Palmer Luckey On Military Defense, War In Israel, & U.S. Manufacturing | Pirate Wires Podcast #22 🏴‍☠️
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Your job is to think of the horrible things that could go wrong and fix them .

before that happen. The way I look at iron done is the ultimate manifestation of the future of the united states, is role in future conflicts. You can have a lot of those jackey rockets level washington, D.

C. In a matter of a few days. Don't end up in the situation that apple said. So dependent on china, I believe that the next war fighting domain is the subterranean domain.

What does something that makes you feel hopeful right now?

Walk back to the pod guys today we have the legendary palmer lucky, founder of andreo, super excited of Young. We talked, you know, I handle the times now at this point, but this is the first time i've ever got you on the piot virus pod um I wish he was in sort of less horrifying, terrible global circumstances but obviously we are at war and not we the world is sort of locked in a horrifying war again um you know a little over a year following the ukrainian escalation and uh is kind of you pretty bleak moment.

I think a lot of people are feeling um nervous and just about IT and I uh you know several from those feeling is just very curious about the war component of IT, all the technology component of IT, all this is a new terrain and who Better to talk to about that just the kind of the mechanics of that than you. So thanks for joining. And I kind of want to just get right into IT. Uh maybe we start with just the the process of um how a private defense company even works with governments and foreign governments is super basic. I know for people who are super steeping this stuff, but for it's new like i'm assuming that the process here is like the government has a sort of OK list and then it's know you're working with ukraine or .

you're working with this real house. More is more even involved than that. I often get asked by people who are not experts in or experts in anything like like much of the media.

If I would sell to x country, y country or z country. What about this conflict? What about this hypothetical? And the good news is that is actually not up to me.

The united states government has rules, so IT doesn't really matter if I would be willing to sell to north korea or willing to sell to china. IT is prohibited by the united states government. I go to prison for doing so.

That's a point worth worth worth hearing ing on a little bit because it's important that IT doesn't matter what my opinion is. You you don't want to live in a country where are foreign policy is determined by corporate executives deciding who they want to work with and who they don't. You shouldn't.

People in my position in a private corporation making weapons systems shouldn't have the ability to yeah, I would love to sell to north korea or no, I personally would not. But the guy down the street with that, it's not it's not a terrible situation. So luckily, the people who are making these decisions are to some degree accountable to the populist through the democratic process of someone is doing the exaction, you can vote them out.

And uh, company is like mine. We we have to work actually pretty closer with the government. There's something called FM, the foreign military sales process and pretty much everything that is a that is exclusive for military use has to go through that process. And luckily, the united states has gotten Better at facilitating those transactions that we can talk about how they could get how they could get uh to a good place and say they are Better.

but not good. Before I get to sort of my technical questions about the kinds of defense technologies that might be useful in this particular conflict in the middle east, um is there anything that you can tell me about who you guys are uh, working with right now? I not actually sure .

I can't talk about everyone that we're working with, especially where we would disclose you t things that are Operational sensitive. But things I can talk about, we of course work with the united states. We do a lot of work with the U.

K. Ministry defense. We do a lot of work with australia. Uh, we've sold to a few other european countries. We are doing some uh doing, of course doing some stuff in ukraine have been since the second week of the war and that continues to be ongoing.

We're part of one of the recent aid packages getting some more loader ing municipality, the ukraine um so we have cast a pretty wide net you know when we started the enrol IT wasn't just about the united states. IT was explicitly around defending the west. And I think god even goes back to the name of the company. We wanted to take this position that you countries aren't just different, that there are countries that are Better or worse, and that we were going to be on the sides of the ones that were Better as determined by the handful of values that still remain true between those, between those countries. Today.

there's a book called the sobbing individual. And IT talks lot about the sort of shape of the future world as determined by new technologies that sort of force the world in in a given direction. Um one of the themes I thought was very fast ating i'm talking about a lot right now is um the way in which technology seems to a advantage the defensive over the offensive.

Um IT will be much easier. For example, the authors speculated that IT would be much easier for underpopulated in under powered region with sufficient technology to defend cell from the outside. Yes, that IT would be to sort of go after.

Is that you roughly agree with that given what you're seeing in the sort of technologies that are emerging right now? Is, is, is are the offenders advantaged over the offenders? Or increasingly, is that kind of the direction we're going?

I think IT depends on the technologies are talking about, and there are a lot of things that certainly do a crew more to the defender than to to the invader. I mean, IT really depends, for example, if you're talking about the ability to manufacturer large numbers of autonomous systems really, really does not matter so much. Choose the defend who's often and defense as who is the larger industrial capacity.

Like if you have china is a huge major industrial power, they're going to add a huge advantage in a world where autonomy enables them to win the way that they can best win against a much smaller. But on the other side, as I do, especially as you start to look at things that are enabled by AI, there are a lot of advice are going na crew more to the defender. I can feel this way about bioweapons.

For example, people are out that that largely ye models might allow for the creation of really dangerous bioweapons. I do think that that's kind of scary. But at the same time, it's an area where I think that A A I biodefense is actually the thing is going to get a stronger, a stronger, a cruel of advantages in other's.

If I can use IT to build systems that keep people you free of pathogens, i'm just going to go away off the science fiction bend here like if we can get to building, you know, neo bots that are going through our blood and getting rid of everything that is not matching a biosignature that is seen in the week before. That's an advantage that is going to work against every potential pathogen that you could imagine making. And so now either there's thousands of ways you can try to beat that, but the one thing you've made is now defending and all those, and it's worse than that.

Maybe for the aggression, they don't just have two up yet. Maybe one brand of nanobots, maybe may have ten brands of nanobots in my body, including an open source one, and they're all gonna continuously updated in competing against each other to try and stop these pathogen. So that's an example where I think that dad, in a whole bunch of other things, the defender does, the defender does have the advantage.

It's reminding me of the first, I think, really evocative technology of the conflict.

It's old technology, but it's something that I think probably lot of people just tuning in to all of this in middle, which is the air american, which is really me I think I have died right now like, oh shit, have to pay attention list again um the iron dome uh, so you have this really just, I think, visually spectacular representation of the power of defense up in the sky. Yeah, you're seeing light up and you're being well defended. Its very unique.

Most, if maybe no other region of the world, no other city in the world region, the world has this. I would love to know and I know it's not exactly what you guys are working on at under. I am sure that you would work on IT in a slightly different way if you have to. But in terms of that, like how does that work? Is that some kind of drone technology like it's nice they're doing anti missile or I mean, you the shooting .

down missiles with missile and it's a fundamentally counter ballistics system. So it's not necessarily designed to go after serving targets like like aircraft, but it's really good at going after the threats that israel has been seeing, and I don't know, you might know, was collaboration between the united states in his right. There's a lot of U.

