464: Palmer Luckey—The Department of War Has a Mullet

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

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

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Hello friends, it's Mike Rowe. This is The Way I Heard It. My guest today is a young man who I had the pleasure to meet serendipitously some months ago at an energy summit sponsored by our podcast's good friend Alex Epstein. Chuck, you were there as well, as I recall.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I was, yes. I was quite fascinated by Palmer and I was so glad. I've been trying to get him on the podcast ever since and thankfully, he was able to be here today.

• 0:32Mike Rowe?

  Palmer Lucky, if you're unfamiliar, is, I think he's 33 years old.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:37Mike Rowe?

  He was just a boy, like many boys, obsessed with video games and computers and his hobby got out of hand and he came up with this idea called Oculus and Mark Zuckerberg bought it for $2.2 billion. And so, young Palmer wound up with a lot of ready cash.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  A lot of jack.

• 0:56Mike Rowe?

  Lot of duxan jingoa.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Woo, shekels raining down and he was just a young man. I think it was like, he was 20 or 22 when that sale went down and then they fired him.

• 1:06Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you know, he, well, he was a young man and he heard some things he liked coming out of the mouth of one Donald Trump, of all people, and donated a modest amount, like $9,000, I think, to a PAC. Anyway, yeah, Facebook hated that, fired him.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe he got even though.

• 1:30Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know, it worked out for him and, you know, he and Mark are friends again and he doesn't seem to hold a grudge with anything, but what this guy's done is launch a company called Andoril. And this company is a part of the industrial military complex. They're worth billions of dollars and he makes drones and uses AI to create autonomous weapons that the Department of War is seriously enamored of. So obviously, I wanted to talk to him about that, but as you'll hear, it doesn't much matter what I want to do. When Palmer Lucky is in the room, he comes in hot. I'm so glad and really grateful that he came at all.

• 2:15Mike Rowe?

  He's as busy as you might imagine a defense contractor would be.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  He flew himself here in a helicopter.

• 2:22Mike Rowe?

  Right, with a giant bodyguard, a giant of a man. I won't use his name for security reasons.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Nice guy, that was my second time meeting him because, you know, they did in advance last week.

• 2:34Mike Rowe?

  Oh, they came here?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Well, he did, yeah.

• 2:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, Palmer doesn't skimp when it comes to security. And when it comes to this country's security, he's deadly serious. He's not serious about a great many other things. In fact, this episode is called "The Department of War Has A Mullet", because Palmer Lucky does.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Man, he rocks that mullet, I'm serious, that's a good head of hair.

• 2:55Mike Rowe?

  It's, I mean, honestly, if I had a head of hair like that, I'd probably go with a mullet for a while.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Why not, man?

• 3:00Mike Rowe?

  Why not?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Luxurious locks in the back.

• 3:03Mike Rowe?

  His standard uniform is a Hawaiian shirt and like board shorts usually with sandals of some kind or flip flops. Today, because he flew his helicopter, he's got these special shoes with individual spaces for each toe.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a glove for your feet.

• 3:24Mike Rowe?

  I don't think I'm overstating it. It's certainly a stream of consciousness, but it's one of the most, one of the more intelligent conversations that I've had. I knew it would be, but I had no idea the zigs and zags it would take from the ring of power to the aforementioned gloves for your feet. It's a homeostatic risk, to the very clear and present dangers that we face as a country, and to the absolutely deadly weapons this guy's making.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  And he's dead serious about protecting this country. It's obvious he really loves this country. And as serpentine as the conversation was, don't be fooled, he's a deep, deep thinker who really, really considers things. He has a lot of very interesting ideas, and he gets them like that.

• 4:14Mike Rowe?

  That's not to say you'll agree with every single thing you're about to hear, but in the aggregate, if you don't walk away liking this guy, well, I don't know what's wrong with you. Palmer Lucky, the Department of War has a mullet, right after this.

• 4:29Speaker 02

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• 5:01Mike Rowe?

  Gavin is Bobby Kennedy's oldest, oldest friend, who did security for, I don't know, three presidents. I think, I think he's currently on Jeff Bezos.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Well, that must have been, three presidents has gotta, gotta be a pretty interesting time.

• 5:17Mike Rowe?

  Dude, his stories, you, I'm surprised your paths haven't crossed. He's, he's about 70 now, and he's sat here a couple of times. And he's one of those guys, you, you just say, how's it going? And then two hours later, you're like, you gotta be shitting me. You did that? He guarded Elizabeth Taylor. He, I mean, this is a story after story after story. Wrote a great book called, The Gift of Fear.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Interesting. How long did he write it?

• 5:44Mike Rowe?

  25 years.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Okay. So before his Jeff Bezos time?

• 5:48Mike Rowe?

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

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Interesting. Forbidden facts. I gotta check this out. I've got a whole category of stuff that I follow that are different forbidden facts.

• 6:12Mike Rowe?

  Oh, I bet you do.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, um, did you know that it is illegal to market devices that use electrical stimulation as burning calories? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a rule that goes back to the, to the 1960s, 1970s. And the problem is that there are lots of devices that use electrical stimulation that burn lots of calories. And so it's like, have you ever used like a TENS unit? You know, like where you're getting rehabilitation?

• 6:42Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  So that's burning calories. And remember, it's triggering your muscles.

• 6:46Mike Rowe?

  And that's illegal.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  And so, of course, they're burning calories. And there's people who use similar things to do various like rehabilitation, muscle toning. But if you were to say, here is my product, here's my device, and it burns this many calories per hour when used in this way, here are 100 peer-reviewed clinical trials that are, that prove that this is the case. The government says you can't say that. That's not allowed. That's forbidden.

• 7:15Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Because it is illegal to market electrical stimulation devices as burning calories. Now, the reason that is, there were devices that were scams.

• 7:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Back then, and they didn't really work. But even then, they were burning calories, but they weren't, you know, really safe. And so it's like, well, wait a sec. The safety or efficacy of those devices shouldn't have impact on whether you're allowed to say something that's true.

• 7:35Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's the double whammy. Safe and effective.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Right. And then, just like the vaccine.

• 7:41Mike Rowe?

  That's exactly it. Well, but almost every, every controversial thing has some combination of those two terms.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 7:49Mike Rowe?

  Over top of it.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's things that are even...

• 7:52Mike Rowe?

  Are we, are we rolling?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're rolling.

• 7:54Mike Rowe?

  Oh, good.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's very interesting.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  That's one of those interesting things. It's just like, you are not allowed to state that true fact. It is, it is a true fact that you are prohibited from saying, because they think it might lead to bad things happening. And I've always wished that one of these companies would pursue this, not on, like, they should pursue it on First Amendment grounds.

• 8:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. But see, that's the magical part of the language, right?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:17Mike Rowe?

  It's like, words, phrases, it's like, the, we all know it, but the act of uttering the thing.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:24Mike Rowe?

  Saying the thing.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Well, another interesting example is, you'll have... You know, in California, you're not allowed to take certain factors into your hiring. And without getting into all of them, like, one of the most interesting ones to me has always been age. And, you know, I'm playing with fire here as someone who's So what, he's 33? Well, You're hired. Well, for my age, it's fine, but I'm in a hiring firing authority, running, running a company and running here in California. And without getting into the specifics of it, and without me making any particular claims, suppose that science showed, not that old people are better or young people are better, let's just say it demonstrated that old people have superior performance at certain tasks.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  And suppose that young people showed superior performance at certain other tasks. Now, if you were to say this in the context of a baseball team, everyone would agree with you. Of course. Everyone would say, oh, I mean, you, this is, this is like the easiest kind of commentary. Oh, man, you know, this is last year, he hasn't been keeping his numbers up, his contract's not getting renewed. Why? It's his age. And his age, it doesn't mean, and they'll, and they'll, they'll talk through, they'll say, he's got the strategy, he knows what to do, he knows how to get people's head, but he just doesn't have the footwork that he used to, he doesn't have the arm strength that he used to. Right. But then all of a sudden, you do this in the context of an engineering firm, or really, any other business, to even imply that perhaps

• 9:46Speaker 03

  there are certain areas where people of one age would do better, and sort of, you can't, it's illegal. They, they would say, well, this is indicative of illegal hiring practices. I might be able to say, I believe this is the case, and the science showed this is the case. And then when they say, and have you ever made a hiring decision on the basis of this information that is scientifically confirmed and proven in fact, you have to say, no, of course not. Of course not. I would never act on this information that is inarguably true, and everyone knows it at a, at like a common sense level, at a scientific level, at a, even social commentary ever understands. You ever, you ever heard, you heard this guy says, oh, man, I can't pull these long nights like I used to. Right. People themselves realize this. I mean, I realize that I'm weaker at things that I used to be better at.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  When I started my first company, Oculus, when I was 19 years old, there's things I could do then, that I can't do today. Not that I would ever make a business. Business decision based on that fact, but

• 10:40Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  This idea of

• 10:41Mike Rowe?

  You just can't point it out. If you're the employer, you can't point that out. You can know it, but you can't say it. No one can say it.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  And anyone can throw it in your face and you can't acknowledge it. So you're familiar with the concept of like a lot of Soviet propaganda, where the point wasn't really to trick people into believing it. It was to force them to acknowledge propaganda that was obviously untrue. In fact, that was how you showed the power. The power of the state propaganda apparatus was such that you couldn't deny these things that were being said, even though you, everyone knew that they weren't true. It's a similar thing. They can say, oh, so are you saying you've ever acted in this obvious way that you would on these obvious facts? And you have to bend the knee and say, no, of course not.

• 11:23Mike Rowe?

  That's Hans Christian Andersen. That's the emperor's new clothes.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:27Mike Rowe?

  Right? What do you mean he's naked? You can't say he's naked.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  That's right. And the thing is, there's people who know it.

• 11:32Mike Rowe?

  It takes a kid.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  They could throw it in your face and force you to perform the ritual.

• 11:35Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Perform the ritual for us.

• 11:37Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Say that you refuse to acknowledge the reality. And I want to stay in business, so.

• 11:42Mike Rowe?

  So the more you can get an otherwise sensible person to say that the clearly naked man

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:47Mike Rowe?

  Isn't naked, the more of something truly fundamental you take

• 11:52Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 11:52Mike Rowe?

  From that person, you whittle them down to a single dimension. Until pretty soon, you're saying, yes, the man who just won that medal, who's standing on the podium, who's, who's, who's phallus is clearly visible is not a man. I'll, I admit, I'll say it out loud.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Did you see the, you see the South Park about the transgender sports issue? And this was before it was really actually a pretty big issue.

• 12:15Mike Rowe?

  Greatest satire, I think of all time. It'll surely be remembered.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And for people who aren't familiar, they have Macho Man Randy Savage.

• 12:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  That was before he passed. Um, and, and he, he gets on, he's, he's just Macho Man Randy Savage. And he just beats up a bunch of women and beats them bloody. And then the reporter is going up to all the women and he says, and Randy Savage, he's, he's a, that's a real woman, right? They're like, yes.

• 12:40Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  And you, you don't have any concerns? Cause he's, he's a real woman, right? She says, yeah, yeah, he is.

• 12:46Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  And you know, it's, it's the, it's the act of.

• 12:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, isn't that, it's, you know, but hold on. I had not even.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  You came in hot, dude. Randy Savage says, I'm not here to talk about my transition. I'm here to kick some ass.

• 13:02Mike Rowe?

  Palmer Lucky came in hot. I appreciate it. A helicopter?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I flew in, um, I own a few helicopters, but today I flew my Eurocopter EC120, although now it's owned by Airbus.

• 13:14Mike Rowe?

  You flew it?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I flew it. So I'm a, I flew it with a copilot. I'm a-

• 13:18Mike Rowe?

  So you're still under some level of supervision?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  I'm on, look, when you get to a certain level of responsibility, uh, it's irresponsible to not spend a little money and have somebody who's a lot better at it than you. And I'm, like, I'm, I'm an okay beginner helicopter pilot. I am not competent enough to be flying around on my own. Uh, if I could, I'd bring a copilot on my motorcycle, but I can't.

• 13:38Mike Rowe?

  See, that's the level of disclosure and honesty I'd like to hear on a, on, on United or American Airlines. As I'm strapping in, right, I'd just like to hear the guy up front, or the woman, just level with me, you know? Uh, this is my second year. I, I feel pretty good. I think I've got room for improvement and I appreciate you guys letting me work through some of the bugs here.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Well, and it's helpful and they could say, and the guy, and I'm the copilot and the captain has, you know, 40 years of experience. That's what people want to hear.

• 14:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Somebody's, we want the warm milk that says, you know what? It's gonna be okay. Somebody's got an eye on you. Ignore the sirens outside. It adds to the verisimilitude. But, um, it's funny, the first time I met you, I think it was, it must've been nine months ago. Alex Epstein in Newport, it was the energy conference.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 14:25Mike Rowe?

