Transcript: Anduril Industries’ Founder Palmer Luckey on Joe Rogan Podcast

Two, they’re out of—

JOE ROGAN: So he’s loading like this and the keyboard underwater.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, exactly. So you’re floating at neutral position, basically.

JOE ROGAN: And just to code. He wants to code like that.

PALMER LUCKEY: He wants to code.

JOE ROGAN: He must be a super weirdo.

PALMER LUCKEY: I want to do it for VR gaming. I think that’d be really interesting. If you can’t simulate the experience of your body being in the game, at least to forget that your body exists and have the only thing you’re viewing be your vision. And the sound, I feel like would be a very interesting experience. I’m begging off an hour in it from him when he gets it done. But I’m looking forward to that.

The Float Tank Experience

JOE ROGAN: I would let you use ours to try it out, but we just had a problem with one of our pumps broke, so it’s—

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, that’s a bummer.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it flooded everything with salt water. It’s weird. It’s a weird—have you done it?

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

JOE ROGAN: You should get one for your place.

PALMER LUCKEY: Maybe I should.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PALMER LUCKEY: I should probably try it first, right? Or it’s just so good I should have it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you’ll love it. Yeah, it’s very relaxing too. And it’s really good for thinking. Like if you have a thought and you’re just around with it in your head, like, “I don’t know what to do with this.” You’re in there. You have zero distractions.

It’s like your mind has more computational power that’s available because even though you don’t think about it, like right now we’re in these chairs. Your butt’s touching the chair, your feet are on the floor, your hands on the table, your clothes are on your body. There’s all these different things that your body is recognizing as input.

When you take those away, it’s like if you’re having a conversation, there’s a bunch of people right beside you with a jackhammer. Like, “This is too distracting. Let’s go over here.” And you go where in the park? It’s nice and peaceful now you can have a conversation so much easier.

Well, you don’t realize that regular everyday life, just establishing the distance between the walls and thinking about all the data, all that stuff is—your brain is computing this.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right. And it’s all salt laden, so it’s isotonic. It’s not exactly—

JOE ROGAN: You feel like you’re flying.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s so cool. I’ve done a lot of reading on it and I’m super interested in the science of it, but I’ve never actually managed to get into a float tank, which is really embarrassing. I mean, you’d think that a billionaire would have the resources to get into a bucket of salt water.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you should have somebody make you one, build you one at your place.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, that’d be cool. Maybe get one made out of wood instead of the plastic.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, you’ll have to show it to me so that I can check it out.

The Future of VR and Sensory Deprivation

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: You drop into it. That would be the perfect environment to do it in salt water.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep. I mean, that’s been my—that was always my dream in the old—you know, my first company was Oculus, and so that was my dream was to just fully feel like you were inside of the video game. Completely forget about—

JOE ROGAN: How old were you when you started working there?

Palmer’s Journey with Oculus

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

JOE ROGAN: Did you work with Carmack?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah. So, well, Carmack was—John Carmack was one of my heroes growing up.

JOE ROGAN: Love that dude.

PALMER LUCKEY: And it was one of these crazy things where the universe kind of brought us together. I was working on my VR technology and nobody was paying attention to VR back then. It was kind of a crazy person thing. Nobody was paying attention what I was doing, but I was posting about it on this Internet forum.

And then John Carmack started posting on that same forum, asking for help, modifying his own Sony head mounted display that he had bought to reduce the latency. And so I gave him a bunch of input on why he couldn’t do it, why it was a large, impossible project because I had been trying to do the same thing.

And then he ended up seeing the work I was doing on the Oculus Rift and he said, “Hey, Palmer, can I buy one of these from you?” Said, “Well, I’m not really selling these yet, but I’d be happy to lend it to you for free.” And so I sent it to him.

He ended up writing a review and posting it on his blog and said it was the best VR experience the world has ever seen. He introduced me to Sony. They tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab. I turned him down. They doubled the offer. I turned that down.

And then so John was kind of the guy who got me—he’s kind of the first guy who got any public attention for me where everyone was like, “Oh, John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important.”

And then if you could believe it, two years later, after I started Oculus and started selling these, he actually left ID Software and became the CTO of Oculus. So then I had the incredible opportunity to work with one of my childhood heroes as my CTO.

JOE ROGAN: What year was that?

PALMER LUCKEY: That was 2012.

JOE ROGAN: He came on the podcast, I think 2016. He brought one.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, he joined in 2013. So I think it was June of 2013. So about a year after I started Oculus is when he joined as CTO.

VR Gaming and Fitness

JOE ROGAN: Well, he showed us and he was doing whatever the one is where you, I guess you have drumsticks. Is that what you have? And you’re whacking stuff as it comes out of the sky. He showed us that. And what a work—

PALMER LUCKEY: Probably Beat Saber.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, he’s a huge Beat Saber fan.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he was going nuts and he was doing it really fast. This is nuts.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s actually—it is good fitness, good coordination training. Yeah, it really—Beat Saber was great because it really busted this myth that VR was this totally inactive, be a fat, lazy, slob thing.

VR gaming, at least as it exists today, takes a lot more caloric expenditure than any other type of gaming. I mean for sure. And even more than other motion games, like remember Wii Bowling and Wii Sports? That’s one movement every once in a while. Beat Saber is a full body workout.

JOE ROGAN: What’s really impressive is the boxing games. The boxing games are a really good workout.

PALMER LUCKEY: Did you play—I think one of them was Creed by a company called Survios.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t remember what the name was. We had a couple different ones at the old studio in LA and I’d work out with it. I’d put it on and you know, you do a round with these virtual boxers, you really get a workout in. Your feet hurt. You’re like, “Wow, I’m utilizing a lot of movement here.”

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep. You know, the company that did a few of those boxing games is this LA studio called Survios. And the two co-founders of that were actually guys who worked with me in the Army Research lab that I worked in before starting Oculus. So it’s one of those teeny tiny worlds. There were so few of us that really believed in VR in those days.

VR Training for Professional Athletes

JOE ROGAN: Is there a VR that a professional boxer could use? Could you get VR to the point where you could program it with AI so you could take the movement of a Sugar Ray Leonard or something like that and actually program it into the machine?

PALMER LUCKEY: So I’d go first. It’s not just something you could do. It’s being done. There are boxers who are using this technology.

JOE ROGAN: Really.

PALMER LUCKEY: So I know Logan Paul and Jake Paul, and I’ve talked with them a lot about using virtual reality and how they’re using it to do that training. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Well, my thought was that you could actually emulate an opponent. So say if you were supposed to fight Canelo Alvarez, we have this database of all Canelo Alvarez’s performances and training footage. So you could calculate what his normal exchanges are, what his opening moves are, how he sets the hook up off the jab, he feints the right hand.

Robot Fighting and AI Combat Sports

PALMER LUCKEY: He had a crazy deja vu. Let me send you. Let me show you the text message that I was just doing with Logan Paul last night. I said, it’s time to have robots fighting people. My dream is that you can have robots perfectly tuned to match your own current physical capability and progressively ramp up against yourself over time, or against the greats we were talking through, this was less VR.

Well, are you even following some of the Robot Fighting League stuff? So that’s controlled by VR. You put on a VR headset, you put on a motion capture suit, you tele operate a robot. One of the things I’ve been talking with Logan about is the idea of having one teleoperated robot versus an actual human.

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

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

PALMER LUCKEY: It could pull its punches. Yes, that’s really good for the best.

JOE ROGAN: Sparring partners, someone who could.

PALMER LUCKEY: So the mechanics of it are all the same, but you don’t have the follow through.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it would have more control probably even than a person. Right. So you think of the precise movements that surgical robots are able to do.

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

JOE ROGAN: Is this something that someone’s working out with? This is Bob Fightly again, San Francisco.

PALMER LUCKEY: So actually this is a buddy of mine who’s been working in VR for a really, really long time. So it’s again, what a tiny world of weird wackos. But yeah, Sixliv has been working on, which is his real name, by the way, he’s been working on VR stuff for the past 15 years. And he recently got into doing this robot, robot combat sports league.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s that.

PALMER LUCKEY: They’re doing a bit. They’re doing a big US vs China fight in December. If you want me to get you tickets, I can. I can make it happen. I can pull some strings.

JOE ROGAN: Where is it?

PALMER LUCKEY: Where’s it taking place? I think it’s going to be in San Francisco.

JOE ROGAN: That’s funny. I try to stay out of San Francisco. I also don’t really want to watch robots fight. No, I don’t mind watching them on.

PALMER LUCKEY: TV, but you ever. You ever see. You ever read manga or anime about fighting?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Anime Fighting Techniques and Robot Applications

PALMER LUCKEY: So I got to admit, I’m less of a fighting guy, more of an anime manga guy. But I love some of the just ridiculous inventions that then make you think if there might be something there. So like Fist of the North Star, there’s a move that a guy learns and it’s like a. I forget the name of it, but it’s like a double punch.

So what you do is you fold your fingers and you punch the guy and then his skin recoils, delivers the full hit. And then you fold your fingers in. So you hit, fold your fingers and then punch again. And it’s like one punch, but it’s a double punch. And then one of the culmination of his training is where his master shows him that there’s actually a final step. You can see where it’s going. It’s a triple punch.

So you punch him like this and then like this and then like this. And mostly that stuff is nonsense and never going to work with a person. But it makes me wonder if a robot could do it.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: What I’m thinking is a robot would allow you to do this type of muscles.

JOE ROGAN: It’s using a different force.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. So your first one would carry all your inertia through and then you could get a second one. Because you would think you would probably.

JOE ROGAN: Want the most power in the first shot and concentrate only on that.

PALMER LUCKEY: But what if you could do the most power in the first shot and then another follow up shot anyway? Yeah, or you hit him and it throws him back a bit and then the moment, the distance it creates. Look, I’m not a fighting expert. I’m a computer kid.

Human Form vs. Optimal Combat Design

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, it ends up looking like a battle bot. Probably something heavily shielded and armored and it’s got a big spike on an arm.

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

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

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s terrible. It’s a terrible form.

PALMER LUCKEY: Although I would say one of my, I don’t think James Cameron ever really explored this in Terminator. But my personal kind of head cannon theory would be that the reason that Skynet made the terminators into a humanoid form is because maybe there is really some hope in that there’s something of humanity left in it.

If it was truly a merciless killing machine with no affiliation with humanity, why would it make its agents so uniformly human shaped? But that’s just something I’m thinking just.

JOE ROGAN: For deception, sneak around.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, the later ones truly were for deception. But if you look at a lot of the flashes into the future, they don’t have meat shielded terminators. There’s lots of T series humanoid combat robots that are just walking around as bare metal skeletons.

And so I feel like it’s almost like an admission that the AI does see itself in the, in the mind of. It sees itself as a creation of man. It sees itself in the eyes of man.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s very creepy, right, because that’s in the Bible. God created man in his image.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s very much like it realizes it was created in man’s image and derives some sort of satisfaction or value from that. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s just a giant cycle.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s how life eventually does create artificial life.

Panspermia and Extraterrestrial Life

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, I mean you’re familiar with all the theories around humanity being planted here by and that’s always interesting because you could imagine a world where yeah, it is this cycle of things that look kind of like humans were on top of us. And maybe eventually there will be things that look like humans beneath us.

JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t there some weird discovery, recent discovery of an asteroid where they picked apart whether it’s the crucial amino acids for life or some sort of genetic material.

PALMER LUCKEY: You’re talking about the NASA release that there were strong indicated bio signs that are compatible with what we would expect from life?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, there was.

PALMER LUCKEY: And then I think recently. Right, it was recently. Although they walked it back pretty quickly.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, did they?

PALMER LUCKEY: There was kind of an initial release that said that we found that they’re strongly aligned with being biological signals. And then they kind of reached back, they said, well maybe not. I haven’t dug into that one as deep as others. I’ve just been too busy really lately. And you’re right, this is very recent news.

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

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

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PALMER LUCKEY: Which, of course, what we all want. We want people or, you know, little green men.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PALMER LUCKEY: Something like that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s probably going to be pretty far away.

UAP Footage and Sensor Verification

PALMER LUCKEY: It probably is. And it seems. I mean, my experience on this front is largely from a military angle and looking at a lot of the footage that’s coming out and a lot of the sensor feeds that have come out. And the thing that what we really need even more than discovering microbes like these flying objects, the problem is that most of them, and I’m not saying all of them, most of them, we’re only capturing on, let’s say, one sensor.

A camera is seeing it or a radar is seeing it. It’s very rare to get both of those totally different types of sensors looking at it at the same time. It’s relatively easy to imagine a world where a sensor would have an error or an artifact or even that’s being actively spoofed. Right. People are actively trying to trick it.

You can make radars see things that aren’t there. You can make cameras see things that aren’t there if you’re really smart about how you interact with them. It’s very hard to make something that makes a radar and a camera see something that isn’t there in a way that perfectly aligns with what is there.

Now, you saw the recent one with the Hellfire that was fired at, and it appears to have broken up but then kept moving.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

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

JOE ROGAN: And is that definite real footage?

PALMER LUCKEY: I mean, I believe it’s been verified. I am probably not in a position where I should say if I know if it’s been verified, but I’ll tell you this. I believe the footage is real.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s run through perplexity and ask, what.

PALMER LUCKEY: Do you mean by verified, though?

JOE ROGAN: Just ask if it has been verified that this is legitimate footage from the military of whatever they thought it was going to be, and a Hellfire missile hits it.

PALMER LUCKEY: I do believe that one of the members of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Committees in Congress introduced it into a hearing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where it came from.

PALMER LUCKEY: It came from a hearing? Yeah. So who released it?

JOE ROGAN: It didn’t just show up on Twitter. Okay, which guy released it?

PALMER LUCKEY: You saw the phenomenon?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PALMER LUCKEY: Fantastic.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really good.

PALMER LUCKEY: You know, the guy who did it is doing a follow up. Have you heard about this?

Defense Spending and Government Waste

JOE ROGAN: What’s he doing?

PALMER LUCKEY: You know, I probably shouldn’t say too much more, but there’s a follow-up to it that’s coming that’s even…

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute. Wasn’t the phenomenon James Fox? James Fox, was it? James Fox was a phenomenon. Say again? James Fox, was that the phenomenon? Yeah, but the age of disclosure. He had moment of contact. He had the Virginia. That’s the Virginia one. And then didn’t he have the phenomenon too? Somebody did it. I saw it. Why did I think it was Fox? It is Fox.

Yeah, Fox has been on here a few times. He’s got that crazy one about the Virginia Brazil sighting. Do you know about that one? That one’s nuts. Like the whole town saw this thing. It crashed in the 90s and they have like a statue of this thing as you’re entering the city.

And supposedly this is the crazy story. There was a wounded alien. One of the police officers carried this wounded alien in the back of a car. They brought it to a hospital. There’s records of them bringing this to the hospital. The hospital said, we can’t handle this. We have no, take it to a different hospital. So they took it to another hospital. Then the guy who carried the thing gets a severe bacterial infection that’s unresponsive to antibiotics and dies.

PALMER LUCKEY: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Young, healthy, fighting age man gets this weird infection after handling this creature. Multiple witnesses say they saw another one of them. There was like a couple of them. One of them was injured that they picked up, and there was another one that was there. And then many people in the town said that they saw another craft come by to retrieve those aliens.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s a really nutty story because it’s…

JOE ROGAN: The same story is told independently by a bunch of people.

Palmer’s Retirement Plans: The Privately Funded X-Files

PALMER LUCKEY: You know, I’ve kind of got my retirement figured out and I have for a while.

JOE ROGAN: Can you just retire right now if you wanted to?

PALMER LUCKEY: I mean, I could. What I’m doing, I think is important. You know, I got to see my mission through. The government is… we’ve been spending way too much money on defense, not getting nearly enough for it. So I started Anduril with the goal of saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I need to see that through.

But what I get to someday is there’s a handful of these government groups that are going around looking into things like what you’re talking about. You know, like they look into the strange phenomenon. Those groups do exist, and I’ve tracked down a few of them.

The problem is that they’re not taken seriously. They’re not well funded, and they’re subject to all the same normal rules as an average government employee. Their problems are not finding weird things. It’s stuff like getting approval to buy plane tickets to go somewhere and getting approval to stay there for two nights versus one night.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, look, it’s the typical government bureaucracy where they have to make every penny count. They only have so much money anyway. One of my dreams is I’m going to at some point when I’m retired, I’m going to go get deputized by the government, go get my federal badge, and I’ll be the government’s privately funded X-Files.

And I’ll just fly around. I’ll fly around on my own plane. I’ll have my own team. We’ll bring our own sensors, our own computers. Oh, man, if only we could bring in this expert, but he’s on the other side of the world. Say, bring him in. Bring him in. Send the plane. Yes, sir.

JOE ROGAN: Put out the Palmer signal.

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

The Age of Disclosure and Legal Implications

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

PALMER LUCKEY: No, I haven’t seen that.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a new one and it has a hypothesis, it has a theory of why there hasn’t been disclosure. And a lot of it has to do with the legal implications because too many people have been misappropriating funds. If this is real. So if this is real, like if…

PALMER LUCKEY: There’s recovered alien crash objects, if those have been parceled out to private companies.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly, that’s exactly the dilemma. So say if, let’s say just to make up a name, Lockheed Martin gets it and they have this back-engineered craft that they’re working on. But then Raytheon doesn’t get it. Raytheon should be able to sue the government. Like, why’d you do that? Is it an unfair competitive advantage?

Also the people that are in charge of the projects, there’s all this money that they have to lie to Congress about. And so in this documentary, one of the things that they’re proposing, guys like Lou Elizondo and like, what is the path to sanity with all this stuff? One of the things they’re proposing is amnesty. Just give like blanket amnesty, tell us what the fuck, you know, let’s go. But then there’s still…

PALMER LUCKEY: And I still have a limited time amnesty. And amnesty only applies to what is disclosed in this amnesty. It doesn’t apply beyond that.

