Palmer Luckey：美國要贏｜Anduril 創辦人胡佛研究所完整訪談 [中文字幕]

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]He wears Hawaiian shirts and tells the Pentagon how to defend the republic.

[00:00:05]Palmer Lucky on Uncommon Knowledge. Now, welcome to Uncommon Knowledge recording today at a Pacific Research event here at the Reagan Library in Seami Valley, California. I'm Peter Robinson. A native of Long Beach, Palmer Lucky was homeschooled by his mother. He attended Long Beach State, then dropped out to develop a virtual reality company. In 2014, Mr. Lucky sold that company, Oculus, to Facebook for $2 billion. He was 21.

[00:00:45]In 2017, Mr. Lucky founded Anderal Palmer, thank you for driving up from Elsagundo for us.

[00:00:53]It was it was it was it was it was no problem at all. N I I took I took my helicopter partway actually and I had another engagement.

[00:01:01]>> Palmer Lucky on 60 Minutes just a year ago. I'm quoting you Palmer. I've always said that the United States needs to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. What do you mean?

[00:01:14]Well, there's a lot packed in there. Um I the first one is the United States has a history of fighting for other countries that maybe aren't very interested in fighting for themselves.

[00:01:28]And maybe there's times that we want to go in there for for US interests, but but but generally speaking, uh it doesn't make sense for us to send our people to go die for a country or a or a form of government or any, you know, anything that's not directly aligned with US interests if they're not willing to die for themselves. And I think for example, you saw our withdrawal from Afghanistan prove this out. You know, that the moment that we weren't there.

[00:01:49]Turns out that the people there didn't really care much to maintain what we had been saying was what they wanted the whole time. Um and and so if you're the world police, you're out there trying to trying to fight that battle for these countries. I think we need to transition to a role where we are equipping these countries with what they need to defend themselves. if they want to fight for themselves, if they want to defend themselves, we should help them do that.

[00:02:14]And then I think that the gun store analogy works in a few other ways. If you're going to be the world's gun store, you need to do things that a store would generally do to stay in business. You have to deliver on time.

[00:02:24]You have to keep things in stock. You cannot uh you cannot necessarily pretend that you're the only store in town because we aren't anymore.

[00:02:36]Countries have options in China. they have options in Russia and we need to recognize that and not pretend like we're like we're the only store in the entire world that these guys can buy from. Um, and then I'd say the last bit here in terms of World Police versus World Gun Store, you could disagree with me. You could think my strategy is wrong. You could think that actually we should maintain a tight grip on all these weapons. We shouldn't sell to the Japanese and let them do their own thing. We shouldn't sell to the Germans, let them do their own thing. Look at how it went last time. There's a reasonable critique, but I think the reality is the United States does not have in us politically another largecale boot on the ground war to fight for somebody else. I don't even think we have it in us for a good cause.

[00:03:19]What I had said in that interview actually was I don't think we have another D-Day in us even for a just cause. Because Americans, particularly people of my generation and and in the generation before, they've they've they've seen this play out and they've seen that these things turn into long multi- trillion dollar slogs where the benefits are very very diffuse. And so you can go and say, "Hey guys, this is a really great cause." And they say, you know, a lot of things start out as a great cause. And uh and and and pretty soon it's been 20 years and you've spent $5 trillion and your highways are still broken and nobody has the jobs that they wanted. Uh so I I I think we have realistically we have to take a different approach.

[00:03:58]>> And the story of Anderable when you co-ounded Andre in 2017 you were a 20some with plenty of cash. You could have enjoyed yourself. You could have gone into consumer electronics. You love video games. Not too far from here is electronic arts. It's a very big business. You could have gone into that.

[00:04:19]You founded Anderil instead. Why?

[00:04:23]There's a lot of there's a lot of reasons, but uh a lot of people don't necessarily know this, but uh before I started Oculus, when I was a teenager, and because I lied about my age, I was working in an army funded research center on the Bravemind program, which was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. And uh that was where I was first exposed to how big of a difference technology could make to the people that are in our military. It's what exposed me to how bad our procurement system was, how so much was done on a cost plus basis where you made more money if it took you longer and you used more stuff and if it was more expensive. And then also exposed me to the fact that nobody not in academia, not in industry was interested in figuring out how to cut production times in half or how how to cut product prices in half. Because if you cut the production time in half, then well, where where's where's your plus going to come on all that cost? You if you make something that's $6 million into a $3 million thing, you're literally just losing money. And so, uh, I realized I was a horrible broken set of incentives. It wasn't until I had money from Oculus that I felt like there's something that I could help do to solve that. And at the same time, I had moved up to Silicon Valley and I had spent several years there running the virtual reality division at at Facebook after they acquired my company. And uh it to make a long story short, there was a national divorce going on in the early 201s between our tech industry and our national security apparatus even in Silicon Valley which was started by funded for Department of Defense uh projects. And that that's a very dangerous experiment. We've never run that experiment in this country where you've had that national divorce. We've always had our most innovative people, our most innovative thinkers, our most creative technologists working on national security problems. What happens when that's not the case? What happens when these companies refuse to work with our military? Right?

[00:06:18]>> And so you have to ask yourself, you got you got all these companies that are divorced from national security and they don't believe in the basics of what they're actually they're saying, oh, you know, people deserve a right to have their own identity. You why are you erasing these people? I refuse your Oh, unless you're Taiwanese and then we'll we'll we'll we'll throw you under the rug in in in a second. I realized that's a really dangerous situation for our country to be in. And so I wanted to start annual to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and to get people out of these advertising companies, these entertainment companies that are controlled by foreign adversaries and put them to work on the tools that are going to hold those adversaries at bay.