  Now, I don't know if you remember this, you arrived at that event on a motorcycle.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  I did. I do remember that.

• 14:30Mike Rowe?

  Dude, you were wearing what I think may have been a jacket made of copper.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  That's, that's right. Actually, it's so funny. I, I don't even wear it all that often. And I wore it on Joe Rogan and I wore it on that motorcycle. I'm actually not sure I wore it more than once or twice between those events a year apart. It's funny that that jacket comes up yet again.

• 14:52Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean-

• 14:53Speaker 03

  You know, it's really cool, though.

• 14:55Mike Rowe?

  It's what they call sui generis, right? It's a one of a kind, I would assume, unless you shop at a copper store.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Now, there's a company called Vollebak, V-O-L-L-E-B-A-K. And they make a bunch of really interesting, like, think of it as like clothing from the future out of really novel materials. And a lot of those are very novel performance characteristics. Like, they make one out of like carbon fiber and dinema thread. And it's like, it's like an ultralight set of pants that weighs nothing, but it's as strong as any motorcycle suit sliding on the ground. They make a jacket out of the same material used for the supersonic parachutes that landed the Mars rovers on Mars. So like, really, really strong Kevlar-backed stuff.

• 15:39Mike Rowe?

  There it is.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is, yeah, this is, this is some new thing. The Martian aerogel jacket. Let's even, let's read what the aerogel jacket is. I don't even know what this is.

• 15:48Mike Rowe?

  What is aerogel?

• 15:49Speaker 03

  So aerogel is a compound that was invented by NASA. You do a hydrated silica, and then they remove all of the moisture. And you're left with a, basically a gel with no moisture. And it is one of the strongest per unit weight things there is, mostly because it's so light. But mostly, it's extremely good at insulation. It weighs nothing, and it has extremely powerful insulation. See, I'll scroll down. What does it say about it? Built with the same advanced aerogel in parachutes that land rovers on Mars.

• 16:18Mike Rowe?

  There you go.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  They do some really cool stuff like that.

• 16:20Mike Rowe?

  Look at the expression on this guy's face, Chuck. Scroll up a little more. I don't know what to make of a model who assumes such an odd mix of insouciance, confusion, deliberate five o'clock shadow, and malaise.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Well, you know, when you get into the world of fashion, there's a lot of things that are hard to explain. But one of the things I like about this is like, clearly, there's some momentum. It's like a fashion play. It's just cool. But I do like that all of it is also driven by the actual technical material science. You know, these things are actually better. I've never liked Fashion for the sake of fashion, nearly as much as fashion for the sake of functionality. Like I'm wearing these, my five finger shoes.

• 16:59Mike Rowe?

  Well, at least they're not, I mean, I was expecting flip flops. That's the standard.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  So this is the thing, I normally do wear flip flops, but in this case I had to fly my helicopter. And so I want to get some, I want to wear shoes that are fire retardant in case I crash. I don't want my shoes melting in my feet in case, you know, you have to step through some fire. I needed something that is really flexible, really thin, so I can feel the pedals really well. It's important to be able to operate the foot controls in a helicopter even more so than an airplane. And so I'm not wearing these for fashion reasons. I'm wearing them for, for, for function reasons and that's, that's the best kind of fashion.

• 17:32Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's the more, it's the more type of disclosure I'd like to hear again, from the average pilot getting me from here to there. You know, you'll be relieved to know folks that my footwear is made out of a space age polymer material. So if I have to walk through fire, I'm going to be okay.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I would love that.

• 17:47Speaker 04

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• 18:17Speaker 03

  This is another one of those things that edges on the idea of forbidden, but um, you know, you could, you could look at statistical averages on, you know, who, who gets into crashes. Like, you know, like based on their flight hours and their training and where they went to school. You could probably build a pretty decent statistical model of which planes are safer to fly on. And I mean, not I mean, I don't mean the aircraft, I mean literally like which flights.

• 18:41Mike Rowe?

  Now that would be.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Because I'd pay more to be on a flight that was that was at the upper at the upper limits of what's the safest aircraft, the particular one in the fleet that's never had a grounded a grounding error.

• 18:55Mike Rowe?

  So if people could book based on the safety record, both of the equipment and the pilot that you know, you're going to get, well, you'd have total chaos because that that would mean every single thing in the experience is ranked.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:11Mike Rowe?

  And you would have to adjust the price, I suppose. You get the crappiest equipment with the worst pilot.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 19:17Mike Rowe?

  You know it now and you paid less.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  You know, honestly, I, now that you've said it out loud like that, I know what the outcome would be. It wouldn't be that people pay for the safest. They would just still what they want today, which is the cheapest flight.

• 19:29Mike Rowe?

  The cheapest would just roll the dice.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, like one of the thought experiments I've always pondered is.

• 19:34Mike Rowe?

  All the available pilots are drunk, so it's $9.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah.

• 19:40Mike Rowe?

  From here to the East Coast.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  The one of the one of the things I've always pondered is what if TSA was optional? Like suppose that you said, hey, you can buy a, you can, you can either go to, you know, the TSA process, or you could do the no TSA process and it's somewhat cheaper and a lot faster to get onto the plane without TSA. What would people choose? And what I've found is that it tends to be, it tends to be that most people would, would, would be just fine with danger air. Well, I remember we did this for a long time, you know, it's like, it's like, the question isn't so much, do you think that, you do you think that it's better to have security or not? It's do you think the security is there is going to catch any of the bad things that actually do happen, right? You have to, you have to believe, you have to

• 20:24Speaker 03

  believe that you should have security and that also the security will catch things. Because I know people who say, oh yeah, there should be security.

• 20:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  I just don't think TSA can catch any of the things that matter. And so it's basically, you know, it's, it's a waste.

• 20:36Mike Rowe?

  It's a different argument. You're saying. One extreme or the other.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:40Mike Rowe?

  So let's take guns, right? Would you rather be in a stadium where everybody was armed?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:46Mike Rowe?

  Or nobody was armed? Now, in reality, there's never been such a stadium.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 20:52Mike Rowe?

  Which is why you've got anxiety and uncertainty.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:57Mike Rowe?

  I'd take my chances on the plane where nobody went through TSA, because every single person on the plane basically was weighed and measured.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:05Mike Rowe?

  In the same way. That's what the TSA tries to do now.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:09Mike Rowe?

  But the price for that sameness involves endless humiliations from your shoes to the gropings and the cavity searches and all of it. But don't you think in the end it's the squishy middle that always jacks us up, leaves us disappointed and frustrated? And also creates opportunities for guys like you to capitalize on some sort of inefficiency?

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I think it does create opportunities. Where it gets tricky, of course, is where it's tied to legislation, especially where it can get very prescriptive. You know, there's certain areas where you can innovate relatively freely. And those tend to be the areas that see the most innovation, right? There's a reason that I think the internet and social media and all these things got so much investment. It was partly because those were nascent technological spaces. It was also because there were basically no rules. You could just do anything.

• 22:01Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Whereas, you know, one of my, one example of this is with, is with like automobiles. There's a lot of safety devices that are legal in other places, like automatic steering headlights. And they're just not legal here in the United States yet. And eventually, usually, we catch up with these things.

• 22:18Mike Rowe?

  Automatic steering, you mean headlights that give it as you turn?

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So they can, they can basically, you know, keep more, like imagine if you're going around a tight turn, your headlights are pointing forward. Now you can't see anything in the inside of the turn. They solved this in Europe a while ago. I don't usually give kudos to Europe, but this is one, the one thing. But uh

• 22:38Mike Rowe?

  Croissants.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, croissants are good too. Well, that was a long time ago. I've got a whole theory that a lot of these European nations are kind of living in graveyards where they're like monuments to their forbears who invented the croissants. But like another example is seatbelts. People wonder why seatbelt technology hasn't advanced and why we haven't had something that like replaces seatbelts. And the answer is that when seatbelts were being first introduced, there were actually active research and development programs around things like total immobilizers based on airbag technology, on cars that had that had just different schemes for protecting someone in a crash. But then Congress passed legislation that required all cars to have a seatbelt. And a seatbelt is defined in extremely specific way. It's a three-point

• 23:23Speaker 03

  harness. It does this. It does that. For example, this is my favorite example, race cars. Those guys are not using three-point harnesses. They're using four-point, five-point harnesses.

• 23:33Mike Rowe?

  Seven.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  And why are they doing that? Because it's safer. And I've heard people say, well, so like I have a buddy of mine who has a car and it has a five-point harness in it and it has a three-point seatbelt in it. Why? Because if he gets pulled over on the highway, wearing his inarguably scientifically proven to be safer five-point harness, well, that doesn't meet the definition of a seatbelt. You're supposed to on the highway be wearing that three-point harness. And so this is one of those things that kills innovation. Why would GM or Ford invest billions in a new safety technology that would replace a seatbelt when the law says you have to have a seatbelt? And here's exactly what a seatbelt is. It's anyway, but the point is, these tightly regulated spaces, it's where

• 24:16Speaker 03

  you see the least innovation, which is why I'm crazy for starting a company in the defense space because it's so highly regulated.

• 24:22Mike Rowe?

  And yet, well, right. But look, it's that you're talking about the the trap of doing it right.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 24:29Mike Rowe?

  In other words, just because you're in compliance, doesn't mean you're out of danger.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 24:35Mike Rowe?

  The theory, as I understand it, goes back to something called homeostatic risk or risk equilibrium or compensatory risk, right? And this, I'd love to get your take on this, because it's an ethema to OSHA. But it basically says that everybody in that same stadium, I just. Hypothesized has a different capacity for risk.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 24:59Mike Rowe?

  They process it differently.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 25:01Mike Rowe?

  And a lot of this is subliminal, but the unintended consequence of introducing various mandates and safety protocols will make you safer environmentally, but emotionally you will compensate. So now you know you're safer because your seatbelt's on, your helmet's on, you're locked in five points. Every study indicates that the driver who feels that way will accelerate, corner more tightly.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:33Mike Rowe?

  And take more chances, not on purpose, but because your brain is trying to get back to some sort of equilibrium that is only pegged to your individual tastes and everybody's.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 25:47Mike Rowe?

  Protocols are different.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Well, there's a, there's a pretty good proposal on how this should be handled that's been proposed at the NHTSA, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration level. So NHTSA and DOT have had this idea proposed before and I actually am a supporter of it. It's that you should measure the safety of vehicles based on the actual observed outcomes rather than hypothetical compliance to the points you just made. In other, in other words, right now, they say, do you have a safety backup camera? Can you survive a crash of this speed in this way if such a crash occurs? And they say, well, you have the seatbelt, you have the crash test safety rating, therefore this is a safe car. Well, what if for unrelated factors, other factors, some of the factors you're talking about, what if people take more risk

• 26:33Speaker 03

  in these cars? What if, for example, one of my favorites, what if in building an SUV to survive a crash event better, you make it more likely to get in a crash because it has worse handling, less ability to brake? Well, you don't get penalized for that. NHTSA doesn't give you bonus points for being able to avoid a crash. They only give you points for being able to survive a crash. So naturally you'll have cars that are designed to hit this checklist. Now, what would cars look like if they were designed to, you know, the kind of this homeostasis theory that you're positing? What if you said, we're just going to look at the total. Outcome total and what are the fatality and injury rates associated with this model of vehicle? Or like even literally like we're going to look at a Honda Odyssey. Like what, what are the risks associated with? And what if they pace regulations on that?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  I think that'd be a lot healthier and like the theoretical win here in the long run is imagine if I as an innovator could make a car where it has terrible crash test safety ratings, right? It cannot survive a crash at all, but I proved that through psychological changes and maybe better maneuverability, maybe automated braking systems or even steering systems that get you out of accidents. What if you could prove that it gets in a 10th of the accidents? And therefore still has a higher survival rate than this big giant beastly tank that survives more crashes, but also gets in more. But nobody looks at it this way at a regulatory level. And so this is, that's, it's just another area.

• 27:56Mike Rowe?

  If they look at it that way, we go to where we just were, which is to say, wait, wait, wait. Now everybody has to have this fundamentally unsafe car. Because then everybody will realize that they're not going to survive a crash. Therefore you don't need speed limits anymore because everybody is going to compensate their risk equilibrium. But same argument, NFL, take away the helmets, more or less brain injury.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Well, right. Cause the theory is you give them the helmets and they're doing these, you know, they're using the helmets as weapons. Basically, yeah, they're slamming into each other 100%. Well, something else that people probably don't.

• 28:31Mike Rowe?