S. Weapons technology in there. Ah there's a lot of island know how in there as well. I the way I look at iron dome is the ultimate manifestation of the future of the united state's role in future conflicts, which is not to be the world police, but to be the world gun store. So IT, it's not that we're going to be setting boots on the ground. They're going marching around and you dying for other people's country, countries, I think, that are future roles going to look, making things like iron do more accessible to other nations, making defensive tools that allow people to defend their homes, making these countries and a prickly porcupine that nobody wants to step on. That's actually probably the best way for us to shape a lot of these foreign wars is just a pick who were going to sell defensive tools to and then double down on getting the right tools and letting them die for their countries when IT comes to everything else, but giving them the tools to do that themselves rather than taken on the load ourselves.

You yeah you mentioned it's I A great yes. And then also you are saying it's designed for the specific chAllenges is facing there。 What are the sort of junker y rockets? It's not that serious of a threat, right? I think maybe that's one of the misconceptions of of the region. Is that like the super power rocker ery, they're there are they're just like they're just jack enough maybe to take on i'm wondering, like how could the offensive escalate in ways that would be more difficult for the dome to protect this television, for example, how would do you think about maybe improving?

I mean, they say, yeah, the rockets are, jane, but they're Carrying pretty significant payloads. And really, the reason that they're not such a huge threat anymore is only because of this highly advanced defensive system has been optimized, optimized against them that they were they are very powerful emetrius capability against a lot of people. Like put another way.

You get have a lot of those jenky rockets level washington, D C. In a matter of a few days. But because we don't have a system yeah well, I don't know what I say.

No defense, but certain ly not capable of a prolonged defense against the garage like that. That's true of most nations in the world. Israel has been forced to confront the reality of violence as a part of their of of their continued existence. And so theyve that had to build things like, like, like the iron do I think the future is going to have actually a lot of these specialized systems.

I don't think that in the past, the united states who develop these very exquisite, powerful weapon systems that were often optimized around projection of force to the other side of the world, and then those are the things that would go through the f ms. Process, the foreign military sales process, and we would sell them to countries, and we would be selling them, things that were way too expensive for the particular threat that they have faced. I'll give you a critical ple patriot missile.

They got a couple million in a shot, and you often need to fire two of them to make sure that at least one of them hit that they are reasonably reliable. But if you really need to take something out, you're not going to bet just one. They cost couple million boxes pop.

And there have been cases where we have allies were shooting down drones that cause quad options that cost hundreds of dollars with multi million dollar mussels. And I I think you and I have have heard about these alpha long time, but I think the average american is not quite aware of how ridiculous IT is that were kind of selling these tools to people that are hugely overmatch for the real thread they have. I think in the future you're going to see the U.

S. Doing a lot more work like what Andrew is done, where we work with customers to build things that are tightly tailor to their particular problem. The thing that solves israel's problem is iron done to a degree, but even iron dome doesn't solve the problem of a dozen other U.

S. nations. We're going to need to build the things that allow them to cost effectively fight their terrors.

But all I get into ah the I want to talk about subtract I warfare. Yeah but but before we get right, before we get to that, you you are looting to some stuff that you're working on and wondering how much of you you could share. Like I would love an example of a chAllenge of facing that honest kind of solving in a unique way.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I can't talk about. But no, there's one thing I can't talk about the details of, but we we have A A system that's a reusable um counter ara factor. So it's something that allows you to rather than throwing away a missile every time you need to shoot down a large aircraft, you can instead use this tool and then use IT again and again and again and again and again.

And that hasn't really been the way that cost cost contractors have thought about the problem. As long as governments are willing to buy single use missile that are really expensive, you actually want them to buy a new missile every time. But if you started to think about driving down the Operational cost of using this for long periods of time, think like how, how many dollars do I need to spend per kill, rather than dollars per missile fired up.

You are going to make very, very different decisions. And so you keep an eye out on some of that stuff. But I I think we are thinking about IT pretty differently because we have different incentives is not as i'm smarter, I think a lot of these companies could have .

come up with this stuff. They are never incentive to do .

that because this is the cost plus. But I mean, for this audience, you know, cosplay s contracting is the way that most procurement ment of new weapons systems are done in the united states. And in the background here is eighty percent of the procurement money goes to just five companies and thirty percent of weapons, major weapons programs have only a single bitter, meaning no competition at all.

A cost post contracts is where the government agrees to pay you for all of your costs and that they fixed percentage of profit on top, I say four or five or six percent. It's usually a pretty low margin thing compared to the consumer space, the B2B spa ce. The problem with that is that IT incentivises you for your costs to be high because I only make money on the plus and there has to be more cost going to be more plus.

So you actually want your programs to run as long over schedule as you can get away with before IT gets cancelled. You want to use the most expensive bult, the most expensive engine, the most expensive sensor that you can possibly justify. And you're never going to propose a system that can solve a problem for ten thousand dollars if you could instead build a system for one hundred million dollars that does the same thing.

Whereas the money in IT, you can make money in a cosplay world. If you're too cheap, you actually have to fundamental think about the problem, and maybe be that means defining the problem is larger than that needs to be. For iron dome example would be, what if they claimed iron dome didn't just need to shoot down these kind of gene olympic missiles, but I had to work against high speed renewal ing air targets as well. That's the type of thing that a contractor would say because they can't make money on the cheap er system. And so it's just it's a horrible set of .

incentives that puts you in an interesting place where you're one of the few, if not the only, uh, defense contract or that passages think independently about the the the sort of new or terrain you're not given a set of things to build. You're giving a set of not even give IT a set of problems. You're thinking of problems that you want to solve.

What we always say, we always say to trust that the customer knows what there's problem is, but never trust that they know what the solution is. These know how they're getting the rash kicked and they know what their weak points are, but they don't necessarily have enough aware as of the entire engineering possibility space to know what the right way to solve their problems. And they certainly don't know what building blocks and real is instead vize to reuse because we're not a cosplay contractor, we're not trying to redo work over and over again. We want to reuse the exact same ingredients, ts, to build new things, just like talk about does for their menu.

Now the this brings me to the subterranean warfare stuff, because a while the principles of the soren individual sort of IT tend to be working in the favor of israel. The context of protecting, like televise on rocket bombardment, IT would seem to me that, you know, a bit of on the sight of hamas in gaza makes IT very difficult to more difficult than ever. Mean invading somewhere is has always been difficult. And famously, people predicted way more deaths had the adam bombs not been dropped.