[00:06:57]So and thank you.

[00:07:06]Give us just a moment or two on the difference between the way Anderal operates. You've touched on this, but I want to the difference between the way Andreal operates and the way the so-called primes operate. Loheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, the others. Look, these companies are building some cool products. They have a long history. So, I'm not here to say that they're that that they're awful. And in fact, I work with most of them. But there's a big difference between us. And is not a defense contractor. We're a defense product company. The key word there is product company. uh we we use our own money to decide what products to build, how to build them, and then we build those products, then we sell them to the government. It is a model that exists across more or less the entire United States economy. But this is how almost everything you buy is is built and the the there are very few examples otherwise. Um one industry where cost plus is still common outside of defense is residential renovation. Uh and and I I have to look out into this in this world. How many people out there who have done a renovation on a cost plus contract were satisfied with the incentive structure and the outcome? Of course you were, right? You know, it goes longer, the contractor makes more money. Uh the GC is asking all his subs to boost their prices and then oh, I'm going to give you a nice little kickback on the side where the money comes back to you, but because the, you know, the the invoice is bigger, I get to charge the government a bigger 6% on top. It's all the same. it it it is identical. And so the difference there is we make more money when we make our products cheaper.

[00:08:38]We make more money when we make it faster. When I deliver a year ahead of time, I don't have to fire half my team because there's no money to pay them. In fact, I've just saved an enormous amount of money. I probably get to promote those people and have them work on some other product. And then the other big difference is we take all of our money and put it back into research and development, every single penny. So a lot of other defense companies are putting about 1% to 3% of their revenue back into internal research and development. And much of that is cost matched by the government. Uh we are putting 100% of our revenue back into it. Now you could say Palmer that's not going to hold up. You won't be able to convince your investors to do that uh forever. To which I would say I've pulled it off for 8 years and change. Uh I've got a clear road map to doing it for about another four or five years. I think I can stretch it out a lot longer than that. And and the nice thing about US capital markets, if you're growing fast, if you are growing, people will let you get away with a lot. Look how long Jeff Bezos's investors let him get away with Amazon net not making money.

[00:09:35]Uh if you have a healthy business and you could turn that switch, people are not going to demand it. So look, someday are we going to have to start returning money to uh you know things other than R&D? Yes. But for now, our customers like that when they give us money, they they know that it's either going to product or into their next product.

[00:09:53]>> Okay. So I just want to stay with that point for one moment. a billion in revenues in 2024 up to about 4.3 billion is what I found as I was doing research for this year. That's about the projection for this year. And then evaluation on that 43 >> and those are just public projects.

[00:10:10]>> Okay. All right.

[00:10:12]What I'm getting at is >> we have two showrooms. We have one with our public products and then we have another one that's government only.

[00:10:19]>> Okay. All right. All right. Well, I haven't been into that showroom, but on 4.3 billion, you're prep the you're seem to be valued at around 60 billion. You're happy with that.

[00:10:32]And you're not worried about when you're actually going to turn a profit.

[00:10:36]>> I'm not worried with when we're going to turn a profit because if look, our products are better and faster and cheaper and at any moment I could be making money. It's just like to be clear, I am >> I mean, this is your problem. I'm happy with it all. I >> I mean, I'll tell you my numbers. on our most mature products, we're making about a 40% profit margin despite selling for a tenth of what our competition does.

[00:10:54]And so we're not just so we are cheaper in absolute terms. We are also making more because the car competition is often doing these singledigit cost plus profit contract. So we're actually making more money in terms of percentage and absolute dollars off of something that is an order of magnitude cheaper.

[00:11:12]So the e everybody wins in this case, but I'm taking that 40% and I'm putting it back into other products that are not making money, things that won't even start making money for years to come because they're they're really really important.

[00:11:25]>> So let me let me list what I take to be the main categories of your products.

[00:11:30]And because time is limited, you choose one and wax a little bit rapsotic about it. anti-derone defenses, maritime and subsurface platforms, autonomous aircraft, and then this lattice software that ties it all together.

[00:11:48]Um, if you had your way, would the Pentagon operate entirely on your systems?

[00:11:56]So, I mean, just to wax rapid about one of those things, >> choose one. Choose one. Go ahead.

[00:12:00]>> That's about a third of the categories of categorian warfare. You didn't mention uh augmented reality systems. You didn't mention exoskeletons. You didn't mention small arms. That's okay. Um I'd say on the on the air system side, we build a lot of stuff.

[00:12:12]>> I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

[00:12:13]>> That's okay. It's okay.

[00:12:14]>> I truly I didn't >> forgive you.

[00:12:16]>> All right. All right.

[00:12:17]>> Forgiven.

[00:12:18]>> Thank you.

[00:12:19]>> Um Oh, man. No. Trump got in a lot of trouble for pretending to be Jesus. I better not do that. Um so the I mean to to to talk about one is uh is the FQ44 Fury which is the United Air Force's first autonomous fighter jet. We were competing with Boeing, Lockheed and uh North Grumman for that contract and we beat them and that was because we put $900 million our own money into developing that platform, building that factory and uh it it's it went from uh it went from signing that contract with the government to first flight in 556 days. That's the fastest new fighter development program ever. I That's not quite true. found one in the Korean War that might have been as fast.

[00:13:08]It has been a long time since we developed a new fighter like and people have said Palmer that's not true. What about you know the stuff in World War II and and I I would say it is true they were a fighter of the time but I think you can draw a distinction between jet age and uh and and prop planes and arguably the the the fighters that were built that fast were actually derivatives of other designs not clean sheet but and we can debate about that another time. That was a huge win for us because it was not only a huge contract.

