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We’ve had two astronauts stuck in space for about two months, due to issues with Boeing’s Starliner. What is your take on the situation?

I think it’s helpful to look at it from two perspectives. One is the lens through which I see everything: how would the press handle this if the tables were turned? And of course, we know. It’d be like, “Elon Musk smokes a joint while astronauts’ careers go up in smoke.” It would be crazy. It’s interesting to see not just the government, but the entire media apparatus more or less running an interference campaign for [Boeing]. I don’t know if you’ve seen these stories, like, “Oh, it’s an unexpected boon for the other teams on the ISS, having extra hands to help with their experiments,” and “The unexpected benefits of what we’re learning from having more people than beds on the ISS right now.” You would never see that, the other way around. But you can kind of move past that.

If it were Elon, it would be straight up 24/7 coverage about how “Elon Musk’s ego stranded two astronauts in space.” It would be constant headlines.

For sure. I remember when I gave $9,000 to this anti-Clinton group, Gizmodo launched a weekly piece called Palmer Watch, where they offered a bounty to anyone who could track me down, because of this small political contribution. They ran it from September 2016 to February 2017 — and I’m not a celebrity at all. [If Elon had stranded the astronauts], you’d have 24/7 coverage, dedicated pieces, people on the #spacestranding beat. They’d be interviewing the families of the people. “Oh yeah, Rick always was a little claustrophobic and one time I was late to pick him up for a ride and he had a breakdown in college and I bet that’s coming back to him now because of Elon Musk.”

Do you think the fact that Elon is potentially the only lifeline for these guys, is the reason the Biden administration is dragging its feet? It seems like giving Elon a huge victory right now in the middle of an election would be pretty politically — I don’t know if it would be damaging to Biden, but it would certainly not be helpful.

So that’s actually the second lens I was going to say. The first is the media lens. The second is the government perspective lens. There’s kind of a straw man and a steel man version of this. If you want to make the steel man case for why the government should be waiting and hoping that Starliner works and that all this goes well, it’s because they want more competition. They want more than one provider. And they would love it if the two providers competing were both competent. They would love it if there were three providers that were competent. And in a world where there’s SpaceX, another SpaceX, another SpaceX, and then Boeing, Boeing obviously would not be getting the benefit of the doubt the way they are. But as of right now, [the government does] only have two choices. So the steel man is the government is doing everything they can to not turn this into a monopoly.

But of course, the [reality] I think is actually pretty close to what [you said]. It would be such a loss politically to send them home on not just a SpaceX-built rocket, but a non-union rocket. Remember when Biden invited all the electric vehicle companies to the EV summit at the White House? He brought [General Motors CEO] Mary Barra on stage and said, “I just want to say to everyone that you have electrified the entire automotive industry. You did it. And I mean that. It’s true.”

In that year, GM had shipped 13 electric cars. I don’t mean 13 models. I mean 13 cars. They just launched their first electric vehicle in that year, the new Hummer EV. And to be clear, I like GM, I really like GM defense. Those are really great guys there. And I love that they have a defense division — compared to most of the other car companies that have not built anything [specifically] for the military since World War II. But it was crazy to watch that nonsense. And we all know what the answer was: union companies were allowed to come to the White House, and were boosted as electrifying the automotive industry. Meanwhile, the guy who outsold every other company there put together by a factor of 10 was snubbed. And the rocket thing is just that, on steroids. A non-union rocket bringing home our brave astronauts is not a politically viable event in an election season.

Let’s talk about defense — how much funding are the gigantic incumbents getting compared to the smaller players?

Well, they’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re getting the lion’s share of the money. I mean, it’s like 80% of major weapons contracts go to one of five companies. 30% of major weapons contracts have a single bidder, meaning only one company even shows up to say they’ll do it for any price. The defense industry is really about as bad as it gets on that front.

The interesting thing about Anduril is that we’re going into a lot of these areas and doing things for a tenth of the price of the incumbents, and we’re using our own money to develop these capabilities so that the taxpayer is not on the hook when it doesn’t work. Like they’re only buying it if it actually works, and we actually make it work.

That’s not a business model that [America has] used to build our defense industry, but it’s something I’ve been pushing with politicians over the last few years. They’ve kind of explained to me the red pill of, “Look, Palmer, we know there’s lots of problems. We know the model’s bad, but we’ve built an entire military around that model and around these companies. And if you just rug pull these guys and say, you only get money if you’re good, you only get money if it works — you will just put them out of business, they will cease to exist.” It’s this strange situation where they know there’s a problem, but they can’t really do anything about it because — I think we can agree on this — destroying the US military and our ability to fight around the world probably has more negative impact than hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending every year, as crazy as that is.