Millions of U. S. casual. Millions of U. S. Casual in tens of millions on the japanese side. All fossil.

A great essay called then got for the adam bomb that specifically address sed this kind of thing. I think people realize how difficult to is and how much carnage on both sides. If you really want .

to get spicy s it's not that people don't remember. It's that people ever have a raised IT. People are working.

You'll see people strongly arguing, here's why I really wouldn't have happened. Here's why they wouldn't have fought to the death. I think there there was a recent, I forget who I was.

There was one of one of the one of the higher profile internet talking head journalist people in these. Do you people really imagine that the japanese would have fought to the last, to the last heads? I do look at the outer pacific jack japan, japanese islands, like they did. They fought to the last person, and they ran off clifts. When IT became clear we were going to win like people have a race to this because I feel like it's almost I think people don't like to admit how different cultures can be, and they act like the modern multi culture, global, global culture is what you need to look at world war two with that. That's the right lens and there they're just wrong .

yeah where all the same is the assumption and we're not so .

different you and I we're two sides of the same coin. It's a trope for a reason that feels that people forget how different we .

were with a religion. I think we see this a lot where people just genuinely do not believe when someone .

really believes in a religion IT is hard. They really they assume everyone else is just kind of in the same bug. And he isn't really believe that he needs to, that he needs to know be a jihadist. That's just a convenient political angle for him to get his way and then and then he blows himself. You say, oh, I know in the new .

I actually believed that then you accused of bigotry for just listening to things that people say and it's like what I think you're the big IT you're not believing that they're telling you who they are and how they think. And I think that's there are lots of people. I mean, they're different .

religions in different ways.

Artists name um substrate in warfare now, so we have the principles of the sothern individual working in defense perhaps of telling you to a certain mix step. I think i'm hoping that as technology as the bbar min intensifies, which I expect has to happen, um new technologies will be used to defend that region. But to take out hamas now, you have to go into gaza and the a haas militants um have dogged this incredible series of tunnels deep underground yet where they are hiding and storing weapons and everything else that this step is under civilian infrastructure. IT seems like hopeless. I don't even know how you it's how do you enter a viper nest like that and uh and take care of business um what is your you know as someone who asses IT down and look at problems like this and take up your solutions um have you thought about this one at all and like how might you begin to think through potential solutions for focus on the ground?

So i've been thinking about not exactly this problem, but actually much a broader problem for the last few years. And I i've talked about this publicly, but nobody, no, never really talks, talk, talks about me talking about IT. So I guess i'll just keep saying and eventually people pay attention.

But uh, very, very big picture. I believe that the next war, fighting the ain. Is the subterranean domain in the same way the air, land, sea space and arguably cyber space are.

And I people think that I mean subterranean, that I mean tunnels and caves. That isn't what I mean. I mean using the entire volume of the earth as a dimensional space, so you can manuvers and fight wars in.

And that that sounds a little crazy. But then you remember that the united states in the soviets used to believe this. During the cold war, the U.

S. And the soviet union both had sub term programs trying to build nuclear powered underground vehicles. They could bore through the earth as easily as a submarine moves through the water on aircraft moves through the air.

Maybe not quite as easily, but at least they are the same in principle. The idea that you can go anywhere arbitrarily and deliver big payloads, big effects a and do so using the earth as the medium through which you traveled and hid. And unfortunately, when the cold war started wrapping up all of this kind of clubs, the soviet is actually built a working prototype.

IT wasn't just a concept. They actually built one. But with the collapse of the Sophia union, with the recognition of the powers that be, that nuclear was going to not be a significant part of our civil economy or wartime strategy.

We ban the idea of ticket nux basically said, our strategic nukes is all are going to have. We're going to keep nuclear power's ships that we already have in the submarine Operations very able. We're not gonna go and find new things for nukes to do anymore, which was a huge mistake, maybe the biggest mistake our countries ever made, but we can have a hole podcast on that.

Um recent advances in technology, especially on the power density side, air independent propulsion side and also the ability to put useful pilots in a very small things, has actually brought back this idea in my mind as the next future of warfare are being underground. And so i've actually built vehicles, uh a here and all that are capable of tunneling underground and delivering a variety of electronic and connect effects to wherever you want them to go. I I wish I was further along on IT.

I D say things like the tunnels and gaza. Just one example at north korea as a huge tunnel system, they have them built in the mountains, built in to the ground. You have a lot of other similar subterranean systems that are in era where they are very, very smartly locating all their critical step deep underground.

So it's one of those cases where you you go to war with the tools you have, not the tools that you want. And right now, we do not have the tools to fight in the subterrane domain. And I think that eventually you gonna like A U. S. Sub terra core.

I don't know what service that's going to live under, but I I do strongly, I strongly believe that if we had robots and vehicles that could move around underground as easily as summary moves in the water, this tunnel problem would be so much easier to solve. You would be easier to map them and would be easier to take them out, and would be easier to do so without having to go through the air and then through the ground and then into the underground dome. The bombs from the air is a really, really high power in precise way to take out tunnels deep and round.

It's really the only option this is really have. It's the only option really anyone has, but it's none the less. If you just look at IT from the first principles perspective, bombs that have to go through the air and then throw buildings and then through the ground and then into a tunnel is a lot less elegant than something that could just .

go into the title. To back up a moment, you were mentioning taxi nukes ban by the U. S. I'm confused, how does that how does that affect the tunneling where the tunnels being? I mean, they were nuclear power tunnel boards or or they were actually looking.

I I what i'm saying is more as a it's an example of a broader shift in what we were to do with nukes. The idea nuclear weapons on the battle field used to be a very resulting. We were imaging where to use them to bust tank formations.

We had nuclear anti aircraft missile that can take out a squadroom of bombers as nukes were kind of envisions as and enabling technology for all types of warm fighting across every domain. We've decided that's not the case. Nuclear weapons particularly are basically the domain of I cbm, which are strategic you mutual assured destruction weapons, uh, nuclear powered submarine, which are themselves primarily, you know justified through the existence of mutually assured destruction nuclear weapons.

And then also, we had built nuclear powered aircraft Carriers, and we weren't going to go back on that because they like the only way to actually make make a modern aircraft Carrier group work. But there was, there was a recognition. Okay, we're done.

We're not going to build nuclear powered fighter jets. We're not gone to build nuclear power takes. So we're not going to build nuclear powered boring vehicles underground.

That's off limits now. And the shift away from tactical nuclear weapons is just part of that. Shift away from having nukes on the battle field is part of an everyday conflict. So the tactical .

thing was an actually ban. But actually.

here I am, actually not sure with a ban is much as a policy change. We said we are not gonna. Tactical looks is part of our strategic doctrine, whether worse that the russians do to this day, the russians train for using tactical nukes on the battlefield, they imagine saying, i'm going to deploy a nuclear weapon to destroy a bit of tanks, or to blow up a naval formation, or to get rid of an airfield.