[00:13:34]The Air Force intends to buy a lot of CCA's collaborative combat aircraft from us and from other companies like General Atomics who are much smaller than the big primes. Uh but it it shows that there's a recognition that these new companies can build things that are of critical national importance. They don't have to only bet on the Now you asked if everything should be built according to my system. No. U you can't build everything according to my system. Um there are some things where the expenditure is simply too large. For example, nuclear aircraft carriers. I cannot speculatively just scrge together spare 14 billion dollars and build a boat and then hope that they buy it.

[00:14:09]Also, what if they don't buy it? I can't sell like I can't sell >> aftermarket. There's no secondary market.

[00:14:15]>> There's there's no Yeah, there's no real other secondary market. I mean, and we we don't want other people to have even our allies were not selling them nuclear aircraft carriers. Japanese can't buy it because article 9 of their constitution currently prohibits offensive warfare or or platforms for for for offensive use outside of Japan. I'm pretty sure we're not going to sell it to Russia. Pretty sure pretty sure the the Brits have to fix their fix their aircraft carriers before they get a new one. Um and so there's certain things like that. Like another example would probably be our nuclear arsenal in general. um you you you cannot speculatively build atomic weapons and then uh sell them to for for as cheap as you can. It it probably makes sense to have government government involvement there. Uh and then like there's a whole bunch of other interesting ones, but I'll give you one more example on the defensive side. Um there are programs to build certain bioweapon defense systems. You probably realistically cannot have a divorced from government private sector bioweapons research lab that just builds bioweapons and then defenses to them uh on their own without supervision using their own money and then tries to sell to the government. And you you want to talk about bad incentives. Imagine this.

[00:15:23]You build a system that can protect you from certain set of boweapons. If only there was some way to show the government just how bad it would be if it got out into the wild. I'm not saying that I would ever do this, but it's not a way you can run an entire defense industry because someone is going to follow the incentive and uh so I no there are things where it does actually genuinely make sense to do it the old fashioned way.

[00:15:44]>> Uh I want to come to China in some detail in a moment but first the Pentagon.

[00:15:52]When I first when I myself first moved to Silicon Valley, I'm slightly older than you. You'd be surprised to hear David Packard was still around. By the way, everybody called him Mr. Packard.

[00:16:02]And Bill Hulet, >> that's incredible. That's really cool.

[00:16:05]>> Yeah, he was Mr. Pack. I had a few conversations with Mr. Packard, as he was called. He was he he'd show up on the Stanford campus. Bill Hulet was still around. And it was very clear that in their generation the cultural difference, the understanding of patriotism, the understanding of America's place in the world, the difference between the men and in those days they were almost exclusively men who ran the Pentagon and the men and once again they were almost exclusively men in those days who had built our aerospace industry largely here in California. David Packard was assistant secretary of defense in the Nixon administration. Bill Hulet had served in the Second World War. There was no difference between them. They were they were the same kinds of human beings with the same reading on the world. All right. We now come to today. I'm taking a moment to set this up to give you plenty of time to respond to it because it strikes me as central. We now come to today.

[00:17:05]We have all the really interesting action that's taking place in the private sector outside this military-industrial complex and the men and women in charge of the Pentagon are still pretty a pretty buttoned up crowd. Those flag officers are pretty disciplined and the people running the defense tech companies, you know what, some of them even wear Hawaiian shirts.

[00:17:34]So the so my question is how do you deal with the Pentagon? I mean you guys have to work you have to work together. How's it going? I think that I think that people rise to what is expected of them. And if you take a guy who spent his whole college life smoking pot and and and and you know co coding you coding interesting things for you know some tech company and then if you're able to expose them to problems and some sometimes this is done by the by the Pentagon where they they you can give you the briefing and say here is the threat here is what's going on. um you you'd be surprised how when people when they when you can get them to comprehend the threat and a lot of smart people they can um they uh they they very much rise to the occasion. Now, I'm not saying they're not going to wear their hoodie, but you can get them to stop smoking pot and you can get them to work on something more important than advertising or or video games or or or something else. I think it does help that the people in the Pentagon uh the they they are pretty tolerant these days of people who are not exactly the the mold of a military man. Uh >> so it works.

[00:18:42]>> I I think that they they're very practical, right? They a lot of the people in the Pentagon, they realize that if you are only willing to work with personalities that that that look look look like you and and talk like you, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good talent. In fact, if if I really had to be honest, I'd say maybe the pattern matching has gone a little too far. I think that a person who has a mullet in a Hawaiian shirt and is is a bit of a larger than-l life uh you know charismatic guy and and uh is probably actually going to do better than he should in the Pentagon. I'm not just talking about myself. I'm saying there's a lot of other people who have realized now sometimes it pays to be a caricature and a character and uh and and and you you they expect the breakthroughs to come from not the guy with the pocket protector but the guy but the guy with the dreadlocks. And uh I I will say though, you know, one thing hasn't changed.

[00:19:31]You know, I I appreciate your disclaimer, you know, about how the whole aerospace industry back then, you know, it was almost entirely men. Uh and and I assure you that has not changed.

[00:19:41]Uh it is it is it is it is it is men all the way down. And people can say, Palmer, there are women. Yes, of course, women exist. Uh but it is it is it is more than gaming, more than tech, more than anything else. There's there there there there's something about the defense industry in particular that attracts a certain type of person. And uh the certain type of person, they just they don't seem to wear a lot of dresses.

[00:20:07]>> By the way, while we're on that certain type of person, what percentage of your employees you've got about 7,000 now?