JOE ROGAN: But also if it’s government, you know, there’s a lot of fraud and waste.

PALMER LUCKEY: Sure.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Little Cayman Islands there, you know, so stuff is probably, it’s probably real ugly.

PALMER LUCKEY: Right. Which is…

JOE ROGAN: And they’ve been doing this for… if it’s real, they’ve been doing this for decades with no oversight.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: So they probably are, they’re a little wild, they’re a little feral by now.

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

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that with everything though? Right? It’s like that’s how it is with charities as well.

Targeting Defense Department Waste

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s with everything. But it’s a question of how you can apply targeted pressure as a private individual. So, yeah, like charities, there’s a lot of graft going on. But what can I really do to stop that at each of these charities? There’s no one charity that kind of dominates. It’s a thousand grains of rice.

Whereas the Department of Defense is one giant entity with a trillion dollar a year budget. And so it’s much easier, like if you wanted to call it, save a hundred billion dollars a year for taxpayers, you kind of have to go after the big concentrated chunks. Like you might be able to do that going after healthcare problems, maybe education problems, definitely going after Department of Defense problems. And I know a lot more about how to build good technology than I do about healthcare.

JOE ROGAN: And so if these were all private companies, they would never survive the way they’re running, correct?

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

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

JOE ROGAN: No, I did not.

Secretary Driscoll’s Reform Efforts

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh man. It might be worth pulling it up. He pulls up this piece, this piece of hardware and he’s like, “Hey, this little thing, it costs this insane amount of money. And we were able to make it in our own lab, just 3D print it for like ten dollars.” And so that’s what we’re going to be doing now.

And he killed the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program. He killed this new kind of boondoggle of a robotic tank program where it was going to be millions of dollars for these robot tanks that were going to get blown up by three hundred dollar drones.

And so I mean, there’s just kind of been like no rules, just going and axing all of the dumb stuff that doesn’t make sense and then taking a knife to these companies that have been charging way too much money, which is very different from the past.

It’s very rare. It has been a long time since you saw a secretary level official being willing to publicly contraindicate defense companies and say you’re screwing over taxpayers and it ends here. I’m actually pretty optimistic about this. Across the services. I think people are fed up.

The DOGE Effect

JOE ROGAN: Do you think DOGE sort of started that ball moving and then that direction has sort of momentum headed on its side right now?

PALMER LUCKEY: I think the DOGE thing was interesting because it wasn’t even the techniques so much. Like the techniques where they kind of went into the data on USAID and looked through all of this stuff and basically where the data science of it is what allowed them to find the graft. That doesn’t really apply to finding the problems in DoD because it’s just so much more deeply buried.

But it kind of gave people permission to go look at these things. Like, it gave people permission to even say, “I believe there is billions of dollars in waste in my department, I’m going to do something about it.” I don’t think people felt like they had psychic permission to do that five years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow, that’s interesting.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, I mean, let’s go to…

JOE ROGAN: So you just didn’t want to rock the boat.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, I mean, let’s go to the height of… and you’re not even making it political, just timeline wise. Go to the middle of the Biden administration. Could you imagine any official in that era, like secretary or chair or anybody coming out and saying, “My department is wasting billions, billions of dollars. We are taking money from taxpayers and using it on absurd nonsense”? That would never happen five years ago.

And I think the DOGE stuff gave people permission to come out and say that and for them to be seen not as crazy, but as just being honest about the truth. So when you see the Secretary of the Army come out and say, “We are wasting billions of dollars on total bullshit and we are getting screwed this way and the other,” I think that’s a really good development.

Competing with China

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Correct.

JOE ROGAN: Like other countries like China, the government fully embedded in private companies and the private companies are competing against civil military fusion. Right.

Government Accountability and Competition

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, and it goes even beyond that where, like, central planning has downsides, but it does have upsides. And one of the interesting things, there is also, like, there are some people who are being accused of corruption because they just want to kill them and get them out of the way for political reasons.

There’s other people who are actually corrupt and they’re going in. And when people are wasting money, they’re not going in and saying, oh, well, you kind of wasted a few billion dollars, but, you know, we’re going to give you another shot and try this again. They just imprison them for treason or kill them.

I’m not saying that’s what we should do exactly, but I think that there’s a scale to all of these things on a scale of, you know, give them another shot versus shoot them in the head for treason. We could probably move in that direction without going all of the way and it would probably be healthy for our country’s national security.

JOE ROGAN: Would that be the, like, if you, ideally, would it be that all this national security stuff was handled by a private company? Would that be like ideal in terms of efficiency, in terms of technological innovation, implementing ideas? I think that look like private. I’m not suggesting that. I’m just saying, like, there’s problems with running a government.

PALMER LUCKEY: I mean, look, I’ve got a strong opinion here. I think that what you want, it’s not a private company. It needs to be done by competing entities. Right. And so if it’s private, at least one of them has to be private. So like, I don’t even really mind the government doing something if they’re not being favored.

In other words, if there’s some government office that is competing with multiple private sector companies.

JOE ROGAN: Like the post office versus UPS.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. Although that’s a little unfair in that I don’t know how deep, by the way, I’m very deep on this. Like, I don’t understand why we give the USPS a monopoly on normal mail. Are you familiar with this whole bit? Yeah, it’s a little weird. It’s like we would never.

JOE ROGAN: The only way you can get chickens shipped too.

PALMER LUCKEY: I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if you have baby chicks, they send them through the regular mail, but they won’t send them UPS.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s so interesting. Well, it’s the same thing with firearms. You can only send them USPS, UPS. So I don’t know why we’ve given a private company a monopoly. If there was a private company that had the same monopoly that the USPS does, and they were using it to send 100 pounds of junk mail to every American every year, there’s no way they would survive. They would be regulated out of existence.

What you really want is competition. You want organizations, private or public, that when they trip and fall, they skin their own knees instead of getting bailed out by taxpayers. You want them to live in fear, be highly competitive, and by the way, make their audits.

JOE ROGAN: By the way.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, exactly. And they have to survive an auditing process. They have to be accountable to whether it’s a board or to some committee. And the problem is right now we don’t have a lot of that.

Private Companies and National Security Policy

I will say, though, you asked should these national security programs be in the hands of private companies? I think that’s true for the development of the technology. However, it can never ever be in the hands of private companies when it comes to the actual national security policy of what we are building or who we are building it for or where it should go.

Of course I get people all the time who come to me, usually people who are more skeptical of government, and yet they say, Palmer, aren’t there countries you would commit to never building for? Would you just build for whoever gives you money? And I say, well, look, my job is to do what the government tells me. They’re the ones who decide who we’re going to war with or not.

And they say, how could you do that? How could you work with this country or that country? How could you build this type of system or that type of system? And my point to them is, do you want to live in a corporatocracy where big tech CEOs get to decide the de facto foreign policy and military policy of the United States?

Like you should, if I were in a position to make those decisions, something’s gone very wrong in this country because you can’t vote me out, you can’t elect my competitor. And so a lot of people who normally are skeptical of the government and government power and overreach, suddenly they look to the private sector for, oh, like the private sector is going to regulate this.

To me, that’s the most cyberpunk, dystopian thing. Imagine like me and a bunch of weapons executives sitting in a room being like, so which countries are on the green list this year? I don’t know. I was thinking we could sell some missile defense to those guys and I think we should sell some offensive weapons to those guys.

Like, no, that has to be the government. Unless you just don’t believe in democracy at all. Right? Like if you believe that the system that we cannot elect officials that are accountable, then that’s a different thing. But I’m not that black pilled.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not that black pilled either, but I’m getting there.

PALMER LUCKEY: I know, look, sometimes I see it too. I mean, I think that what it is, is inevitably when you have a pendulum, sometimes it will swing too far. But I think the good news, it can correct. I mean, like, look at a lot of our misadventures in the Middle East as a really good example, where there were a lot of things like the government caused a lot of things to happen.

I think never would have happened had people really known the truth behind a lot of those actions. But in the end, we did have the ability to hold them accountable. Now the real problem is that people didn’t hold them accountable.

Like, there’s a lot of people today where they’re not really that worked up about some of these people in government who lied to us. But I would say that’s a fault of the American people, not of the democratic process. It just means people don’t care about that issue as much, which is I think they should care more.

JOE ROGAN: I think they’re also not that informed, like, universally now.

PALMER LUCKEY: Is that because they don’t want to be or because they can’t be?

JOE ROGAN: It’s difficult because most people don’t have time. I think that’s a big part of it.

The Role of New Media in Public Education

PALMER LUCKEY: That does make it hard. That does make it hard. But I mean, I think that, not to butter you up, but this is one of the things where shows like yours have made a huge difference, where they’ve been able to take things that are pretty complex for a person to figure out from first principles, stories that they would never read about in establishment media, like, let’s say, the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, is dependent on continued access to the US Government.

They can’t just go out and burn everybody in the government or nobody will ever talk to them. You’ve taken a lot of these stories and put them into a format where the guy who’s busy, he’s in his truck, he’s on his way to the work site, can actually become informed on these issues.

And as someone who is a journalism major, I’ve been so happy to see that shift because I wanted to be a journalist because there were no good technology journalists and I was good at technology. Figured I was going to beat all these guys and be a better technology journalist. In the end, I ended up dropping out of school and starting Oculus instead.

JOE ROGAN: But that worked out. I think you would agree it is getting easier to become educated on these things.

PALMER LUCKEY: It is in America.

Free Speech and Cultural Differences

JOE ROGAN: It is in America, but it’s a little disconcerting. Like when you see the way they’re handling things in Europe.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, sure.

JOE ROGAN: Like it’s getting really weird in the UK. Twelve thousand arrests this year for social media posts about immigration and now they want.

PALMER LUCKEY: Everybody to have a slide for that meme, mate.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s getting really weird.

PALMER LUCKEY: And arrests for posting disturbing or offensive content.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Or annoying.

PALMER LUCKEY: Can I share a little story? This has been so funny watching this in the UK because the first thing I ever did that anyone cared about was called Mod Retro. So it was this Internet forum for people modifying game consoles, making portable versions of old game consoles, upgrading modern game consoles.

Anyway, when we started the site it was me and a few other people who were kind of running it. I was the founder and there were a few other co-administrators and one of them was this British guy who went by the online handle of Bacteria. And I won’t say his real name because it doesn’t matter, but he was a British guy. He worked in very, very low level British government. So like not a higher up at all, but he worked in a government office.

And he was always, I think of all the people on this forum, which was mostly like teenagers and college students, he was kind of like the older guy and he says, oh, we need to be kind about what we say, you know, that we shouldn’t say anything that is bad. And he was always pushing that our rules should say that it was against our rules to offend anybody and you shouldn’t be able to say anything that was too offensive.

And we mostly just made fun of him. He’s the old British man. But what’s interesting is he ended up eventually leaving the site because he thought people were being too mean to each other. And he started his own competing website. And the rule number one was no content that may make any member feel demeaned, uncomfortable or insulted.

We were making fun of that. We were making our own little image macros and memes about it. We actually made some fake ads for his website and put them on Facebook. And it said, come join Bacteria’s website. Nobody will say anything to you that might offend or displease you.

But what’s interesting is, as all this UK stuff has come around, I remember these kind of long forgotten childhood memories. I was like 13 or 14 at the time. And I think it really is partly a cultural reflection for them. Like, there are a lot of people in the UK who genuinely think it’s good to police this stuff. They don’t want people to be able to go out and just cause a ruckus, you know, to say things that are insulting in the streets.

And of course you have people who are protesting against that, but I think that also their surveillance state, you know, where there’s cameras everywhere, it’s actually a reflection of different cultural norms. And so the one good thing about what’s going on in the UK is I don’t think it would ever come over to America very easily because culturally, you know, we’re not walking around feeling like it’s a crime to insult people. They feel like it should be.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe perhaps some of them do, but I think it’s so overwhelming, moving towards tyranny.

PALMER LUCKEY: I think it’s the majority that’s the crazy.

JOE ROGAN: I think the majority of people want that way.

Cultural Attitudes Toward Free Speech and Censorship

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

JOE ROGAN: Wow, really?

PALMER LUCKEY: That has been my experience. Now there are people who disagree, of course, and I would say maybe it’s a growing group, they’re a highly visible group, they’re protesting. But if I had to bet, most people don’t care. Most people in the UK just don’t care about it one way or the other. And I think the group of people who are on the side of the control is larger than the people who are not on the side.

By the way, similar thing in China. People talk about Chinese censorship on things like Tiananmen Square, and that’s actually the majority Chinese opinion, too. If you talk to most Chinese people and you say, “Well, what do you think about the fact that they’re censoring all this discussion?” The typical—and I know lots of people in China—they say, “That’s an irrelevant issue from 30 or 40 years ago. It doesn’t matter. Anyone who’s trying to make every discussion about Tiananmen Square is just a troublemaker. And I don’t care if they’re shut down. I’m glad that they’re not clogging the comments, and I’m glad those people are being pushed out of the conversation.”

And that’s actually a pretty normal opinion: don’t cause trouble needlessly. Now, these same people might say, “I have strong opinions about the COVID lockdown information lockdown in China.” They might say, “I don’t like that the Chinese government is locking us in our apartments.” But when it comes to discussion of political issues, China in general, they think that people who bring this up would just be a troublemaker.

They say that Joe Rogan, he’s a troublemaker. Why is he bringing up all these problems from the past? It’s irrelevant. Why are we allowing this guy to take up our public spaces? If you’re public protesting in public space, they’re not here. You’ve probably seen protesters you didn’t agree with and said, “You know, I’m glad they’re doing something they believe in.”

JOE ROGAN: I’m glad George Soros is sending them checks.

PALMER LUCKEY: Maybe not. But true grassroots, you know, the guys who swear—

JOE ROGAN: Look, that’s important, but that’s not a thing in China. It’s an important part of our First Amendment.

PALMER LUCKEY: People are trying to see that, and they say, “Look at those troublemakers ruining my beautiful public space.” It’s a very interesting cultural value difference.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they also don’t have any perception of the ability to change the government.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: There’s one party in power. I think we can do this. I think we can push them out, I think—nope.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: You ain’t fixing shit. So put your nose down, get to work.

PALMER LUCKEY: I wonder if that really is the difference. I mean, in Europe, it has to be.

JOE ROGAN: Well, in Europe, they kind of resign themselves to the fact that they’re not participating.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s easier to be—

PALMER LUCKEY: Apolitical when it’s a futile exercise.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s like, what are you going to do? Stop being a troublemaker?

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

JOE ROGAN: I mean, military dictatorships, so same deal.

The Power of Propaganda and Mind Control

PALMER LUCKEY: One of the conclusions I’ve come to—you know, I work in the weapons industry and I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff. I’ve seen stuff that the US is making, that I’m making. I’m familiar with a lot of the weapon systems that Russia and China have in fielding or in progress. Some of the stuff that China and Russia are doing, I mean, it’s as sci-fi as what the United States is doing.

But I’ve come to the conclusion their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone. It’s their ability to control people’s minds through the media, through propaganda, through kind of state pressure. They convince them to believe things about the world that weren’t true, that aren’t true. And then they’re basically making people willing to fight for causes that don’t really exist.

A good example of this is Ukraine. A lot of the Russians who went to fight in Ukraine in the early days—I think the truth is out now, but when they were first invading—they were told that the people of Ukraine want to be liberated. “You’re going to be a hero, you’re going to go over there.” They desperately want Russia to save them and reunify them. And it’s just this Kyiv-led cabal funded by the west that’s barely holding on to the country and keeping and staying in power. And people in Russia really believed that. The guys who were fighting on the front lines, the guys who were flying tanks and helicopters, they believed it.

When I went to Ukraine during the war, one of the things that I got to see was there was this helicopter wreck. It was an attack helicopter that was trying to seize an airfield of a private aerospace company. And the guys actually shot it down themselves. They showed me videos of them wearing polo shirts shooting down the helicopter in their parking lot. I mean, it’s crazy shit.

So the pilot’s kind of go bag, you know, this bag with all of his emergency and survival gear in it—it had three or four days of water, three or four days of food, another flight uniform, his dress uniform with dress shoes because they were told they were going to be—they said, “This is going to be a five-day military operation. There’s going to be parades.” So dress uniform and then 50 condoms.

This guy thought that he was going to be—he thought the women were going to be all over him. They were going to—he was going to need 50 condoms for the post-war celebration. And to me, that speaks to how brainwashed this guy was. And remember, helicopter pilots aren’t the dumb grunt dragging. I mean, he’s probably one of the more highly educated people, right? And they convinced him that the people of Ukraine wanted him to liberate them and that they were going to be so happy to see him, that he was getting his dress uniform and 50 condoms.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PALMER LUCKEY: And there were similar—50 is a lot.

JOE ROGAN: That guy’s fucking up a storm.

PALMER LUCKEY: I will give them a little credit. 50 condoms doesn’t take up that much space in your bag. But also, but it’s a lot. It’s a lot. And this wasn’t the only guy. This was actually pretty common.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody had 50 condoms?

PALMER LUCKEY: I don’t know if everybody had 50.

JOE ROGAN: They all brought condoms.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, a lot of guys had condoms and a lot of people brought their dress uniforms. They thought that they were going to roll into Kyiv, take over. The people wanted them to be in power and that they were going to be marching around town. People say, “Look, it’s our liberators, our saviors.”

Now of course, that’s totally divorced from reality. Whatever you—however you feel about the politics of Ukraine and Russia and America, because they’re all tightly intermingled—that’s clearly not reality. And so what I worry about is the easy one is if China invades Taiwan, they’re going to come up with a similar story. They’re going to trick their people into thinking, “Oh, Taiwan wants to be reunified, you’re fighting for the better cause.”

But then the really spooky thing is what happens when our media pulls the same stunt? I would argue that what we did in the Middle East was driven by really not that different. Right? I mean, a lot of the justification for going over there and doing this nation building—I mean, we were told all these stories. “Oh, they want—they don’t want—they want to get out from under the Taliban. They don’t want to have these tribal rule. They do want democracy.” And in reality, we were kind of sold a bill of goods. Just wasn’t true.