  Would you do that? Like, would you favor that knowing like the way, I'm trying to figure out how your brain works.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Well, look, I lean libertarian. So what I would say is that that'd be a voluntary contract that you could enter into. I think if somebody wants to enter into a contract that has a 50% chance of them suffering brain injury over the course of their career, they should be allowed to do it. And I have people who fight back on this. They say, Palmer, how could you be? Everyone's life is sacred and shouldn't we protect that? Say, okay, but, but I mean, you look at the fatality rates for like EMS helicopter pilots. It's something like one in 30 of them will die over the course of their career. And I mean, that's, that's insane. That's, that's an extraordinarily high rate. And it's not because these are crazy people. It's because it's a dangerous job. And so then the question, and people say, well, that's to save lives, you know, that doesn't count, right? But my point is, look, racing cars is dangerous, racing motorcycles

• 29:22Speaker 03

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

• 30:03Mike Rowe?

  I'm just interested, though, but look, that fundamental problem that I think we're talking about and around gets applied from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it's certainly applicable in defense contracting, it's certainly applicable in the fact that the most dangerous intersections in the world are the ones with the little man who tells you when to walk. The ones with no lights are very safe.

• 30:27Speaker 04

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• 30:58Speaker 03

  There is an exception here, which is maybe something to introduce to the conversation, which is, these things actually vary, not just person by person, but also state by state, and country by country, so like... There's a, have you ever been to, um, have you been, ever been to the Shibuya scramble in, in, in Japan?

• 31:16Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  It's this five-way intersection. It's a famous insanely large intersection. It's got all the, you know, little walking man lights. And it's actually totally fine. It's totally fine because it's in Japan.

• 31:27Mike Rowe?

  Because it's in Japan.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Because it's in Japan.

• 31:29Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Have you been to the Kaiser's Grot in Amsterdam?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 31:32Mike Rowe?

  Okay. So, uh, two-way highway, fine. In between tram car.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:41Mike Rowe?

  That's interesting. On either side, bike lanes.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Wow. Takes a high-trust society to make that work.

• 31:49Mike Rowe?

  You have to be blessed and lucky to cross all six of these, right? Because each one, it's half a dozen ways to die.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And they're all moving at vastly different speeds, I imagine.

• 32:01Mike Rowe?

  Totally different speeds. So it's impossible to handicap or anticipate. It's so bad that there are no signs.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  You just have to figure it out.

• 32:09Mike Rowe?

  You, you, yep. There's no way anybody could try and take the responsibility to say, okay, now is good. You just can't. So, look, all of this, it's like the unintended consequences of force compliance. And where we started, if I remember, was basically how that impacts language.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 32:30Mike Rowe?

  And in a jokey way, we talked about what would happen to the state of mind of a passenger on a plane if he or she was confronted with, with the blistering truth of the pilot.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:44Mike Rowe?

  Cause right now, to your point, we're being lied to. Like, when I sit down and strap in, as I will later, um, my pilot's gonna tell me that safety is our priority.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 32:54Mike Rowe?

  Now that's bullshit. If it were, we wouldn't be, you know, in an aluminum tube, flying 550 miles an hour at defined gravity. We, we simply wouldn't do that if the most important thing was to be safe. Uh, but he's gonna tell me it is, and then he's gonna say, he's gonna serve a bunch of warm milk, designed to make everybody, you know, feel a special way. If he told the truth, on the other hand. If he said, look. My name's Jack McGillicuddy. I've been flying for this airline now for 20 years and I'm big fan of everybody on the plane. We're so grateful for your business, but in the scheme of things, I love my wife more and my kids are super, super important to me. So here's

• 33:36Mike Rowe?

  the good news. I'm gonna get my ass home to them tonight, come hell or high water. You guys, you just sit back, strap in, don't give the flight attendants a hard time, and you're welcome. I would feel so much better.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Of course, his selfish self-interest is obviously much more compelling than a corporate value written where they say, he doesn't care really that, you know, United Airlines or American Airlines is the safety priority. I mean, I don't know if you know this, my grandfather was a United Airlines pilot for about 45 years.

• 34:09Mike Rowe?

  It's a shame to say I'm not up to speed on your pops' curriculum vitae.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  It's all, it's all, it's all good. And so he, he ended his career flying Boeing 747 400s, which incredible, incredible plane, really sad that there's no commercial passenger flights on them anymore. To your point, he's flying to go home and see his family.

• 34:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Uh, he's not, he's, you know, he's, what is he looking at when he takes off? It's a picture of his family out of his wallet, not the United corporate safety guidelines.

• 34:37Mike Rowe?

  No, and look, if you're on that plane-

• 34:38Speaker 03

  He complies with them, but it's not what he's, it's not what's driving him.

• 34:42Mike Rowe?

  And he's no different than anybody on the plane. You know, we're all creatures of self-interest. In the, see, let's, before we pivot, I think maybe, the truth is always out there. It's just not the thing you're allowed to say. But if you root around for it, you'll find it on the carriage of travel. You'll find it on the back of your ticket in the finest of print. Now, on the front, like, on the back of the seat in front of you, it will say, "Safety first. Your safety is our priority." On the back of the ticket, it says, "By purchasing this thing for an indiscriminate amount of money, which will in no way comport or match with any other ticket sold on this same flight, welcome to randomness, you understand that we are defying the laws of gravity. You understand

• 35:26Mike Rowe?

  there's great risk in this activity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 35:29Speaker 03

  It's inherently risky and you understand that.

• 35:31Mike Rowe?

  The truer it gets, the smaller the print. The bigger the lie, the more color is employed and the splashier it seems.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  My favorite waiver is that, uh, have you ever been to Go Kart World in Los Angeles?

• 35:41Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  I love their waiver.

• 35:43Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  You know, it's actually, we've talked a lot about dishonesty. That's actually probably the most honesty I've seen from a business. They say, "Go karts are extremely dangerous. These vehicles are, these vehicles are not designed to comply with highway standards. They are, they are controlled and unpredictable in severe ways. There is a real, a real and substantial risk of death or dismemberment." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's like, that's completely..."

• 36:13Mike Rowe?

  Where do I sign?

• 36:14Speaker 03

  It's, and I...

• 36:14Mike Rowe?

  Where do I sign?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  That's interesting that there is honesty. Why, why, so why, why is the Go Kart World can do it and United can't?

• 36:20Mike Rowe?

  There you go. That's it. That's, I, I've signed between three and 400 waivers in my life. My favorite was, uh, for shark diving. I was testing a stainless steel shark suit.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 36:34Mike Rowe?

  With the guy...

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Like a chainmail one?

• 36:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, the guy who invented it, Jeremiah Sullivan. The job was to make it with him. So we're down in the Bahamas and we make it. And then, of course, he's like, "Well, let's see if it works." And then we're on a boat and then we're chumming the water.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:47Mike Rowe?

  And then we jump in and then the sharks bite us. And, uh, the thing I signed before I did that basically said, "I understand I'm engaging in a self-destructive activity. What follows will hurt, there will be blood. I could lose a body part and quite possibly die." That makes you like snort. It's so, not because it's funny though, because in a way, it's so bracing to, to be confronted with the unadulterated truth of a thing at a time when the facts are forbidden and we dare not articulate that.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  That's interesting. The bizarre nature of the humor is that they're telling the truth in a time where you can so rarely find out.

• 37:31Mike Rowe?

  Have you been to Mount Washington? Have you ever climbed? This is in, uh, where is it? Taylor's of Vermont or is it, uh... Mount Washington, famous up in New England somewhere, not Maine. I think it's, I don't know, it's New Hampshire. It's New Hampshire. It's the worst weather in the lower forty-eight. Like, it can literally go from, yeah, it's in the White Mountains. It can go from seventy degrees to negative ten. The signs as you climb.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  What do they say?

• 38:02Mike Rowe?

  Stop, turn around, don't be an asshole. Honestly, you are approaching a place where the weather is so volatile. This is gonna be unpleasant for you. They just get increasingly.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 38:15Mike Rowe?

  It's like a mildly drunk, irreverent, subversive was asked to just lay out the truth on the way up. I love that.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Does it work?

• 38:26Mike Rowe?

  Um, no, but. But it makes life better. You know, it makes it better. It's like you mentioned seatbelts. I had a neighbor, a guy named Gans, he's ninety-nine years old now. He invented the, um, the thing that allows it to catch. Like, the most critical part of it.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 38:46Mike Rowe?

  Which didn't exist in the original model. It, it, it, there was some mechanism.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  I believe it was, it was a fixed mechanism. And so you, you had to adjust it perfectly. But what this is, is this drove people to just not use them. And also, they are very uncomfortable.

• 39:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 39:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  You couldn't, like, lean forward slowly and get something and then.

• 39:05Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, that was, that was what made it really use, usable.

• 39:09Mike Rowe?

  All right, let's conclude the rhetorical linguistic vernacular part of the conversation. And, and, and try, if we can, uh, explain to people.

• 39:23Mike Rowe?

  Oh, there it is. Stop, the area ahead has the worst weather in America. Many have died there from exposure. Even in the summer, turn back now if the weather is bad. That's the first one.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  That's really good.

• 39:36Mike Rowe?

  Later, it's just like, you again, you're still here, you're still walking.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  In Hawaii, there is a number of beaches where they have a death count on the sign. Those are good, too. And it says, you know, there, it's, there's one that says something like, there are thirty-eight people who thought they could outswim the current. Don't be the next one. And it really puts it into stark relief.

• 39:59Mike Rowe?

  There's a, uh. There's a highway in the outback. They literally call it the road to Cooper Pedy and it's the most dangerous stretch of world, uh, road, I think, anywhere. But my God, the billboards there, they're just guys with toothpicks literally holding their eyes open. There are memorials all along the way where people have died. And it's the same sort of thing, man. Does, is, is any of this applicable in the business of defense?

• 40:30Speaker 03

  You'd be surprised. I think so. I mean, one of the interesting things about the defense industry is that we've built kind of a, a similar set of fictions around our capability and how we're safe and we're secure and we're spending all this money on, on defense to good end. I think it's started to fall apart slowly, first as we just spent more and more and more. And I think people realize we're just spending too much on it.

• 40:56Mike Rowe?

  Wait a minute, are you talking about you or the big five?

• 40:58Speaker 03

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

• 41:40Speaker 03

  the world, basically unimpeded, means that you don't even have to, to use an ICBM to deliver a nuke into a port. You just put it in a shipping container and put it over on a ship and it will go right up to the same place and it'll only cost you like 600 bucks too.

• 41:52Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  I think people are realizing that there were all of these underlying assumptions that that just aren't true. That we kind of assumed that a war would look like how we assumed it would during the Cold War. And we're realizing, actually, we live in a world where people are going to exploit every advantage they have and every disadvantage that you have. And it probably doesn't look anything like the conflicts of the past. And that's, that's actually why I got into the defense space. It wasn't because I thought this was an area that was ripe for innovation. It wasn't because I thought, oh, this is the place where I'm going to be able to just very easily come in and change things. It was because I was so terrified of what would happen if we didn't get people out of working on things like tech, you know, search engines and social media, and put them to work on building the things

• 42:36Speaker 03

  that can stop the actual threats that the United States faces. Things that are being built by Russia, by China, by Iran, even by North Korea, and then really whatever comes next. There's a lot of, there's a lot of these things. You don't need to be a superpower to build small drones, or cyber warfare tools, or really interesting novel bioweapons. You don't need to be like a US-style hyperpower to try and build a bioweapon that exterminates your ethnic neighbors in Africa that aren't quite exactly the same type of African that you are. Those are the types of things that we need to figure out how to defend against. And the, you know, the big five, but also the United States in general, was not equipped to work on those problems.

• 43:21Mike Rowe?

  So who, just so people understand it, maybe me too, but General Dynamics, Raytheon, is Thiacal part of them? Or that's more Rocket?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  It depends on the year, you know?

• 43:32Mike Rowe?

  Northrop?

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:34Mike Rowe?

  Lockheed?

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yep. I mean, what happened post-Cold War was a consolidation of about 50 companies of note into maybe five, six, seven, depending on, you know, how, at what point you count the mergers.

• 43:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  There was a massive amount of consolidation that happened. And there, that was not an accident, and it wasn't even a free market thing. It was actually directed by the government. There was, there was a dinner called the Last Supper, where they brought together the executives from all these top companies. Right after the end of the Cold War.

• 44:05Mike Rowe?

  This is the military industrial complex.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 44:07Mike Rowe?

  writ large.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  writ large.

• 44:08Mike Rowe?

  And there was a dinner.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Literally one dinner.

• 44:10Mike Rowe?

  Called the Last Supper.