The thing I’ve been pushing to them is to learn from the Democrats. The Democrats have done a really good job with their issues, like climate policy or green energy — saying, “Hey, we know we can’t get what we want now, but here’s our vision for 50 years in the future: at some day, at some distant future, we’re going to have no oil, and everything is going to be green, and gas stoves are going to be banned, and you’re going to eat the bugs, and you’re not going to own anything, and you’re going to love it.” You can take issue with those policy positions, but they’re very clear about this future that’s very far out, and it gets people enthused. Young people feel like well, at least the Democrats have this vision.

The Republicans are just reactive, day-to-day playing politics. What I tell the Republicans is, “You guys need to put a stake in the ground and say, ’Here’s our vision for what defense spending is like 50 years in the future.’ Maybe you can’t cut them off today, but you could say, ’You know what, my vision is 50 years from now, there won’t be cost-plus contracts. 50 years from now, if you fail to deliver, you don’t get paid. My vision is that in 25 years, every company is gonna put at least as much into R&D as the government does on any given program.’” At least then, I would feel like there’s a path to things being solved. And the good news is actually people really like this idea. The last time I talked about it with somebody, they called their assistant to send somebody to take notes.

It’s not just defense, right? This is a broader problem. That’s the Republican Party in general, on every single issue. I was talking about this on a libertarian podcast not so long ago where they were arguing that there is a sort of right-wing philosophy on education or whatever. But fundamentally, a lot of right-wing people don’t even believe in the concept. They’re the party of ‘No’ to everything, and the Democrats are the party of ‘Yes’ to everything. And you can only lose that way.

There’s also no ability to think two steps ahead. The Democrats are great at this one-two punch. You pass this bill that does one thing and then you use it to create some other thing that was downstream of that. Like, “We’re gonna pass this law that’s going to get rid of smog in the Los Angeles basin. Just kidding, it means we can take over all the power plants 50 years later.” They’re great at that one-two punch.

The Republicans generally are not thinking that way because they don’t think there should be any laws for anything. They don’t want regulation. I’ve had people say, “Palmer, how can the Republicans take control of the education system? It seems like there’s no way they can.” I say, “You don’t understand. When the Republicans take control of an institution, they dismantle it to the greatest extent they can get away with, because they don’t believe it should be big — or exist.” Whereas the other side makes it do more and more and more. And so you’re kind of in this interesting position where any time you take power, you immediately set about the task of reducing your power. [Democrats are] like, “I want to become king of this country.” The Republican view is like, “I did it, I became king, time to reduce the power of the king and make sure I can’t affect anything.”

What do [the defense incumbents] get right? Is there anything that you can say in their defense?

I think cost-plus contracting has a place for a handful of things. I can speculatively build a new missile and sell it, not on a cost-plus contract. And I think that’s great. I think that’s the way it should work. I don’t think the government should be taking on all the risk on something like that.

But what about what about an aircraft carrier? I’m not going to speculatively design and build an aircraft carrier in the hopes that the government selects my product, right? It’s just not feasible. It’s too much metal. It’s too much stuff. It’s too big of a thing. Or like, nuclear powered submarines. If they don’t select me, what am I going to do with it? It’s illegal for me to sell it to anyone else.

There are these pockets where the [cost-plus] business model does make sense, and the incentives maybe don’t lead to efficient outcomes. But not everything you do has to be efficient. Look, I’m a rich guy. I buy lots of meals that are not cost efficient. And that’s fine because I have a little bit of money to spare and I can afford to have parts of my life be inefficient if it means I’m happy and everything works. But you can’t run an entire country that way. You can’t run an entire military that way. We need to be very efficient on the things that we can be efficient on, so that we can afford to have these cool things like nuclear submarines where they just have to work no matter what, no matter how much they cost, no matter how inefficient it is.

You guys just raised $1.5 billion — your series F, led by Founders Fund (where I also work, full disclosure).

One of the big things you guys talked about in the press release [about the raise] was Arsenal. It’s a huge facility to be building, you said tens of thousands of autonomous systems. I’m assuming that means —

It’s AI fighter jets, AI submarines, anything and everything. Arsenal’s reconfigurable to build a whole bunch of different things. But yeah, it’s not a factory for one product. It’s a factory for a bunch of different products.

What do you mean by “tens of thousands of autonomous systems”?

I mean, you could frame it as autonomous weapons, but some of the things are kind of more weapons-adjacent, than being a weapon directly. So “systems” just means like, you know, chunks of matter. Sometimes they’ll be in the shape of an airplane. Sometimes they’ll be in the shape of a missile. Sometimes they’ll be in the shape of a surveillance tower. But that’s why it’s “systems,” and not strictly weapons.

I want to get into the specifics of how this factory seems so different. In the press release, you said America would run out of weapons in about three weeks if we went to war. That’s pretty shocking. You’d think that America is the sort of land of unlimited weapons.

I mean, we have really limited industrial capacity when it comes to making lots of weapons. The United States has a lot of [critical] weapons today that were manufactured in the 1980s and the 1990s, and we just stockpiled them. That’s why you’re hearing about people being pulled out of retirement to restart the Stinger and Javelin missile lines. The only people alive who know how to make more of them are in their seventies. It’s a crazy situation.