So it’s easy to make fun of the Russian with his 50 condoms. But we’re not really that much better.

The Desert Storm Effect and Modern Warfare

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So Desert Storm, we were like, “Where the fuck is shit? We’re just going to roll in and kick everybody’s ass.” And it happened so quickly with so minimal casualties.

PALMER LUCKEY: And my grandpa, he wasn’t military, but he was a United Airlines pilot for 45 years, and he was part of the civilian support element for Desert Storm. So he actually has a letter from the secretary of the Air Force that they sent to all of the commercial pilots who were bringing troops and equipment back and forth for a few days. I mean, they were flying like crazy, 24-hour shifts, getting people in and out.

But I mean, I remember my grandpa, he came out of that saying, “Man, nobody can stop us. I mean, we are just—we are unstoppable. If we want to go in and do something, we just go get it done.” And I mean, he was convinced, you know, but you’re right. I think everybody was convinced by that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what everybody thought in the 1990s. They thought that the United States government and the military was so much more power. It probably was. It was for a while, relatively speaking, for a while. Technology seems to be shifting all that stuff in a very weird place.

And this is where I get concerned with China, because they have complete compliance. Their government and their private corporations, they’re the same, they work together. And the stuff that they’re producing in terms of—pay attention to their electric cars. Oh yeah, they have a 300-mile-an-hour car now.

PALMER LUCKEY: They’re—and their cars are extremely cheap and they are extremely good. They have extremely good, really nice cars.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy technology in terms of ability to absorb bumps. You see how smooth they are? Oh yeah, they put champagne glasses on them.

Chinese Automotive Technology and Cultural Differences

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

JOE ROGAN: What are the cars?

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, so this is one of my—this is such an interesting rabbit hole. So in China, people with money don’t drive cars. They’re driven. That is the culture. You don’t drive. You are driven if you have really any money. Of course there’s a few rich guys buying sports cars, but in general, the wealthy in China don’t buy cars to drive them themselves.

And so for example, Tesla has a China-exclusive model of the Model S, which has teeny tiny little front driver and passenger seats. And then it has two seats in the rear with extremely long leg room. Not three in a row, but just two giant chairs. And they kind of cram the driver way forward to create this gigantic path. I think it doesn’t even have a trunk. That’s right, they pulled the trunk out of it even. Or maybe it’s just way smaller.

And in China that’s what people want. So their best-selling Mercedes Benz, even American brands like Buick, we have these cars that are made to be driven in. So as a result, their most luxurious, most expensive cars have suspension that is designed to absorb all of the bumps, be extremely smooth because, you know, riding in the back and it creates terrible mushy road feel for the driver.

In America, rich people, they want to drive and you want to feel the road. You know, you want that sports car. And even our SUVs, people generally want that sports car-like feel. And so I guess I will push back only on the champagne glass thing because I’ve seen people saying this a lot. Believe me, there are a handful—you can buy an American Buick or a Mercedes that is that good, but they’re just not very popular here.

In China, cars like that are much more profitable. Cars that feel like shit to drive for the driver and are super mushy and bouncy, but for the guy in the back, his champagne glass doesn’t fall over.

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

Chinese Manufacturing and Economic Competition

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. And it’s not even when it gets to a certain price point, long before you’re buying a $100,000 car, you’re being driven around. Even if you’re halfway there, you’re being driven around. Rich people there, they don’t drive, they are driven. It is a cultural thing. It’s a sign that you’ve made it as well.

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

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

PALMER LUCKEY: They do. And I would say largely those are export focused. China knows the broader markets want this.

JOE ROGAN: They sell them in America at all?

PALMER LUCKEY: They don’t. But that’s largely due to American policy being very protectionist against Chinese cars. The reason that Chinese manufactured cars have not taken over the US is not because Americans don’t want them.

JOE ROGAN: By the way, that seems kind of crazy because Japanese cars are ubiquitous.

PALMER LUCKEY: Japanese cars are ubiquitous from Japanese brands. But many or most of them are actually, the most American car you can buy, I think right now it’s either a Nissan or a Toyota outside of Tesla. Teslas are made in the US, but I think the most, I can’t remember, it’s either a Nissan or Toyota is the most American pickup you can buy right now. And it’s because we have a lot of our parts, even for our US-made cars, made in Mexico, made in Canada, or made in Japan.

JOE ROGAN: That’s such a dirty trick for someone who wants to drive a Chevy because they feel like it’s an American brand. I’m buying American, I’m helping American jobs.

The Cost of American Manufacturing

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, this is the point I was trying to get to. Here’s the problem. Let’s say you said we’re going to make an all-American version of the Chevy and it’s 10% more, people wouldn’t buy it. When I say that people, I think unfortunately would buy these Chinese cars if they were for sale in the United States. People can say they want to support the US, but at the end of the day they want to provide the best quality of life for their family. They have a fiduciary duty to do so.

And so if they have the choice between an American truck or a Chinese truck, a Chinese new TV and a Chinese new computer and a Chinese new HVAC system to replace one and their phone, how can I blame them for choosing the Chinese one? The only way we can solve this is for the United States to become competitive with China again.

Which means we need to get our energy costs down. We need to get our resource extraction costs down. You know why these cars in China are cheap? It’s not magic, it’s because the cost of resource extraction is lower. The cost of making steel and aluminum is lower. The cost of building a factory is lower. And that’s why you’re able to buy an awesome car for $10,000 in China. And here the cheapest thing you can buy is a shitbox for 17 or 18 grand. And I mean it’s bad. Have you ever driven a $17,000 car?

JOE ROGAN: What do they have at $17,000?

PALMER LUCKEY: What can you buy? I think you can buy a new…

JOE ROGAN: A Chevy Volt or something?

PALMER LUCKEY: Not so, there’s the, I think you can buy a Chevy Spark, which is actually not an electric car. The Bolt was an electric platform. So I think you could buy Chevy Spark. I think you buy Nissan Versa. Those are the two cheapest cars in America right now. I think both of them, I believe you can get them out the door for less than $20,000.

And look, I’m sorry Chevy, I’m sorry Nissan. I like those brands. But these cars are not the stewards of the brand. They’re the college student shitboxes.

JOE ROGAN: Just transportation.

PALMER LUCKEY: And you can buy a car like that in China for three or four thousand dollars. Three or four grand will get you a car that here is almost 20 grand. And again, it’s not magic. They’re not geniuses. And people also, they kind of have this, there’s this current attempt to kind of mythologize, “Oh well, they’re geniuses. They’re just so good at it.”

If we would just do the basics right, we can be competitive. But we aren’t doing the basics right. We’ve made energy so competitive and materials fabrication so expensive. I mean, how could we compete?

Ford’s Wake-Up Call in China

JOE ROGAN: I was watching an interview where I believe it was someone from Ford. One of the engineers from Ford made a visit to China.

PALMER LUCKEY: It was the CEO of Ford. Even better. And he went with his whole engineering team.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And was humbled.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Just, oh no.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, I think he said when he came back, he said, “I wanted to take the SUV I was driving back home with me.” I mean that’s, you said it’s that good. I didn’t want to stop driving it.

JOE ROGAN: That seems kind of fucked. I mean that’s very anti-competitive of us.

PALMER LUCKEY: You mean that we’re locking the Chinese out?

JOE ROGAN: Kind of a bitch ass move.

PALMER LUCKEY: So I lean libertarian and in general I’m a fan of free markets. But there is something that makes this tricky though.

JOE ROGAN: You tank the economy.

The Strategic Importance of Manufacturing

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, there’s tanking the economy and there’s also, it isn’t actually free. So we do need to do a better job on the basics. But China is also subsidizing these. Right. So they’re actually putting money from other industries to prop up these other industries. And so even if you let them freely compete, if you let them go toe to toe, China would be thrilled if they could subsidize their way into destroying the American automotive apparatus.

Partly for economic reasons. But there’s another reason that I don’t know if you’ve thought of. How did the United States win World War II? Just big, I know that’s a big picture question.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of it was manufacturing.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. And that manufacturing, some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories. So we took all of our farm implement factories, John Deere and Caterpillar. They were building tanks and guns. We took all our automotive factories. We had them building aircraft, we had them building weapons, we had them building missiles.

In fact, we even designed those weapons so they could be manufactured by those plants. The specifics of how thick of a gauge of metal you could bend to a certain radius, we were limited by the automotive manufacturing machines as to what we could do in aircraft. And so we won because we had all this automotive and other industrial capacity.

China would love to wipe out the American automotive industry, partly for economic reasons, because it also means we will never be able to fight a war against them. Imagine in America, we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing. You’re probably familiar with that. We don’t make nearly as much as we used to, but we still make a few things. We still have some things that we do, and cars is one of them. And we even export those cars. We’re doing okay on cars.

If China could wipe out our industrial capacity entirely, they never need to worry about fighting a war with the US again because they know that we wouldn’t be able to get back in the game fast enough to matter. And so that’s China’s aim there. And it gets back to what you talked about earlier. It’s the civil-military fusion. So this is a, there’s the economic war and the kinetic war that they could win with one move, which is out-competing our automotive industry.

JOE ROGAN: That’s interesting. I never did think of that.

Anduril’s Approach to Scalable Manufacturing

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, Anduril has to think about this all the time. Because unlike a lot of these other defense companies that are designing weapons that can only be made by really fancy, high-end bespoke factories, we’re designing weapons that can be made in existing American industrial capacity.

So we make this line of cruise missiles, the Barracuda. We make three different Barracuda missiles. It has 90% fewer parts than legacy cruise missiles. It can be made with 10 tools that all exist in every automotive plant. So you could make this missile at mass scale in any GM facility, in any Ford facility.

And that’s really important for us because if you can only make your missiles in this specialized factory that took you 10 years to set up, well, what in the world do you do when you need 100 times more of those missiles made every day? You’re just kind of screwed.

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

JOE ROGAN: That’s very smart.

China’s Automated Military Production

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

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t.

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

JOE ROGAN: You’ve seen their shipping ports. It’s bananas.

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

But another thing China does is they actually require many of their commercial vessels that have nothing to do with the military to build to military standards for two reasons. One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards. Two, they plan on, basically, they’re going to press all of these civilian vessels into service.

So they’re saying, “Hey, you have this roll-on, roll-off car ferry that’s used for moving cars around, for delivering cars to the United States. You have to build it to deck plate pressures that allow us to roll a bunch of tanks onto it so that we can then use it to deliver tanks to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland.” And they’re just requiring people to do that.

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

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that an invasion of Taiwan is imminent?

China’s Potential Move on Taiwan

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s not imminent, but it’s coming. So Anduril has an internal policy called China27. The idea is that anything we are working on, anything that we are investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan. And I might be wrong on this, right? It might be never. It might be a longer term thing.

But in general, imagine how stupid I’ll feel if I spend hundreds of millions of dollars building some new weapon system that I know is not going to come into service until the 2030s, which is what most experts say is outside of the window of when this invasion would happen. Wouldn’t I feel pretty stupid if there’s a gigantic fight and I’ve spent all my money on something that wasn’t ready in time?

I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons. So Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he’s reunified China. He’s got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age. He’s got a lot of economic problems where they’re propping up their economy with a lot of fake GDP, fake growth, fake demand, fake construction. And he’s doing that, I think, to help build up his war machine. But it’s not sustainable in the long run.

So I think there’s a window where they can do this. If you had to ask me, it’s more likely that they don’t do a full scale invasion to start. It’s much more likely that they do something like a blockade. So they’ll come up with some pretense. They’ll say, “Oh, Taiwan is exporting goods that say made in Taiwan. And our position is that Taiwan is part of China and therefore they need to pay Chinese taxes on those made in China goods. So we’re going to blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this.”

And I worry, I worry about them boiling the frog. You know, they blockade one port and then two ports and then the airports and then the people of Taiwan are running out of money, running out of food, but you’ve boiled the frog enough where there’s never a point where Taiwan really wants to fire the first shot and actually start a war. And certainly, I think you and I would agree here, the US probably should not start World War 3 over a blockade of a port. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Boiling the frog is a great analogy.

America as the World’s Gun Store

PALMER LUCKEY: Boiling the frog, I think, is what China will do. And so what we need to do, and this is just my opinion, which is definitely biased. So to be clear, just so people know, nobody’s going to dig it up and say, “But Palmer, Palmer’s obviously only saying this because he’s got money in the game.” I will first say, I have plenty of money. I sold my first company for billions of dollars. I don’t need to work. I could retire. I’m not doing any of this for the money defense. You make a lot less money for each hour of work you put in than you can make in tech or media or elsewhere.

But I do a lot of work with Taiwan. So actually, I just went to Taiwan a few weeks ago to personally deliver a bunch of missiles and weapon systems that are specifically to counter a Chinese invasion. My opinion is that the United States, we don’t want to get into a shooting war ourselves, right? We want to avoid that. The United States needs to stop being the world police, stop sending our people overseas to die for other countries, and instead we need to become the world’s gun store.

We need to say, “Hey, look, what do you need to do to be a good gun store?” Right? You got to keep stuff in stock. You got to keep things on the shelves. You need to be reasonably priced. You need to not arbitrarily cut off allies. Could you imagine if you went to a gun store and they told you, “Joe, we’re going to sell you this gun, but you can’t use it over in that county. You can only use it in this one. And we’re going to tell you exactly how you can use it. We’re going to be micromanaging you, and we’re going to be taking responsibility for how you use your gun.”

I mean, that would never work. You would never want to work with them. You say, “I’m going to go to a different store, I’m going to go buy something.” And that’s what some nations are doing. They’re going to Russia, they’re going to China, they’re going to India and buying systems because we’re going in and telling them our weapons are expensive. They’re never in stock. We never deliver them to you. And also we’re going to tell you what to do with them if we ever do give you to them.

Did you know that Taiwan is $20 billion behind on arms deliveries from the United States? They have $20 billion in orders that have not been delivered. And these are not things they would maybe like to have. They need these yesterday. China could move in tomorrow. And the thing is, even a blockade, the best way to deter that is for Taiwan to have the things that make them a very prickly porcupine, right?

You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to effect without destroying the entire fleet. You want things like missiles and counter missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country. But we’re $20 billion behind. And I mean, you’ve seen what’s happened with Ukraine where, I mean, there’s an argument as to how we should arm them separate from that argument. You’ve probably seen, I mean, we can’t even give them what they’re asking for even if we want to give it to them, because we don’t have enough to even cover ourselves, right?

We can’t just give them all of our Patriot missiles. We can’t give them even purely defensive tools to protect their capital because we don’t make enough of them. We don’t have enough of them. They’re too expensive. That’s crazy to me.

JOE ROGAN: That is crazy.

PALMER LUCKEY: It is crazy. So I think the best way for the United States to contribute to world stability again, stop being the world police, start being the world gun store and get serious about it. Instead of saying, “Well, it’s okay that we are a crappy gun store because we’re going to come and save your ass when shit hits the fan.” We need to say, “No, no, we’re going to give everything you need to fight for your own freedom. Look, you’re our friend, you’re our ally. We’ll give you everything you need. We’ll give you support, we’ll give you intelligence, but we’re not going to fight your wars for you.”

Because I don’t think the American people have it in us to go do another two decades of adventures in the Middle East or adventures in Europe or adventures in Asia. We don’t have it in us.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re too informed now too.

PALMER LUCKEY: There’s that too.

JOE ROGAN: The Internet fucked all that game up.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, and I mean, arguably Vietnam, right? I mean, Vietnam, I think was the war that changed everything because you had war on TV. You could see what was really happening.

JOE ROGAN: And we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was all false flag that got us into it in the first place.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t trust you anymore.

George W. Bush and Presidential Pressure

PALMER LUCKEY: You know, so well, you remember what George Bush said? He said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can’t get fooled again.”

JOE ROGAN: I remember that.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, that was a good. That’s one of my favorite George Bush isms. I hear the thing, the theory I’ve heard is that he realized he was about to say “shame on me” on camera, and then the press would have obviously said, “George Bush admits he got fooled. Quote, shame on me.”

JOE ROGAN: But I think he just forgot it.

PALMER LUCKEY: Maybe there’s that one. I don’t know. I think Bush was a pretty, I think he was a sharper guy. I think he was maybe not well spoken, but I think he’s actually pretty sharp. I think he just stumbled on his words.

JOE ROGAN: Well, what’s stunning is you ever see his speeches when he was running for governor of Texas?

PALMER LUCKEY: I have not actually gone back and looked at those.

JOE ROGAN: Smooth as butter.

PALMER LUCKEY: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Smooth as butter. Super articulate, you know, different guy.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s weird.

JOE ROGAN: I think it gets to a certain point with the pressure and the chaos and being the president and all the madness of the cameras in your face. The magnitude of it all wears on people, which is why they get so old.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, I mean, there’s the, I mean, well, even, you know, the pictures of Obama, you’ve seen him, you know, he looks like a college student on his first inauguration, and then eight years later…

JOE ROGAN: He looks like he’s 50 years older.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nuts. It’s just the pressure. The only one who’s ever handled it is Trump. He looks younger.

PALMER LUCKEY: It really is astounding how that’s worked out.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, yeah. I think he’s, it’s like the Bruce Banner Hulk thing, you know, “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” Right, right, right. I think that’s how it was for Trump. Trump was already living at the red line nonstop, you know, getting what, four hours of sleep?

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

Sleep Patterns and Genetics

JOE ROGAN: Well, some people just don’t need, Jocko, you know, Jocko Willink. He sleeps four hours a night.

PALMER LUCKEY: Really? Same thing.

JOE ROGAN: He works out like an animal.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s so interesting.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: I’m not either.

JOE ROGAN: I need seven. I like six. If I could tolerate six, eight is, “Oh, I’m so good today.” But if I can, if I get less than six, I’m a mess.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, I need my sleep significantly dumber.