• 44:13Speaker 03

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

• 44:44Speaker 04

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• 45:14Speaker 03

  And there's another thing that it leads to, which is a lot of too big to fail type of decisions. When you have 50 companies, it's easy to let the one that trips and falls because they were running too fast perish. You know, if someone does a risk, if they're taking too much risk, and I don't even talk about technical risk. You have to take technical risk in research and development. I'm talking about things like they were paying too much of their profits out to shareholders as dividends. And so they don't have any cash reserves to cover, to cover the shortfall when, when a program is running long. That type of risk. But when you, what do you do when you only have one company in the entire country that can build fighter jets? What do you do when there's one company that is able to build submarines?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  You end up in a really gnarly situation where you either have to prop them up no matter how bad it gets. Or you have to let them die. And probably you're, you're now just screwed for decades until you can restand up that capability elsewhere. And I think unfortunately, the people who made this centrally planned decision. As people doing centrally planned government often do, they did not realize what that for the second and third order impacts of their decision would be this consolidate or die. They didn't understand what it was really going to bring about.

• 46:29Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's like the indigenous or the invasive non indigenous species, you know, it's a they're brought in with good intentions.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 46:37Mike Rowe?

  Like there's a logic around that last supper. There's a logic to consolidate.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  We need the cats to eat the rats. Oh, but now there's too many cats. Well, we're going to bring in coyotes. Oh, but now the coyotes have transmitted this disease to the to the to the to the fox. And now now that's all dying out. Yeah, I mean, this has happened over and over again.

• 46:56Mike Rowe?

  I mean, it's truly the story of our lives. It's the story of

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:01Mike Rowe?

  It's the story of our environment.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  You tracking the mule deer problem on Catalina Island right now?

• 47:06Mike Rowe?

  Well, I live up there.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Oh, on Catalina?

• 47:09Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'm sorry, I was thinking Sausalito.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no. Catalina Island, off the coast, Channel Islands.

• 47:14Mike Rowe?

  No, what's so what's happening with the mule deer?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  They've got about it. People don't know exactly. It might be 2,000. It might be 4,000. And we haven't figured out quite how many there are. But there are these there's these non native deer that were introduced a really, really long time ago. A lot like there were there used to be goats on Catalina as well. I think those were brought by the Spanish.

• 47:33Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  For food and milk. Anyway.

• 47:36Mike Rowe?

  Classic Spaniard move.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  We wiped out the goats a long time ago, after the goats wiped out a bunch of endangered species all over Catalina. And now you still have these mule deer. And this problem is that they eat all of the young, fresh saplings and young, fresh flowers. And then they don't eat all the dry scrubby stuff. And so what happens is you have more and more of this stuff that wants to catch on fire. You have stuff that doesn't have deep roots over a long time. And so they've actually fundamentally changed the composition. Yeah, yeah, then the and they've been trying. They were they were hoping for a while that hunters would just wipe them out recreationally. That's been kind of the theory was we're going to grant hunting permits and people are just going to shoot them.

• 48:17Mike Rowe?

  Catalina?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  But they're but they're but they're they're reproducing like deer do. And there's so many of them, they can't stop them. So now the Catalina Island is trying to figure out what to do. They to save all these other species, they need to get rid of the mule deer. But actually, what's happening now is a lot of people are saying, But the mule deer are so cute.

• 48:34Mike Rowe?

  They're so cute.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  They're so cute.

• 48:36Mike Rowe?

  So now, you literally just yanked us back to the beginning here with what you can say, what you can show, and what you can do.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 48:44Mike Rowe?

  We went to a place once called-

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Although if I could, before you say that, I have to say, I am on the wrong side of the issue here in one way. I, I think we need to get rid of the mule deer for, for environmental purposes. However, there are also a bunch of buffalo that live on Catalina Island that were left there by a movie production, and I am a big fan of the buffalo, and I don't want to get rid of the buffalo. So even I'm captured by this idea. I'm like, no, buffalo are cool. We, don't get rid of the buffalo.

• 49:09Mike Rowe?

  You know what? You've got buffalo guilt, man, because, you know.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  We killed them all.

• 49:13Mike Rowe?

  We, we really-

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Can't kill these guys. They're the, they're the last handful.

• 49:17Mike Rowe?

  Vomit Island is this little spit of rock in one of the Great Lakes, I forget which one, but it's, it's home to the cormorants and all these seabirds, and it's, you've never seen so much avian life. The place is teeming with it. And I went there with my crew years ago because when these birds get, they get freaked out when humans come in.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 49:40Mike Rowe?

  And they, up in the trees, they throw up on you.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 49:43Mike Rowe?

  I mean, that's, that's literally their defense system. They throw up on you. So it's a great dirty job. And it was just one of these feel-good things, and I was like, God, that was such a, I learned so much. And then, uh, one of the guys, one of the park rangers says, uh, you want to see something really amazing, come back in two weeks. I'm like, what happens in two weeks? He goes, I, I shouldn't tell you. Like, his boss is going, "Grr, grr." Because my crew still has our cameras up and stuff.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:11Mike Rowe?

  And I said, "No, no, just tell me, it's, we'll keep it in the circle of trust." Enough time has gone by now, it doesn't matter. But, um, a team goes back in two weeks later because there's so many birds on the island that it can't sustain them.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:25Mike Rowe?

  These are rare birds. These are beautiful birds. These are seabirds. And these are men with, um, 22s suppressed and just-

• 50:36Speaker 03

  They have to cull them.

• 50:37Mike Rowe?

  Seventy, seventy-five percent of them.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  That's a bummer.

• 50:40Mike Rowe?

  Now, that happens. That cannot be shown. That probably can't even, certainly can't be talked about or, or written about.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Well, to your point, he said, hey, don't, don't talk about this.

• 50:53Mike Rowe?

  Same thing at the hatchery, Murray McMurray. You separate the baby chicks, right? The, the, the pullets from the cockerels. They're cute. You send them through the mail. It's amazing. And then the cameras turn off and the lights go down. And as it turns out, you really, you really only need one cockerel for every thirty pullets. So thousands, thousands of adorable baby chicks go through a Quesart. It's just a giant grinder. And they come out and they're chicken food. No one sees this. No one discusses it. Which brings me to this question. The Department of War.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:31Mike Rowe?

  Did somebody just actually speak the truth?

• 51:34Speaker 03

  So I, I don't know if you know this either, but I was one of the people who was pushing for the name change, Department of War.

• 51:40Mike Rowe?

  I swear to God, I had no idea, Paul.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  It was actually the, literally, I, I had a handful of things on my list, but when, when I was at Mar-a-Lago, right after Trump won, one of the very first things that I started pushing was that we need to be honest about what the Department of Defense does. And remember, it used to be the Department of War.

• 52:03Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  For a long time. In fact, the Department of War as the Department of War has a better track record than the Department of Defense. I don't know if that's totally unrelated. Obviously, there's more factors than just a name. But when, you should think of it as a sliding scale of possible names and possible meanings. Department of War is at one end. It's very, very clear what it is. Your goal is to win wars, not necessarily to start wars. Remember, the Department of War, it's, they don't get to decide who they're fighting. That's up to Congress, that's up to the president, that's up to the civilian leadership that are accountable to leaders. You shouldn't want the people in the Department of War to be people who are measured people, weighing what might be right geopolitically. It's not the time for nuance.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Their, their job is to win wars and to maintain a posture that will allow them to win wars. So that they, so that the, the civilian leadership has that as, you know, the, the, the strength part of the peace through strength equation. They, they need to be able to say, hey, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. And we'd prefer to not fight, but if there's a fight, the Department of War will win that war. And then there's, so on the other end of the scale is not defense. I would actually say it's peace. Imagine if you called it the Department of Peace. This would be very 1984, I think, to say, well, what are, what is our, our business is peace? Yeah. And of course that would, that's just hiding the truth. It's wrapping it in this, it would be, it would be like farcical to, to do.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  The, the Department of Defense in some ways is, is worse, but it is, you know, maybe more back towards the middle of the spectrum. Because when you're spending on defense, well, is there ever too, how much do you devalue your defense? Can you ever spend too much on defense? And shouldn't defense also include things like fighting, you know, defending our country from climate change? Shouldn't it also be that we are, uh, you know, that we are defending ourselves from misinformation? And these are things that the military intelligence community, that the military transportation logistics are, are used for. And, uh, you end up with this kind of hugely expanding set of duties. And I think that's way more honest to just say, the Department of War's purpose is to fight wars, to be ready to fight wars.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  And every dollar that we spend on it is a dollar that goes towards that purpose. I think, I actually think it would have been harder for the defense budget to grow as much as it has if you were more honest about it. Cause because every year you say, you want to spend money on education or warfighting ability? And I think it, it's a different weight than if it's Department of Defense. And of course imagine if you said, well, what do you want to spend more on? Education, healthcare or peace? That would be like the ultimate, the ultimate lie, you know? We're just spending more and more on peace. So I'm, I'm a huge fan of the name change. I think that it's better to, it's better to be, one, I think it's, it's good to, our, our, the department's trying to get back to the basics. They're trying to get rid of a lot of cruft

• 54:55Speaker 03

  and graft and overspending, overdoing, even overtraining. You saw they've removed a lot of training that is not required for particular occupational specialities. They said, no, people need to focus on the things that they are doing, not this long laundry list of other, of, of, of other things.

• 55:12Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And so in a department that's getting back to the basics, I think it's good to say, we're, we're going, it hearkens back to that time. And then even independently of the history, I think it's better for the department to have an honest name.

• 55:23Mike Rowe?

  Well, defense, it, it, people get confused and maybe a little offended if, like in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 55:33Mike Rowe?

  Well, I, I think there's a corollary in language. If there's a department of defense, where's the department of offense?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 55:42Mike Rowe?

  Who do we call when it's time to be offensive, belligerent, obnoxious?

• 55:46Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 55:47Mike Rowe?

  Grabby, as clearly we have been and always will be. So it's a kind of virtue signal.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 55:53Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I mean, Carlin talked about the, the general softening of the language.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  It attracts a different kind of person, too, which then it's a self-reinforcing effect.

• 56:02Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  That person comes in, they change the nature more. The more the nature changes, the more the type of person that attracts changes. And so the organism, over time, it self-reinforces more and more and more towards whatever its stated purpose is, is purported to be.

• 56:16Mike Rowe?

  So did you, I mean. I think I know the answer, but to what extent was your interest in forming Anduril? Anduril or Andril?

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Anduril.

• 56:27Mike Rowe?

  It's constantly mispronounced.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a, there's, there's, it's, it's a philosophical and, and ingrammatical and, and, you know, it's a, here's the thing, pronunciation debates don't get settled by the company. They get settled by, by the gen, by the general public. Eventually, people decide what something is called.

• 56:45Mike Rowe?

  Well, can't we, in this case, defer to Tolkien? I mean, I'm, I'm assuming this is the,

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Well, in that case.

• 56:49Mike Rowe?

  Like the sword of power, right?

• 56:51Speaker 03

  In that case, it's probably something more like Anduril.

• 56:53Mike Rowe?

  Anduril.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Anduril, which is Elven. And so this is why I've not, I've not, I'm actually a fan of, of Anduril, which is, which is closer to the Elven.

• 57:04Mike Rowe?

  So you're a Tolkien geek full on?

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm, I'm a huge Tolkien geek, but I'm, but I'm also, I'm also. I'm a geek with a high enough charisma stat to know that you can't fight people to pronounce things the Elvin way and still walk out of the room being a well-liked guy. So I've had to learn that.

• 57:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, when you, when you, when you crack open the Silmarillion as your reference, right?

• 57:26Speaker 03

  You have to rec, yeah, you have to recognize, you know, look, I'll debate it with other, with other, you know, token nerds, but I'm not gonna, I don't, I don't need to fight about it with, you know, like CNBC when they call it, when they call it Andrill.

• 57:39Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  I just say, that's right.

• 57:41Mike Rowe?

  You bet it is.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  That's right. That's a hundred percent. You gotta pick your battles.

• 57:44Mike Rowe?

  I wanna circle back to what the defense industry or the Department of War today can learn from the Ring of Power and all that Tolkien wrote about. So file that back there in a, a minute from now.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Can do.

• 58:01Mike Rowe?

  But.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Ring of Power.

• 58:03Mike Rowe?

  Why, to what degree did the inefficiencies that you mentioned before, especially regarding cost?

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:12Mike Rowe?

  Motivate you, a guy who created Oculus Rift, sold it for a couple billion dollars, got himself fired from Facebook for donating nine grand to some PAC that supported Trump, to get back into this world, to what degree was your desire to save the country some money a motivating factor?