And that's why you you want to remember maybe was a year ago. great. Yeah with at risk of this well, they in IT, they they moved they moved the unit that's in charge of practical new deployment into high alert and had them doing day a day back to back training on scenario.

So it's part of their docker on it's not part of ours. I think that also russia not not to not to not to gas russia too much, but they've made similar good decisions in using nukes for non military applications. Did you know that in russia, multiple privately own civilian nuclear ice's aking and container or ships? How crazy that that the happy thing that we should have in america, we have, we should have the zero emissions, zero carbon, dirt cheap to Operate nuclear container ships.

Instead, it's the russians. You can even book a tour on one of them as a Normal person. You can go to the north pole on a nuclear power ice's aker that's run by a civilian company. So they they did not abandon the adam the way they that we did, which is again, one of the worst decisions we ever made.

Yeah, I think I very naively assumed that the tactical milk thing was like a tree between the two countries, and we all sort of put our new down. I didn't realize that the russians were are really innovating in this way. While we were just choosing not to have chose.

we have chose that we don't wanted to be part of part of the way that we fight worse.

So it's the extra power is what you would need to borrow very easily. Is that why the nuclear boring was?

So I used to be. So this gets down to the payloads s problem that I talked about back then. They were, imagine that these would be manned vehicles, and so they would be large enough to have cruel quarters.

And you know, that room for the pilots, for the Operators. And to do that, it's true. You need vision refusing to make enough energy to display enough soil and a vast enough speed to be relevant.

And so they had to be nuclear power um today because you can automate so much of that. You don't necessarily need, let's say, a room full of signal Operators who are running the election onic warfare or data collection systems. You can actually fit all this stuff into much smaller diameter stuff.

If you want to go to the extreme. A A vehicle that is, you know, one hundred kilometres long at a millimeter wide is not going to take very much energy to push through a hole because in a day you born the whole a length is free. Once you've made the whole everything going through the hole after that is kind of very negligible energy cost.

Making that diameter in the first places is what's expensive. So, uh, I don't want to give away my whole, my home, my home, my whole scheme here, but totally works like this is not like crazy far future science fiction. It's a type of thing where if I would have started working on IT five years ago, we would already be deployed IT today when we started working on at two years ago. So right.

so we would be deploying our own boring technology. I guess the question of wondering is, how do you approach going after the enemy inside a .

series of tuna tone ways? I mean, so the first thing you do is you need tactical situation awareness. You need to know where these tunnels are.

So first you descend these things and then you would map them all out using ground penetrating radar and of a variety of of of acoustic schemes. IT would not be that hard to build a pretty high fidelity map of what's going on. There are especially if you had built that map up ahead of time.

If we had these tools, you wouldn't be building IT right as the war starts, you would they would have had a continuous awareness of where every tunnel was. Um once you have that map, there's a variety of effects that you can deliver. The boring one part of the pung, the boring payload is just explosives.

I'm just going to collapse the tunnels. Uh, another good idea is to flood the tunnels with sea water from the meditation ian just born a hole, from the meditation ian to a pump station, pump s station, to a whole bunch of holes and just fill all those holes with water. That's that's another thing you can do.

And then there's my personal favorite, which haven't seen anyone talking about, but it's something i've always i've always thought was under utilized, is using carbon dioxide as a as a structure denial weapons. So carbon oxide, the gas really easier to move around as liquid CEO to or as dry CEO to. Um with really, really good explanation fun fact about the body, the human body does not have the ability to detect lack of oxygen IT only has the ability to detect presence of co two.

And so if you've ever been in a you know room that gets really stuffy, that's the co two building up and makes you really want to get out. If you're in a room that has enough CEO to and IT, it's going to feel like you're holding your breath and it's going to make you feel like you're sufficing even though you're totally find in terms of oxygen your brain. I think we should just feel the tunnels with carbon dioxide that wouldn't be perfect.

They would still, for example, be able to move through them using self contain breathing upper right. So these guys could, you know, pull out their scup gear and walk around in the tunnels. But man, that would make you a huge pain in the east to be in those tunnels if you couldn't take even one breath of them without feeling like you're sufficing.

But you're not actually suffocating people. If you feel the title of this, a nitrogen gas people would be walking into the tunnels and just falling over dead and suffocating. You pump C O two and they're gona feel like they're suffer, citing it's immensely powerful physiological response but you would not actually be necessarily, uh, killing them.

And so I I actually had started experimenting with us a long time, go doing C O two delivery from drones. Let's you've got a hostage situation where Normally you would have a swat team trying to rescue people. What ideas?

You would just pump the building full of carbon dioxide gas a from a liquid care to container in a few minutes. And everyone in that building is going to say you would be like being in the stuffy st. room.

You've ever been stuffin and you would feel a mense paddock and need to get out. And i've tested this on myself. IT definitely works. It's it's not it's not right.

Um what are some of the other technologies that perhaps have not made IT to the battlefield yet, but that you anticipate people are going to pull out that could complicate a not just the conflict in the midwest but at a blog. So I get i'm asking, what are the things that are coming that people are not aware of, that they should be aware of and and how much you work around them?

No, mean, I mean, look, this is all game of cat mouse, right? Very big picture. You're never going to win forever. You just need to win more often than they do at the important break over post.

If I can, if I can build something that keeps me and my people safe for five years and then they're able to break IT, but that I able to fix IT again. But with something Better with IT with in a day that like that's a that's a huge win and that's really the best we can hope for. We're not going to get to the point where it's absolutely perfect coverage.

IT used to be the united states could build things like stealth fighter aircraft, and we were just the best in the world by far. Nobody was closed for decades at a time. Those days are kind of over.

The proliferation of knowledge has made IT impossible to keep secrets like that once they're out of the bag. Um and so we we need to be in a world, we come quickly. Other technologies that are going to be really a really big deal.

Um I think that there is a lot of stuff that can be done to deny humans access to areas uniquely. Um this is a little it's a little boring, but there is a lot of old stuff on the chemical warfare side and the biological warfare side that is not being used simply because everyone's agreed that is a bad idea to do. So IT works when everyone is a rational actor, and IT works when everyone is kind of afraid of biological weapons in a mutually assured destruction sense.

But how does that work when you have irrational actors who believe that they are that the highest glory an life is to die a matter? You really can have shift to the equation where maybe they don't even mind overwhelming retaliation and exchange for night. I'd say I also worry about people believing that they can use biological weapons in a way that accomplishes their ideological aims.