It’s not a good movie, but there’s a great scene at the end of Battleship where after the aliens EMP all the modern military ships and fighters, and are about to take over the world, a bunch of special force guys go to a nursing home and get a bunch of World War II veterans to go down to the pier where they have an old World War II-era battleship. And then they shovel the coal in and they load up some shells and they go out to fight the aliens at sea with their all-analog ship.

That’s basically what we’re doing. We’re pulling people out of the nursing homes to remake systems that we haven’t made for decades because it’s the only thing we can do. And that is a really big problem. We also are in an era where we aren’t able to make enough solid rocket motors. We can’t make enough artillery shells. We can’t make enough ammunition. We can’t make enough missiles. We can’t make enough boats. China has orders of magnitude more shipbuilding capacity than we do. We don’t have the ability to even make the right types of steel to make some of the types of ships that we need unless we buy that steel from China. It’s a disastrous situation that we’ve let ourselves get into. It’s the downside of transitioning to an information economy and giving away all our manufacturing to China over the course of decades.

People imagine we have unlimited weapons. It isn’t the case. The reason people think we have this kind of endless capability is because we’ve been blowing up a bunch of huts in the desert for 20 years. And so we think we’re hot shit, but in a real war where you’re actually going toe-to-toe with a great power and you’re trading blows and depleting your magazine, we would blow our load that it took decades to build in a matter of days or weeks. The country is not on a path to solve that. Anduril is trying.

I’d like to drill down a little bit more on Arsenal itself. You guys have a bunch of facilities. You have facilities in Rhode Island, in Georgia, in Australia. (I didn’t realize it was called Ghost Shark, which is incredible.) What is different about Arsenal?

The thing about Arsenal that makes it different is that each of those other factories is focused on building one system or a family of systems that are all pretty similar, like making a missile and variants of that missile. Arsenal is millions of square feet into which we are investing hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s a reconfigurable factory that is being designed to share resources between a bunch of different systems. [It will be] able to share machines, share space, be reconfigured on the fly to ramp up production of one thing as another one scales down. That’s not the way that you would typically run a factory, but it is what we’re gonna have to make happen with Arsenal.

This reminds me Henry Ford. It’s not just a factory, it’s a new way of operating a factory.

Well it is, and there’s a lot of layers to it too. There’s a lot that goes on in a factory that isn’t just the robot arms moving around and welding stuff together. And you know, software ate the world in a lot of other industries. It has not eaten the world in the defense industry because at its core, the defense industry is not rewarded for efficiency. You make more money when things are more expensive, when they take longer, and when the parts are more expensive. And there’s not been an incentive for these companies to invest heavily in building the tooling and automation that would allow them to build future systems much more cheaply at a lower upfront cost because nobody’s going to pay you for that.

But Anduril was not configured to optimally capture taxpayer money. I’ll just be honest. It was optimally configured to solve the problems the DOD has and build the tools we actually need. I think Anduril could be making more money as a cost-plus contractor with a bunch of smart people and smart tooling to allow us to maximally capture revenue from taxpayers. But I would not be able to convince myself to do something like that. I think we need to prove there’s a better way to do this stuff. Because if we can prove it, everyone else is going to get forced to come along with us. That’s really the proof of concept we’re going for here.

Is your sense that you have been proving it to them? I know when you first started, it was a ’No,’ and they were still getting all these huge contracts. But is your sense that they’re afraid, a bit, at this point?

We’re proving it up and up and up and up the chain. I think there was a sense of, “Well sure, you can do software as a product, but you can’t do full systems.” And then it was, “Oh, well maybe you can do some hardware systems that way, like Ghost is cool, Anvil’s cool, maybe companies can speculatively build their own things, use their own money to decide what works, what doesn’t, and then sell it as a product, but you’ll never be able to do that with missiles.” And then it was, “You’re not going to speculatively build a fighter jet, like that’s really our bread and butter.” And then we beat Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop on the collaborative combat aircraft selection. And all of a sudden, people are realizing, “Oh, you can do it this way, you can run a company like Anduril and you can build not just little tiny software building blocks or little tiny quadcopters. You can build real meaningful systems with this business model.” I think people are starting to realize that.

A huge part of the conversation when it comes to Arsenal is just the fact that America’s manufacturing capacity is no longer there. The engine of that [decline] has been globalism and global trade. We’re competing with people who can either produce things much cheaper than we can produce them here, or in cases like China, you have their government actually subsidizing their industries.

This brings us to the topic of tariffs. Trump’s talked about tariffs for a long time. The economists tend to hate this idea, libertarians really hate this idea. They frame tariffs as a very broad thing. From what I’ve heard, it seems like [Trump’s] tactics would be much narrower — tariffs in certain situations to achieve whatever aim. I still think there’s room to disagree on this one, and I’m wondering where you stand on it.