JOE ROGAN: If you’ve ever listened to a podcast and I’m stumbling, guaranteed, I’m working on four.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh yeah, yeah, I’m working on less than I wanted to because I got to bed at around 2 and then I was up at 6:30. But I can do that today. Today it was just, there’s a lot going on.

JOE ROGAN: You seem fine. I’m not worried at all.

PALMER LUCKEY: The good news is it’s the first day, right? The first day of sleep, you’re okay, you’re pulling on your reserves. And then the second and the third day, then you start to get destroyed. At least for me.

JOE ROGAN: Me too.

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

JOE ROGAN: Perfect.

PALMER LUCKEY: And then that usually recovers.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a renewable resource. That’s the beautiful thing about sleep.

PALMER LUCKEY: I wonder what would happen if Trump slept for 11 hours. Would it be like the most incredible version of Trump we’ve ever seen? Or would it throw him off?

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

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

JOE ROGAN: Really?

Palmer Luckey’s Early Trump Support

PALMER LUCKEY: And how old are you now? I’m 30. Just turned 33. Wow. So this was a long time ago, actually. Not only luckily, I sent a letter and I posted about it on Facebook, which I’m really happy about. Wait, no, this wasn’t 2015. No, this was when I was 15. I’m sorry, I meant to say when I was 15. So, I mean, this is way back. This is like back in 2009, 2010. So way before anyone else.

And best part is I posted about on Facebook and I said, “I think Donald Trump would be a better choice for president than any of these other guys. I want to see a businessman who signed both sides of a check before.” And you look at the people who are running kind of the modern parties, arguably the uniparty, and he’s clearly not part of that.

And it’s so wild when people later, they’re like, “Oh, Palmer was an early Trump supporter. He supported him in 2016, probably because he loved Trump’s extremist rhetoric.” I’m like, oh, no, you don’t even know. I love extremist rhetoric going back to 2009.

JOE ROGAN: It wasn’t even that extremist then.

PALMER LUCKEY: It wasn’t then. That was the thing. He’s been so consistent. I mean, you’ve probably seen these interviews from the 80s where he says, “We’re getting ripped off on trade.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s ridiculous. When he was talking to Oprah back when everybody loved him.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right, exactly. He’s saying the exact same words. And today they say, oh, it’s extreme. You remember when he was running and he was saying we were going to have over 3% GDP growth, and Obama said, “There’s no magic wand. You can’t wave a magic wand that gets you to 3%.”

And then Trump said in one of his speeches, he said, “They told me not to say this, and they told me I can’t.” He said, “It’s going to be 3%. And they told me not to say this, but it’s actually going to be more, a lot more.” And of course, it ended up being far in excess of 3%. I think it was 4.5% GDP increase that year.

JOE ROGAN: What year was this?

PALMER LUCKEY: I think this was his first year in office, 2017. When he was inaugurated. And it’s one of those things where the easiest argument for Trump in those days was just, look, you don’t have to agree with the guy on everything. But the real question is, do you believe that either party outside of Trump is going to do well?

You have the Democrats saying, “There’s no magic wand to get it,” and you have everyone else attacking Trump and saying, “Oh, we’re just going to do everything the same way the Republicans have always done it.” The strongest argument for Trump is that anybody would have been better than what the establishment was pushing.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s the best argument. Yeah.

The $9,000 Billboard and Hillary’s No-Fly Zone

PALMER LUCKEY: For me, one of the big ones was, I mean, I got in a lot of shit for this. I gave $9,000 to a pro-Trump group that ran a single anti-Clinton billboard. It was a picture of her face that said “Too Big to Jail.” And this was right after it had come out that she had been mishandling classified information, running an email server out of her own home.

You probably remember the famous phrase where they asked her, “Were you aware that your staff was directed to wipe that server?” And she said, “Like, with a cloth?” Do you remember? “Like, with a cloth?” I mean, it was just so absurd.

But for me, one of the red lines was when Hillary, and it’s not really Hillary, it’s kind of the political machine of which she is just the face, said she would enforce a strict no-fly zone in Syria. And it’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, I would enforce a no-fly zone.” And that sounds, oh, yeah, keep these bombers out of the air, keep these fighters out of the air.

But what does that really mean? That means that you’re saying you’re going to shoot down Russian aircraft if they cross into airspace that doesn’t even belong to the United States. I mean, that’s practically an announcement that you’re starting a world war to say, “I am going to shoot down Russian aircraft.” That is what enforcement of a no-fly zone is.

And it was crazy to me. Everyone says, “Oh, Trump is an isolationist, and Hillary is the only one who understands what we need to do in Syria.” Are you kidding me? Without even taking a position on what we are doing in Syria or what we’re doing in Syria, I know better than to commit that we are going to shoot down Russian aircraft because they decide to fly in Syrian airspace.

We should not care about almost anything that much. And by the way, if we didn’t do it, that’s almost as bad, because now we’ve drawn a red line in the sand and we’ve let them cross it and we’ve shown that we’re not actually serious. So you shouldn’t say that, you shouldn’t act on it, and you shouldn’t not act on it. It’s a lose-lose-lose every step of the way.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s just politics as normal.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right. And so, I mean, I would explain this to friends of mine. They’d say, “Oh, my God, Trump’s a warmonger.” But Trump, I cared about this national security stuff pretty deeply then. This was right when I was starting Anduril eight years ago. And so I was dedicating my career to these national security problems.

Guys, how can Trump be the warmonger when he’s the guy saying, “We need to stop fighting these wars, get out of these other countries, get our boots back in the US and not get in a fight with Russia, China, or any other country that we don’t have to get into”? And how can you say Trump’s a warmonger and then support someone who says we’re going to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria?

And I think a lot of people, it was just really emotional. You can’t reason people out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into.

Hillary’s Shifting Positions on Immigration and Gay Marriage

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

PALMER LUCKEY: And I think one of the phrases was, “We have to send them back.”

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PALMER LUCKEY: Could you imagine? Can you imagine that today? “We have to send them back.”

JOE ROGAN: I mean, imagine her. This was her position. And she sounds like a hard-line Republican now.

PALMER LUCKEY: I mean, let’s bring up another one, also gay marriage. I mean, I’ll tell you, my personal view is that the state shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all. It’s actually a very recent invention. I don’t know if you’ve ever dug into this.

JOE ROGAN: No.

PALMER LUCKEY: So state marriage licensure is a very recent development. There are people alive today who got married when you were not required to have a marriage license. It was primarily a kind of race-driven thing. States didn’t want black men to marry white women, and they got terrified of that in the civil rights era. And so they all passed these rules about marriage licensure, many of them prohibiting interracial marriage.

So basically, marriage licenses were a way to enforce against interracial marriage. Because if marriage was a purely religious thing where you could just go to a pastor, get married, sign it in a Bible, the state had no power over it, and so they wanted to enforce their will on people. So marriage licensure is very recent.

My personal opinion is the state has no legitimate authority, constitutional or otherwise, to regulate marriage at all. Gay marriage is not even a question. This is a religious, cultural, social ceremony witnessed before your friends and your family. It is not something the state should be involved in. They shouldn’t have the right to give you a marriage license, nor to deny you one. When did I give the state the ability to say it’s illegal for me to get married without their permission? That’s crazy.

Anyway, so Hillary, you might remember, I mean, even in 2008, she was against gay marriage. And she was out there, she says, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.” So here’s someone who, I was on the “state shouldn’t be involved in it at all” side. Hillary’s on the “No, we should use state power to enforce what marriage is between a man and a woman” side.

And then you have Donald Trump, who, he’s asked about it. Do you remember his quote on this? So, I mean, he had been to gay weddings, he had gay friends, and he was asked about it. And he said, “Well, look, marriage, okay? It’s like a restaurant. You’ve got steak, you’ve got burgers, and different people like different things. And that’s okay.” I mean, it was actually the most progressive view you could ever have.

And then, so Obama, by the way, same thing. Obama was against gay marriage, Hillary was against gay marriage. And you fast forward just three short years and you have people like Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla, getting fired by his board of directors because he supported Prop 8, which said that marriage is between a man and a woman in California, which, by the way, even then passed in California. So the majority of Californians agreed with him.

But I mean, you’re right. Hillary was, the views she had when she was running for president, you’re right. Today she would be a hard-line Republican.

JOE ROGAN: Hard-line, right.

PALMER LUCKEY: She’d be certainly on the cultural side alone.

JOE ROGAN: She’d be on the right of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

PALMER LUCKEY: No, that’s a great point. Marjorie Taylor Greene, right. She’s very pro-LGBT. She certainly is not for intervention in the Middle East.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, you’re right. I never thought about it that way. Marjorie Taylor Greene would be far, far left of a Hillary Clinton running again today.

The Secret Hillary Clinton Meeting in Silicon Valley

You know, I want to tell a story that I’ve never told publicly, but I just, enough time has passed that I should. Since we’re talking about Hillary. So when I was in Silicon Valley, this is after Facebook bought Oculus, and so I’m up there and I was actually pro-immigration even more then than I am now.

So I was thinking about supporting this group called FWD.us, which was trying to lead to immigration reform in the United States. And I’ve since evolved on this issue. I think that immigration can help depress US wages in ways I didn’t understand then. I hadn’t observed a lot of the H-1B visa abuse that I have now observed, having spent years in the Valley. So cut me a little slack if anyone thinks I shouldn’t have worked with FWD.us.

But I ended up with this invitation to go to an event, a Hillary Clinton event in Silicon Valley. It was very, very hush-hush, no media, nobody was saying anything. And this was before she had officially announced she was running. So you know when a politician is going to run and everybody knows, but technically they haven’t announced it.

So Hillary was going to come out and she was there with John Podesta, who was her CTO at the time, or was it chief of staff, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: One of those, yeah.

PALMER LUCKEY: So it was going to be her and Podesta. At the last second, Hillary ends up bailing, but I end up going anyway. And I had a couple prepared questions for Hillary. And so it was me and about 15 other billionaires in Silicon Valley who went to this really, really intimate gathering and they wanted to sell us on why we should support Hillary in this upcoming run when she ran.

And first of all, I thought it was kind of shitty that she just didn’t show up at the last second and didn’t say basically until we were already on the way.

JOE ROGAN: She had some legitimate health issues, right? And still does.

The Hillary Clinton Campaign Meeting

PALMER LUCKEY: She might have in general, but I don’t think that was the problem at this point. And so there were two issues that I brought up to Podesta. I said, hey, I wanted to ask these of Hillary, by the way. Note that in this story, I hadn’t decided who I was going to support. So a lot of people think I’m like this hard political guy. I was a VR guy. I was a computer kid. Politics was something I cared about. But, like, I was reasonable. I was not. I was Not. I had not yet been. What do they call it? Radicalized.

I had not yet been radicalized. It was after they fired me for giving $9,000 to Trump that I got radicalized. But pre radicalized Palmer. Okay, so I go to this meeting and I had two questions for Hillary.

I said, one, in the past, Hillary, you’ve supported a 55 mile per hour federal speed limit. You were one of the original proponents. You were one of the people who supported it in the Senate. You wrote an open letter with a lot of other wives of politicians saying that the blood would run red with the streets would run red with the blood of children if we got rid of this, of this speed limit.

And then in 2008, when you last ran for president, you said on, I think it was the View, actually, which is, it’s so funny because the View has turned into, like, almost a parody of itself. But as you said on the View, that when you were asked about the speed limit, you said that whenever and however we can make it happen, we should have a 55 mile per hour speed limit.

Now, given. Given that you’ve never driven a car in the last 20 years, have you reconsidered this rule or would you be supporting this as a campaign? And Podesta said, oh, we don’t really have a position on that issue. I said, but, like, could you make up one right now? Most Americans don’t want a 55 mile per hour speed limit. I think that was really dumb of Hillary to say she supported one last time. I think it might be why she lost. Would you agree that probably it’s not a winning issue?

And he said, oh, we can’t, we can’t take a position on that at this time. Which was crazy to me. Shouldn’t that be just so easy to be like, yeah, yeah, like, this is clearly like a thing. It’s a fight she lost, you know, half a century ago and she’s still worked up about it. Just give up. People don’t want to drive 55.

JOE ROGAN: You remember when Sammy Hagar wrote a song about it?

The Corn Subsidy Question

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, you know, you know, Tom Cruise had a can’t drive 55 decal on his motorcycle in Top Gun. And I mean, like, I mean, the cultural battle’s been won. Then my second question was, hey, we’re a bunch of techno bros up here in the Valley. We all believe in battery electric hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles in general, but Hillary’s been a huge supporter of. Oh, no, it’s the other way. I’m sorry this has been so long. I haven’t thought about this.

No. I said Hillary actually was against corn subsidies at one point. She called them at one point, like the ethanol blending mandate. They were making corn at a loss, paid for with taxpayer dollars and then mandating that it go into gasoline, which hurts car. It’s got lots of fuel storage problems and it’s just a waste of money. And there’s less energy in it too, so you get actually worse mileage.

Anyway, I said, hey, in the past Hillary has come out and she wrote this open letter that called ethanol blending mandates the quote, “most astonishingly anti consumer mandate in the history of the American government.” Does she still believe that? Does she want money to go away from, you know, biofuels and more towards actual cutting edge technology, or is she going to support corn subsidies to win votes in Iowa?

And Podesta says, oh, well, we don’t have a position on that at this time. I said, I just got to press you there. You don’t have a position or you don’t want to tell us the answer? Because none of us here think that the future is biofuels. It’s a failed experiment, it’s a failed mandate. Hillary used to agree. Is she going to flip on us? He said, I’m honestly, genuinely telling you we do not have a position on him at this time. Not that bad, right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s not bad.

PALMER LUCKEY: And so three days later, Hillary announces officially she’s running her first ads. Start running. And what do you think the first series of ads are? It’s Hillary in a cornfield talking about how she’s going to boost corn subsidies and she’s going to lead a clean energy revolution and she’s going to give them so much corn money.

And like, setting aside the fact that I think biofuel subsidies are dumb, she lost so much trust of people in that room because her answer wasn’t, here’s why I support them and deal with it. And it wasn’t, I don’t support it technologically, but I support it politically, which I think people could have respected. It was, oh, we don’t have a position.

JOE ROGAN: But she did.

PALMER LUCKEY: They had already paid for the ads, they’d already made the ads. They were probably sitting on a tape in the TV studio ready to run as we’re meeting with her chief of staff. And honestly, I know I said that like the Syria thing was a red line. That was actually the moment where I decided that I couldn’t vote for Hillary. It wasn’t about any particular issue. I was like, it’s just, how can you vote for someone who’s willing to just lie that way to manipulate.

And she’s trying to manipulate me and a bunch of other rich guys. And there were a bunch of other guys in that room who said the same thing. We all were in a group chat. We’re like, we’re not going to, we’re not going to, like. By the way, my questions weren’t the only ones. Like, there were like another dozen questions.

JOE ROGAN: Did Podesta answer any of them with like, meaningful.

PALMER LUCKEY: He did. There were some that they answered meaningfully. Like, I’d say actually on the immigration side, there were some real ones. There were questions about policy for dreamers in particular. And like, he had, he had his talking points. He didn’t expect anyone to come out of, you know, to come off the top rope with 55 mile per hour speed limit.

But there were a few other things. I’m trying to remember what were the other ones that I think he misled people on. There was something in there, around. There was something around there around content, like for social media platforms. You know, in Silicon Valley, people care about this stuff. It was like, hey, do you agree that the government shouldn’t be moderating content, that they shouldn’t be censoring? Because this was kind of the very early days of the government interfering with this stuff. It was.

Government Interference in Social Media

JOE ROGAN: When did the government first start interfering with social media content? Do you know what their initial issues were?

PALMER LUCKEY: So I don’t know the initial issues, but like, let’s look at this from first principles, ignoring the social media part. When did the government start intervening in media?

JOE ROGAN: From the beginning.

PALMER LUCKEY: From the beginning. You know, one of the reasons everyone loves Alexander Hamilton, he’s really popular Founding father. I have to admit, he’s actually my least favorite founding father, partly because he supported central banking. I’m just not really a, a gigantic fan of it and how it’s turned out.

But interesting, by the way, he was also very anti immigrant, which is so funny because look up the interview with the directors of Hamilton the Musical when they were asked, why did you make Hamilton the Musical super pro immigrant? When in reality he was very, I mean, very anti immigrant. I mean, he literally said, immigrants are a poison to our nation. I mean, he was, he was really against. And which is funny because he was himself an immigrant. And I mean, he was like, you know, blood and soil all the way. I mean, he was really into it.

And their answer was, we wanted to represent Hamilton as we think he would have existed in the climate of today. Not with the information he had at the time, anyway.

JOE ROGAN: They made a fake person.

PALMER LUCKEY: But one of the other things about Hamilton is that he did not support the First Amendment. He actually thought that the government should be able to criminalize speech that lied about the government in a critical way. Now to be clear, he didn’t think they should be able to regulate everything. But his point was, if someone’s lying about the government or what it’s doing or its authority, we have to be able to stop that.

You actually had a counterpoint in people like Benjamin Franklin, who of course had done like letters pretending to be the King of Prussia and lots of satirical stuff pretending to be the King of England. He said, no, you can’t, because if you say that we can’t make up lies about the government, then the government just needs to make anything that’s critical about them a lie. Because if it’s a so called lie, now they can stop it. And so he said, we can’t give the government the power to do this.

So Alexander Hamilton was not a fan. And I think that that thread has been there through the history of our government. There’s always been people from literally before the founding who believed that the state should have a role in influencing the media. And like, I mean you’re familiar with all of like the stuff that came out post JFK about the media influence operations. What was it like 55 or 60 different media assets were activated for the JFK messaging campaign in national media.

And so I guess getting back to your question of when did they get into social media, I think it was probably continuous the whole time. The moment that it was of any importance, the moment that it was being paid attention to. I’m certain that the people who were running these media influence operations immediately jumped into that new sphere. I can’t prove it. That’s just my.