• 58:34Speaker 03

  It was a huge motivating factor. And the way to look at it, you know, it's some combination of having better, having better capability because we desperately needed it, but then also saving money. And these two things actually go hand in hand. If you don't have efficient innovation and you don't have efficient product creation, you'll never be able to build the right tools to move forward. In other words, think, think about it this way, spending money is really just a proxy for something else. In theory, you could just spend more and more and more on defense. And if it was only a matter of money, I'd actually be okay with it. Like, it wouldn't be great, but I'd find it hard for me to become passionate about. It's hard, it's hard for me to become passionate about think something that's, you know, just saving taxpayer dollars, as good as that is.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  But you have to remember that money is a proxy for something. It's a proxy for someone's time working in a factory or for a building that had to be constructed that took two years to build or for a raw materials that had to be extracted from the earth, processed, turned into something else. And so when you're spending lots of money on something, ignoring, you know, like, you know, graft and fraud.

• 59:40Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  It represents in some way the efficiency of a product. When a product costs twice as much, it's because you're probably doing, it costs twice as much as it should, it means it's twice as hard to build as it should be. And that was the thing that I was really worried about. Because if you get into a war with another superpower, and let's say that you need to start making fighter jets, fast enough to replace the ones that are being shot out of the sky, and you need to start building ships, fast enough to protect not just us, but all our allies who are now at threat all over the world. Even if I have unlimited money, like, let's say financially, we can print unlimited money, there is not unlimited productivity in the country.

• 1:00:20Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  Even if you could somehow, say Palmer here's $100 trillion for the defense budget, 100 times more, well, that factory still takes two years to build. And that guy who was slowly building that wiring harness under a cost-plus contract that incentivized him to do it slowly, he's, he only knows how to build harnesses in that way, slowly. And then the materials, maybe we selected materials that are really hard to process, really hard to mine, maybe we don't have enough reserves of them. And so saving money really means that you're probably figuring, like, if I want to build something for a tenth of the cost, I'm figuring out how to build faster factories, I'm figuring out how to train people faster, I'm trying to, and now if I give myself that budget, I can actually do stuff.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  So, yes, I care about the cost, but more as a proxy for productivity total, because that's what we actually need, is the ability to make this stuff, if we need to make enough of it to win a war.

• 1:01:13Mike Rowe?

  And interestingly, regarding money, on the other end of things, when you run out of it, it sure seems like war follows.

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• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  This is true both inside of countries and then in between countries. You know, when, when, when countries become, I would say it's not even that you run out of money. I'll even go a step further than what you're saying like it's true. States that run out of money and collapse, war does tend to follow. You get strong men in power. You need people who need to seize resources, seize resources. They can't do it through their own productivity and so they look outward. But I would go a step further. War can also happen through economic irrelevance. There's a lot of country, here's an example. I don't want to be too mean to the Dutch, but I'll bring it up as an example. They ask for it. So the Dutch. Up there with their wooden shoes. So the Dutch, the Dutch used to have arguably the world's most powerful navy. Sure.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  And there's a very reasonable question, well, why is that not today? Why is this tradition of maritime prowess not continued into the modern day? Even through World War One, you still had the Dutch having a quite powerful navy. And the answer is not that Dutch, is not that the Dutch have, you know, seen this economic collapse. It's not that their population has disappeared. It's that the world grew up around them so much faster that they became irrelevant. Nobody destroyed the Dutch Navy. They just made it not something you have to think about anymore. They were made irrelevant. Exactly. And so it's not even just that countries are in a race to not collapse and run out of money. To a certain extent, they are in a race against everybody else, whether they like it or not.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Another example of this is South Korea. South Korea has a rapidly declining birth rate. They're now down to about point six, seven births per woman on average. And you need to be at about 2.1 to meet replacement rate. And what that means is that North Korea doesn't need to fight South Korea to win. All they have to do is keep having kids and making artillery shells. And within about two generations, there's going to be eight times more North Korean military age males than South Korean. And I'm not saying military age males, just because they're going to get into a fight. Military age male is a reasonable proxy for economic productivity, right? You know, these people are the, who are going off, they're starting businesses, they're running factories. And then you wait four generations.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Not that long, right? You can do four generations inside of a lifespan. Inside of a lifespan, you're looking at something like sixteen, maybe twenty times as many North Koreans as South Koreans. So what happens when South Korea is, like, what happens when there's less than a million people in Seoul? And the answer is, it doesn't matter how smart they are. And maybe they're really rich per person in Seoul. But they're economically irrelevant. And so you have to ask, is the United States going to be able to justify, let's say, fighting World War III over a country that has shrunk down to be smaller than a small town?

• 1:04:37Mike Rowe?

  Your country just turned into the Dutch Navy.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so this is the, this is the real rat race that we're all stuck in, whether we like it or not.

• 1:04:44Mike Rowe?

  But this is also the level.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  The globalized economy has made it where you have to hit a certain level of growth, or you will, e- even if you don't run out of money, you become irrelevant, you become a target, and people are, there's a nice idea like, well, I've heard, I've heard people say, I think we would still stick up for South Korea. I say, you can't possibly predict what the world looks like a lifetime from now. And I bet that Americans, a lifetime from now, are not willing to send their kids to go die for a tiny enclave of people they've never met on the other side of the world who are economically irrelevant to our economy. Like, there's a reason that we have such strong ties with South Korea today. Because we have incredible economic bonds in the automotive space, the resource space, shipbuilding,

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  semiconductors, displays, TVs, computers, phones. Where's your phone made? My phone's made in Korea. If that's not the case, the world changes.

• 1:05:40Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Both Gondor and Mordor. I mean, how much did they think about the Shire, really?

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  It's, it's an interesting question, actually. The, um, you know, there, there was this, uh, I mean, what you have in the Shire, and actually, there's a, there's an incredible quote. I need to, I need to, I need to bring it up.

• 1:05:56Mike Rowe?

  Go ahead.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  So, so, you know, C.S. Lewis was a, was a close friend of, uh, of Tolkien. After Tolkien's death, he had a really interesting take on what he thought the story was really about. Give me just one moment to find this.

• 1:06:09Mike Rowe?

  No, do it. C.S. Lewis, of course, one of the great Christian apologists.

• 1:06:15Mike Rowe?

  Wrote, uh, what did he write? He wrote the Screwtape Letters, I believe.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Mike Rowe?

  Mere Christianity.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Mike Rowe?

  I believe.

• 1:06:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, he was something.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  It's gonna take me a moment, give me a sec.

• 1:06:29Mike Rowe?

  One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  The lion and the witch in the wardrobe?

• 1:06:34Mike Rowe?

  One ring to bring them all, and in darkness, bind them. In the land of

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Well, it's one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them. There we go, that's my, there's, there's, there's my nerd, nerd-dom coming through.

• 1:06:49Mike Rowe?

  Where the shadows lie.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  The quote that I'm looking for is, I, I, I, he talks about how, about how they're fighting against powers that they can't understand. I'm gonna find it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get it, it's, it's good.

• 1:07:04Mike Rowe?

  While you're doing that, I'm, I mean, that's

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  I'm gonna find, it's such a good quote that I have to find it, even if we have to stop talking.

• 1:07:10Mike Rowe?

  No, no, do, do your thing, I'm just gonna say some things out loud so I don't forget them. What do you really do in a world where most of the wars are so determined by the size of the populations?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Well,

• 1:07:24Mike Rowe?

  You have to do what Anduril is doing, you have to figure out a way to fight them autonomously.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, an important point that I often make to people is, we have this time advantage on China, where we were prosperous before they were. It's only an advantage in time. It's hard to imagine, even talk to the most anti-Chinese, most racist guy you can think of.

• 1:07:49Mike Rowe?

  Chuck?

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  But let, you know, go, go find him, and, and, and ask him, do you think, and he'll say, well, America's, you know, better person than any Chinaman, and so that's why we're gonna beat them in the long run. And what I would argue with them is, it doesn't matter how convinced you are of American exceptionalism and superiority, how can a country of 500 million people, in the long run, outcompete economically and militarily, militarily, a country of 2 or 3 billion people? You'd have to believe that each American is six times as productive or useful as each Chinese national. That doesn't seem likely. I, I, I don't, even the most anti-Chinese person is not going to say

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  that they're that different from us, because they, because they aren't.

• 1:08:36Mike Rowe?

  I talked to Jim Farley the other day, over at Ford, you know, who had just come back from China, and it's just, they're

• 1:08:45Mike Rowe?

  They're kind of stunned. The factories, you know, these dark factories.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, where you don't even, you don't even have people, you don't even have people. I found, I found the quote. Here we go. By the way, I brought this up recently on Twitter in September because there's a lot of people who, they look to Tolkien and they say, oh, I can't believe Palmer named his company after something from the Lord of the Rings. He doesn't understand the novels. They don't understand that Tolkien hated war, blah, blah, blah. So do I. That's the whole point. Tolkien was not someone who, he was not someone who was pro-war by any means. The things he saw in World War I, he made that very clear. But he did believe in good and evil, and he did believe in wars that needed to be fought. And he made very clear that those are the wars you need to focus on fighting.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  So here's, here's the quote. This is from C.S. Lewis. When someone asked him about this, like, how could, well, he doesn't, he didn't support war. And he said, "Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the hobbits, or the Shire, and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called. The terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident. That its existence depends on being protected by powers which the hobbits forget against powers which the hobbits dare not imagine." And I think that describes a lot of Americans and a lot of American allies.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  They're, they're being protected against powers that they forget, against forces they dare not imagine, and they forget that it is a local and temporary situation.

• 1:10:30Mike Rowe?

  And you look at the map of Middle Earth and you see where the Shire is.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:00Mike Rowe?

  We take the times we live in and immediately juxtapose it to whatever the story is.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  And it's not quite so simple.

• 1:11:05Mike Rowe?

  Right. It's like, they're not really Nazis, right?

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  But one of the interesting things that he does call out is how you have this human nature for the people who live far away from Morroto to basically not believe any of these things. They literally don't believe in this invasion. They don't believe that these monsters exist. Contrast that with the men who are living literally on the front lines of this conflict. They are the last line of defense for the entire kingdom of man and everyone who lives behind them.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  They're not, they don't have the luxury of wondering if these things are real. They don't have the luxury of thinking that maybe evil doesn't exist. They're confronting it every day. And I think there's very similar analog to our modern military. You'll talk to people who say, oh, well, you know, I don't think that anyone's truly evil. And I think that nobody deserves to die. Nobody deserves to die as a result of their actions. You know, we need to bring these people, you know, at worst, we need to try them and bring them to justice. There are a lot of people who have been on the front lines of conflicts who could never, they don't have the luxury of that.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Someone who's been, who's looked evil in the eye can't pretend, well, I think it doesn't exist. And really, we shouldn't be killing anybody. There's nobody who deserves to die. It is a luxury belief. You get to believe it because somebody else doesn't have to.

• 1:12:32Mike Rowe?

  You get to be an isolationist.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:12:34Mike Rowe?

  Because you're isolated.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:12:36Mike Rowe?

  There's no isolationism in, you know, Habsburg or the World War One Europe, right? You're like, you're sharing a border with everybody.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:12:46Mike Rowe?

  And the knives are out all of the time.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Well, and I think too, in World War Two, we got a really good, not to use the vaccine analogy, but I kind of have to. We got a good, we got a good bit of immunity to these problems in that every family had someone who fought. I mean, almost without exception. The draft was was was so extensive and the the the the number of volunteers was so broad.

• 1:13:11Mike Rowe?

  There was a home front.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. And and so people understood that we were fighting for something that mattered, that we were fighting for allies who mattered, that we were fighting a just war against a against a real foe. And I think that as those people have died off, we now live in a country where less, I think it's something like, I don't want to get this wrong, but I think it's less than a third of families in the US have a family member who is in the military. And you wonder what does that do to the character of a nation. It becomes much easier for a whole family of people to become, you know, anti military, not not not anti war. There's a difference between these things, to become anti military.

• 1:13:49Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  In their pursuit of being anti war. And it's because they don't know anybody who's actually been part of it. They don't know anyone who's been part of that, at least not directly. Maybe they did in their past, but they forget. There's a lot of kids today who can't remember nine 11. Do you really think that they're going to be remembering the lessons of World War Two or World War One? Unfortunately not.

• 1:14:09Mike Rowe?

  I'm looking at the results of a recent election in New York City. And I'm looking at the primary demographic.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:14:19Mike Rowe?

  Got this guy elected.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Well, the question people said is how could New York City elect someone like that? And the best response I said, they said, how could the New York City that saw nine 11 elect someone like this? I said, it's not the same New York City. It's a different New York City. And I think that it's the same in, you know, it's it's this is why such an incredible quote.

• 1:14:37Mike Rowe?

  It really is.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  You know, a sort of local and temporary accident really describes the relative peace we've had since the end of World War Two till now. It is a local and temporary accident that comes as a result of Pax Americana, this post-World War Two era.