I primarily believe in tariffs as a national security issue. It’s so easy to say, “Well, you know, the libertarian perspective on this is that the most efficient player in the market should be allowed to sell.” The problem with that is that you destroy your entire ability to defend yourself. You have no ability to make weapons.

And this isn’t just the United States. We’re talking about this in the United States because we’re in the unenviable position of having a poorly functioning manufacturing apparatus and also being the world police. There are a lot of countries in the world that cannot possibly defend themselves because they have also outsourced all of their manufacturing capacity. It’s not just the US that’s been hollowed out by China. It’s everybody. It’s the entire West. And the only reason we have anything left here is because we’re the world police and we have some weapons market.

There are countries all over Europe that used to be powerhouses, and now they’re reliant on us because they have zero manufacturing capability of any substance at all. So to me, tariffs are great because they ensure there is a market for manufacturing and they ensure that market takes place under US human rights laws and US energy laws.

Slavery is really profitable. And so you have a lot of places around the world where you have quasi-slavery or literal slavery making things really, really cheap. And I get this argument in the election year of “Tariffs are just taxes.” You’ve seen what the Harris campaign is saying. They’re saying “He’s putting a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on groceries, a Trump tax on your car.” It’s like, okay, that’s great. But at some point, why make anything? It probably is cheaper for us to have child slaves in Africa make everything for us. I mean, why would you want a Trump tax on your car when it can be made by child slaves in the Congo? But it’s just this ludicrous political argument when you take it all the way to its libertarian extreme. So I am really enjoying the Harris campaign taking the extremist libertarian position of “child slaves making your stuff is okay.”

That’s what these policies have done, as you said. [They’ve] enslaved people in foreign countries and we don’t really talk much about that.

And we end up enslaving ourselves in the long run. You can say, “Oh, I think things should always go to the most efficient player.” OK, well, let’s play that out 30 years. We now have no ability to make cars, no ability to make batteries or solar panels. Our energy industry, food industry, and automotive industry is owned entirely by our largest strategic adversary, which is also now the world’s largest hyperpower. And then they just take Hawaii because there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s actually the logical outcome of these things if you play it out to the extreme.

What is the sort of tariff policy you would like to see? What do you think would work here, versus what do you think would not work?

Well, everyone wants — this is gonna sound so self-serving — welfare for their thing. The farmers want welfare for corn and the auto workers want welfare for auto unions. And look at me, the weapons dealer. Surprise, surprise, I want welfare for the defense industry.

I would love to see tariffs on things that are directly downstream of strategically important assets. For example, I’m a fan of steel tariffs to the extent that they allow us to maintain some steel industry. And aluminum tariffs that allow us to have some aluminum industry.

I’m not saying we need to make it where you don’t have any imported aluminum or any imported steel, but there’s a world of difference between allowing there to be some viable US industry and none at all. It’s the difference between having, let’s say, an aluminum plant that you could ramp up, talent that you could ramp up, and literally no capacity whatsoever.

I would love to see them say, “What are the things we can’t get along without?” Like, we need the ability to make critical metals. We need the ability to feed ourselves. We better make sure we are not dependent on other people for food, particularly people who hate us. And let’s pick these areas and enact tariffs sufficient to safeguard those industries. Then people say, “But Palmer, that’s protectionist, and then [American industries] will be less efficient.” And my argument would be, okay, well that’s why you need to get rid of the regulations everywhere else so that you can have lots of competition, and there’s lots of money to be made. Make it where there’s lots of competition in the US, but you don’t have to worry about slave-grown strawberries.

Are you familiar with slavery avocados?

Wait, slavery avocados? No. Tell me more about slavery avocados.

So one of the interesting things the cartels have been doing over the last couple of decades as the war on drugs has made drugs less and less profitable is going in and taking over avocado farms by force, then running them without complying with environmental regulations and not paying any taxes. And when I say “by force,” I mean they’re literally making people work these avocado farms at gunpoint and not allowing them to leave to return to their families. So it’s wild to me when you get these extremist libertarians who are like, “Oh, we should buy avocados from wherever the cheapest are. You shouldn’t have those tariffs.” And you know what? I just can’t feel that bad about starving the cartels of revenue from slavery avocados.

The avocados in America are more expensive. That’s why we’re buying Mexican avocados — and that has to do with tax policy, and things like this. And libertarians will say, “Well, you know, if we do these tariffs, Americans are going to have to pay $10 for an avocado or something.” But that’s not going to happen because the moment that, you know, Becky comes out of yoga class and has to pay $10 for an avocado is the moment that the policy [making avocados expensive] evaporates. And we once again have a market for avocados in America.

Well, and also what happens is eventually the guys in El Segundo are going to start growing avocados. If you really get to $10 avocados, you’re going to see people building robot avocado farms.

You get these short term pain points. Tariffs are very painful in the short term because they raise prices, but then people come in and figure out how to do things even better that probably never would have happened had the status quo not been shaken up. It’s kind of what we’ve seen with automation in the food service sector. The minimum wage laws are what’s actually driving all this automation. And I’m not a fan of minimum wage laws, but I feel like tariffs are something that can drive positive innovation.