JOE ROGAN: I think that before social media though, like, I wonder if they were preparing for something like that or if it started to happen and they didn’t recognize what an impact it was going to happen.

PALMER LUCKEY: I think they understood the impact of the Internet before social media. So even before social media you had people writing blogs, you had people doing, you had these bulletin board systems. And it’s well known that the CIA was active on early bulletin board systems, pushing the government perspective, of course.

And so I think they’ve been continuously involved in every Internet platform. Even before social media, as we call it today now was popular, I was.

JOE ROGAN: Watching a particular political debate on YouTube and occasionally when I see something that’s very contentious, I’m like, let me go to the comments and See what it is. And it was all bots. It was wild, you know, obvious zero, a bunch of zeros and numbers after a name. John.

PALMER LUCKEY: Six zeros, no profile picture or some ridiculous AI generated thing.

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

Dead Internet Theory

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, you’re familiar with dead Internet theory, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, explain that to people.

PALMER LUCKEY: So dead Internet theory has been around for quite a long time, probably long before the Internet was actually dead. And it’s this theory that over time there will be increasing amounts of literal robotic content and then also kind of like Astroturf fake content, you know, like one guy running 100 accounts.

And the theory is that eventually there will be almost no real human back and forth on the Internet. That it’s actually kind of just propaganda and counter propaganda playing out on a stage for our benefit by moneyed interests, whether it’s corporations, the government, foreign adversaries. And, you know, there might be a few people in the mix, but it’s primarily going to be just robots arguing with each other. And I think that more and more it’s becoming true.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s getting close. Like that FBI analyst that when Elon was in the middle of buying Twitter, who looked at all the different bots and you know, they were trying to say was 5%, he said, no, I think it’s 80.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep, 80%.

JOE ROGAN: So when you’re on Twitter and people arguing and making points and even posting things.

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

JOE ROGAN: How odd.

PALMER LUCKEY: How odd. Could I take a quick break and get a little bit of water?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s water right there in front of you.

PALMER LUCKEY: There we go. Thank you. I missed that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s all you need?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: We have filtered water in that jug.

PALMER LUCKEY: Okay, I need to pause.

JOE ROGAN: Ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be right back.

PALMER LUCKEY: I need to take off my jacket too. It’s good when you’re walking around and there’s air moving on it because the copper conducts heat away really well. But just sitting in here, is this actually copper?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PALMER LUCKEY: Here, check it out.

JOE ROGAN: Wait, I want to do this on camera. Are we still rolling?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, a little bit. Look.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, you keep rolling here, you guys. That’s a copper jacket.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s from this company called Volobox.

JOE ROGAN: It’s actually made out of copper.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s actually made out of copper.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. It’s so heavy.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, it weighs like four and a half pounds.

JOE ROGAN: This is nuts.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s something like 3,000 miles of ultra fine copper thread.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: So it would. If you put your phones into that pocket, then no signals go out.

JOE ROGAN: Watch. Oh, so it’s like a Faraday cage.

The Copper Jacket and Faraday Cage Technology

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, it’s a little wearable Faraday cage. So it’s actually got some use beyond being cool. But the company makes these. Yeah, so the company, Volabok’s really interesting. So they make…

JOE ROGAN: Can I try this one?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, of course. They make a bunch of really cool clothes out of very novel materials, some of them very futuristic. They make a jacket out of the material that the Mars Rover parachute was made. So it’s like a supersonic parachute material. It is pretty weird.

JOE ROGAN: Make me feel very restricted.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, you’re also a lot bigger than me, so I’m a little skinny, so you can.

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah. But it seems to fit, but it just seems heavy and restrictive.

PALMER LUCKEY: You know, you do have to make sure you sized it where there’s plenty of room to move around inside of it because it does not stretch at all. So there’s a few benefits. The first is that it looks sweet.

JOE ROGAN: Jamie’s ordering one right now.

PALMER LUCKEY: Look at him. The other is that copper is an antimicrobial material. So you never get mildew on it. You never get mold. It magically kills all of that stuff. Also, I mentioned earlier, the pockets are basically a Faraday cage. So if you want, if I want my phone to get calls, I keep it in my pants pocket. If I want to disappear…

JOE ROGAN: If there was a jacket that Palmer Luckey was wearing, I would hope it would be this. When you showed up in this crazy jacket, I’m like, that’s what I would hope it would be.

PALMER LUCKEY: They’ve got a new one that’s a T-shirt that’s made out of carbon nanotech, so you should check that out. They’re working on some wild next gen stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

PALMER LUCKEY: Sorry. Give me just a second. I just got to take it. I actually just need to take a mental break.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, take a break. I’ll take a leak.

PALMER LUCKEY: All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Vintage Military Gear and Authenticity

JOE ROGAN: So there’s a place called Commando Store. Yeah, we’re talking about these panties I have.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, yeah, we’re just talking about your Tiger Stripe Ranger panties. And Commando Store is doing these reproductions of vintage gear, like Vietnam era US Gear, Russian gear, using modern materials, but old camo prints. And they’re super authentic. But the problem is a lot of this actual gear, it’s all mildewed, it’s destroyed, the thread is all crusty and busting apart.

And so if you actually want to be authentic, the guys in the Vietnamese jungle did not look like they were wearing old, crappy, busted apart gear. Their gear was fresh. And so if you want to look just like they did, you actually have to buy newly manufactured gear. But I’ll send you some links. They have a lot of really cool Tiger stripe stuff that’s very, very cool and authentic.

JOE ROGAN: Nice. When you were a kid, did you ever imagine you’d be selling weapons? Does that ever seem surreal to you that you go from being this guy who’s really into VR to weapons manufacturing?

From VR to Weapons Manufacturing

PALMER LUCKEY: It seems a little bit surreal, but only a little bit. Growing up, I always would be the guy who identified with the guy in the story who is making the tools. So when I would watch James Bond, I never thought, I’m James Bond. It was like, oh, I want to be Q. I want to be the guy making the tools or Tony Stark. Exactly. And Tony did it all.

And so I have to admit, it occurred to me, one of my favorite anime characters was an anti-hero named Seto Kaiba who ran a weapons company that was also a virtual reality company. And they built virtual reality gaming simulator pods and also weapons. And so it’s really weird. You start to ponder, are you really making decisions with free will or are you actually just enacting the programming of when you’re a kid? It’s hard to really know.

But when people are like, oh, Palmer, how’d you get into this stuff? I mean, I remember being 7 years old and thinking about this stuff. Or you watch Power Rangers. I grew up watching Power Rangers when I was a really little kid. Reruns of the first season of Power Rangers. And the character I most identified was the techno wizard of the group Billy, who was building flying cars and upgrading their robot suits.

And I don’t know, it’s really weird when you end up as an adult just doing exactly what you were fascinated with when you were a kid. Because what you’re fascinated with when you’re a kid is really a function of what’s put in front of you. Right? What if I would have had different things put…

JOE ROGAN: What if you lived in Montana?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, what if I lived in Montana? What if, you know, is there a world? I grew up in Nashville, and I would have inevitably been a musician almost without even being able to choose it. Even if I went in one direction, would I have ended up coming back to it?

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

The Path to Success

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, that’s the crazy thing. I think part of the reason it’s so wild my progression, is it only happens if it’s successful continuously, right? So a world where I don’t basically figure out how to build good virtual reality technology is one where Oculus doesn’t exist. If Oculus doesn’t exist, I don’t get bought by Facebook. I don’t go to Silicon Valley. I don’t become kind of one of the leading tech figures in that industry.

JOE ROGAN: Up there, you have to hit every green light.

PALMER LUCKEY: You have to hit every green light. You know who funded Anduril when I started it? Yes, me. I put a lot of my money into it, but it was all of these same investors who had invested in Oculus. I mean, literally the same people. It’s like, Brian Singerman is a good example. He was a partner at Founders Fund, which was Peter Thiel’s investment fund. They decided to put $1 million into Oculus before any other fund was willing to give us money. So they were the first institutional money into Oculus VR. And then he ended up being our first investor, also in Anduril.

So the same people, even these relationships come back around, and then that turns into running a weapons company, and then that turns into building more efficient weapons. And then one of our recent wins, we were competing Anduril with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to build the Air Force’s first AI powered fighter jet. So the first fighter jet with no human pilot. Not limited by human ability, instead limited by the ability of this robot brain making the whole thing go and we beat them.

I mean, how crazy is that? That’s what’s crazy to me. It’s not sitting here crazy like, oh, is it crazy I’m building weapons for me. It’s crazy. It’s not that hard to imagine. You end up building guns for the marines. But nothing against the marines or the people who build guns for them. I love those guys.

The crazy part to me is that all these things have gone right over and over to the point where I can literally have billions of dollars at my disposal from my investors to build multimillion square foot factories to build the Air Force’s first AI fighter jet, which is the official designation they just gave it is the FQ-44. F for fighter, Q for unmanned. And then 44 is the number designation.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

The AI Fighter Jet Revolution

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, that’s the crazy thing. When I lay awake at night, that’s what I’m thinking about. It’s not so much that I am building weapons, it’s that we’re actually pulling off things that make a difference. And by the way, AI fighter jets.

JOE ROGAN: There it is.

PALMER LUCKEY: There it is. So that was wind tunnel test. And you’ll notice there’s no protrusion for a cockpit. The whole thing is a stealth aircraft, low signature, uses the same weapon systems that a real fighter jet uses.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it looks like in the front.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep. So this was a very early propulsion system test. And one of the crazy things…

JOE ROGAN: Is that what they look like?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep, yep. So one of the crazy things about this is that the United States, so the idea is you have a bunch of these for every manned fighter because they’re cheaper, they are more expendable, you can take more risk with them. So imagine this. I’ve got an F-35 flying with five of these things. The original name of the program was Loyal Wingman. The idea is that I have a loyal wingman, does whatever I tell him. I can talk to it like I would any human co-worker. And it’s going to go in and do what I tell it, but it’s never going to question my orders. It’s never going to try to save itself if it means ruining the mission.

And one of the craziest things about autonomous aircraft is that the United States has spent basically a century figuring out what works in air combat. I mean, you’ve seen Top Gun, right? You know, they have this book of tactics that they need to learn to stay alive. How you manage your energy and your altitude and your position so that you destroy the enemy and you don’t get destroyed yourself.

There’s another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy, but will probably get you killed in the process. We don’t teach those generally, or if we do, it’s in the context of don’t do this. All of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI powered fighter jets. I can now have it doing things that are so risky that a human pilot would never even try the maneuver because let’s say it’s a coin flip. It’s a 50/50 chance that you’re going to die, but a 100% chance that I’m going to be able to take out the enemy target.

Imagine going after something where I know I am probably going to get shot down at the end of that maneuver. But I definitely take out all the surface to air missile launchers on the shore, which then allow everything else to come in through the gap that you just cleared. You’ll make that trade every day. You’ll trade a cheap AI fighter jet to blow up a bunch of really expensive manned or autonomous systems in the air or on the ground every time if it allows you to accomplish that mission.

And so autonomy really changes the game on this stuff. It’s not an incremental change in tactics. It’s a complete revolution.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: The unidentified aero phenomenon?

JOE ROGAN: What was that all about?

The New Jersey Drone Phenomenon

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, what’s so interesting about the New Jersey stuff. And you’re probably tracking this as well or better than me, but it is so perfectly aligned with things that we’ve seen in the past. Like you’re familiar with all the overflights and hovering over nuclear facilities and military bases in the past. Here’s what I think happened. I think that there was something really weird that was going on. I think briefly there was something that was really unexplained.

And then what happened, unfortunately, is everyone found out about it online. Everybody got their drones, put them in their cars, drove out there to go out and try and fly it. And then I think that the next three weeks were a bunch of idiots with drones flying in circles looking at each other. I’ve seen all these videos, 99% of them, it’s pretty obvious that the thing they’re looking at is another DJI drone that is also looking at them.

JOE ROGAN: Oh dude, oh shit.

PALMER LUCKEY: There it is. It was kind of this crazy media circus. I think there was something that was real and then very, very quickly it evolved into being just kind of a flash mob social media circus.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: And it was like, it’s drone time.

The Alien Cover Theory

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, have you heard the theory? There’s a theory that someone’s come up with. I can’t forget what it is. It’s like proliferation masking or something. Have you heard the theory that modern drone technology was seeded by aliens so that we would create a bunch of things that would be up in the sky that look kind of like their aircraft so that they would basically act as cover for the real activity?

Have you heard this theory? I don’t really believe it because I actually have met with the people who kind of invented modern quadcopters and flight controllers. But the idea is very interesting and it makes me wonder if there might be some truth to it elsewhere in the world. Like, it sure is convenient. Imagine that you’re an alien. You’re regularly operating around military bases, nuclear infrastructure. Wouldn’t it be convenient if there was something else that people could explain away as?

Like, wouldn’t it be great if there was something that also darted around and hovered in place and was very quiet and just little tiny flashing lights? Like, wouldn’t that be really convenient as a cover for what you are doing? Because these same activities in the 50s and the 60s, there was nothing like that. Right? Like back then, if you said, “Oh yeah, I saw 100 red lights orbiting around that nuclear facility,” all you could say was, “Holy shit, what in the world could that be?” And today it’s so easy to say, “Oh, it’s just some drones.”

JOE ROGAN: Right?

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

What Was Really Happening in New Jersey

JOE ROGAN: When you say that something weird was happening in New Jersey, what are you saying?

PALMER LUCKEY: So something that was observable by some sensors and not by other sensors. And that’s really the common thread between a lot of these things. Like it’ll show up on visual. Like a guy sees it with his eyes and he sees it with a thermal sensor, but it isn’t showing up on radar or something where they’ll see it on radar, but they can’t pick it up on other sensors. And of course, there are some things where it’s multi sensor.

But in general, when I say something weird, it’s not obviously just drone or weird in that it’s acting in ways we don’t expect. Like, how does something move so quickly and not have any skin heating? Why isn’t it white hot if it’s moving that fast through the air? How can it change direction so quickly without the airframe tearing apart? That’s what I mean by weird. And look, I don’t know what this stuff is.

JOE ROGAN: When you say weird, like what was observed?

PALMER LUCKEY: So the weird thing that was observed was primarily that there was something there in an area that it shouldn’t have been and that there shouldn’t have been anything. There should not have been anything that was able to endure for that long in that area with those characteristics. Like little tiny drones that cannot show up on radar and that can kind of hide in place like that, they don’t have hours and hours and hours of endurance. Right. They fly for 25, 30 minutes tops.

And then also they typically would need to be launched by something close to there. And the particular area it was in, it would have been really hard to launch from one of the nearby areas, get over the water, get to there, and then stay there as long as it did. It’s not the weirdest thing that people have seen though. The Hellfire thing recently with the missile, that was some of the weirdest stuff that I’ve seen.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so weird because it got hit and it just shook it off and kept moving.

PALMER LUCKEY: And it’s almost, it looks almost like they were pieces. It’s like reconstituted, right?

JOE ROGAN: Like it took pieces of it.

Alternative Theories: Beyond Aliens

PALMER LUCKEY: So one of, I don’t know if you’ve done, everyone wants to believe that it’s aliens. And that’s what I want to believe. Of course, I don’t think that it is a foreign adversary. I don’t buy into the idea that the Chinese or the Russians have secretly figured this out. But then the question is, okay, well what does that leave?

And I feel like my gut is that it’s something that is weirder than anything that anyone has made popular. Like just as an example, it’s literally bleeding in from some parallel dimension. It’s an energy signature and it’s co-aligned by accident rather than intent. Right. Like it’s there because there’s something in its parallel universe that is similar to what we’re doing and that’s why they’re co-aligned.

I know this sounds like weirdo mumbo jumbo, but it seems like something like that even would be more likely. Did you ever read Michael Crichton’s novel “The Sphere”? Or was it just “Sphere”?

JOE ROGAN: No.

PALMER LUCKEY: All right. Do you mind if I spoil “Sphere” for you? So there was a movie. It was not nearly as good as the book. So in “Sphere,” without spoiling the ending, the very beginning of it is you have this researcher who is brought out to this secret naval research facility in the Pacific Ocean because the Navy has discovered a massive object, multiple kilometers long lying on top of a shallow coral reef on some atoll covered in coral that appears to be a spacecraft, an alien spacecraft.

And they figured out that when it crashed thousands of years ago there, it probably crashed onto an island which then sea levels rose and then it became covered. So by this they basically figure out it must have been there for about three or four thousand years. And so the Navy is going and they’re trying to figure out what it is. They’re scraping coral off this ship, they bring in this researcher and as the researcher is being brought to the site, they discover for the first time what they’ve been looking for, a door into the layer.

They were scraping the coral, looking for some way in through this ultra tough metallic alloy that had never been observed ever in nature or science. And then the big reveal of the first arc of the book is they scrape off the coral, they look at the door. Incredible, it’s a door. But then they look next to the door and there’s a marking. And what does the marking say on this 3,000 year old spaceship? United States Navy and an American flag.

And you know what’s interesting is they never actually fully explain it, but the implication is, and what they believe happened is that this was a time traveling craft that somehow went back in time. Or alternately, that it’s actually from some distant past civilization that traveled forward in time, like maybe went to space, did some exploring and came back. Maybe the United States is actually a purpose reconstitution of the branding and social structures of some long lost society from 500 million years ago.

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

Space Travel vs. Time Travel

JOE ROGAN: Why is that harder to believe? Why is space travel harder to believe than time travel?

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s mostly all of the, or dimension travel. So dimensional travel, that’s totally believable. Specifically, the thing I think is least likely is that using normal conventional physics that we understand, it’s people coming from another place that’s many light years away coming to where we are. It’s just, it’s a matter of we haven’t observed anything that could do that. We haven’t seen any synthetic material that could have. We haven’t seen any natural phenomena, right?