• 1:14:53Mike Rowe?

  Well, riddle me this. How do you square, I've heard you say in various interviews that.

• 1:14:59Mike Rowe?

  You'd much rather have our wars and battles being fought with the kind of hardware that you're creating, better to have the gear over there than our blood and treasure.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:15:12Mike Rowe?

  But you've also made the point, and I certainly agree with it, that if the country itself becomes disconnected from its military, either consciously or unconsciously, then we're not in the fight in the same way. And the more disconnected we get from the fight, the more likely it is the fight will come to pass.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:15:34Mike Rowe?

  And if the goal is to avoid the fight in the same way that our goal with cars is not to crash or get TMIs playing football.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:15:43Mike Rowe?

  Vis a vis all the unintended consequences and language that we've talked about, how does, how are we to think about the positives of all the tech that's allowing us to fight without being there?

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  So I think that these things go hand in hand. I've often said, and you know, I've, I've, I've kind of beat it, I'm beating a dead horse on this, because I've been saying it for like eight years, but I've been saying, the US needs to stop being the world police and start being the world's gun store. In other words, we shouldn't be sending our own people to die for other countries' interests. We should be giving them the tools that they need to maintain, you know, their existence as a nation that the US wants to be allied with. My analogy I prefer is to turn them into porcupines. You give them tons of surface-to-air missile defense systems, tons of local, local, you know, local defense systems and, and offensive weapons that make it where you just don't want to put this guy in between

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  your teeth. Because even if you could win, it's going to be so painful, you're not going to want to. What you're talking about, you know, not about, you know, the, the perils of becoming more and more likely to become involved in these wars as, as the people are pulled out. I think that's one of the reasons it's so important to stop being the world police and instead leave that decision as to whether to fight up to the people who are dealing with the consequences. So like somebody in, uh, somebody in Ukraine, for example, they're not thinking about whether or not they'll fight on the basis of whether or not it's a robotic system or not, whether they're on the front line or the back line. For them, it's much more fundamental. It's actually a little bit like the pilot analogy earlier, looking at his family. They're fighting so that their country exists.

• 1:17:21Mike Rowe?

  They're in it, man.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  They are. They are in it. I think that that's actually a very healthy motivation to fight. If you are fighting for the existence of your country and your family and your business and your culture, that's the person who should be deciding whether or not this is a life or death fight. It shouldn't be another country on the other side of the world fighting that for you. And then also, how does that country know when to stop fighting too, right? I think this is what we saw in the Middle East. We fought these wars in the Middle East long after the people we were supposedly helping wanted to be fighting them. And that's of course, why the Taliban was able to come immediately back into power in Afghanistan, like within weeks of the US pulling out. It's because the Afghani military that we were propping up,

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  what were they fighting for, right? They, nothing, they were, I'm not saying nothing, nothing at all, obviously. Like, you know, I, it sucks that all of these, all girls' schools got shut down.

• 1:18:17Mike Rowe?

  We can't want your sovereignty more than you do.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Exactly, and we shouldn't be making that decision. And so I think these things go together. If you give people the tools that they need, I think that they're going to be motivated, not by the fact that they have robotic weapons to fight or not fight. It's going to be about the existence of their countries. I think countries should generally not be making decisions about the prolonged existence or fighting decisions of another nation that is not their home. Like, the US shouldn't be deciding if Ukraine continues their war or not. And the US shouldn't be deciding if Taiwan is going to defend itself or not. That has to be their decision.

• 1:18:55Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  And I want to give them the tools that they can use to make that decision.

• 1:18:58Mike Rowe?

  I want to talk about, and I, forgive me, I don't want to pull you out of your lane.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  One more thing, real fast. I believe this partly is a moral thing, but I can make a very practical argument that I've had with like, you know, the kind of real politic GOP side of things in particular, where they say, "Oh, you know, well Palmer, sometimes we do need to go abroad and sometimes we do have interests that we have." And my point to them is, We don't have the political capital to do that as a nation anymore. America is done with it. We burned all of that credibility that we built up during World War II. We burned most of it during Vietnam. And we burned up the rest of it in the Middle East, fighting this war on terror. And you will not convince Americans to go fight another war, even if it is just. This is not a judgment on whether we should.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  I would argue, I don't think that America could work itself up enough to go fight the Nazis again. I think that if it came to us, they said, we're gonna have to lose a few million people, and we're gonna have to mobilize our whole economy. I think we literally don't have it in us. And that whether it's spiritually, or morally, or politically, whatever you want to call it, we will not be able to muster the political will or capital to make that happen. And so this is kind of the remaining solution, whether you want it to be or not.

• 1:20:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, that worries me.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Oh, it worries me too.

• 1:20:18Mike Rowe?

  It's worrisome.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  I want America to be in a world where if there is a just reason to rise to the occasion, that we're able to. But I just don't think that we have it in us. And I don't think the kids coming out of modern schools are ready to go. I don't think that the kids who are... Look at the kids who are on the beaches in Normandy on D-Day.

• 1:20:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Do you think that we have a few million of those?

• 1:20:44Mike Rowe?

  I do not.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  That's the problem.

• 1:20:46Mike Rowe?

  I do not. I'm stipulated.

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

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• 1:21:18Mike Rowe?

  Two things. I think all that was true in 2019. I think it's doubly true now. Because along with the death of the things that you mentioned...

• 1:21:29Mike Rowe?

  Our trust has also died in the very institutions that we used to immediately defer to.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:21:36Mike Rowe?

  And so, building that back is way outside my pay grade. It has to happen, but I suspect it won't happen until things go splat first. Sometimes, well, it's Churchill, right? When you're marching through hell, keep going. You gotta get through it.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Historically speaking, you're right. It's very rare that, it's very rare that something with a lot of inertia stops without a sudden impact.

• 1:22:01Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's just.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Because it takes.

• 1:22:03Mike Rowe?

  It's very Newtonian of you.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:22:05Mike Rowe?

  No, but here's the thing that I think.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  Politics is very Newtonian.

• 1:22:10Mike Rowe?

  And linguistic and so forth.

• 1:22:14Mike Rowe?

  The thing I think we can control, but I'm not quite sure how, and I really want to get into it with you. I know we've been talking, what, an hour, 20 minutes or something, but you're still late. I mean, the helicopter's not leaving without you.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  No, I'm totally fine.

• 1:22:29Mike Rowe?

  Okay, and I know you've got, I know you've got like, national affairs to attend to.

• 1:22:35Mike Rowe?

  But why were you at that energy summit? How important is our energy policy in enabling you to make the tools that we need to prevail in this coming population collapse world? And skilled labor, we have to reinvigorate the trades somehow. That's why I was at that conference. And you made some remarks with Alex that makes me think that we might be singing out of the same hymn book in this regard.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  100%. So, these are two other things that go hand in hand. So if you want to have skilled jobs in manufacturing, making goods, processing minerals, I mean, you could pick almost, almost anything.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

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

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  You have to have low energy cost because it goes into everything. It drives the cost of everything. If your energy costs are too high, there won't be any jobs for skilled labor because the products that would come out of that energy cost will be too expensive to compete against foreign options here in the US. And they'll be too expensive to export to other countries. They're just going to choose other people. And so if you want there to be skilled jobs and if you want there to be, you know, jobs for people to like, there has to be an economic impetus for that. And that only happens if we're competitive on energy, ideally much cheaper. The interesting about energy is you can be competitive, uh, which means like, let's say you can be a competitive with Asia and in Europe and if, but it's also a bit of

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  an easy button to be hyper competitive. If I can drop my energy costs down to near zero and other countries can't do it, now they're the ones that are screwed. Now they're the ones that are saying, oh my God, how do I compete with American automobiles? Their cost of energy is so low that they're able to extract metals easier, process metals easier, weld metals easier, run their factories so much more easily. And then as a result, there's all of this demand for skilled labor. They have this economy built around all these people do this. How can we compete with them when our energy costs are five times as high? And I, I think that America is one of the few countries that is actually well positioned to turn that knob to zero. This was the dream of the early age of atomic power.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:50Mike Rowe?

  I just walked, I just walked through a data center for the first time.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:25:53Mike Rowe?

  Big tour, Plano. Our buddies over at, uh, aligned, right? Man, I talk about metering a thing. Like, the amount of energy that it's gonna take to run those things.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  And we need, and we need to make that energy. And the thing is, like, it's gonna take everything. Like, we're gonna need oil, we're gonna need gas, we're gonna need nuclear. I'm a huge nuclear fan. I think we should, by the way, US has great reserves of uranium. This is another thing we have that other countries don't. We were blessed with incredible farmland and an incredible river transportation system. Isn't it just incredible that as we move into the atomic age, it turns out we also have more of the stuff you need for the atomic age than anybody else?

• 1:26:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  What a, what a, what a stroke of luck that we've just kind of thrown away. And in California, we're shutting down our nuclear plants, just like Germany is shutting down their nuclear plants. We need more and more and more energy. It's just been really discarded for largely political reasons. And, you know, there was a, there was a great, there was a great bit that AOC did when the Green New Deal was going through. And originally, it didn't include any subsidies for nuclear power. And somebody asked her, hey, why are there no subsidies for nuclear power? Isn't that lowering, about lowering carbon emissions? And she said, the Green New Deal isn't about lowering carbon emissions. It's about fundamentally restructuring the power of energy generation, power and energy generation away from private corporations into the hands of the government. I was like, oh, my God.

• 1:27:16Mike Rowe?

  You just said the quiet part out loud.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  She said the quiet part, and actually I'm-

• 1:27:18Mike Rowe?

  She's the pilot who just leveled with the crew.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  I actually maxed out to AOC. I wrote a, I guess it was like a $5,400 check to her campaign. They ended up returning it, but my thought was, you know what? I want more people who are honest about what they're doing in politics. I'd rather have someone who's, who's honest about it.

• 1:27:35Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Than somebody who's, you know, talking out both sides of their mouth and concealing their true, their true intentions. Also, she's from the Bronx, and nobody from my favorite political party is likely to win the Bronx. So it's kind of a, it's kind of a free, a free donation.

• 1:27:47Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, I mean, six years ago, she told me and the rest of the world that- We had 12 years and then, you know, life, you know, that's the end of the earth. And Bill Gates, just what, four days ago, did you read that?

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  I did.

• 1:28:01Mike Rowe?

  Holy crap, dude.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Well, he's, I mean, he's, he's, he's admitting that things will generally be fine. I mean, you know, what, what Bill, Bill was saying is we should focus on mitigating, you know, the changes that will occur. Humanity will still do better. It is going to prosper and we need to make a lot more energy. But I, you know, one of the things I talked about at the conference, I think, was this whole concept of climate change is predicated on the fact that nobody wants it to change. But that's not really true. This is actually, I think, one of maybe the great conspiracies of the modern time. The reality is the, the global south has basically no political power globally. And they are the people who will be most negatively impacted by temperature going up a few degrees. I'm not saying it's going to be like a catastrophe that destroys the world.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  I'm just saying if you count the impacts, positive and negative.

• 1:28:50Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  They probably come out negative. However, for a huge chunk of the world, the temperature going up by a degree or two is actually really good for their economy, massive for their economic stability. Look at all the land that China is going to unlock for agriculture. Look at all of the Northern European nations that are going to have somewhat more agricultural independence. Russia don't even have to get into it. It's just obvious.

• 1:29:14Mike Rowe?

  Siberia?

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so.

• 1:29:16Mike Rowe?

  It's nice in the spring.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  And the, my, my theory here has been like, as I've looked at the things that you can do to control climate, it's not actually that hard. If you want the earth to get warmer, that's not hard. If you want the earth to get colder, that's also not hard. It's the type of thing one country with a geoengineering program could just do it unilaterally on their own. Now, what would happen is they would probably be stopped by other countries, but technologically, the US could do it, Japan could do it, Russia could do it. If they want to make the earth's temperature go up 10 degrees, they can. If they want it to go down 10, go down 10 degrees, they could. And so my, my, my, my working, my working hypothesis here is the real reason nobody's doing anything to so-called, you know, stop climate change is because a lot of people

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  realize, actually, we don't really have an interest in stopping it until it gets to a certain point. And then all of a sudden, we're going to care. All of a sudden, we're going to do all these things. And I wish that we could be honest about this. I wish somebody would say, you know what? We're just gonna pick a temperature that we think we want to be at. And we're not gonna, we're not gonna try to stop change. We're going to actively engineer the planet to be whatever we think the thing is that will lead to the, you know, the least loss of life, the most economic productivity, the most reliable agriculture. You can, you can pick what your values are. Everyone, different people will have different values.

• 1:30:33Mike Rowe?

  Are you saying, and do you really think we can control the temperature of the planet to that degree?