[00:20:12]>> About 7,000 employees, about 4,400 of which are here in California.

[00:20:16]>> And how many of those are vets?

[00:20:18]>> Are feds?

[00:20:19]>> No. No. Vets. Veterans.

[00:20:20]>> Vets. Oh, man. I was like, "Oh, man.

[00:20:22]Yeah, this is this just got wild. Um, a number of them are feds, by the way. Um, uh, um, now how many of them are veterans? I I I think somewhere at one point we were about 30% service veterans. At this point, I think it's down to about 15 or 20%. I think it's around hovering around a thousand people out of the seven out of the 7,000 that are that that are that that are service veterans.

[00:20:45]>> Okay. But by contrast with the cons with with meta >> Oh, yeah. Way above that. And I mean, it's not because we're out there saying, "Let's give welfare to veterans." It's because the people who understand these problems the best are often people who have that real world experience.

[00:21:00]Sometimes, you know, they they they use the GI Bill to go and get a degree in something relevant and now they're coming in with, you know, the technical background and the uh you the service background that allows them to really understand these customers. Uh there's also people that we have we have a lot of veterans who are maintaining these systems. One of the things we do that's also different than a lot of our competition is we send people all the way forward to this stuff and we have them even iterating on features in the field on these systems. So we have a bunch of people in the Middle East right now like everyone you know while everyone else was getting on the planes going this way our people were getting on the planes going that way and we have more people out there now than before the conflict started. Uh we had people and weapons in Ukraine the second week of the war. I went to Kev in the early days of the war and I helped train people on how to use our systems. And so we we've we've just got a very very different philosophy and a lot of the veterans in the company are the ones who are who are helping drive that culture.

[00:21:58]>> China, your TED talk of last year, you described a scenario in which I'm quoting you, our fighter jets are shot down one by one and Taiwan falls within weeks.

[00:22:10]My first question is, we have a Pentagon budget of upwards of $900 billion. As best I can tell, you can't trust Chinese figures, but as best I can tell, the Chinese spend well less than 500 million, and most estimates seem to be around 400 million.

[00:22:30]Why aren't we better than the Chinese right now?

[00:22:32]>> Well, there's a lot of reasons. Um, so like like let's let's set aside the whole purchasing power discussion. like let's assume that every purchasing power is the same between countries. Um do you believe that the Pentagon is uh is it could spend its money 50% better?

[00:22:49]You know, I I I do like you you there's just a level of inefficiency that exists where if they're just more efficient with each dollar, then they can do more.

[00:22:57]>> The Chinese are >> Yeah. And look, I used to make millions of virtual reality headsets in China.

[00:23:01]I've been to Shenzhen a bunch of times.

[00:23:03]uh if you want to get stuff done and you want to build things, it is the place to be. And they don't get 50% more for their dollar. They get like 10x for their dollar. Things that here would take you a million dollars, you'd be there for $50,000, $100,000, like a development program. Labor is not even the cheap thing. A lot of that's an outdated concept. They think of China, China's just having really cheap labor.

[00:23:28]Uh they they they automate most of these things. They automate most of the the labor intensive production. Their people are just genuinely extremely good. They have the world's best battery engineers.

[00:23:38]They have many of the world's best metallurgists, many of the world's best optical engineers. American companies have been hollowed out because our companies and our degrees which feed these companies because the companies feed these uh colleges a whole a whole bill of goods on what they should be teaching people. Basically, we were not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore. We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured. We're teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together design package that gets sent to the real engineers in China and they actually figure out how to do the work.

[00:24:10]This is true even with our mechanical engineering programs, even with our electrical engineering programs. People are turning into architecture astronauts. They they they pick components and they put them in a nominal layout. But the real work of how am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this thing?

[00:24:26]How am I going to need to figure out how to do the 1 2 3 4 five different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards?

[00:24:34]That's all done in China. So, they are the real engineers. We've hollowed out our real engineering capacity and and and and like I don't want to put down Apple too much. Apple used to have to figure out how to actually make their stuff. These days, most of the really hard work is being done by Chinese by by Chinese >> engineers. I just want to bear down on this because you're making what strikes me as a fascinating point here. All your points are fascinating. But what you're saying is you cannot divorce innovation from the act of manufacturing. If you make the stuff, that's where the innovation takes place.

[00:25:04]>> The act of making manufacturing your feed stocks as well. You need to make you like if you don't control your raw materials. If you don't control if you are dependent on your largest strategic adversary for everything that underpins your quality of life, you are fundamentally not in control of your own destiny. And if you would have written our current situation in a cold war novel, imagine imagine when Reagan was still in office. If uh imagine if there had been a novel comes out like a Tom Clancy novel and he says in just 20 years all of the Pentagon's most secure command and control terminals, information displays, and every other electronic device will be made by the Soviet Union under Kremlin supervision.

[00:25:47]and we're going to buy them by the millions, it would have been unthinkable. It wouldn't have even been believable as fiction. And yet, that's what happens today. The the largest laptop manufacturer for the Pentagon is Lenovo, which is owned by China. The their headquarters has a flag pole with the CCP party flag and then the Lenovo logo under it. I mean, it's nuts. I'd say one more thing on this. Why? Why we're not just beating China? China is taking their 400 or 500 billion, whatever you want to call it, right?