I want to pivot to one of my favorite punching bags, Google, for just a moment. They’re in the news this week — about 200 employees at Google DeepMind signed a pledge or open letter of some kind not to work with the US military.

This is the exact same environment that we were in back when you guys were founding Anduril. Do you think this is indicative of a broader tech sentiment? Was there a vibe shift? How much of the vibe shift has been real? Where do you think the Valley is on this stuff now?

I think the Valley is on the side of violence as a tool that you need to have in your toolbox. Here’s an interesting point. You said it’s 200 Google employees, right? Remember that the last time this happened, the open letter had 3,000 people on it. I think that that’s probably indicative of the vibe shift in a very direct way. Even back when there were the 3,000 employees who signed it, I said at the time that it was not as indicative of anti-military sentiment as you might think. Nine out of ten people in the Valley, I believe, support the idea that the United States should have better weapons than Russia and China. It’s not that controversial. And everyone felt like it was controversial because of that loud minority making a whole bunch of noise about it. And so people would talk to me, they’d be like, “Hey, Palmer, I like the military, but don’t tell anybody.” It was so funny, because people really thought it was this contrarian position. I’m like, “Guys, all of you agree on this, you’re just allowing yourself to be ruled by this little vocal minority.”

Also remember, a lot of the people who signed that 3,000-person Google letter, many of them were not US citizens. Some of them had literally never been to the United States. For example, one of the guys signing the letter was a marketing manager working out of the Google London office who’s a Chinese national. It’s like, “Google workers pledge to not support the US military.” It’s like, “Wow, yeah, this is news. Chinese national doesn’t want to work for the US military. What a surprise.”

When you first highlighted the Chinese national component of this story [in 2018], you were attacked in the press pretty brutally for that.

Kara Swisher said that she would have rushed the stage had she been there to hold me to account. Real Twitter tough guy action. It’s was one step removed from “I would have kicked that guy’s ass if he said that to me.” And all I said was that many of the people [who signed the Google letter] were not US nationals. They were like, “That’s so racist, why does it matter if they’re US nationals?” Uhh, because we’re talking about the United States military? I forgot about how wild it was.

Eight years ago, you were voting for Trump. You were not even doing it publicly. You were supporting him privately. That got out into the news. You were destroyed for it. You lost your job for it. You were demonized throughout the entire industry for it. Eight years later, it’s very different. How do you feel about or think about Silicon Valley’s apparent tolerance for newly public Trump supporters?

Once again, two answers. One is I’m actually very sore about it. I’m very bitter about it because a lot of the people who today are putting out these announcements, they’re like, you know what? I am gonna support Trump and here’s why, you know, I’m so brave — and everyone’s applauding them. Many of those people are the same ones who were literally calling for me to be fired, specifically because of my support for Donald Trump. I understand that politics is about persuasion. Like, you shouldn’t draw battle lines and then say, by the way, I will never accept you to my side — that is not productive politics. However, you can see where someone like me would be a little sore about the people who tried to get me fired.

Marc Andreessen did an interview back in 2016 or 2017, right around when all the controversy around me was going around. They asked him about it, and he said that he’s one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley, which is not an exaggeration — he knows everybody — and he only knew of two people willing to admit they supported Donald Trump: me and Peter Thiel. His point was, he knew there were more than two people out there that supported Trump, but that something had gone seriously wrong in America, or at least in the tech industry, so that someone as well-connected as Mark was only able to find two people who supported the winning candidate for president of the United States.

I think what’s happened is every person who supports him makes it easier to come out as supporting him. And a lot of people are not so much supporting Trump, as they just feel like they have no choice when [the alternative] is taxing unrealized gains and destroying the innovation economy. They’re like, damn, I guess I shouldn’t vote for people who hate me.

Trump was taboo eight years ago. What is the new Trump — or are we in a post taboo era? Has the vibe shift been that real?

If you separate it from you, and just think about it generally, what are some things out there that people are getting attacked for that maybe they shouldn’t be?

Interesting. This one’s tough because both parties definitely believe things that are heretical as judged by the other side. There are very few things that are heretical to both parties. This is going to sound really lame, but the most heretical views are combination views where you believe a set of things that one side believes and then the other side believes, but they’re not the ones that are supposed to blend.

Robert Kennedy Jr. [is an example]. He’s anti-vaccine in a way that is, I think, quite popular with certain elements of the right and certain elements of the left. But it’s more crazy that he is pro-environment, but anti-vaccine and pro-free speech. The combination is like water and oil.

Those are the people who are seen as apostates, and apostates are always attacked in a way that’s vicious beyond recognition.

Yeah, but in terms of truly heretical ideas, there’s not that many I would be willing to say. I mean, here’s a heretical idea — maybe a pretty good one. The Democrats are very much kind of anti-conquest, right? They don’t believe that nations that were conquered should remain conquered. They kind of believe in winding back the clock. It’s just an argument about how far you should wind back the clock. Lots of people on the left are like, “Oh my God, Israel stole their land.” I’m like, “Oh, so we should give back Hawaii.” They’re like, “No, not that far!”