JOE ROGAN: But if you just go back 200 years ago, cell phones, impossible.

PALMER LUCKEY: But the difference here is that we’re able to see millions of years of history of the universe coming into us, right? We’re observing things that happened hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, millions of years ago, from all over our galaxy and other galaxies. And there’s a lot of markers that you would expect to see that would line up with how we understand intelligent life and we’re just not seeing them.

And you’re familiar with dark forest theory, you know, maybe that the civilizations that emanate those signals get whacked down before they become a threat to the dominant powers. Maybe everyone’s heightened, right? Like there are these theories as to why this is the case. And maybe we’re being, if you’ve heard probably the theory about us being idiots for transmitting, like Stephen Hawking was of this opinion, he thought it was really stupid for us to try and make first contact.

His point was not just that it’s probably a bad idea in general. His point was the fact that we haven’t observed it from anyone else suggests a lot of danger in doing so. Like it could mean that nobody’s doing it. It could mean that anyone who does it gets wiped out. If you stand up, you get knocked down.

And so it’s just, I have a hard time believing that it’s conventional, conventional thing on another planet that comes to see us. That’s not to say there isn’t life out there in the universe. I think it’s out there, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to be life that’s capable of inter solar system or intergalactic travel.

Gravity Drives and Dimensional Travel

JOE ROGAN: But what do you think of people that talk about some sort of a potential science that eventually gets cracked where it’s a gravity drive, like something that folds space time?

PALMER LUCKEY: In that case, and so what, this is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite theories about this. People talk about that there’s a question, like if you’re actually folding space time or breaking space time, there’s a question as to are you going to see visitors from another part of your plane of existence that are just using that technology to jump a few miles over to you, or are you more likely that that level of technology is one that allows people to come from in completely different planes of existence?

Different dimensions, different types of universes we don’t even begin to understand. Like, if we can prove that we can manipulate space time like that, to me, that’s an indicator that you can do even more than that. Again, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just putting my chips on the table as the things that I’ve seen.

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

Ocean Anomalies

JOE ROGAN: Did you see that guy? Representative, what’s his name? Tim Burchett? Is that his name was talking about? There’s five specific areas where these things seem to be emanating from the ocean.

PALMER LUCKEY: I’m generally familiar. I don’t remember what those areas are. I know that weird, one of them is very near me. It’s the Channel Islands corridor.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

UFOs and Unidentified Submersible Objects

PALMER LUCKEY: I tracked down this book that’s out of print now called “The Unidentified.” No, it’s “The UFOs and USOs: Unidentified Submersible Objects of the Santa Catalina Channel.” This guy went around that area. Well, in this one area, tons of bizarre activity. This guy went around and he interviewed everybody who had a weird story. And he just basically compiled them. He said, “What do you see? Describe it in detail.”

And he went back like, these are fishermen who had stories from the 80s. And he talked to naval aviators and he talked to local yachtsmen, and he talked to all these people. And he points out in his prologue, “These are all just the stories I’ve collected. I have not edited these stories. I have not modified these stories. And the people have verified that they are correct.”

And here they are, all on the record. This is their name. He didn’t include anybody who was anonymous because his point was, if it’s anonymous, you could just claim I made it up. It has to be a real person who stands behind it. He said, “You’ll notice that across about 50 years of stories I’ve collected that there’s extraordinary commonality between these stories. People who have never met have no reason to work together, have no reason to have a common story, and yet they all observe very similar things.”

And when you see a one-off, it’s hard to draw a conclusion. When you see a pattern, it becomes longer.

JOE ROGAN: Well, what are they observing specifically?

PALMER LUCKEY: So specifically the Santa Catalina Channel. So you have basically Catalina Island off the coast of California, and you have a few more Channel Islands that are stretched out on either end of it. The things that they were seeing were vehicles that were in the sky and then going into the water at high speed and appearing to not hit them and slam and explode like you’d expect, but instead, still a huge splash, but just seamlessly transitioning into the water. Lots of noise, lots of splash, but not destroying themselves.

And then similarly, objects coming out of the water in the same way. And so they all describe these very, very steep approach paths. So not coming in like an aircraft landing on the water, but almost like coming out of the sky at these very steep angles and then just smashing into the water in a way you would expect would destroy anything. But then instead, the vehicles are apparently fine and the water just parts around them as they rocket in. Really, really bizarre stuff.

And it makes you wonder, could that be related? The same technology or process that allows the air? You’ve seen these systems, they’re not creating sonic booms. You don’t see shock waves coming off of them. And they’re not heated by the movement through the air. They’re not really, really hot. I mean, you’ve heard the stories about the SR-71. I mean, it would get literally red hot on its leading edges, glowing titanium.

But these things are cold. And so is there some technology that can displace air around you, that can also displace water around you? That’s kind of the interesting theory there. But yeah, that particular area I’ve dug into because it’s only about 20 miles away from my house.

The Breakaway Civilization Theory

JOE ROGAN: The weird one is the breakaway civilization thing. That’s the weird one, because that’s the most ridiculous until you start thinking about it, and then you start looking back at past civilizations, like ancient Egypt and some of the monolithic construction around the world.

PALMER LUCKEY: You’ve read “Chariots of the Gods”?

JOE ROGAN: I talked to Von Däniken once.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: He went to Peter Thiel’s house and Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein brought me over for lunch.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, that must have been so cool.

JOE ROGAN: It was so cool to just question him about stuff.

PALMER LUCKEY: I read “Chariots of the Gods” when I was, I don’t know, probably like seven or eight.

JOE ROGAN: It was a fun movie too.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, I haven’t seen the movie. I didn’t even know there was a movie.

JOE ROGAN: It’s an old movie. Well, it’s an old book.

PALMER LUCKEY: It was in the movie theater.

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

JOE ROGAN: Well, Ben Van Kerkwyk, who runs UnchartedX, he was on the podcast recently and he was describing how there’s specific hieroglyphs that indicate some sort of a star portal.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what the hieroglyphs are saying. Like this is a stargate and it shows stars. It shows this portal and gate. And this is, it’s written multiple times. And they’re trying to figure out, well, what is this trying to say? Like, what is this?

Interspecies Communication and Ancient Knowledge

PALMER LUCKEY: What do you think about the theory that there’s other sentient species of Earth that might have better lore on this than us? Have you heard of this theory?

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t want to.

PALMER LUCKEY: So this is going to make me sound a little bit like a nutter, but I’m pretty deep on this. We’re pretty deep down the rabbit hole.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we’re on nutter territory right now.

PALMER LUCKEY: So people have oral traditions that have passed down pretty well. But we’ve also observed that stories can pass down in other sentient species, like whales, like dolphins. They have these whale calls that have been constant for a long time. They communicate with each other.

One of the theories, and by the way, this is explored in some of the old Star Trek movies. They explored this idea that the whales actually had better and more stable oral history than humanity. And it’s not that crazy of an idea. And so you wonder, for example, if we could understand them, what would they have to say about any of this stuff?

Maybe they’re not smart enough to have anything to say, but do they have anything to say about it? It may not be obvious. It may not be, “We know about star people who are going through stargates.” But for example, what if there’s oral tradition or even genetic programming around, “Oh, we never go to this area, never go to this place,” or “Never eat the food from this place”? Could there be interesting leads that are buried in cultures that are not human?

JOE ROGAN: Well, we were talking about that before, that you’re working on interspecies communication.

The XPRIZE for Interspecies Communication

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right. So this hasn’t actually officially launched yet. Hopefully they won’t mind me talking about it. Are you familiar with the XPRIZE Foundation?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, we were just talking about it.

PALMER LUCKEY: So for people who aren’t familiar, XPRIZE is basically this group that makes these big significant monetary prizes for teams to compete against each other to do things that seem crazy. So there was an XPRIZE for going to space on a reusable rocket. John Carmack was competing for that. Did you know that?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I did.

PALMER LUCKEY: So that inspired him. They’re doing some cancer XPRIZEs. There’s one that’s going on right now called the Wildfire XPRIZE, which is basically challenging companies to build a system that can detect wildfires anywhere on the planet in less than a minute from space, and then deploy autonomous drones to extinguish them before they get large enough that they turn into a real wildfire.

The idea is instead of responding to fires once they’re too big to control, you’re able to stop them in their tracks. And I mean, just like the Palisades fire created $20 billion in damage, it’s actually very cheap to do this relative to the damage that wildfires cause.

Anyway, the XPRIZE guys came to me a while back and we were jamming on a few ideas for their next XPRIZE. And hopefully they don’t mind me saying this, but initially I said, “You guys should do an uplift XPRIZE.” You’re familiar with uplift, the science fiction concept? It’s fallen out of favor. It was really popular for a while. There was an uplift trilogy written by, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he wrote a whole book about non-human consciousnesses.

In his book, there’s plasma consciousnesses in the sun. You’ve probably heard these crazy ideas of intelligent beings that live in the sun. But one of the main thrusts of uplift is taking species that are not sentient and lifting them up to the level of sentience and beyond. So can you take a dog and teach it to talk by genetically modifying it to make it smarter? Can you take whales and pass them up?

By the way, the uplift trilogy also explored this idea like Star Trek of the whales having an oral tradition that was more stable than humanity’s and actually having a lot of information that was concealed from man until they uplifted those species. And I’ve always thought that was really interesting.

And so I went to XPRIZE. I said, “I want you guys to do an uplift XPRIZE. First person to modify an animal to be smarter than a person.” And they actually said, “That’s too crazy.” XPRIZE is trying to push the future, but for a variety of honestly quite good reasons, they said this is not quite our jam.

But one we are working towards is an interspecies communication XPRIZE. It’s a prize to, I think that with modern AI advances, this is going to be a lot more possible to gather large amounts of data, reason about it and figure out the vocabulary and grammar of these species. The idea is it’s the first team that can meet species where they are and communicate with them in a repeatable, verifiable way.

This isn’t teaching a dog to say yes when you say, “Do you want to eat?”

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

PALMER LUCKEY: This is bi-directional communication, objective, verifiable, deterministic, predictable. It’s a really hard one. But I think a good XPRIZE should be, you shouldn’t be picking things that are easy, you’re picking things that seem like they’re just out of reach and you just need to stretch for it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s been talk…

PALMER LUCKEY: And if we do that, I’m going to be asking the whales.

JOE ROGAN: Whales and dolphins, they have a language, but we don’t know what it is.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Because we’ve learned some things. We’ve learned how a lot of cetaceans can call names and very, very unique IDs.

JOE ROGAN: They have dialects.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep, they do. But we are so far away from cracking the code. I mean, isn’t it crazy that we can crack basically any cipher, any crypto code? We can translate languages basically from scratch if we get a few words.

JOE ROGAN: Like the Rosetta Stone?

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. And we have no idea how it works. And I don’t mean we don’t know the words, but we know there are words. There’s weird things where they’re communicating via ultrasound with each other. And we think that one is emitting and another is receiving and emitting. And maybe there’s information in the phase difference between those two.

They might be, this is where the theory of acoustic hologram as a primary means of cetacean communication. I don’t believe in that anymore. I think it wasn’t quite right. But differences in phase between simultaneous transmit and receive ultrasonic communication, it seems to be, that’s part of it.

So you can’t just listen for words. You’re actually looking for differences in how these waves are interacting and those are distance dependent, direction dependent. We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us to understand animals.

Alex the African Grey Parrot

PALMER LUCKEY: That is so wild. You’re familiar with Alex, the African Grey parrot?

JOE ROGAN: No.

PALMER LUCKEY: Oh, you’ve got to look into this. I mean, maybe you could even get one of his trainers on the show. So Alex, the African Grey parrot. African Grey parrots are probably the smartest bird. Definitely one of the smartest animals.

JOE ROGAN: Right up there with crows or ravens.

PALMER LUCKEY: Smarter. They’re very, very smart. They can talk, they can reason. Alex the parrot was a uniquely smart African Grey parrot. By the way, African Greys are usually not kept in captivity just because they’re such a handful. There we go, that’s Alex.

JOE ROGAN: They’re a handful because they’re so intelligent.

African Grey Parrots and Intelligence

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s like dogs that need to be exercised. They need to be intellectually stimulated. And most people just don’t have the time to keep an African Grey properly stimulated. So they start, they get depressed, they self harm. So they’re not recommended as a beginner parrot by any means.

Now, Alex was interesting because he had a vocabulary, he understood grammar, and he is one of the, I think the only animal who asked an existential question. And he actually did it right before he died, if I remember correctly. Like, he wasn’t just saying, give me food. He could say, like, tomorrow I want this food. He could be, whoa.

But the existential question he asked was, “What’s happening? And where am I going?” Which is. And he had never asked those questions before. They were brand new formulated questions that he asked very shortly before he passed. And so there’s a lot of.

Now here’s the other cool part. He’s got a bird brain. He has a tiny little brain and yet it has all that capacity. You’ve probably heard of people who have lost huge chunks of their brain and they reprogram and they seem to get by. Parrots like Alex suggest that you can get by with very little brain if it’s oriented correctly.

So imagine if I took a species like an African Grey and I modified certain elements of genetic code to cause its brain to be somewhat larger, somewhat more glucose consuming, so it has more energy and then also to have more folds. They’re very smooth brain. What if I could have. We know that folded brain tissue and the high density that it creates on the neuronal surface is very good for intelligence.

Like, could you make an African Grey that is able to have a normal human level conversation? I think it’s actually very close to that. Wow. So this is one of those. How many? Come on, can you tell me how many? Very good.

JOE ROGAN: What?

PALMER LUCKEY: Two?

JOE ROGAN: We keep going.

PALMER LUCKEY: Can you tell me what’s different? What’s different?

JOE ROGAN: Color.

PALMER LUCKEY: What number is gray? Well, tell me, what number is grey to nut? What number is gray? Very good.

JOE ROGAN: Good boy. Holy shit, man.

PALMER LUCKEY: Right. And I mean, you’re looking at intelligence that’s on par by all of the traditional metrics with a human toddler, but with radically less brain tissue, but also.

JOE ROGAN: Radically less body to control.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s true. And also a lot of, like semiautonomous, you know, how some animals have more of their nervous system distributed like, you know, octopuses have, you know, autonomy in their muscles. It’s actually similar for a lot of animals.

AI and Understanding Consciousness

And so one of the reasons I’ve always found AI so interesting is not just what we can do with AI, but learning how. Like building up, building a thinking system from scratch, I’m thinking, will help us understand how other systems think. Like we haven’t. There’s never been an economic motive to really dig into how to understand how the brain fundamentally works.

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

AI is the first time that humanity has ever dedicated a huge amount of resources to understanding what thought is, how to make it synthetically and how to make it better. And we’re going to make a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think that understanding how to make synthetic brains via AI is going to teach us how to make parrots like Alex a lot smarter too.

Genetic Engineering and Human Evolution

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

PALMER LUCKEY: You.

JOE ROGAN: But it brings me to the weirder theory about human evolution, that we’re a product of accelerated evolution and that some superior intelligence would do exactly what you’re saying.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s my favorite part about uplift, is that if you can prove that it works, you open up a whole avenue of theories that have been treated as crazy. Like right now, what you just said about augmented evolution of humans, it’s a crazy person thing. Right? Right.

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

It gets back to Skynet earlier. If we make animals more into our own image, is it really crazy to think that we are the result of something like that? So I’m a religious person, I’m a Christian, and I feel like what you see where God was created or man was created in God’s image, I feel like it’s reflected in our desire to create things in our own image.

And so I think there’s a certain beautiful symmetry there where if we’re doing it, it’s actually easier for people to believe, I think, that it happened to us. It’s easier for people to believe that we have a creator who wanted to create something in his own image when we are doing the same.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And we’re like, well, they’re on the way. They’re on the way. But they need, like, 300 million years before they get to where we are.

PALMER LUCKEY: We wouldn’t want to wait.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

Human Drive for Innovation

JOE ROGAN: Which is one of the weirder things about us. We were talking about this last night at the mothership. We were on the Green Room. We were talking about one thing that human beings share in common with everything we do. Everyone’s trying to make the best version of everything.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yes.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: I would even go beyond. I think it’s not even better. It’s that we seek novel things.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PALMER LUCKEY: And humans are programmed to seek novelty. And I think it’s clearly been an evolutionarily advantageous trait. Societies that foster seeking of novel experiences build stronger cultures, stronger technologies, and then, by the way, the groups that don’t seek novelty end up becoming stagnant. Yes.

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

Hunter-Gatherer Lifestyle vs. Modern Civilization

JOE ROGAN: What’s really fascinating when you think about human beings in particular is that people that lived in those tribes did not want to civilize and that the people that were even captured by Indians, a lot of them wanted to stay because they found that to resonate more with being a human being, because we had lived so many thousands of years as hunter gatherers that that resonated with your being.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: And I think anyone getting food from a store, anyone who’s ever been on a camping trip understands what you’re talking about.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s. Imagine that. You can feel it.

PALMER LUCKEY: People were not meant to live in urban jungles.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a great Vice piece back when Vice was really interesting. It’s called Hindmo’s Arctic Adventure. And it’s this guy who. He lives north of the Arctic Circle, or near the Arctic Circle, and he has a cabin up there, and he’s grandfathered in, and he’s been there forever. I think he started working there in the 1970s.

This guy. He didn’t even know about 9/11 until way later someone showed him a picture of what happened. He has television and VHS tapes and a log cabin powered by a generator. And all he does is hunt caribou and fish. And he’s very intelligent.

And so this nerdy reporter from fucking Williamsburg is hanging out with this guy or wherever he’s from. And this guy’s explaining how this resonates with being a human being.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s so interesting. On the one hand, I agree. But then I love, like, I mean, I love that human. The human race is doing a pretty good job of seeking novelty because that’s what drive. If we all hunt. If we all. I mean, maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s that, you know, maybe hunting caribou is what makes us happy. But you still need the guy who wants to go for something else.