[00:26:18]>> They're building one military with one purpose. They need to build a force that can invade Taiwan, then occupy Taiwan using an amphibious landing uh the amphibious landing strategy and then if and when that works, use the leftovers to go pick up the leftovers in some Japanese islands, some Philippines islands, and some Korean islands. That's their whole military. The United States is trying to build a military that can continuous flight two to two and a half fronts anywhere in the world against a diverse set of enemies across every climate, every every bit of terrain, every possible weapon system. We've got a way harder job than they do. We have to solve every problem and everyone else's problems by the way and they just have to solve the one. And so I would rather have their problem to be candid.

[00:27:05]>> Okay. So if it is correct, the Chinese obviously will always outnumber us. Now they have an economy big enough and they're efficient enough in the way they spend money and they have >> I don't necessily agree. We can we can outrouce them, but that's a different that's a different topic for a different day.

[00:27:20]>> That is that is episode number two.

[00:27:23]Palmer, >> we cannot beat we cannot beat China with 500 million Americans. It will never happen. We'll become economically irrelevant. But if our if our hope if our only hope for some kind of systematic advantage population is episode two, I mean we just but with this population, our only hope for systematic chance against China is innovation. Two questions. One, how do we keep them from stealing innovations?

[00:27:51]Stop patenting everything. Uh patents are Chinese instruction manuals. You're taking your most valuable stuff. you are. Look, so the founding fathers never predicted a world where you would have a globalized economy where the entire patent office could be downloaded every single morning and then ripped off and then used to fight a war against you. Um the the problem that we have right now is that uh western companies patent things so that they can trade temporary exclusivity on an idea in exchange for eventually it enters the public domain.

[00:28:22]And all that really means in practice is that for the 20 years or so between when you file for a patent and when somebody could launch a product that is a ripoff, it means China can just rip it off right away and Western companies can only rip it off after 20 years. And then you repeat this cycle over and over again for every single generation. And uh it it's killing us. And so I don't I don't hardly get patents anymore. There's a few things here and there, mostly defensively because unfortunately our patent system allows people to sue you when they think that you're they're infringing. We need to really fundamentally revisit the patent system.

[00:28:57]And I I'm not just complaining here.

[00:28:58]I've got a possible solution. I think we need to massively expand the national security patent process. Uh you can you can obtain a classified patent. You can get a patent on something that you are not allowed to disclose to anyone, but you still maintain the exclusivity on those rights. We need to massively expand that program and also massively expand all the categories of things that are covered by mandatory national security disclosure laws in during the cold war. A lot of sensors and micro computer technology was covered by this because the government said, "Oh my god, if the Russians get this, >> it's over." And we put in all the money, we put in all the time, they're just going to be able to rip it off. If we let them rip all the stuff without and paying any of the money to get there, then all of their money will go way further than us where we're doing the fundamentals of all of this. U I think for example that a lot of the things Google patents around artificial intelligence, they are of national security importance, they should be allowed to get a patent and it should absolutely not be disclosed publicly and uh you should have to be a US citizen to gain access to these patents. Maybe it's not classified, right? we can't require, you know, security clearance for every engineer to run these things. But I'm I'm suggesting something where it's much broader, but the bar is lowered quite a bit. And so you can imagine a world where you kind of maybe have to uh you go to a go to the Library of Congress to access access these things or you have to use a CAT card. And and people say, "But Palmer, the spies will get in, the spies will get stuff." Okay, fine. Maybe we can make it where it's at least a little hard because right now again they can go to the US patent office website and download every single patent that Google and Apple and everybody else put in every single morning. We could at least try to do a little better than that. Maybe I can't buy 20 years, but maybe I can buy one, two, three. If I could buy a year, that would be enough to be worth the effort. Okay. So something remarkable is taking that is the first time I have ever heard a patent discussion illicit applause.

[00:30:58]>> Chinese instruction manuals. We have to stop them.

[00:31:01]>> So that raises a second question about innovation. It used to be that we could tell ourselves that the Chinese could steal and they could copy and they could manufacture but they couldn't do zero to one that we were the innovators and they were not.

[00:31:20]Are we still contin We're still kicking their butt on on zero to one. We we were way ahead of them. It's not even close. There are a few people that are kind of the Chinese Palmer llies. And the interesting thing is I've been able to get to where I am largely because I've become interested in a lot of things and I'm good enough at a lot of things that I can draw connections between different fields in a way that people who are native to those fields might not. The Chinese system doesn't produce people like that.

[00:31:46]Um, it's a bit like Germany in that uh early pretty early in your education, you get tracked off into the gifted kids or the middle kids or uh the other kids and uh and and and then they put you into tracks that are that are that that are pretty well set and it's very very difficult to have a mid-career shift.

[00:32:02]It's very hard to reinvent yourself in modern China. I'm not saying it's impossible. You'll always find examples, but by and large it does not happen. You don't have the guy here who, you know, is, you know, doing Hollywood films one day and then he does VFX and then he does a robotics company and then he, you know, he burns out for a while and he and he and he draw he draws paintings on on the street, you know, on Venice Beach and then he gets back into it and raises a million dollars. That's not a real thing in China. And uh there's a few examples though. There's a guy who like one of the co-founders of DJI, the drone company. uh he's he's he's from a wealthier family, privately tutored, western style education, uh learned a lot coming to the United States to be educated, went back to China, and he is a polymath. He understands lasers and engineering and self-driving cars and computers and AI and and aerodynamics and and batteries, and he he's he does understand this stuff really well. I don't know him well, but I've met him in a number of these kind of global Illuminati type events that the Europeans host where where everybody's invited and you all smile at each other.

[00:33:02]Um, and it's very funny because I'm personally sanctioned by China as a radical separatist terrorist uh on account of arming Taiwan. Yeah, it's good one. Thank you. Um, I've also sanctioned in Russia and Bellarus. Uh, so uh Bellarus just does whatever Russia tells them. I never did anything to Bellarus. Um, I I I I forgot they're even a thing. The point is >> the founder of DJI, right?