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  I am absolutely confident. And this is something where I've, I differ from the Republican Party. There's, the Dems have basically been saying, climate change is coming, or global warming is coming, and it's gonna destroy the world. The Republicans have been saying, oh, it's not really gonna be that bad, no matter how bad it gets, and we're not causing it anyway. I, I set all that aside and say, no, no, we should actively be changing the climate to be exactly what we want it to be. And it, and it's crazy to say we can't change the climate, because we very, very easily can. There's me, and this isn't like, this isn't like a crazy conspiracy. There's maybe a half dozen very real technologies that could allow us to instantly modulate the, the temperature of the planet. Like, one of my favorites is called cloud brightening.

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  So more sun reflects off of white clouds than dark stuff underneath, right? Like, if you have a cloud over the ocean, a lot of sun hits that cloud, bounces back into space, never makes it to the ocean. It's really, really easy to just take saltwater, shoot it up out of big giant pumps up into the air, and have it make big giant clouds that attract moisture around the little tiny salt crystals. And you just make big giant clouds in the middle of the ocean. It would take a handful of nuclear powered ships to raise, sorry, to lower the Earth's temperature by two or three degrees using cloud brightening. You then could just go out in the middle of the Pacific, make a big giant patch of clouds that's there all the time, and you would do it. Did you follow the, did you follow the cargo, the cargo shipping cloud effect?

• 1:32:04Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  So this is another example. The tiny amount of sulfur allowed for nucleation sites to occur that then caused artificial clouds. We've basically been running this experiment for about 30 years.

• 1:32:15Mike Rowe?

  Is this a chemtrail thing? Is it related, adjacent, something?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  It's a little bit. Chemtrails are usually similar in tech, in technology to the theory, but you know, to, I don't think anyone thinks chemtrails are for, you know, climate change. They mostly think they're for, you know, drugging people, or, or changing their minds, or so, or vaccinating them, or something like that. I think that the vast and overwhelming majority of chemtrails that people have identified are just normal atmospheric effects and aviation-related effects. You know, it's condensation wakes in engine trails. There are extremely small, vanishingly small handful of situations where there clearly have been things that have been dispensed. I think most of those end up being things like antibacterial agents or pest control agents. I've also seen one where there's like, it was an, they were like, oh my God, they're

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  spraying, they're spraying this town. And what it ended up being was, it was a plane that was going to crash. It was a crop sprayer and it needed to dump its, it needed to dump its stuff before it crashed because it's so, it's so heavy that you don't want to, you know, crash a plane like that. So, but like, we're talking, that's like 0.01% of the cases. So I have to admit, I'm not a chemtrails guy. I think as a guy who does a lot of flying around in planes, everything that someone sent to me that was a chemtrail, I'm like, no, man, that's, that's just how airplanes work. That's, that's just what they do.

• 1:33:34Mike Rowe?

  What kind of security clearance do you have?

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  I think I am not supposed to get into the details on a public forum like this, but I have a security clearance and it's appropriate for the level of information access that I have. I could say I do, I have a secure, I do have a security clearance.

• 1:33:54Mike Rowe?

  I mean, how, how, how big is your company?

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  We're about 4,000 people, kind of like full-time, truly internal people, actually maybe closing on 5,000. And then if you count contractors, people who are, people who are like, people who are working with us part-time, people, if you count everything, it's, it's over 6,000 people.

• 1:34:18Mike Rowe?

  Where will you be in the, in the, in the Patheon of Raytheons?

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they're, they're a lot bigger than us, but this gets back to what I talked about earlier, which is that, you know, but.

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  You know, money is a proxy for productivity and so is people. You know, it's possible for a company to have 10 times as many people and still be slower than the first company.

• 1:34:42Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  And so I, I, I think we're, we're definitely a lot smaller than the big guys. I mean, they have tens of thousands or like low hundreds of thousands of people. If you count all the contractors working for them.

• 1:34:53Mike Rowe?

  But the, but the potential for you guys to scale.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  The potential for us to scale is, is there because I don't need that many people to do what I do. A lot of what I do, for example, on the manufacturing side, a lot of it is automated. And it's not that, it's not that we don't have any people who are doing manufacturing. We have thousands of people doing it. It's just we're augmenting them with technology so that each of them can fight with the strength of a hundred men. Or in our case, build wiring harnesses with the strength of a thousand men. Or, you know, build composites or sensors or, or, or, or rocket motors. But that, that, that's going to be the key. I guess what I would say, I don't measure the progress of my company that much in terms of the people. I, it's, it's in our output. Like what are we making? Are we successfully making AI fighter jets, robot submarines, rockets and munitions and missiles and, you know, self aiming rifles and force fields?

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Like if, if we're making that stuff, I'm okay if my company isn't growing, if those people are becoming more and more and more capable.

• 1:35:47Mike Rowe?

  You know, the Bill Gates thing, I just, as we start to land this.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  The energy thing?

• 1:35:51Mike Rowe?

  Metaphorical plane. Yeah. Like, we started with forbidden facts and we started with the idea that, you know, when you understate or overstate a thing, it's only a matter of time until the people catch up to your smack.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:36:06Mike Rowe?

  Right? So here's Bill Gates, you know, six, seven years after Alexandria at all told us we had 12 years. He comes out and he says, no, I don't think that's true. I still think it's an issue, but, and 3,000 words later, he's basically walking a lot of stuff back. Right? And so all of that kind of happened because people who genuinely cared about the future of the climate and the planet overstated it.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:39Mike Rowe?

  They abused the language.

• 1:36:41Speaker 03

  And they certainly understated the benefits too. This is what Alex makes the point.

• 1:36:45Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  They don't, they don't talk about. You know, the millions of people in India who will die if fuel becomes more expensive because they already don't have enough to heat their homes. You know, he doesn't, there's Three billion people burning dung and wood. People like to, yeah, and they don't talk about like the deaths caused by all the particulates when they burn that dung because they can't afford fossil fuels. So, yeah, it's simultaneously overstating the negative impact and then understanding or even ignoring the positive impact when really these things need to be taken as a balance. And I think the reason people haven't done that is because it means taking responsibility. Imagine that I'm a, imagine I'm like a, you know, I'm a Euro, Euro politician. What's an easier

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  position for me to take? I'm a, you know, I'm a politician, maybe, maybe I'm the prime minister of some small European country that isn't relevant anymore. Dutch, the Netherlands. I don't, I can't pick a particular one because I like some of those guys, small or not. But suppose, what's an easier position for me to take? To say, climate change is a huge problem. It's not our problem. It's being caused by the United States and by China and by Russia, but it's a big problem. And it's kind of this act of God that we just have to try our best to stop. Who knows if we can stop it or not? Well, we're gonna do our best to be good moral people and fight the good fight. Or imagine a position where

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  he says, I believe the global climate should be exactly this. The average should be, you know, the average, the average should be 65 degrees Fahrenheit right along the meridian at exactly this point. And that should be our climate target because that is what I believe will harm the right number of people and hurt the right number of people. And people, people, the thing is, if you said this, think about what happens next. It's the back of the ticket. It's the truth in the fine print. And they say, but wait, if we do that, those guys who live on the equator in Africa are going to be destroyed agriculturally. And what's easier to say? To say, I hope those people make it. Or to say, I am willing to trade the prosperity of that African nation

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  for our agricultural security and doubling the number of crop yields that we get from Are from our marshy fields and to do that takes response, you have to own it and take responsibility. And so I think the real reason that people have been talking about climate change is this, you know, huge problem where everyone's causing it and all we can do is fight it together is because nobody has to take responsibility for the winners and the losers. And I wish we would just be honest and say, you know what, we're going to pick up temperature. That's what it's going to be. There's going to be winners. There's going to be losers. We can fight it out in the UN. You know, that African nation can come and make their case. Maybe we pay them off and we say, hey, you know what, you're, you're, you are going to get turbo screwed here. We'll, we'll give you some, some of the surplus profits of what we're doing here and you can use it to subsize your economy.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer. I'm not a politician, but what I do know is that pretending that we can't control the climate in both directions is only possible if you ignore the wealth of I have to say one more thing about forbidden truths. Did you know that geoengineering is prohibited research at many universities? You're not even allowed to research it and you can't get any funds to do it. You won't get any approval. And they say because it's irresponsible. Explain what it is exactly. So geoengineering, you know, you're full of terraforming. Let's go to other planets. It's just the same thing, but on earth. Let's make earth more habitable. Because by the way, if you were coming to earth from space today as, and there were no people on the planet, the climate of earth today is not what you would probably choose for optimum human habitation.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  So if you were to look at it and say, what just, what should it be? What's the optimal? Where we are is probably not it. It's just where we happen to be right now. And humans have been, we've, we've, we've, we've seen a lot. We've, we've been through ice ages and we, we came out okay. That, but the, the, um, oh, what was the point that I was, that I was, that I was making? Uh, forbidden fact. Oh, that's right. So a lot of these universities, what they've done is they've said you cannot research geoengineering and they're saying, well, because geoengineering is dangerous. Like what if we use geoengineering and then because it's able to keep the climate perfectly stable, we start using too many fossil fuels and we cause ocean, ocean acidification. So let's say temperature is constant, but there's more carbon dioxide in the air and so the oceans were acid.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

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

• 1:41:47Mike Rowe?

  Sorry, Charlie, I can't let him go. It's too good. How about this one? Fracking.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:41:54Mike Rowe?

  Right? I mean, this is the ultimate F-word in the energy game.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:41:59Mike Rowe?

  My friend Harold Hamm more or less pioneered it. In the old days, if this were an oil field, there'd be 50 wells.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:42:08Mike Rowe?

  Today, there's one. It goes down a couple of miles and it goes out. And I don't know, I believe fracking was the proximate cause, horizontal drilling, the proximate cause of energy independence in this country, right? And we still, that was such a failure of communication and there's still so much misinformation around the reality of what that is. I'm thinking now about, since you mentioned the oceans, polymetallic nodules.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  I have. Oh my, deep sea mining.

• 1:42:39Mike Rowe?

  God, I mean, look.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  We just gotta go get them.

• 1:42:43Mike Rowe?

  We've gotta get them.

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  We gotta go get them.

• 1:42:45Mike Rowe?

  What is it, a 16 to 20 trillion dollar industry? You got every, this is copper, nickel, cobalt, and manganese in a single potato-sized nodule.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  And also a lot of rare earths as well.

• 1:42:56Mike Rowe?

  And they're there. So Trump signs the EO in April. There's this, I think... By this, a few months from now, it's going to be headline, we're going to have the same giant conversation.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:43:08Mike Rowe?

  About the ethical, moral dilemma of going down 5,000 meters and scooping up these rocks.

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:43:15Mike Rowe?

  Meanwhile, there's the rainforest, or what's left of it.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, actually, here's another thing that's there. So we're going to be doing all of this, we're going to be doing all of this, debating whether or not we should do in this mining. Meanwhile, Europe and America are going to keep paying for Russian minerals that are only in Russia, that we could be getting off of the supply. Same thing with oil and gas. I mean, Germany's given tens of billions of dollars to Russia. They've given them more oil and gas money than they've given Ukraine's armed support. And so, like, these things have a real trade. When you say, "We're not going to drill for more oil and gas," what you're really saying is, "We're going to fund Russia's war in Ukraine by giving them money for their oil instead." That's actually the real trade that's going on. But it's kind of out of sight, out of mind. That's another country.

• 1:44:03Mike Rowe?

  I need your opinion, or maybe even your advice, if you want to give it. I've been at this, what, 17 years now, trying to reinvigorate the trades.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:44:13Mike Rowe?

  Right? And we've had a huge amount of progress. In fact, this year, we had 10 times the number of applications as we did the year before.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Wow, that's extraordinary.

• 1:44:21Mike Rowe?

  I'm not doing anything different. Something's tipped.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:44:24Mike Rowe?

  Right? Now, I look at the maritime industry, you know, they need 250,000 welders and electricians for submarines. There's going to be another 100,000 for the deep sea mining, automotive, energy, AI, so forth. Like, the stakes are really real. And I'm a little freaked out, because after that conference where I met you, I went to a few others.

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:44:43Mike Rowe?

  And, you know, the people who are helping us with this national campaign are not the people who I thought would call. It's... It's Wells Fargo. It's Larry Fink of all people. BlackRock. It's Fisher Investments.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  Wow, the whole ESG network.

• 1:45:04Mike Rowe?

  It's crazy. But I think what they've done is they've looked into their own portfolios. And they've seen a lot of companies who are just crapping up their backs, man. They're scared.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:45:20Mike Rowe?

  They don't know where these people are coming from. So the question is, I believe we need a national campaign. Certainly, a series of statewide campaigns. I think I can get the money necessary from some unlikely places. But it's still, this is the Manhattan Project in my world.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:45:38Mike Rowe?