Like, for example, you could imagine, imagine him. They can realize, you know, probably a bad idea to use biological weapons. They're going to end up killing a bunch of my own people to yeah it's it's very hard to control these things.

Not a good idea to just even have them out there at all. But what if I believed or could engineer a uh A A pathogen that was uh engineer, to kill only people with a certain genetic line? Yeah the things they know and IT doesn't even, and they don't even need to be right.

That's the really scary thing I want. I say they imagine that they could be getting kind. They could be not really understanding IT IT could be that IT mutates away from that function within one generation. If they believe we've created that, you can imagine someone's heck, yeah, we're going to wipe out the jews with the jew virus, and we're all gonna fine, right? That changes the calculus around weapons when you .

are willing to be a matter. We just saw a hack of twenty three and me, massive hacks specifically like accessing the DNA of, oh kanai juice up and IT. I thought of the same thing like IT just does not. There's no way that something good is coming of a hack like that. Um it's nerve asking the .

future may be a twenty three and me kit for Christmas a few years ago and politely I live returned IT and told them told them why yeah and it's exactly along these lies well.

right to because I mean, if you could imagine those .

database are obviously going to be compromised, whether it's through foreign intelligence or leaks or profit motivated hackers. It's very obvious that at some point that that data going to end up out there. And I if if I do not want, if I want to use you a good things, I can keep IT to myself and use IT for those good things.

You that i'm not i'm not against D. N. A testing. I'm against having everyone's DNA in a dragani database. It's going to be stolen by the chinese communist party in the news to wipe us out.

I guess one thing we have in our favorite in that regard is america's DNA. American DNA is so diverse um that there is some robust there uh to us immigration and over so many hundreds of years in working the ark or in that regard. Um the bio thing is interesting.

I always worried about just the next the next virus, the next so the next H I V is one that i'm really frightened about, right just because IT takes so long to even realize that you're sick. Um and I was talking to a guy who uh is a bio guy, works um sort of works for the government. They mostly spend their time in airport bathrooms checking for viral shedding because that's where most of the company contamination comes from. They're looking for for evidence of new things. They don't even care what IT is necessarily there is looking to see if something is proferred that any is is worth because anything new is bad like you can't have anything that you don't understand suddenly proliferating anything yeah viral mature um well that the way that like he's probably .

the thing for the respective of viruses that have longing caution periods. They take a while for you to do, you have them and then they become lethal.

But if you look at things that have been developed on the therapeutics side, like like optogenetics s, where they are figuring out how to build viruses that bind yourself ells and make them so that they are responsive to certain frequencies of light, would start to realize you can actually build pathogens that do not have an internal trigger like you. You could, for example, hype, atheistic, build up, build something that infects you, has absolutely no symptoms at all. And then when the summer comes around and you're exposed to U.

V. Light of a certain concentration of the sun, you become extremely sick, die. And you could imagine deploying that in away where an entire, an entire country could become infected during one period, and then boom, without even knowing at everyone's trigger all at once. So the old rules of pathogen don't really apply to engineer, to engineer one, to engineered viruses. You, you can have viruses that would never survive in the wild turning into something that is much career.

It's also, I think, one of the really scared to to serve contrast IT with what we're looking at right this minute in the middle east. I have what we're seeing. The middle is not abstract.

It's it's big and physical. And you see the thread. And after even the tunnels, they are there new that's a new kind of thing problem to work through.

But it's a problem you can wrap your mind around. Yeah, all the biological stuff is so abstract that we just saw. We just saw a pandemic and what that means, and we've kind of immediately gone back to the memory, all be arrested for my memory.

We're not worrying about IT. No, is asking what happens when not even forget weapons, just the next natural pandemic. If IT with IT were natural.

that's pretty conversions than the next the next natural virus I thought we were talking .

about cover so yeah there's nothing where is kind of knowledge dressing that um that one that won makes me up. How do you spend so much time? This is a very personal question that I want to get into uh manufacturing a bit um but how do you spend so much time thinking about all these problems and I don't know, manage your emotional state or like happiness, you're day to day. I mean your job is to think of horrible things that could go wrong and fixed them before they happen.

We stressful what we built up up in the immunity to a certain degree. We've talked about this. But I don't want to be doing and all necessarily like I would actually be having much more fun building the world's fastest race cars or people that we talked about.

Yeah sky steadying. I want to be doing skystein. I want to be, I want, I want to be playing my my dream ship. R. V.

That's going to take me to the moons of satan and that's really want I want to be working on um you, you know, i'm a fan of uplifting species. Uh, you know what you fear leads to a multipolar world that's very dangerous, which is a very reasonable fear. But none's, I want to do IT know where is my? Where's my super intelligent parents?

Yeah, but that's what I want to be working on, what i'm working in a national security because I think that it's very important and you do have to deal you do have to deal with the series the seriousness of IT. Um and so I I don't want to say necessarily that i'm i'm cut differently than other people because i've got thousands of people working in andero who think the same way are dealing with those same pressures. But I if if you work on this every day, it's not so it's not quite so it's not quite so horrible being exposed to new threats.

You're like up. It's it's another threat we need to consider. There's all these threats we are talking about every day. When you spend all day thinking about how you are going to counter russian weapons systems that are hugely out classroom.

The the ability to the feather more when you're talking about how screw we are versus china in a mass on mass conflict. You throw in the viruses, you throw in, you throw in energy weapons, you throw in cyber tax segment. There's just a whole bunch of .

this stuff on china that actually is a great segway into the manufacturing question. But first I do on what you just mention is nervous king. Uh, if we're completely outclass when IT comes to a the chinese i'm assuming the chinese military how exactly when you get to know measure like not measure IT but way it's sort of like us to china. What is the lay of the land .

there had to head well. A lot of what china's building right now, I actually think is not the right thing for them to be building. Invested a lot of prestige projects.

So aircraft Carriers are high and man fighter craft. I think that a lot of IT is just, uh, political. They want to be TOTO to at the united states.

They want to show that they are super power. They want people in other countries who think that that's what a superpower looks like, uh, to believe that china is appeared to the us. So I would say those things are fear. So when you hear people say, oh my god, china is gna build that so many aircraft Carriers, they're na have all of these men fighter jets, they're kind of missing the real game. The real game is the stuff that china is not going to reputation's ride on.

They're going to nearby nations say, hey, look, we can make tens of thousands of autonomous anti ship missile at a tenth of the Price of the americans because that's not that's not what a superpower looks like, uh, in a marketing sense. But IT is what a superpower looks like in terms of ability to project power and take over regions and take over countries and invade other countries with community, especially if they sink the entire U. S.