[00:33:26]>> He's he's the Palmer Lucky of China.

[00:33:27]They do exist and it's interesting.

[00:33:29]They're rare rarer than here.

[00:33:31]>> They are much rarer than here. It again because their educational system just does not generate uh it it does not I guess the one way you could look is it doesn't generate very many queen bees and it generates a lot of worker bees.

[00:33:43]>> And what about our capital markets? Is that a big advantage? There's no Peter Teal in China.

[00:33:47]>> No. Well, I mean look I mean Peter's a great example. You know where did I get where I got into it? I got into because of our US capital markets and and people complain about all these all I mean there's a million complaints. Oh, you you you can't get a break in America.

[00:34:00]Blah blah blah. Look, I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19 ft camper trailer, and Peter Teal gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus. And so, and I and I know other people maybe not quite so extreme situations. That's not happening in China. I'll tell you that.

[00:34:20]Uh and and and people say, "Oh my god, but it's so difficult to, you know, get a warm intro to people." And Mark Andre has a really good point on this. He says, "You know the reason that I want a warm intro for anybody that I'm going to invest in? Because if you can't get anyone in my network, and he knows everybody. If you can't get any of the 10,000 people with my phone number to say a nice word about you, and you can't track down anyone dumb enough to connect you with me, why would I talk to you?

[00:34:45]That's part of the test. If you can't get connected to me, you're never going to be successful at convincing people to work for you. Never going to be successful convincing the next round of investors or you're or or you're never going to convince factories to work with you." It's it's part it's part of the process. In China, it's much more centrally planned, right? Like the DJ DJI is successful because the government basically anointed them the chosen drone provider and gave them huge transfers of government technology, free land, free factories and uh and massive subsidies not only on the manufacturing but also the shipping into the United States market and all of these other markets.

[00:35:17]And so it's it's a very fundamental difference. I prefer the you know the US capital markets where money can flow sometimes in bizarre ways but it flows towards the things that have a chance of making a difference.

[00:35:30]>> Can can we all right from China back to us and how we array our forces. Let's take the Navy then the United States Navy today 11 carriers just under 300 other surface combat ships and about 70 submarines all of them nuclear. Uh, the fleet includes, as best I can could tell from doing the research online, four unmanned ships and a few hundred small drone boats. What should the United States Navy look like, say, three years from now?

[00:36:00]>> Oh, I mean, you can't do much in three years. That's the problem.

[00:36:03]>> Five years. What? Okay. What's What's the amount of What's the window for actually getting something done for reconfiguring the force?

[00:36:09]>> Let me think. There's an old saying, you go to war with the with with with the with the with the neighbor you have.

[00:36:15]>> The neighbor you have, not the navy you want. Yes.

[00:36:17]>> Um and in this case, you go to the war with Navy you have, not the one you you you want to build. Um I think that if you give it about 5 years, you could start doing some useful contributions, but it's going to take about 10 years to do the really interesting things. I Here's the reality. We don't need a 300 ship navy. We need about a thousand ships or more.

[00:36:36]>> The only way that we're going to do that >> Wait, autonomous? you're talking about small autonomous ships or >> in general like basically the way that I look at autonomy is it's a thing that enables you to make the right decisions in certain cases. Um it like I'm not I'll give you an example.

[00:36:50]There's going to be ships that are fully autonomous, no people aboard. What's going to be much more common are going to be ships that are very lightly manned because most of the jobs have been automated on them. In other words, an aircraft carrier that doesn't have 5,000 people aboard, it has 120. Uh, a destroyer that instead of having a thousand people aboard has a crew of 50.

[00:37:13]Uh, automating a lot of these jobs and using a combination of robotics and automation and and just materials that don't, for example, require so much constant anti-corrosion treatment. uh we we could build a navy where like I'm not saying that autonomous ships are the answer but autonomy integrated everywhere is the only way we'll do it because if we have a navy that is let's say three times as big in terms of ships we do not have enough people to have three times as many people in the navy it's just never going to work and and the worst part is when you build a new ship you don't just build a ship and then let it sit and wait for war you have to fill it with people and you basically have to have them place play pretend continuously uh so that you're there ready to fight they know how their ships work. You need to sail all over the place. You need to do exercises. It costs almost as much to do nothing as it does to fight a war in some cases. With autonomy, you might be able to change that equation. I could build a thousand autonomous ships. We're mostly autonomous ships and I could put them in dry dock or I could wrap them in a big giant cellophane wrapper and fill it with argon gas. I call this concept the Twinkie ship concept. It's a you put in a wrapper and it lasts for a thousand years. And uh if you could do that, you might be able to make like the cost of building the navy is not building the ship. It's maintaining and sustaining and then replacing that ship when it wears out. If we can just make the cost of building a ship the cost of building a ship and then you wait for war to come, it's a gamecher. So I I think 10 years we need to be thinking about how we can do automated shipyard production.

[00:38:38]building a navy that has the same or even fewer personnel, more specialized, higher paid, even more uh more skilled in their particular disciplines. Uh and then we need to have three or four or five times as many ships.

[00:38:52]>> Okay, let's talk about the question of resources, which is tied to the question of national will with which you began earlier. President Trump just announced a Pentagon budget for the next year w with an increase of over 40%. So it goes from about 900 billion today up to 1.5 trillion. Now that sounds staggering, but it only gets us to about 4% of GDP, which is well below the 8 to 10% of GDP we were spending during the first 20 or so years of the Cold War. And since we're at the Reagan library, I checked.