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

The Value of Nostalgia

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

There’s some people who I feel like look down on nostalgia. They’re like, oh, you’re obsessed with the past. Kind of needlessly. It’s feeling good. I feel like obsessing over the past, I think is healthy in a lot of ways. And I think it’s even good to look at the past with rose tinted glasses because there’s so much that we could learn from the past and should learn from the past if we didn’t look at things with rose tinted glasses.

My theory is that imagine you look at the future possibilities and the past teachings identically with no favoring. It feels like you’re naturally going to prefer the new thing that hasn’t really shown all the downfalls. I guess I’m getting it. I’m a big fan of nostalgia. I’m a big fan of looking at the parts of the past that worked and then lionizing those and reminding people why they worked.

There’s a lot of people who actually say this is fascist now. Have you heard of this?

JOE ROGAN: The nostalgia is fascist.

PALMER LUCKEY: Nostalgia is fascist. If you Google it, you look up nostalgia is fascist. You will find this is like a cutting edge theory of the last year. They’re saying, oh, all this appeal to, you know, appeal to the 90s. It’s pro fascist because they’re trying to make you believe that there was a better time to believe that going backwards in society is a good thing. As if the 1990s were like some like hotbed of injustice and oppression.

JOE ROGAN: That’s interesting. I think nostalgia’s fun, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past. I do when it comes to art. I do when it comes to music. And particularly the role of psychedelics in the influence of culture.

That happened in the 1960s, which I think is the greatest cultural shift of change in recorded history. There’s some the difference in the 50s and the 60s, just this radical change in the way people saw life and how many people were just like, exiting normal society and then how they threw water on that with the passing of the psychedelics act in 1970. But I think that it seems like.

PALMER LUCKEY: Things are going in a different direction. So just so you know, I’m straight edge. I don’t use any drugs. I didn’t drink alcohol till very recently. I just had my first kid. He’s a year old.

JOE ROGAN: And you started drinking?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Soon you had a kid?

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

JOE ROGAN: Why is that? Why is that?

PALMER LUCKEY: You have enough hard nights and hard days taking care of the kid and you say, you know, I totally get it, man. I totally understand why everyone’s. Why everyone’s having beers on the weekend.

The Evolution of American Manufacturing and Design

JOE ROGAN: There’s certainly a place for it. There’s certainly a place for it.

PALMER LUCKEY: But I’m curious why nostalgia and art. I’m not disagreeing, actually. I think I showed you earlier.

JOE ROGAN: I’m completely fascinated with the 1960s in terms of. I’m a huge fan of 1960s automobiles.

PALMER LUCKEY: What year were you born?

JOE ROGAN: 67.

PALMER LUCKEY: Okay, interesting.

JOE ROGAN: When I was a kid in high school, which is really, I was in high school in the 1980s, so I went to high school. First year was 81, which is not that far away from 1970. Right. That’s 11 years, like an 11 year old car. If you had a 2016 Toyota, it looks exactly like a 2025 Toyota. There’s not much difference at all. You would have to be like a car nut to notice the difference.

But when I was a kid in 1981, if someone drove by in a 1970 Chevelle, everybody stopped and stared at it, like, whoa.

PALMER LUCKEY: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: It was like that nostalgia was real because we recognized that something had happened to American manufacturing, particularly in automobile manufacturing, where they just lost the magic. They had magic in the 1960s, the Corvette. Well, cars were art. Yes. They were engineering, they were art. They were an expression of American culture and it went away. Yep, it went away in the 1970s. They turned into dog shit.

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

The Subscription Economy Problem

JOE ROGAN: That’s kind of gross. I’ve heard that there’s some cars that charge you money if you want to use Apple CarPlay.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right. Well, there’s some that are also charging you to use all of your heating and cooling functionality. There’s ones they’re adding.

JOE ROGAN: Just charge me more for your car and don’t fuck me.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, some of them are you’re paying more, it’s paying more to unlock more horsepower. It’s like, wait, you’re making the car, it has the parts and you’re not getting crazy. You know, a lot of these business approaches are actually coming I think not from the car industry. They’re stealing them from the tech and also the gaming industry.

There was a time when these things people were making video games. They would make a game, you’d buy it, you owned a video game and that was it. And they made the best game they could to sell you at a store. And these days they’re making games and also a lot of apps into these subscription experiences. You have to keep paying money. They’re making content that’s just farmed to keep you hooked on the drip continuously. You don’t see these masterpieces the way that you used to. And that’s something I’ve been super passionate about.

JOE ROGAN: It is gross that they do that. They just hook you in because they know you’re hooked already.

PALMER LUCKEY: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: And so you want the new BMW or whatever the car is and you know, I’ll just pay the monthly. Who gives a fuck? Just one more subscription that comes out of my auto pay.

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

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

The Golden Age of Gaming

PALMER LUCKEY: One of the things that’s crazy to me, for you it’s cars because that’s, you grew up during that shift as well. The industry kind of to your point, lost something. But I grew up with the Nintendo Game Boy and a lot of these things were like the era. It was kind of like the early days of gaming where it was all these passionate people doing things because they really desperately wanted to. It was before all the bean counters got in. It was before all the regulators got in. It was before the people figured out how to turn it into this.

You used to be able to make a game with a dozen people and of course you could still do that today. I don’t want to romanticize too much but you could make a best selling game back then with a dozen people. And these are all crazy people who could be making more money working in let’s say farming or industrial manufacturing. And instead they decided to be game programmers.

Today you’ll have game teams that are thousands of people and it’s all, you know, it’s become a very high paying, high prestige job. It’s just a totally different universe.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also a giant business now.

PALMER LUCKEY: Right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s been proven that it’s a huge moneymaker.

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s purely, it’s totally financialized now. It’s optimized by the bean counters. How are we going to make $5 billion in profit this year?

JOE ROGAN: And the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry, right?

PALMER LUCKEY: It is actually and it has been even for a while. I think that happened I want to say it was like six or seven years ago that the games industry. I showed you before we came on. I have this knockoff of the Nintendo Game Boy that I made. I remember I talked about that web forum I started with the.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a superior Game Boy.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: You can feel it just holding onto it.

The Anduril Game Boy

PALMER LUCKEY: So actually this one is even nicer than the ones that we normally sell. This is my personal Anduril edition one. So this is made with the same alloys we use in our attack drones. And the coating on it is a wear proof Cerakote ceramic. It feels very sturdy. Also the screen lens instead of plastic like on the original Game Boy, it’s actually lab grown sapphire crystal. It’s the largest piece of sapphire crystal in any product ever in history.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a fine watch.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. But then we made a new version of Tetris for it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s incredible.

PALMER LUCKEY: But the thing so interesting about this, I turn it on, the game is instantly going. There’s no ads, there’s no subscriptions. It doesn’t say log in and download the update. Let us show you the pre roll ads. Now you need to make a user account and put in all your user preferences and give us access to your email and give us access to your social media. If you want to have the extra booster packs, it’s just access to your social media.

Data Collection and Privacy Concerns

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s a very common thing.

PALMER LUCKEY: Now a lot of games, they are heavily incentivizing linking your social media accounts to your game accounts and letting them see your contacts, your friends list. Well, because they want all that data. They want to know who they can market to. They want to see what your demographics are. They want to say, what does this customer like?

JOE ROGAN: Can you opt out?

PALMER LUCKEY: So there are some games that require you to have social media integration. There’s other. You have people with dark patterns.

JOE ROGAN: No.

PALMER LUCKEY: So there are these patterns that exist in social media design and app design that steer you down a particular direction and so they don’t force you to do it. But the average user, unless they’re trying to fight their way out of it, is going to do it.

So for example, I’ll be logging into a game I’ve just downloaded Overwatch 2 and it says you need to log in. You can either go through this extremely convoluted process of creating a new only Overwatch 2 Blizzard account, or you can click the button that says log in with Google or log in with Facebook. What are 99? And then you click it and it says, to do this, you have to give us permission to see this.

You and I care about this stuff because I think we’re relics who remember when privacy was a thing and when some things are for your, a lot of these kids, they just don’t care.

JOE ROGAN: They just click it.

PALMER LUCKEY: You talk to the Gen Z kids and it’s like, well, why do you want, are you going to give that away? They say, well, they don’t see value in it. And they grew up with that as the norm. And that’s why I say it’s important to remember when it wasn’t the norm.

JOE ROGAN: Do people get dummy accounts so they can give a dummy account to that?

PALMER LUCKEY: There are people who do it, but most people don’t. And also, the thing is they make it where there’s even reasons where you want it to be tied to your social media. So they want to gather lots of information and get you plugged into their marketing ecosystem. And they say, oh, if you log in with this social media account, then we can automatically add all of your friends to your in game friends list so you don’t have to go and manually invite them.

So it is a convenience feature, but the thing is they could do that without storing all that data and giving them persistent access to all your social media accounts and seeing everything that you’re posting. Some of these apps, even you give them permission to post on your behalf. Oh, and what they do is this was innovated, kind of like the Farmville stuff. Do you remember Farmville?

And you had to say the reason it was so viral is when you would do stuff in Farmville, it would literally post on your wall and say, oh, Palmer just did this. Palmer just visited Joe’s farm and helped him do this. Those tactics have evolved way beyond to make these things very sticky, very addictive. So look, you can make a fake account, you can make a burner account and there’s like 1% of people who will ever think of doing something like that.

JOE ROGAN: So for them it’s just about mass.

Capitalism Meets Social Engineering

PALMER LUCKEY: And I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just about making money. Making money is fine. I’m a believer in the free market generally. I’m a believer in capitalism strongly. But then the problem is you have this combination of capitalism driven capture efforts combined with people who don’t care about making money nearly so much as pushing their particular social ideals.

You’ve probably seen this in Hollywood. You certainly see it in the games industry where you have people who are joining the industry not because they want to make great games, not even because they want to make money. And I feel like making great games is the best reason. Making money is an acceptable reason. It’s because they want to bring about greater equity and representation of people that look like them.

And that’s fine to have as a thing in the back of your mind. But there’s people who are joining where that is what they want to do. And anyone who’s against it, they’re going to berate them. Anyone in the company who says, I actually think we should make games for our customers, not the people you wish were our customers. Let’s make games for the guys who buy our games, not the moms you wish were buying our games. And people like that are being ejected out of companies. I mean, it’s very politically incorrect. There’s a question.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the Bud Light dilemma, right?

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: They tried to make Bud Light for people who don’t want Bud Light and make fun of the Bud Light people.

The Mythical Audience

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s the mythical audience. It’s a mythical mainstream audience. They say, and you know, it’s even worse in gaming because they’ll say things like, oh, you know, 50% of gamers are stay at home moms. What? That obviously isn’t true. And what it is is it’s something like there’s a lot of stay at homes who’ve played Candy Crush a few times and there’s a lot of them. And they’re like, therefore we need to build to that market.

Okay, I don’t want to get into a fight over what a gamer is, but what do you think sounds like a better business plan to go after the young men primarily who buy a dozen fifty dollar games a year or the mom who once spent $5 on Candy Crush. And there’s kind of, and if you say that, if you put, I just put it, they’re like, that’s so sexist of you. Why don’t you want to bring in new audiences?

I saw this when I was in Silicon Valley. What I called it was, I said there’s too many people who drink Starbucks and not enough who drink Mountain Dew. And you know exactly what I mean when I say that. It’s just, it’s been a really bizarre thing to watch in all of these different industries.

The Mind Virus in Corporate Culture

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a mind virus. It’s captured universities and then it bled out into corporations.

PALMER LUCKEY: One of my favorite questions to ask people is starting a company is hard. You’ll fail most of the time even when you don’t constrain yourself to trying to change the social system. Look, if you could make it where all those moms get into games and it was free, that would be great. But it’s not, it’s a trade off. You have to take resources you would have put on your real customers and put it towards them.

And one question I ask people is just ideologically, okay, imagine your job is to build a corporate building for a company. And the company, you know exactly who they are, you know how many men there are, you know how many women there are. We don’t have to say how many there are. Like we’re not, don’t even, don’t make it about one gender versus another. It’s just there are lots of men, there’s lots of women. I won’t pick a number.

When you’re designing this building, should you have the number of bathrooms that would best serve the actual gender makeup of the company that would allow them to use the bathroom and get back to their desk without waiting in line? Or would you pursue a different strategy? And if it’s different, what would your strategy be?

And many people say, well, I would build it, you know, perfect 50/50. And if they say, well, I’m doing that because it’s the easiest way to do it, I’d be like, okay, that’s fine. But if they say, well, I would hope that I want to create an environment where it should eventually be 50% men and 50% women. I say, okay, so wait, you’re going to have a company 90% men, 10% women. You think the men should have to wait in line five times as long for the bathroom because someday that might make more women want to work at this company?

And it’s one of those really interesting dividing questions where it’s basically, do you want to solve the problem that allows your business to succeed, or are you trying to achieve totally parallel social aims at the expense of the business? And companies are hiring a lot of people who think about it that way. They don’t see their role as to come in and make the company better or to make a better product for their customer. They see it as to come in and effect that change, even if it tanks the company in the process.

JOE ROGAN: How did that happen? Dude, I don’t know where that’s common.

The Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon

PALMER LUCKEY: I think that probably you let… I mean, there’s a lot of theories. I can give you mine. It was the zero interest rate phenomenon theory. Are you familiar with this? The zero interest rate phenomenon? ZIRP, they call it. Some people call it the zero interest rate period.

So ZIRP was this period of time that we’ve really seen over the last 15 years, up until very recently, where money was basically free to borrow. That’s where you’ve seen so much economic growth. You’ve seen a lot of it artificially propped up in the tech and the media industry. I think a lot of these streaming plays have been propped up by ZIRP.

When interest rates are extremely low and money is very cheap to borrow, people will spend tons and tons of money. The economy appears to be doing very well. You have the growth that looks good on the stock market. And so companies don’t need to ever tighten their belts. They can hire and hire and hire. They can become grossly inefficient. They can pursue things that don’t make money, and they’re still doing okay.

And so a lot of these companies, their employees were kind of out of control. You had people coming out of college who believed their job was to change the world by using the money of these corporations. And the corporations didn’t push back on it because they would be accused of being bigots and committing hate crimes. And they said, you know what? The stock is going up. Everything’s going well. We can just keep doing this.

My theory is actually that interest rates going up have been very good for solving this problem. You’ve seen a lot of layoffs in the tech industry. You’ve seen a lot of layoffs in the media industry. I think that a lot of those are driven by interest rates rising. Money’s not free. And now companies have to actually make what people want.

Did you see? You probably didn’t, but did you happen to see the first quarterly earnings call by the new CEO of Warner Brothers, who came in a year or two ago? And it was incredible. He had this speech that was exactly what fans wanted to hear and what investors wanted to hear. But his employees were furious.

He came on and said, “In my tenure, I’m going to pursue something that’s been novel for Warner Brothers. Instead of making movies that people don’t want to see, I’m going to make movies that people do want to see. Instead of making movies that don’t make money, we will make movies that do make money. And to do that, we are going to make products that people want, like Batman and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. And that is going to be the core of our market success.”

And that’s what fans want. They’re like, oh, my God, this is great. They’re going to stop making these kind of social justice pieces and make us the things that we actually want. The investors love it because he says they’re going to make money.

But the people who are angry were all of the college students who joined thinking that they were going to use billions of dollars from Warner Brothers to make their pet art film projects about various oppressed groups. And I think that that is happening across the industry, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s a good adjustment.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense. So speaking of making things…

PALMER LUCKEY: Helmet.

JOE ROGAN: Bust out the helmet, son.

Introducing Eagle Eye: The Future of Combat Technology

PALMER LUCKEY: All right, so I’m going to take this off. So I’ve been working on head mounted displays for a long time. I created the Oculus Rift when I was 19 years old, living in a camper trailer in my garage, and that was really the virtual reality headset that changed the industry. Sold that company for billions of dollars.

And now that I’m working in the national security space, I’ve continued to believe that virtual reality, augmented reality is going to be a critical part of our military. So the ability to have night vision, thermal vision, but also the ability to see where all the bad guys are, see where all the good guys are by fusing everyone’s view together. Think of it almost like a hive mind.

If I’m able to see something, you should be able to see it. If a drone can see it, you should be able to see it. Even if it’s on the other side of a building, you should be able to see it and effectively have X-ray vision. And I should be able to command and control all these other systems using this heads up display interface.

None of what I’m saying sounds that crazy, right? It just sounds like any science fiction film. These are ideas that have been around for 100 years, but only very recently has it become possible.

So this is a new product that we just announced at the Army’s conference yesterday. We’ve been working on it for years using our own money. No taxpayer dollars were used to create it. It’s called Eagle Eye and it is an integrated ballistics shell. So you’ve got a helmet, you’ve got hearing protection, you’ve got thermal sensors, night sensors, signals intelligence sensors that allow you to detect where cell phones are, where radios are, see that in your view. It even detects where gunshots are, shows them exactly where they’re placed and how far they are.

JOE ROGAN: So this is a recreation of it?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, so this is a video feed of what it is like to use the system. So I’ve got the helmet on here. And then what I have is this pair of augmented reality glasses. So basically I can take these glasses and I put them on, these sync with the helmet and with these sensors.

So I can, for example, see where my gun is pointing. I can see where every enemy is. I can see where all of my buddies are. So there’s a view that’s coming up here where you’re going to notice a drone picks up a guy behind that container over there. And what’s going to happen is when he walks behind that container, I’m able to continue to see where he is and what he’s doing.

So here’s Ghost X, the drone that’s watching. So just watch for a moment. So the Blue Force is my friendlies. So see that little right hand corner where it sees behind the containers? They’re tracking where the bad guy is. They’re tracking where my guys are. And then watch when they go behind the container so I can actually see through it. And watch. Now they’re engaging the guy over there, and he’s down.

Imagine a guy’s coming over a hill, and I want to engage him. So actually, I’m going to put on the mission shield. There we go. So this is a system that allows everybody to basically be operating as one combined hive mind, where you can all share a view of the world.