Navy in the first round of that fight and then just do whatever they have they want for the next twenty years as we remain unable to build any new ships. Like the real power of the chinese military is the ability to manufacturer. They have dozens to hundreds of times more military ship building capacity in the real people debate on how much IT is, but it's at least dozens of times more capacity.

And is someone who's made things in china. I know how cheap things can be done over there, not because the labor's cheap, not because the people are good, the regulations are good, the the supply chain logistics and materials are are very favorable. Uh, so what I talk about china kicking your ass in a mass on mass conflict.

I'm talking about what happens when you have the things that they're good at making versus the things that we are good at making in an actual war, not a prestige war or marketing war. And unfortunately, right now, they are very much on the right side of the equation. And they are building weapons, sometimes Better than ours, for a tenth of the Price and one hundred times the scale.

When you say a moment ago, he said, you know, in some hypothetical combat scary where the entire U. S. Navy is wiped out in moment, that sounds like the opening sees a batarfi tico.

What weapon are they using? What serious or what kind of class of weapon are you imagining is going to a be targeting or could potentially target the navy? And mean, I guess the next question is how to defend against IT. But let me start with what .

the actual problem is. This is a whole bunch of things is like A T ship missile are huge concern, particularly ones to get into the high supersonic or low hypersonic regime, where is very hard to defend against them.

And even if you can defense against one, can you defense against ten? Can you defend against one hundred? And when the aircraft Carrier is so many billions of dollars, ah IT IT doesn't take that many IT you you can justify throwing a lot of missiles at IT and IT still makes a lot of sense from china's perspective.

Um the the scenario i'm talking about, I don't think china is going to go for a perl harbor. I don't think that there a aggressively seek out the united states, uh, navy wherever they are, the plane IT and try to wipe IT out. That's not in their strategic interests, not today, probably not in the near future.

But what they probably could do right now is deny the U. S. Navy the ability to Operate in pretty much any area that they make a priority.

If you make enough hypersonic anti ship missile, you're not going to a have ships existing in range of those missiles. And if the united states knows that what actually happens is not at the destruction of the U. S.

Navy, but the neutering of the U. S. Navy, it's not that we lose those ships, that we realized we can actually use them. And so they just sit somewhere else, watching taiwan get invaded, then watching the Philippines get invaded, then watching northern japan get invaded.

then watching southern japan get invaded.

Technology and technology manufacturing ship missiles that we don't have not. I mean, this is, this is the Andrew, the Andrew mission problem. how? How do we do these things cheaper? How do we do them Better? How do we do them faster? Like the united states has a lot of a lot of missiles.

They're excEllent excelling missiles and not just on the anticipate the airside tactical tactical missiles for going after ground targets. We don't make enough of them like china. If if china makes all hundred times more missile than we do, uh, you this is very hard to win and .

this is really going back to what you were saying.

This is this is this is why android bot A A S the solid rocket company and were investing in building all of these building blocks for uh for for missiles and missile systems that the united states, right only two vendors making the vessels and neither they were particularly good and they are both owned by major defense primes. We need have like I think we need something like one hundred times more capacity than we currently have, even if are not using all that capacity continuously.

The manufacturing question now so this is you know you're saying you're imagining a future potential conflict scenario. Yeah where are really the Victory comes down to who can produce the most, the cheapest, the fastest. And we don't manufacture much in amErica anymore.

I mean, there are lots of manufactured but we it's really just been shattered our manufacturing capability um one thing so recently understand underworld has done has gone to great lengths to remove depends you know from china yeah how difficult has this been and how trick to you think IT would be for the broader united states economy? And we see IT at the most benie level. Uh a place like apple seems company like apple seems hopefully ly compromised in in in this way and in any future conflict area.

Obviously just a flip of switch and we lose all of our manufacturing. There is a huge problem. So yeah, walk me through that process about you. Think about a personally with your own company and then like maybe some advice for the rest .

the rest of the nation. Yeah, we have put a lot effort into this and IT is t we're we're not very yet like we were doing a lot Better, I say Better than basically anyone in the entire country. But but you know not we're not we're not perfect.

The thing is there's two standards, as I see IT. What is the legal standard which we obviously comply with? They say you can't make certain components in china.

You need to remove dependence on china with these materials, with these components. You can have your stuff made in china. fine. You comply with that easy. The hard part is not relying on china in practice, on paper is easy.

And practice is there's a lot of companies that make things comply with these rules that if we actually sanctions to china and we actually couldn't get any components or materials from them or if they couldn't get stuff from us into them and then back into us there, a whole supply chain would fall apart and they would be unable to make things. There's a lot of people making things that they say are made in the united states comply IT with a regulations that are going to be impossible to manufacturer if we actually go to war with china. That's that's just the reality.

And IT really, I really bothers me when companies only fit the paper standard and not the practical standard, because the paper standard is supposed to be the backstop for the practical standard is just the people have figured out to get around IT too much in chinese, figured out out how to get IT too much. One of the crazy things that i've seen is I want name names, but you have executives at major defense companies who are going out and saying that is impossible to decouple from china. That is impossible for the united states or for defense industrial base to decouple china.

At the same time, you have these same companies getting billions of dollars in contracts for weapons systems that are only useful in a world where we are fighting china, toe to toe, which sure implies A D coupling to me as you you have IT on both sides. We kid the couple also give us tons of money for things that are only useful after we d couple of IT IT. IT becomes clear that it's really just a near term argument for why congress should not force the practical independence of china into your company.

My you you ask my advice to other companies. I would say, take a look at this dynamic, realize how far cco IT is realized that IT is getting get forced on you politically at one point to another. Maybe it's out of the blue, maybe it's after china based iwan.

But I tell new founders all the time, don't end up in the situation that apples in, don't end up where you've built a company so dependent on china that you can speak your mind about things like bigger genocide. You can't talk about organ harvesting. You can't talk about censorship in their meddle or or chinese censorship of american media.

Tim cook could not even talk about the sp ano problem member the hearing with uh cook and zoo working and I think dorsey might have been at that one. They were asked if, uh, oh, and bases was at that one. yeah.

They were asked if there were a problem of spice at the company yeah, corp, corp. And tim cook was just like, i've never heard of anything like that. They cut is zocor berg and zoo bergan laughs and he just like, of course, there's a problem with this like everybody knows there's a problem with that's like the name of the game.

And it's not just china is not just spied from china. There's a spot. Of course.

there's a problem with that. I remember when Peter, when Peter was getting slam for this, where they he said that you, google is is certainly compromised by chinese intelligence. And I think he was google like, how can you say that you, they use the old, the old, the old, the old.