Well, I think that’s coming. I really believe that Hawaiian independence is coming on the left.

I’ve been trying to get some of the Hawaiian nationalists to come to Hereticon and give a talk on this, because it is quite heretical. I’m very fascinated by their argument because it actually is quite pro-American Revolution-aligned. Basically, from a narrative perspective, it’s very clear they’re kind of the good guys.

We’re not talking about, for example, the Native Americans — there’s lots of arguments, like, “Well, they were murdering and enslaving people, and there were a lot of bad things going on.” The Hawaiians had actually reformed to be quite a modern society, and then we still went in and we rolled them. So it’s very interesting to hear [from the Hawaiian nationalists].

But also, I don’t want to give up Hawaii, which then boils down to the conclusion like — the conquered remain conquered. We can’t start trying to rewind the clock on that. That’s probably pretty heretical with the mainstream Dems. Would you agree?

I think it’s pretty radical. It’s also adjacent to, I’m calling it Moon Thesis, which is Moon Should Be a State. I think Greenland should be a state, I think Cuba should be a state. I believe in an expansive America and I don’t actually know where we learned that we should not be expanding anymore. I don’t know when that idea set in, in America —

It’s when Manifest Destiny became cancelable. If you go to the Wikipedia page for Manifest Destiny — this concept that man is destined to expand further, conquer more of the world, expand Westward in particular — it’s like, “Manifest Destiny is a racist pseudophilosophy.” What are you talking about? This is the thing that drove the entire American experiment. So I agree with you on that. We should not stop expanding. But is that heretical? Is it heretical to believe we should keep expanding? I feel like you’ll find a lot of good old boys who agree.

I think that it’s pretty heretical. I think that when Greenland was put into the conversation, that was seen as very heretical. If Moon Should Be a State became a more popular idea, I think people would find it very, very heretical. You would see people, Americans, upset about it. I do think the idea of us just expanding is seen as heretical.

Oh, here’s one: public executions. People who support public executions. That’s pretty heretical, and I’m very pro-public execution.

What’s interesting [about public executions] is there are arguments from both sides. When I talk to the right, I say, “Look, public executions are what we should do, because it does serve a deterrent effect. Whether you think it’s worth it or not, that’s another question.”

One argument I’ve been very successful with more left leaning people is, I say, “Look, don’t you think if the state is going to be executing people, that it should be honest about what it’s doing and make it la public, fully in-view thing? Like, is it really okay to medicalize this procedure? They put you in a chair and a doctor injects you with something, and we pretend it’s a medical procedure. Shouldn’t it be an act of violence that’s very clear and explicit?” And I find that a lot of people are sympathetic to that argument.

I’ve got two more [heretical ideas]. 16-year-olds getting married. I’m not talking about adults who want to marry 16-year-olds. [But] should it be okay for people to get married, build a life, and build a family before they get through the state-mandated education system, and then the highly socially-pushed college education system?

You’ve probably seen people saying, “You shouldn’t be allowed to get married until you’re 25, when your brain fully develops.” My God, talk about the tyranny of low expectations. You realize that America was settled by people who got married when they were teenagers? And they settled the entire West. [But instead, it’s like], that guy over there, he’s only 24. You can’t really hold him accountable for his actions as an adult. I feel like the infantilization of America is a real problem. But then when you get to the solutions, I think it’s actually pretty heretical to say like, the way that you make people responsible is you make them responsible.

What do you think? Age of majority at 16.

I think it’s an all or nothing thing for me. It’s either we give kids these rights when they’re young, and it’s all of them — including marriage and sex and things like this — or we don’t let them vote. But you can’t pretend that they’re children in every category other than voting. I also agree with you about the age thing with Americans. I mean, how old was Hamilton, Jefferson, or Madison?

Yeah, some of the founding fathers were teenagers when they were fighting in the revolution. If you can fight the redcoats as a teenager, I think it’s reasonable you should be able to have a drink.

There are even more boring things. When you’re 18, you can’t build a house, because you’re not allowed to sign binding contracts. You can’t be legally liable for it. There are things you can’t buy. It’s not that the government prohibits you. It’s that the government, in saying that you are not old enough to sign a binding contract, makes it infeasible for the free market to deal with you as a fair actor. It’s like you can’t grow up in this country any faster than the lowest common denominator, and that’s crazy.

The problem is, it’s a little bit of an all-or-nothing thing, where society has to be on board with it. Put another way, it’s okay for 16-year-olds to get married if it’s OK for 16-year-olds to get married. And if it’s not, then it’s not.

[What I’m] saying is that it’s not healthy for 16-year-olds to get married in a world where it’s impossible for them to buy [a house], the law is against them, and they’ll be humiliated by society. That probably doesn’t work. But I feel like that’s pretty heretical.