[00:39:25]When President Reagan took office, defense spending stood at 5%. It peaked during his administration at 7% and by the time he left, it was at 6%. I repeat, this seemingly gigantic increase that President Trump is proposing to 1.5 trillion would still only take us to 4% of GDP.

[00:39:45]Enough? Too much? Too little? Just right? Can the Pentagon even deploy that big an increase? What do you think?

[00:39:52]>> Well, I can't say that it's too much money because then I'm liable to get less of it. Um, and that's just that's a reality. Um, well, it's worth noting too that like that 4% of GDP, remember that Trump is out there and Marco Rubio is out there demanding that our allies spend 5% of GDP on national security.

[00:40:14]So, you know, this is a we we would be we would we would be the we'd be the lightweights in this in this percentage calculation. Um, I guess that's it's it's like it's like fair taxes, you know. It means it means it means different people pay different fractions and different amounts. Anyway, um the way that the way that I look at this is I I honestly the first page of Andre's pitch deck that said Androl is going to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year. That's my goal. I think what we need to do in the long run is figure out how to be more efficient with defense spending. I think we can do as much as we're doing and more than we're currently doing for less than we are currently spending. Not talking about the budget. saying, "I think we can get to where we're spending less money to do more."

[00:41:02]But in the same way you go to war with the Navy, you have you write budgets with the weapons that you can actually fund, right? This hypothetical that I have of this like this future Twinkie ship maybe. I mean, we need to build stuff right now to stop really major threats. We need to refill our magazines that we've just depleted, firing everything out of them. And would it be awesome to say, well, what if we could build a replacement for the Tomahawk that wasn't designed in the '60s and it was more manufacturable and we're going to buy a whole Okay, that's great. But we do also need to given that a lot of our doctrine is built around it. Our ship's launchers are built around it.

[00:41:40]Everyone's trained to use it. Our our uh our our allies like Japan are also trained to use it. And so when people say things, well, why don't we just replace with a cheaper system? Okay, well it's going to take a few years to do that. It's going to take a few years to get it out there. How long is it going to take to train people to use them to find all of the problems to work out all the bugs? And so I I think that Trump is reacting to the world as it exists today and realistically if we are going to continue to have the same war fight like when we talk about you know 1.5 trillion budget I I mean you could spend that money just basically getting our military back up to standard with the weapons that we already have. We have tons of weapons that are corroded.

[00:42:18]They are depleted. They are out of service. our ammunition stockpiles, not just I'm probably about missiles. I probably even just normal smaller arms ammunition are hugely depleted. The point is there's a lot of money to spend to overcome a lot of the rot. Uh I I hope that we can get a $ 1.5 trillion budget this year and I hope that 10 years from now it's a fraction of that.

[00:42:38]Got it. All right. Very nice. A few last questions.

[00:42:43]Here's the late Henry Kissinger. He's writing this just a couple of years before his death. If you imagine a war between China and the United States, you have artificial intelligence weapons.

[00:42:53]You can't tell exactly what will happen when AI fighter planes on both sides interact.

[00:42:59]So, you are then in a world of potentially total destructiveness. Close quote. Now, you are warm and funny and articulate. You must be a bear to work for. But but when you're on a stage, at least you're warm and funny. You wear Hawaiian shirts, but there is at a minimum a kind of free floating anxiety about AI, which is a large part of your enterprise. And here we have Henry Kissinger. He co-wrote this book with Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. There are serious people who say we should be scared to death of the likes of Palmer Lucky.

[00:43:48]It's very reasonable. Um it it's it's very it's very reasonable when you put it that way. Um oh there was there was a there was a there was a a quote I'm a quote I'm trying to remember. What was it? Um give me just a second. I it's it's on you know it's on the tip of it's it's on the tip of your brain. You're too young to have that problem.

[00:44:11]>> No, I I' I've got too much in my brain to not have that problem. Look, uh I think that sometimes very very smart people can also simply be wrong. Uh there are uh Oh, I remember what I was going to say. Look, even people in their fields of expertise, the things that they are deeply involved in can say things that don't pan out. Anyone remember Bill Gates? 32 kilob kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody, you know, uh and and so, you know, imagine if you had asked Kissinger about his opinion of uh the useful memory limits of a home computer, uh you know, he would have probably had an answer that was even worse. Uh no, no offense to him, but when he says you have two fighter jets that go up against each other, you don't really know what's going to happen. You I fundamentally disagree with that premise. You can build formally verifiable software that can responds in a very consistent and deterministic way. I can make something that responds the exact same way every single time perfectly even based on AI systems and and and and people the problem is he's looking at probably large language models, you know, like he's looking at chat GPT and saying, "Oh, they're non-deterministic and they do these random weird things. They hallucinate." The types of AI you build for doing large language models are radically different from what is used for flying a fighter jet. Radically different from, for example, determining the difference between a fishing boat and a Chinese destroyer. And people say things to me like this all the time.

[00:45:37]Palmer, it might not know the difference. What if it makes a mistake?

[00:45:41]I I promise you, when you look at the thermal signature, the visible outline, the electromagnetic emissions, the wave profile, the like the wake profile of of of a destroyer, you cannot mistake it with anything. you you you I I'd be willing to bet my life on every single detection of that destroyer that it is not a fishing boat. And a lot of people who are not experts in this area, who aren't working with it, they they they imagine it in the more interesting free form way that Hollywood has taught them to. They see this thing as a Terminator problem. They see AI as a lot more open and sensient and less subservient to man than than it actually is. Maybe someday we're going to have a totally different type of AI. Like imagine, you know, you have the true sensient thinking conscious machine that looks out for its own interests. It's capable of self-evolving, self-eing. Uh, you know, as John Connor said, you don't understand. It'll never stop. It It can never die. It never sleeps. It never grows tired. It won't stop until you're dead.