Right, P， R, T, O claims without evidence that google is compromised by IT do. And I think it's even just the statistical argument so obvious like, well, they have hundreds of thousands of employees. And imagine if china was so incompetent that they couldn't get a single asset into one of the largest american counties.

Put the fall of the other way. Imagine what in competition the united states would be if we didn't have a single asset or source anywhere in alibaba or decently. Isn't not just obviously unbelieving, but but people freak out about IT when you talk about IT. Because you, tim cook, can talk about I think a lot of these media companies aren't allowed to talk about to either they after preter pretended.

So I think part of IT is the compromise. I think part of a lot of people, media are genuinely too dumb to realized that that spise are common things, just culture war now ah they just still get IT. They're thinking, oh no spies that that would be an active or they don't realize that it's just there's spice fucking everywhere that's where is I don't know like where if you ve been how you're a professional .

writer but that is that landi imagine a world of california politicians sleeping with chinese spies. But they haven't managed to get any spies in the google obviously believe yeah you right but you, like tim cook, can talk about these things. And it's not because he's in idio.

It's because he is acting in self interest to preserve his company. As I tell bounders, don't let yourself get into that situation. IT will happen if you're not careful.

Because if you're careful about IT, you can remain untethered from china. You can even do IT, even if you are using certain chinese materials and components. As long as you always have A A backup plan, you always have a second path. And that's my biggest advice to be people, because imagine how stupid you're gna feel.

If you start a company, you raise money against all odds, you achieve the dream, you build this company worth many billions of dollars, you create financial independence for you and all your employees, and then china invades taiwan, just like everyone expects to happen. And then congress passes sanctions on china, and then your company completely collapses and bills overnight. Like who who's the idiot is? Is is everyone else or is that you?

Well, a moment ago you said force like eventually the people who eventually the people who are compromised on manufacturing by china, yes um will be forced to the couple, uh, until they are forced. It's an economics staying right that we've talked .

about this like the whole the whole silicon bali doesn't want to work with U. S. Military for ology.

I think it's actually hugely overblown. I think it's actually most of practical. They don't want to appear to be on the side of the U. S. Because that'll make IT harder for them to work with china. They don't want to be building weapons that are going to be used to fight china because they need to keep Operating in china and be the degrees is is a purely practical financial calculus, not ideological. Change their minds, yes, but no matter, talking good is going .

to change these people's minds. How do you make a cheaper to at home, or at least in countries that are super allied with america, and my sense is mexico IT would be much Better than china, for example. So how do you how .

do you get to there? Well, we're not, unfortunately not in the most influential position like it's largely a political problem, right? The the the united states didn't just ship all our manufacturing overseas out of the blue, uh, IT was IT was the result of specific policy decisions around how we, how we, how we love you terrace, uh, what we were willing to have made by other countries, what we were willing to sell to those other countries.

And so like I would say, like the china problem is one of our own creation. We created IT through policy. And if you continue to allow foreign adversarial powers to sell heavily subsidized goods to the united states to conduct river is not a fight.

IT people say, well, i'll just do Better. And I say, you don't get IT. The chinese government is already subsidizing certain industries of theirs to clipt to ensure we don't build up a competitive one strategy.

Reasons if you figure how to do IT even cheaper, they'll just undercut you even more because if they are not, they don't need to make money in everything, all that wants. If we could all do this and everyone got way cheap er across every industry, eventually china runs out of runs out of debt and they can they can compete. But not optimistic about that. I'm not advised without the ability to outcompete china to an extreme degree in every single industry, for as long as we have the energy policy, we have the labor policies that we have, the the terror policies that we have.

trade less is, if you go to start with trade. So libertarians are super a resistance to the idea of, I say, mechanical ism would be negative framing of what I am constantly asking for now. And it's specifically because of this, like you can't have free trade in the world where the other country has its government guarantee an unfair competition, right? A very.

very narrow example of something where trades and free china in a terrify situation. They just straight up ban huge swath of the U. S.

Economy from computer and ina. Yep, you you can't do that. IT be like we said IT d be like if we said, oh, like chinese, uh, chinese uh, a movies and chinese a phones. Nope, just not legal. We just do the narrow .

example of social media. I mean, we're having this principle. Property are now about tiktok, even though it's a, it's an an, an actual spy APP for the C, C, P.

Even if IT let's say IT wasn't a spy up for the C C P and IT which is a very influential al piece of social media um the dominant maybe social media platform in the country right now. And meanwhile every single one of our competing pieces of software is banned in china. exactly. No sense. We cannot that way.

And that's that's what I was saying during the trump. The trump is, was that you need to look at was kind of frustrated that people made tiktok into a cultural issue. By the way, i'm totally on the culture war side of IT, but I say, practically speaking, you should not make this a culture war issue.

Don't talk about how it's ruining our use ideals. Just say strictly on a trade basis, we cannot allow them to sell this thing to us if we can't sell the same thing to them like that, that should be totally fair. But so my idea was just say, hey, china, where it's not that we're banning tiktok, it's that we're saying there must build the full middle chess, the law equivalent exchange.

Yeah you gotta a have the ability to to go back and forth. They've to let wouldn't know that I said you can do that, which tiktok ban, but that's how I think we ouldn't done IT pure trade issue would have been easy for congress, easy for the president to justify IT. All the youth would wine your banning tiktok say, listen like why to china that we we you want free trade, you want global ism okay let's do IT yeah what we .

can have is is a one sided system and and it's like you got to have to be all the way free or or not um IT sounds like the police. The prescription here is for policymakers to help find ways to actually make manufacturer cheaper, not to tinker with like the cost of labor and things like this, but you actually look at what is causing the bloat here, the expected here, and dramatically slash that.

Because if you don't have manufacturing capability at home, like we really is so hard because it's an abstract question, but or or an abstract concept, I think people don't think of IT this way. But yeah, but your manufacturing capability is your ability to defend yourself. That is how we won the second worldwind.

And and if we don't have that, there's nothing that we can do. Um you can you can build anything. And so it's that's the piece.

It's like how do you make these things less expensive and then the businesses will do the rest. You guys will do the rest. You'll built here.

Everything will be built here if IT is if IT is affordable to do so. But if it's not, that IT won't. And that will be the end of us.

Well, this is what the AI dovers don't recognize as they they imagine that we live in this isolationist world where if they can just protest enough, and if they can just get automation out of the factories, then you are going to keep all these factory jobs. That's not what's going to happen. You're just going to everything made elsewhere in the world and they will have incredible wealth, prosperity of everything that they can ever want.