There’s one other heretical thing I’m remembering now. I’ve got this policy idea. I call it “chain gangs for deadbeat dads.” Nobody likes deadbeat dads, right? Dads who abandon their kids and don’t pay their child support, they’re the lowest of the low. And I couldn’t believe this, [but] there are millions of men paying no child support for children that they do not take care of. And I feel like everyone universally feels like that’s a pretty big problem.

I started looking into this because someone posted the 1992 Democratic party platform. One of the platform bits was they were going to establish a national paternity testing initiative so that every child in America would have established paternity, and the man could be held accountable for taking care of their child. And I was like, wow, that’s really based. I couldn’t imagine them proposing something like that today.

But it got me thinking, what could you do to encourage this? So, one of my heretical policy ideas is if you father a kid, you should have three choices. You can either take care of the kid directly, or you can pay a punitive level of child support, such that your quality of life with the remaining money is going to be poor. Or, you will be provided a job on a government chain gang breaking rocks for 18 years. And it would be highly visible. You’d be doing it on the side of the road, in view of every young man who will see that as his future if he does not take responsibility.

I think that would be a really, really powerful thing in terms of promoting responsibility and promoting people [sticking] it out, even if they don’t particularly prefer to. But I think the Democrats are obviously not for this, because they have a huge number of voters that are in that category. And the Republicans, I think, also know that it’s just [too] politically toxic to touch.

I’m in favor of shame, bringing shame back into culture generally. I think it’s an important tool, and a shameless society is what we live in now.

We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, and I got a lot of pushback for it, but I think specifically for things like bridge blocking, which could lead to actual death — there was one ambulance on the bridge, I think it was two protests ago, that was carrying an organ. It ended up being fine, but the risk of blocking bridges is crazy, that you could be disrupting an organ transfer.

I’ve got an idea on this one too, which is blocking a bridge is carjacking and/or kidnapping. Like it is, by the definition.

I would love to see the federal government, maybe a new president, step up and say, “I’m writing an executive order for federally funded highways — if you are a carjacker or a kidnapper on federal property, you are not allowed to sue anybody for any defensive actions they might take to protect themselves.” And I think that would end the problem very, very, very quickly.

Why should someone on a federal highway — federal property — be surrounded by people with weapons, who could destroy their car, and at any second, pull them out and kill them? Why should they have to sit there and just take it? People say, “But Palmer, are you saying you should be allowed to run over protesters who are blocking highways?” And I turn it around to them, and ask, “Okay, what percentage chance of the death of your child in the backseat are you willing to trade? If you feel there’s a 10% chance they are going to murder your child, is it okay to run them over? What about a 1% chance? What about a 0.1% chance?” I think most people are not willing to take even a 0.1% chance that their child gets killed just so people have the right to block a highway and prevent ambulances from going through. It feels actually like this could be a popular policy.

I think you don’t even have to go that far. It’s just if someone is trying to hold you hostage, what are you allowed to do to stop them from holding you hostage? I was under the impression it was anything. So what are we doing here? Like, you just shouldn’t be allowed to block the bridge.

Yep. I think the issue with this is that it is valid. You could run them over and a viable defense is it was self-defense, but you’re still going to get charged. You’re going to go to court. Your life’s going to be ruined. You’re going to be in debt millions of dollars to lawyers. If you can even find someone to take your case, the [lawyer] is going to insist that you just take a plea deal.

It’s one of those things where, yes, in theory, you can defend yourself. But we’ve seen as a society what happens to the people who do, and as a result, [we’re] unwilling to take any action. That’s why I would want an affirmative action to say, this is a federal issue that we are going to preempt. We’re not going to let the state charge you because the feds are going to charge you. And then we’re immediately going to dismiss the case because you were clearly defending yourself. I would love to see something like that proactively. That feels a little heretical, but on the other hand, I don’t know, I feel like everyone agrees. To borrow a Trumpism, I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.

Yeah, once you break it down, people are on board.

I want to pivot to the media, because the media is really where they’re going to have a field day with these ideas—

And before you get into the media, I just want to preempt anyone who’s listening to this for the first time and hasn’t heard me talk about this before. Palmer Luckey (me) was a journalism major. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er, which was one the largest student papers in the country. I planned on pursuing a career in technology journalism. So lest anyone think I’m anti-journalism, anti-press — no. I’m against bad journalism, bad press, and the corruption of the fourth estate. You know, black people can say things about black people that white people can’t. I can say things about journalists that non-journalists can’t say. That’s my opinion.

You tweeted this: “Should journalists who prostitute themselves — literally, as in money for sex — to men that consider me their arch rival, have to disclose that fact when they report on me?” And the choices were either “Obviously” or “No.” 86% of people voted “Obviously.” Journalists who literally prostitute themselves to Palmer Luckey’s arch rival should have to disclose that fact when they report on Palmer Luckey.

I have a feeling you’re not going to be able to disclose much about this, but I would not be a good journalist if I didn’t ask you: what reporter are you talking about?