[00:46:42]We are a long way away from that form of of AI. And I'm not saying I'm not afraid it might happen someday. But if you rank the things that I'm afraid of, it's way down the list. I'm afraid of boweapons that are tailored to kill particular uh ethnic lines or even family lines. I'm I'm afraid of people uh using AI to develop bacteria that will, you know, destroy a lot of our agricultural reserves. I There's so many things I'm afraid of. Um, and I'd say if anyone is uh really afraid of these things, they should actually talk to the people in the military who are tasked with developing the doctrine around these things because if you don't believe me and you don't trust me, you shouldn't.

[00:47:21]Take everything I say with a pound of salt. Right? I'm the guy making billions of dollars. I'm the guy with the pitch deck that says I want to make tens of billions of dollars selling arms for taxpayer money. Don't trust me. You should talk to the people who are actually tasked with deploying these weapon systems and ask them what they think. And I I if Kissinger went up to the people who are doing this, for example, the experimental operations unit, the EOU in the United States Air Force, which is currently operating our FQ44 autonomous fighter jets today, and they are flying them, developing doctrine for what a future war might look like. If you asked if Ken's sister said, "But if these two fighters meet, you don't even know what's going to happen, really, do you? It could be total war."

[00:48:02]I mean, they they they they might be polite to him in the room, but you wouldn't believe what they'd have to say after he walks out of there. I I think those are the people you need to listen to.

[00:48:12]Last question. I'm going to take a moment to set this up because again, it strikes me as basic.

[00:48:19]In 2004, the late political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote an essay about a new class of Americans that he called Davos men. Huntington quote, "These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty. They view national boundaries as obstacles that are that thankfully are vanishing and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the global elites, global operations." Close quote. For the first time in history, in other words, the United States of America had produced a class of people who had no use for the country itself. And I have to confess that when I looked around Silicon Valley, I thought at the time that Huntington was correct. Mark Zuckerberg gives a commencement address at Harvard in which he praises quote the forces of global community. Close quote.

[00:49:10]>> Bringing the world closer together.

[00:49:12]>> There we go. In 2018, Google employees forced the company to drop a contract with the Pentagon. By the way, just last week, Google employees did it again while we're speaking of Google. Um, more than I'm quoting a news account from last week. Last week, more than 600 Google workers signed an open letter to the CEO expressing concerns about negotiations between Google and the Pentagon. Close quote. Davos men, internationalists, globalists, and along come Peter Teal and Mark Andre and you, Palmer Lucky.

[00:49:50]Why are you such a patriot?

[00:49:54]Well, the good news is, you know, that's a really intelligent and articulate way to put it, but you don't have to be that intelligent or that articulate to understand the problem. I think a lot of un people, Americans understand the problem. They're all members of of of the of the Mono Party or UNI party here in the US and abroad and they buy into a certain set of political values and social values. They largely didn't decide for themselves. they're isolated from the consequences of those decisions. Uh, you know, I I mean, I I saw a lot of this when I was in Silicon Valley. I don't want to beat up too much on Mark Zuckerberg, you know, for uh, you know, learning Chinese or or asking uh, you know, asking the Chinese to help him with everything, but like, you know, I got to go back to my time when I was there.

[00:50:36]There were a bunch of flags that flew on the Facebook campus. You had a pirate flag, an Instagram flag, a gay pride flag, a a world peace flag. There was a Black Lives Matter uh you know, fist for a while. No American flag. And that was because if you asked them at the time, are you an American company? The official answer, and not not this is not me making it up, this is what they testified under oath to Congress. They said, "We are a uh we are an international organization that transcends borders." And the main reason for that is that they were headquartered for tax purposes in Dublin, Ireland. And so if you say that you're an American company, the the jig is up. U but but so it's a little unfair. It was really a tax but but culturally it was true, right? They thought of themselves as part of, you know, this Davos elite type person. And and even, you know, the individual programmers thought of themselves that way. By the way, half the people at Facebook weren't born in America. And I'm not saying that that that there's something bad about being an immigrant, but when you have a place where most of the people did not grow up in a country with its values, you're going to end up inherently with a place that much more greatly centers its care outside of the United States and prioritize things outside of the United States. Um, I mean, you might remember the Clawed Constitution at Anthropic. uh it its publicly posted constitution was that it uh it consider all answers from a perspective that does not uh unduly weigh perspectives or values. I is explicitly being told to to to to to not value these things that the west has decided that are important around you uh uh self-governance, freedom of association, freedom of speech that we mostly still have and the Europeans are forgetting about. But um anyway, you asked me what I what I think about this idea that that the reality is we all know who these people are. And I think the first people to figure it out uh were not uh the intelligencia. I think it was actually bluecollar workers in working working in Detroit, Michigan.

[00:52:46]They understand way better than the people who go to Davos do.

[00:52:51]>> Are you a bluecollar worker in your head?

[00:52:54]>> Look, my dad's a car salesman growing up. My mom's a homemaker. Uh I when I was started Oculus I was I was I had a job sweeping a boatyard for minimum wage. And so it's a little hard to think of myself as a as as as bluecollar today I guess. But uh you know I I I certainly feel like I feel like I come from that background.

[00:53:16]>> Palmer Lucky. Thank you.

[00:53:18]>> Thank you so much >> for Uncommon Knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.