And by the way, this view that I have, it’s shared now with all of the robots as well. So anything I see, every drone and every person now sees that person where he is.

It’s so crazy that I was born at the right time to actually get to build all this stuff, because, you know, Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author who did Starship Troopers, he was literally writing about these ideas of mobile infantry that’s wearing mech suits and ballistics prediction helmets that show you the bad guys, give you radar feeds, give you night vision, give you thermal vision, the ability to do ballistics targeting, where it calculates where the wind is going to blow you around and where it’s going to go.

He was literally writing about this in the 1940s. I mean, we’re talking about almost a hundred years ago. And we happen to be born in the right time, so, you know, too late to explore the seas, too early to explore the stars, but just in time to build Eagle Eye.

JOE ROGAN: You’re in the right timeline.

PALMER LUCKEY: I am in the right timeline.

Simulation Theory and Spirituality

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

PALMER LUCKEY: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Why are all these cool things happening for you?

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

JOE ROGAN: A lot of green lights over and over again.

PALMER LUCKEY: And it does make you think, what are the odds of that? Is it more likely that the world is a simulation or not? And I think actually, it just comes down to… it comes down to I’m a spiritual person. I believe in the existence of a higher creator, of a higher power.

And I feel like there’s actually a lot of similarities between that and believing in simulation theory. I mean, when people say, “Oh, it’s all a simulation,” is that really so different from having a universe that was created by an all powerful being?

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

JOE ROGAN: What were they trying to write down when they were writing the initial religious texts? What were they actually describing when you’re talking about something that’s an oral tradition?

PALMER LUCKEY: Let me pop up the… There we go. I can pop out this.

JOE ROGAN: Can I put that on?

PALMER LUCKEY: Yes, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: What are you seeing right now?

PALMER LUCKEY: So right now nothing, unfortunately. If I’m going to give you a good demo, we need to go to an area where it’s synced up to all the other helmets. I want to show you the night…

JOE ROGAN: I like how the ears pop.

Eagle Eye Helmet Design and Features

PALMER LUCKEY: Yeah, this is my doing. So I’m a huge weapons enthusiast. I own about 450 guns. Huge number of. I own basically everything that anyone’s ever fought in. So ballistic vests, uniforms, boots, gloves, helmets, I collect that stuff. And so one of the cool parts about Eagle Eye is I got to bring all my opinions on what things should be and I can just jam them into the product.

Like the cool thing about this is like you, if you’ve ever used hearing protection, normally, you know, it pops up like this and you know, it’s kind of dangling the way. Notice how it’s really tightly integrated, like it’s not flopping around, but I can pop it open and now I can hear you directly with my own two ears. I can pop that and clip it back in. And I’m able to hear with electronic pass through and it actually enhances my hearing so I can hear certain things better.

And you’ll notice this is ballistic ear protection. So have you ever seen like a high cut helmet where you can have low cut helmets where they protect your ears more? High cut helmets where there’s no ballistic protection over your hearing protection? This is ballistic hearing protection. So when I put this on, everything is protected with armor, even over the soft tissue in my ears and around my upper neck.

JOE ROGAN: Is there any concern about the hinge or that during combat it would pop open?

PALMER LUCKEY: No, no. It’s a super robust system. So here, I’ll actually show you. Let me pull off. So these are modular sensors, pods at the top. They call them wolf ears. But I can basically swap these even in the field. So I could carry, for example…

JOE ROGAN: But that seemed too easy to take off.

PALMER LUCKEY: Magnets, buddy.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But I’m saying, if you’re in the middle of a scramble and you’re here.

PALMER LUCKEY: Check this one out. This one has no connector on it. This one is. These are not actually real modules. This is a tricky one where we have real modules and show modules. The real modules in general, the army doesn’t want to have them passed around and people taking pictures of them.

Like at AUSA, there’s people walking up, taking pictures of everything in the booth. They don’t want you to show off, for example, the size of the aperture of the thermal imager you’re using, because then they can back reverse how far you can see what level of thermal radiation you can see. So, yeah, these are the dummies. Yeah. Normally you actually. When it has a connector in there, you got to actually jam it in there and it’s retained.

JOE ROGAN: And so have you done tests where people fall down off hills and go for a tumble?

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

JOE ROGAN: Got it.

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

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

Advanced Audio Technology

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. But it’s even better. We’re using an array of. So those ones, they have two microphones, the walkers, they typically have one here, one here. What we’re doing is a phased array of microphones so that I can actually steer the amplification beam.

JOE ROGAN: I could send a footsteps over in this left direction. Let’s point in that.

PALMER LUCKEY: Well, even crazier, imagine that I’m looking at a target with this and I look at that target, it can cancel out all of the other sound that it knows is coming out of phase with that direction and distance. And it can give me just the sound there coming from that as best it can.

So it can give me not just enhanced hearing, but directional enhanced hearing. I could say I want to listen to what that guy 100 yards over there is saying. I’m not promising you’ll be able to hear, but you’ll be able to hear it a lot better than you would, than you would without it.

The Microsoft IVAS Program

So it’s worth noting the way this came together is crazy. There was a contract to do this to build an infantry combat heads up display in 2017 and 2018 that was awarded to Microsoft by the United States Army. It was $22 billion to develop this technology. And I actually wanted to compete in that competition back then. But at the time Anduril was only about two dozen people.

And so it was a competition. Do you remember Magic Leap?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PALMER LUCKEY: It was a competition between Magic Leap and Microsoft. Microsoft ended up winning. I think that’s probably good because the guy who was running Magic Leap was not really a fan of the military. And I think it’s dangerous to have even if you don’t. It’s fine to not like the military, but you shouldn’t have people who don’t like the military running the military. Right, people.

And I think you shouldn’t have people who are in love with the military regulating the military. Right. Everyone has their role. Anyway, I was very skeptical of their technology. You remember HoloLens? That was Microsoft’s consumer virtual reality augmented reality effort. Their AR project was adapting that to the military into this product called IVAS.

To make a very, very long story short, it had a lot of problems. Their early hardware was making people sick, it had lag, the night vision wasn’t working well. There were soldier evaluation touch points that came out where they were saying, “Hey, I’ll get killed if I wear this.” Microsoft invested a lot of money trying to make it better, but eventually they ended up killing even their consumer HoloLens division. They just shut everything down.

So the crazy part of this whole story is starting a few years ago I started going to Microsoft and “Hey, will you guys just give me the IVAS program? Will you just let me take over. You guys can keep building Microsoft applications, cloud computing, the stuff you’re good at. Let me build the tactical heads up display hardware.”

And when I first talked to them years ago, they thought I was nuts. They was almost insulted. It was like when Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo and they got literally laughed out of the room. And then as time went on, they started to laugh less and less and eventually they said, “Hey, remember how you said you wanted to take over IVAS? We would actually love to partner with you on this and let you bring your magic to bear on this problem.”

I try to be a humble guy. I don’t usually succeed, but I am not humble in this one regard. I believe that I am the world’s best head mounted display designer, bar none. I took the crown with the Oculus Rift. I think I still hold it. And so I was able to kick the program into shape.

We built our own hardware and we built Eagle Eye over the last couple of years. And it is, it basically solves all the problems that the program had. It is the thing that I think is actually going to end up on the heads of every soldier here. Try taking these on and you’ll feel they’re a bit heavier than normal glasses. But the other thing about them is that they’re also ballistic rated glasses.

So you see in the front and then also on the sides. Yes. These can take pieces of frag. So if someone’s attacking you with a drone and it blows up, this is going to keep those from going into your orbitals, which is a pretty important function for glasses.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I would say. So what is this outside?

Mission Shield Technology

PALMER LUCKEY: Piece of fragrance. So yeah, put the glass, try putting the glass back on. See if you can pop that off. You’ll notice. Yeah, there we go. Perfect. So that’s a mission shield. I like that you asked about it because actually nobody’s even noticed really that it’s two pieces.

So the mission shield is a piece that allows you to reconfigure the glasses for different use cases. If you’re using this, for example, to give you automated instructions on how to repair your Humvee, for example, I don’t need to have that ballistic cover on the front because I don’t need that extra. I don’t expect that I’m going to have an explosion happen and protect my eyes.

But you can also do things like have different types of protection. For example, that’s just a normal ballistic mission shield. We have another mission shield that protects you from laser energy weapons. So it’s actually tuned where now it makes your vision turn. I probably shouldn’t talk about exactly what color because it allows people to figure out what frequencies we’re blocking.

But there are mission shields that you can put on that will protect you from weapons that we know China has. China has a bunch of directed energy laser weapons. Some of them for taking out drones, others designed to blind human troops. And so we’re designing mission shields that protect you from those types of immigration missions.

JOE ROGAN: They’re designed to blind human troops. Are they employed from drones?

PALMER LUCKEY: I don’t want to be too aggressive here, because I’ll tell you, the United States has weapons that are designed to temporarily blind people as well. Now, the thing is, temporary blinding is very close to permanent blinding. And it’s a thin line. It’s dependent on the range. It’s dependent on the power level.

Any system that can temporarily blind people at long range is capable of blinding people permanently at long range. It’s just that that’s the line you walk. If you want it to work in any fog, you need more power. If you want it to work at long ranges, you need more power.

But for example, imagine we deployed a bunch of these glasses and they had the laser filters built in from the start. Now imagine that China shifts their laser frequencies 10nm so that it bypasses that filter. Imagine if I had to just replace all my AR glass. That’s not acceptable. Right? So everything on this system is totally modular. So what would happen is if they shifted their laser weapons, we would just give people a new mission shield. Now they’re all set.

JOE ROGAN: That mission shield comes off very easy though.

PALMER LUCKEY: So this comes. Look, I got to admit, these are primarily for showing off to the army. Got it.

JOE ROGAN: So it’ll somehow another secure into place.

Demo Design Philosophy

PALMER LUCKEY: It’s actually still going to be magnets. It’s just going to be a lot more force to remove. I’m wondering how much I should get into the movie magic here. So, look, I’ll get a little bit into it. I mostly an engineer. I mostly build stuff. But a big part of what I do is understanding what magicians think when they are drawing attention to things, when they have patter, when you’re going through a demo of something to somebody.

I used to demo the Oculus Rift to thousands of people a year. High powered executives, government people, CEOs of major game companies, people we’re trying to hire. And you have to develop a pattern of how you talk about stuff. And you need to be able to go in any direction. If somebody says, “Well, what about this?” You need to be able to show them that feature. You need to be ready for how you show the feature. I need to be intimately familiar with every part of it.

The reason that the magnets are so weak on this is because we show this to people who are weak. I’m not kidding. If you actually have. Because you’re not swapping this as you’re running around, right? So in the real one, you can have, you know, where you’re like, ugh, you know, and it busts off.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PALMER LUCKEY: But imagine this. Imagine we’re sitting in a demo room and then you hand this to either a member of the press or even, let’s say, a member of the armed forces. And I say, “Here you go, and your name is Ashley. Take that, Ashley. Pull it off.” And you. That’s the problem because you need some decent fit.

You see those tabs on the end? See how it. The protrusions? Yeah. That’s going to make it easier for your fingers to grab when you have way more fit force. There are people who have really weak fingers. They don’t really know how to grab stuff. And then it’s actually the same thing with.

JOE ROGAN: I understand what you’re saying.

Demonstrating the Helmet Technology

PALMER LUCKEY: So I’m showing you a little bit of the movie magic behind how I think these… If you want to take this, you can put it on. This is an actual weighted helmet. We’ve developed a bunch of novel technology that makes this work.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

PALMER LUCKEY: It actually fits on you. Oh, here, you’re a little wrapped. Your chin strap’s wrapped around. Yeah, just… Sorry, I wrapped it around before you even had it. Yep, there you go. But yeah, if you’re familiar with Walkers, very, very similar to what we do on the hearing enhancement side. It’s just a world even beyond that. Is it too tight or you got it?

JOE ROGAN: And then this snaps. Oh, yeah. How does this snap?

PALMER LUCKEY: So here, I might have to come around. There’s a little bit of a trick that you learn. What it does is it goes in and then you’re going to push it up and back diagonally.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you did it.

PALMER LUCKEY: There you go. I’m so glad. See, that’s just how intuitive it is.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, very.

PALMER LUCKEY: And the cool thing about this is you don’t have these mounts now that are snagging you here. Well, you got to put on the glasses, too. There you go. You don’t have the mounts that are snagging you. You don’t… Have you ever… You’ve used night vision?

JOE ROGAN: I have.

The Problem with Traditional Night Vision

PALMER LUCKEY: I mean, it’s just, you know, you have this big giant unicorn horn, this thing pounding on your face. Also, it’s very unbelievable weight that’s out here is torquing your neck continuously. And it’s annoying when you’re standing in place, but if you, let’s say, hit a pothole in a Humvee with a big weight on the end of a lever, you destroy your neck.

I think it’s… Oh, my God. That can’t even be right. I want to say, I need to look this up. It might be, is it $200 million for the Air Force? And then I want to say it’s $20 billion that the DoD spends on neck injuries, primarily through the VA, right? There’s so many neck injuries that occur from spinal compression, people getting their heads whipped around.

That’s why helmets need to be extremely lightweight, tightly integrated, no snag hazards. It’s important that you not have a big, giant bulky thing where I’m going through a doorway and it gets on there, and all of a sudden I go in a weird angle, trying to run through a room. Or someone’s turning and part of their rifle, they’re right up on me, and it snags on my helmet and pulls me.

You’ve probably seen a lot of people put big battery packs for their night vision back here. Same thing. It creates a huge snag hazard. You’re sliding down something or sliding over an edge, you clear it, and then the back of your head hits that fence, you go boom.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the battery power of something like that?

PALMER LUCKEY: Okay, so this has a tiny battery pack on it. This has 30 minutes of battery life.

JOE ROGAN: So what is the lithium ion capacity? Is it lithium ion? Is it a cell phone battery?

Revolutionary Battery Integration

PALMER LUCKEY: So the battery on it here is actually… The battery that is in here is basically an emergency reserve. It is not intended to power it most of the time. It is a primary cell chemistry that won’t burst into flames. It’s basically one time use. So it’s an emergency battery that runs it when your helmet is disconnected from the main battery.

The main battery is this. So you ever used ballistic plates before?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PALMER LUCKEY: So this is a standard geometry SAPI geometry plate.

JOE ROGAN: This is good for rucking.

PALMER LUCKEY: Exactly. So the cool thing about this is it’s a combination battery, computer, and ballistic plate. And so here’s the craziest part about this. Normally you would wear a plate and then you would have to wear a battery and a computer. That’s how everyone’s always done heads up displays before.

And I realized that’s crazy because you need that space for other stuff, right? You want to be carrying ammo, you want to be carrying equipment, you want to be carrying grenades or admin stuff. You can’t use your most valuable real estate to just carry a battery brick.

So what’s in here is a battery technology that is an electrolyte free solid state ceramic battery. Now ceramic batteries are not as high energy density in terms of they don’t have as much energy per pound as the very, very best, let’s say car electric batteries. But they are pretty good ballistic material.

And so what I realized is that instead of having the weight of a ballistic plate and then the weight of a battery on top, you should combine those two functions. You should make your battery part of your ballistic material stack up so that… Is it the best ballistic material in the world? No. Is it the best battery material in the world?

JOE ROGAN: World?

Combining Functions to Reduce Weight

PALMER LUCKEY: No. But you can have enough of it that it’s better than either of those things working separately. If I were to try to make a system that was a normal armor plate and then also this much battery… So you notice we actually got all the power actually labeled right here. So this is a 900 watt hour battery.

If we were to have a plate and then a battery, it would be a plate this big and then another big battery on top. By combining the two, I’ve made it where I’ve eliminated something like 10 pounds from the soldier’s ruck, which is a huge deal because that’s weight I can either keep out of his ruck or I can just put more shit into it.

Of course, what all my buddies in the army tell me is “Palmer, don’t let them take those ten pounds and give me ten pounds more shit.” These guys are already carrying an insane amount of stuff.

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

I will note in general, I would recommend using this as your rear plate, not your front plate. So if you’ve got a rear and a front, the rear is probably the one that you want to put this in, because if you do get shot in the plate, you don’t want it to… You’re more likely to get shot in the front than the back, and you don’t want to get shot and then you lose all of your energy to run all of your sensors and everything else.

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

JOE ROGAN: This is amazing stuff, man.

The Reward of Saving Lives

PALMER LUCKEY: Dude, really fascinating. I love my job. I get to work with, I can tell, just the coolest technology on the bleeding edge of all this. And the best part is that the gains… It’s not so much… Some people, they see these gains and they get to make money off of it.

But I do this, and I get to have end users telling me, “Palmer, this is how you saved our unit’s life. Palmer, this is how your technology protected our base. Palmer, people would be dead in this particular building if you had not developed the technology that you did.”

That is the most rewarding thing that you can do. At least the most rewarding thing that I’ve ever done. It’s a really cool set of problems. And I highly encourage people, people who are really smart to look at doing this stuff.

Because some people, they say, “Oh, I don’t want to work on weapons. It’s ethically fraught.” And the point I make to them is that whether you like it or not, we need some form of weapons, right? We’re not going to disarm the entire world. There are bad guys out there. We need to have something.

And if you are worried about the ethics of weapons, it’s actually even more important that you work on them. Because there’s no moral high ground in outsourcing that work to people who are less ethical and less competent than… If you think you’re a competent person and you think you’re an ethical person, you almost have a responsibility to care about these and arguably to work on them. So that’s the way that I look at it.

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

PALMER LUCKEY: This is a lot of fun.

JOE ROGAN: So much fun.

PALMER LUCKEY: I’ve got to get you out sometime. I would love to do the range, because we’ve got a test range. We’ll hook that up, we’ll give you a rifle. You’ll be able to mark targets.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s fucking go.

PALMER LUCKEY: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you very much.

PALMER LUCKEY: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Really fun. Thanks for being here. All right, bye, everybody.

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