  Who do I talk to? How do I get the attention of the people who are truly at the grown up table? Who I know want to help, but are having a hard time looking at the difference between a big persuasive campaign versus another scholarship.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:45:56Mike Rowe?

  Program.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:45:57Mike Rowe?

  Like, where do you think that communication needs to be?

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 1:46:03Mike Rowe?

  Best delivered?

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

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

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  Like, people, gold rushes are real, and you can create them by saying that they're going to happen.

• 1:46:52Mike Rowe?

  There's gold, and then there are hills.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so a persuasion campaign of what you're talking about probably makes a lot of sense. It's probably effective. However, my initial read is you're stepping into a poisoned environment. You're stepping into a world where one of the... Big problems that this government has been trying to solve is that there's been tons of money going out to these kind of softer, harder to measure things. And it's to, it's to help convince, you know, like, it's like cultural, you know, like, you know, like, gender, gender awareness in Uganda. And, oh, isn't it good that we do this? Or helping, helping kids learn to code in Rwanda.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  And the problem is, those campaigns, so many of them were, they were just graft.

• 1:47:39Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Fraud.

• 1:47:39Mike Rowe?

  And badly executed on top of it.

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  Badly executed, you know, things did, the things that were meant to be built didn't get built, things that were meant to happen didn't happen. And there were a lot of things that we shouldn't have been doing. Like, I'm kind of glad it didn't work because they were ridiculous propaganda campaigns anyway. So unfortunately, you're stepping into a poison, it's like a poison well problem. You have people who have made these things look like they're bad on its face. And so I can tell you, there's people in government who would 100% agree with what you're saying. And there's others who on their face are like, no, we are not going to use government funds to do these types of hard to measure, a scholarship you can measure. Did the kid go to school? Did he get his degree? Did it work or not?

• 1:48:18Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, but I can also measure, do we want South Korea to make our ships?

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:48:25Mike Rowe?

  Right now, it's an academic question. We need them to.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:48:30Mike Rowe?

  We can't do it.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  We don't have the capacity.

• 1:48:32Mike Rowe?

  We don't. Talk to Bollinger, talk to, you know, I mean, these are your, you're, I'm asking you this question.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  My current theory there, by the way, is we should maximize our strengths. We do, for example, make some good power trains, electronics, sensors. Like, I think we should basically say, hey, let's work together. We're going to build parts of the superstructure. We're going to build power plants. We're going to, like, the power plants of these ships, like, we should be let, the US has a lot of friends around the world. Let's, uh, let's, let's do stuff together. Of course, in the long run, we need to be building our own ships. It's crazy that we're not.

• 1:49:01Mike Rowe?

  Yes. I keep coming back to the electrician I ran into in Plano in a data center who had been poached from four other projects in the last year.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:11Mike Rowe?

  He's making 230 grand a year. He's 26 years old. He has zero debt.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:17Mike Rowe?

  He learned the skill he has over, like, a 14-month period. And he's working and he his first kid's on the way.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  And this is a young guy. His career is only going up from here.

• 1:49:28Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  Eventually, he's going to, yeah, like, he's not even into his real earning years.

• 1:49:32Mike Rowe?

  Take your big brain on your next helicopter ride. If you got a few synapses to spare, I gotta, I have to find a way to make that kid a household name.

• 1:49:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:48Mike Rowe?

  Times 100,000. There are a lot of men and women who are prospering in and around your space as a result of mastering a skill.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Now, American manufacturing is really poised in a good way because I think finally, finally, people have real, people have realized there is a cost outsourcing and export. I mean, you've been on this for decades. So it's like, it's not new to you, but I think a lot of people are truly just now coming to terms with the cost of exporting all of your critical industry around the world. And what it looks like to be a country that can't make anything itself.

• 1:50:24Mike Rowe?

  That's it. And it's scary. And I think, look, if I had an alarm bell here, I would ring it. And I was in the room with Howard Lutnick and Alex Karp and 36 other CEOs and the President of the United States in Pittsburgh.

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:50:38Mike Rowe?

  When they, when they announced $92 billion earmarked and allocated for data centers in Pennsylvania alone. And there I am, like, just Debbie Downer going, hey, man, you're you're talking about creating 2 million jobs in manufacturing and there are 482,000 open jobs right now we can't fill. What are we gonna do?

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  Where are they gonna come from?

• 1:50:59Mike Rowe?

  Right. Now, you've talked about population collapse. You've talked about all these other things and, man, it's all real.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  Well, it's all tied together. I mean, I'm a big pronatalist, too. I think everyone needs to have a lot more kids.

• 1:51:12Mike Rowe?

  Congratulations on yours.

• 1:51:13Speaker 03

  Thank you. I've got one so far, but I've not, I'm, I have not, I haven't even hit replacement rate. So I'm, I'm.

• 1:51:19Mike Rowe?

  Keep rehearsing.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  I've, no, if I, if I, if I don't hit replacement rate, then, then I'm, I'm a, I'm a real hypocrite. But yeah, like I said earlier, the US can't compete with countries that have billions of people if we're only hundreds of millions of people. And so we, we, we gotta keep up the pace.

• 1:51:37Mike Rowe?

  Dude, I just, I can't wait to see what happens next. You're, you're very interesting, as you know, but the whole Shire Hobbit, Ring of Doom juxtaposition, industrial military complex, the complexities of our language and our airline pilots and AOC and the ability-

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  We've covered a lot of good stuff. We made good time across a lot of ground.

• 1:51:58Mike Rowe?

  I'll put this conversation against, against most. That was fun, man. Really, really fun. I appreciate it.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  That was really fun. Well, thank you. It's fun too, because you usually, people just, they want to, they want to, they want to talk. Most people, they want to talk about, they want to talk about fighter jets, you know, and that's it. It's, but it's fun to be able to talk about these bigger picture questions.

• 1:52:19Mike Rowe?

  I can't bear to ask you questions that, that I know you've been asked a thousand times. Is this-

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  This was a, so I've done two events recently where instead of sending me, I sent a robot and I teleoperated it using a VR headset. And I've been getting away with it so far. Eventually, the novelty is going to wear off and people, people are going to want me to start showing up in person again. But man, what a time saver when you can pull it off. And think how much I'm saving in terms of carbon emissions by not flying.

• 1:52:49Mike Rowe?

  Just clone yourself, man. How hard can it be? Look at that. So where, where is this creature? Where'd you send it?

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  So there were two, two events that I've done. There was the re-industrialized conference and then this was actually here, actually at the, at the Newport Beach Country Club. For, for, for a, for a recent Senate event.

• 1:53:07Mike Rowe?

  This is home for you, right?

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, yeah, this is home for me. I live in Newport Beach.

• 1:53:11Mike Rowe?

  If Alex does that thing again, are you going to swing by?

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, for sure. There's-

• 1:53:15Mike Rowe?

  He's gonna do it.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  There's, oh, good. Well, look, there's, there's a lot of good people there.

• 1:53:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  And, I mean, we just, there are so many things that the United States needs to do on the energy front if we're going to be competitive globally. And we have all the pieces and the good news is it looks like this administration is going to allow nuclear power to really come roaring back. Like that one piece alone is maybe half the puzzle.

• 1:53:39Mike Rowe?

  Do you imagine like small reactors everywhere?

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  So I think that particularly for things like factories, data centers, it doesn't make sense to have a grid that makes energy in one place and then ships it, you know, across the city to the building that uses it. They should just have on premises.

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  Power generation, like they should have small nuclear plants and they that way they're also not degrading everyone else's grid. Like right now, if you pull from the grid, you're pulling all that power. That's power that you like you now have to overbuild the grid to handle things that it was meant to, like people's TVs or you know, running their air conditioning. And then you add in this massive, constant base power load that they were never designed or intended to take.

• 1:54:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:27Speaker 03

  In in in general, I think the grid, the other problem is the grid has also become a political vector. So like in California, most of our energy cost is not the cost of making the energy. It's all of the political pulls that have been placed on top of it in form of taxes. So California has like, what is it 32 cents a kilowatt hour? The national average is like eight cents a kilowatt hour. There's some places that are approaching two or three cents per kilowatt hour if they've got nearby sources.

• 1:54:54Mike Rowe?

  Not so different at the gas pump.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Look, so like the whole point of a grid is that it's supposed to be cheaper to make power cheaper and more reliable, to make more power to central site and then distribute it to all of the end users. So why is it that I can run a gas generator at my house at a scale of just my house and it's cheaper than buying it from the grid? Like, so like, this is another reason I'm a big fan of of factories and data centers, building their own, building their own power onboard and for people being okay with that. It means you can't have somebody temporarily get into power and say, all right, I'm going to basically put all of you under my thumb because it's not just the cost, it's also the threat.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  You can say, oh, I just want to tax energy more equitably. But what you're really doing is saying, local data center, if you don't do what I want politically, and if you support my candidate, I'm going to make your costs go through the roof. You're no longer competitive with the data centers in the next state. And so your whole company is going to go bankrupt because you can't compete with them on AI cost per token prices. Like, that's a lot of power to give to a politician.

• 1:56:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  So I think energy generation needs to become just like a lathe, just like a screwdriver. It's just another tool you have at your factory that you use to get the job done.

• 1:56:11Mike Rowe?

  From your mouth to God's ears, man. What a pleasure. Thank you again. I know you gotta run, but if I don't talk to you first, I'll see you.

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  I'll see you at the Energy Summit.

• 1:56:21Mike Rowe?

  You bet. Palmer Lucky, much obliged.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  It was so fun.

• 1:56:24Mike Rowe?

  Hey, finally, are you in a world now where people go to a thing to like get a book or watch a doc or something that you've done? I didn't even think to ask you.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  Do you wanna hack anything?

• 1:56:37Mike Rowe?

  Like any shameless pluggery?

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you want to, if you like video games, check out modretro.com. This is my side project I've been running since I was 15 years old. And we are doing things like making modern heirloom-grade tributes to the most important game consoles of all time. For example, we have a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy. It's called the Mod Retro Chromatic. It plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. It has in a magnesium aluminum alloy shell. It's the same metal that's used in some of our attack drones at Andorl. The lens on it is not a piece of plastic over the screen. It's a lab-grown sheet of sapphire crystal. It's the largest piece of sapphire crystal on any product anywhere in the world.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  And we're about to launch a new product, the M64, the Mod Retro 64, which plays Nintendo 64 games. We've got some other stuff coming. Anyway, it's $199. I lose money on it. So I've used my money to deeply subsidize it because I really like this type of stuff. And we've been releasing new Game Boy games, re-releasing old Game Boy games, and even doing new releases of Game Boy games developed in the 90s that never came out. So GameStop just launched a new game in-house. We just relaunched a CROC back for its 25th anniversary. We're doing Rayman. We did a thing with Atari. We brought back three of their 90s classics. You can buy those in a set. And if you scroll down a little bit, you can see we have the chromatic available

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  in a whole bunch of different colors. So if I'm gonna get a shameless plug, this is my shameless plug. It's, there's no economic reason for something like this to ever exist.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  Wanted it to happen and in fact, it even has a custom screen. This is the lowest resolution screen you'll find in the world right now. It's 160 by 144 pixels. So it's about 80 times less pixels than your iPhone display. 80 times less.

• 1:58:36Mike Rowe?

  What a delightfully shitty product, man.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  That's how you make it authentic. We didn't want to be scaling it on a modern screen. We had to recreate that old screen. And so, uh, yeah, that's, that's, I wasn't even expecting, but yeah, that's my, that's my, that's my shameless plug. Go check out modretro.com. Check out what we're doing there. It makes a great gift for dads, makes a great gift for husbands, makes a great gift for boyfriends. Women like it too, but mostly, but mostly this is maybe one of those hidden truths. I'll tell you, it's like 90% men that are buying this stuff.

• 1:59:09Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you another hidden truth. You are some kind of geek, Palmer Lucky. I appreciate you coming by.

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  Come and play Dungeons and Dragons with me and my crew sometime where we play every week. D and D night is tomorrow, so I'm a, I'm a, I'm a wizard named Nilrem 5 from, from Atlantis, trying to figure out what happened to my country. Anyway, that's it.

• 1:59:29Mike Rowe?

  This is, this is the guy with his finger on the button, creating the next generation of weapons to protect truth, justice and the American way. On behalf of 330 million of our compatriots, much obliged.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Thank you.

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• 2:00:59Speaker 06

  What's that?

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  My fresh detector.

• 2:01:01Speaker 06

  Uh, your what?

• 2:01:02Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 2:01:03Speaker 06

  What is it detecting?

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 2:01:07Speaker 06

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 2:01:15Speaker 07

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.