow it to, and the FAA certified this, which is so cool. So, but one of my dream, they would never certify it today, but one of my dreams is to find one of those old Aromex seven two sevens and restore it because all of those, uh, all those STCs would be wavered, grandfathered in. And I would then have a, a nice, a nice, you know, nice radio assist seven two seven. That'd be pretty cool.

• 2:19:18Peter Diamandis?

  Small aside, what are you flying these days?

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  So I'm mostly a rotary wing pilot. I own a few helicopters, got a UH-60 Blackhawk, I have an Augusta Robinson.

• 2:19:29Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  I

• 2:19:31Peter Diamandis?

  When can, when can lattice become operational for pilots?

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  Oh, already.

• 2:19:37Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, no, no, no.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, commercial pilots.

• 2:19:40Peter Diamandis?

  I want, I want my heads up display. I want, I want to be able to see fields in the distance. I want to see air. It's like the entire ATC system is so ridiculously broken.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  I, look, I have to admit, one of the non-military problems I would love to work on would be modernizing ATC.

• 2:19:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  It's unclear exactly what's going to happen. President Trump has said he's going to build a beautiful system like nothing anyone's ever seen. I would love to be part of that. I'm not sure if it will end up making sense for us to do so. But I mean, to your point, we should be giving pilots full synthetic vision, full awareness. They should know everything that's going on. You should never have, for example, military helicopters running into, into aircraft. No, it's just, it's, that's, that's, that, we shouldn't be getting within, it shouldn't even be within the realm of possibility of that happening. And it's kind of crazy that with all the tech that we have, that the things like that are still happening. So we were building things for the military that I think are oriented around

• 2:20:43Speaker 01

  avoiding those types of situations. Day, night, weather, you name it. I would love to see that tech fall in the civilian side.

• 2:20:49Peter Diamandis?

  That is one place I think tech could flow back into the commercial world.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  That, that, that's one where I think it could. And I think the way I would justify it is these, these things are operating in close proximity. You know, like if I, making, making manned aviation safer and commercial aviation safer does actually make military aviation safer. The two are so closely intertwined in terms of operating out of the same airfields, operating out of the same airports, using a lot of the same support infrastructure. So safer airports make for a safer military. So that's, that's maybe how I'll justify doing something I wanted to do anyway.

• 2:21:24Peter Diamandis?

  Buddy, listen, thank you for your time today.

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  No, this has been a lot of fun. And thanks to everybody who sent in questions. It's, it's, it's, it's fun to

• 2:21:30Peter Diamandis?

  I have a long, a long list, but I figure it's, it's a good place to break. And just outside of these, our media room that we're in, our beautiful Devices connected by lattice.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Well, their form follows their function.

• 2:21:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  It's very interesting how a lot of the things that we build end up following natural form. It turns, people say, oh, wow, you know, this looks like, you know, some, you know, some sleek, you know, sleek predator. It's like, well, it turns out that predators have certain characteristics inherent and it doesn't matter whether biological or technological. It turns out a lot of them share the same characteristics, whether they're moving through air, water, or, or land.

• 2:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It was, I remember I was with Bert Rutan at Scales Composites and he was putting up an equation for drag and, and he added a term to the equation for drag, C sub D sub B. And, and like, what is that? And he goes, it's the coefficient of drag due to beauty.

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  Hey, good looking airplanes are good flying airplanes.

• 2:22:32Peter Diamandis?

  Anyway.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 2:22:34Peter Diamandis?

  Always a pleasure, pal. Thank you. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmantis.com/subscribe. That's dmantis.com/subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.

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