And we are all going to be buying hand woven baskets at the farmers market for three hundred dollars. That's actually the future that these people are are signing up for. Yes, you're right. We got to stop just fingering with the, with you on on the edge of this. We need we need to really fundamentally rethink the way I think we can do this.

Like you're pride familiar with the fact that china can make seme conductors without a handful of american and european tools, like there are things that we've proven we can do, the west, really, that china hasn't been able to grab their heads around despite trying really hard to do so. I would love IT if we could prove that automated manufacturing and large scale is one of those things because they have not figured that out. They're still very manpower intensive.

What if that isn't advantage that we could build? And what if things became cheaper to build in america? That in china, what what like? That would basically solve the problem right there.

I mean, you would cripple their economy, you would starve them of all of their productivity, and we would get all of that money instead. So that's that's my dream. Whereas where's my fully automated communist factory, the at center robots in in america?

Closely related question to the AI topic that you brought up and IT will be our last one chips. We're talking about semiconductors a moment ago, the u has I mean, we're not we're sitting. We're talking about manufacturing capability and defense and things like this.

Yeah, I don't see real serious effort to solve this broad effort in the country. But there are there are efforts. And we just saw the chips, bill. There are people on both sides of the aisle who aren't at least talking about this and is money. Now, I mean, I looked, I broke down the whole chip thing and most of IT, almost all of IT was the total bullshit.

A lot of IT went to just regional tecum s education, random text bs like random, random like educational programs that you could just study whatever you wanted. A lot of IT was waste, but something that was not. There was a good chunk um we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars set aside uh, for chips manufacturing.

Now that doesn't mean that is just going to happen because of the realities of like how hard to is to build these things, how build these things and our policies that make these things prohibit tally expensive. So i'm sort of mixed on this. I wrote at the time when the bill passed, I was happy to at least see us talking about a real problem and throwing money.

I hadn't seemed that. And so the hung and actual. Problem that was being addressed that IT made me feel partly OK about IT now confident are you that we can get to something like chips independence um are you confident at all like I mean and if not, how do we get there? I'm actually really .

confident on chips independence, not just using traditional techniques, which what can we invented them here, we master them here, and I think we can rebuild that. And there's also a lot of new techniques, both on the author graphical side for traditional semiconductors, but also people doing things in optical computing, which, if IT plays out, could make IT way easier for us to do what we need to do.

I I actually feel pretty good on the high and semi neck side. I think that's a place for the us. Can do IT effectively because of the structure of our economy in our labor force.

I I like IT doesn't take a ton of people. It's not necessarily hugely environmentally intensive. Daily people complete about water use.

Shut up. It's so easy. Just just just go to a place with water. Um it's it's it's totally solvable. I am actually more worried about everything downstream of the semon ductor. So let's suppose that chips act to is is a huge success and we're making high end computer processors. Gp s you name IT.

We don't actually have pcb a capability product manufacturer capability like if you actually want this to turn to the laptop computers, for example, you need to actually send those chips back to china, where they will then be turned in the laptops and so do as a huge margin. And now we make ten dollars on the chip and they make a hundred dollars on the laptop. Who's the winter there? It's it's not actually us.

And they imagine that we end up in a place where they their sanctions on china, we can work with them anymore. You get end up with a chip factory cracking out tons of chips, and you have chips in a warehouse. And we have no ability to do anything with them because we can't build uh, the we can build the the support in the support semiconductors.

We can build the USB host controllers. We can build the actual motherboard assemblies is cost effectively. We can build the batteries, became able to displays like that's actually my bigger concern is that we we we solve the chip's problem and then we don't actually have the rest of the value chain.

And so I would feel much Better if we were investing in that as well. But it's currently not really the political priority, which now may be maybe the idea whose time is not yet come. But I will well.

the last note then is just because this was a sort of slightly more actually.

I can say one more thing, good american suck because they don't care when people try um motorola tried this and he was the motorola. Do you remember this where they were making a phone? They were making a phone in texas.

This isn't the early twenty teens, I think. And IT was only a little more expensive than the than the chinese made version. And they were making the whole phone in texas.

I guess what? Nobody cares. Nobody really to spend .

the next twenty teens. I think that, well, a lot of covered was memory old. I think that the concept of by american as a silly thing is over.

I do think people, the average person, despite politics, these utility in things coming from america, and there are all sorts of reasons. You have your labor, people you like, you're labor like socialist time. People who really care about this on guys. They are like union. This there are is right when component to this, the defense component to this, like there is a reason .

there is more that you can saw. I maybe the time has come back around. I really hope so, working on give me.

give me a, give me A A note of optimism to take us out on like what does something that makes you feel hopeful right now?

I get asked a lot. This comes back to the beginning if I would ever sell weapons to china or north korea or russia. And of course, it's it's just a ridiculous gotcha question to fill time and put me on my back foot, allow them to you show you show me waffling and saying we all do whatever the government tells me to do and they say why you're such a study it's it's very predictable, annoying question.

But the answer that I gave that I actually think reflects my optimism. I actually hope that I do get to sell weapons to china. I hope that I do get to sell weapons to north korea.

And that sounds crazy. Until you remember the example of japan, there was a time we were fighting a world war against these guys. And now we are the backboard of their defense strategy.

They just double their defense budget. And most of that's going to come to the united states for our weapons systems. Germany there more into their stuff. They don't buy that much of our stuff, but they buy some of IT. And i'm glad that we're able to sell germany weapons.

I think that they are screw up their country in a thousand ways, but generally they definitely pass the bar of country we should want to win versus russia for sure. And so I mean, I I actually feel pretty hopeful about the future like the reason I never going to draw line and say I would never sell to china, I would never sell to russia. I think that's bored of my optimism that you're going to see a change there, whether it's A A violent revolution, a democratic revolution, A, A foreign, a foreign, a foreign war driven revolution, I don't know how it's going to plan.

I hope within my lifetime that china is able to get back to what they were, a pre cultural revolution. And you, I can imagine a world where we're out there doing counter arctics Operations and counter counter bioweapon Operations against terror cells with with with the chinese military. That would that would be a really, really good reflection of the state of the world.

Wouldn't the same thing, I would hope, with russia? I don't think it's impossible for russia to become an ally. They've got a long way to go. But but it's not impossible. Like you look at what we did with japan and the the way that IT is turned around and the relationship we have today, IT IT tells me that just about anything is possible.

That's amazing. Thanks, man. This has been great. Uh, glad to have you again this talking .

to the real mike solon a right i'm not talking to an AI you multiple ed yourself yet just I get sure you're not to podcast right now but yeah .

give me a minute um it's been real. I'll catch you next time 谁 来下？