I’m happy to tell you off of the pod. I’m holding it close right now because it’s a serious accusation to levy. But I’m not just throwing it out there as a hypothetical. There is someone who is a reporter who has written negatively about me on many occasions. She is a reporter for a major outlet who I found out is having sex for money with someone who has considered themselves my arch rival for about 10 years now. He hates me, has also written about me, and in fact the reason he reached out to her is their shared dislike of me.

I know you may think, “Oh, that’s so cute, he reached out and they developed a relationship” — no, his first exchange with her was reaching out to ask how much it would cost to buy sex with her. So I’m making sure I have all my ducks in a row before I make it public, because I need to make sure I’ve got everything right. This is not circumstantial — I actually have the emails. I have the entire written record.

I tweeted that out without the names attached for a few reasons. One, both of them now know that I know. Which puts me in a much more powerful position, and means that, I think, both of them will probably cease to engage with me in any negative way. Like, could you imagine if you knew that I knew, and then you went out and wrote another hit piece? So that was part of it.

Two, I felt like maybe there were people in similar situations, and I wanted to hear from those people. And I have already heard from people in these same situations. I know it sounds nuts, but there are people out there who are having pieces written about them by journalists who have a history of paid prostitution with people who hate them.

I’m not saying this is an epidemic across the press, but if a reporter is writing about somebody, they are supposed to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest — not just actual conflict, but even the appearance. The Society for Professional Journalists says that if a conflict is unavoidable, it must be disclosed at the start of the piece. So of course, you shouldn’t be writing about the people who your John hates and complains about. You should have to be like, “By the way, I’m being paid by this guy who hates the person I’m writing about, and that was actually how we met: we both hate him and he paid me money for sex because of it.”

I want to discover if this is a real problem. I suspect it’s me and a handful of other people, but it’s definitely an artifact of the extremely sex-positive, very liberal tech industry. When all the tech writers are on OnlyFans, I guess this is the natural outcome. Oh, by the way, I will throw out, she does have an OnlyFans.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

My point being, it’s not like the guy — and I’m just going to make up, it’s not this outlet, but suppose it were the Washington Post — emailed her at her Washington Post email and was like, hey, will you have sex for money? It was already in a sexually charged context, but it is quite interesting.

Now I will say, with the exception of the potential prostitute in question, the press loves you now, which is a wild, wild change for you. What inspired you to take the BroTopia author Emily Chang out on your warship? Are you forgiving and forgetting, and moving on?

100%. I mean, I’ll even point out that I’ve even given Emily heat in the past. She asked, “You give so much money to politicians. Why is Anduril such a political company?” I was like, “You would never ask that question of Mark Zuckerberg or Reed Hastings or any of these other people who give far more than I do. It’s a one-way question. And the fact that I’m wasting my time talking about it is also a negative, versus talking about my business.”

Emily responded, “I might.” But you’ll notice in that same Bloomberg series, she did interview Mark Zuckerberg, and she didn’t ask that question. I guess we got solid confirmation that she might not. She might, but she might not.

I think I’m trying to take advantage of this moment in time where people seem to broadly understand that national security is important, that China is ascending, and that even if you don’t like me, you can at least recognize that I’m doing things that are good for the United States. And I think this is a good moment for me to reach out through mediums that have a much broader audience than I typically would have. Like, I want to be on 60 Minutes. I want to be on Bloomberg. I want to be on CNBC. I’d be on CNN if they asked me to. And I’m sure part of this is also driven by the fact that the pendulum will swing. A time will come. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what it is, but something’s going to happen and the world’s going to change. And I’m going to be less, less, less — I don’t know what you could call it — like less dick suckable than I am currently. And so I need to take advantage of it.

Would you forgive any of these people? Can we look forward, perhaps, to an interview with the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz?

I mean, you have to draw the line at some point. The problem with Taylor Lorenz is she’s a combination of crazy and non-preservationist. I’ve talked often about how wars are fought when one or both sides misunderstand the outcome. Like, if both sides know what the outcome will be, the war probably won’t be fought, because there won’t be resistance in the first place.

The exception to this, I’ve always pointed out to people, is the jihadist mentality: “I am going to die for my cause, I know I’m going to lose, and in losing is glorious death.” And Taylor Lorenz is a jihadist journalist. Her lack of self-preservation instinct is what makes her so dangerous, because she’ll say and do things that cannot possibly turn out well for her.

And I think she sees glory in the jihad. If she is fired by the Washington Post, I think she sees glory in that, even if it ruins her life. That’s why I wouldn’t do an interview with Taylor Lorenz, because I could imagine that I’d do the interview, and then she says, “I remember when I did that interview, Palmer walked me out the door, and he said ’You fat bitch.’” And it would be totally untrue, but then people would be like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe Palmer did that.”

Don’t create a situation, and there won’t be a situation, is how I feel about Taylor Lorenz.

Yeah, I’ve been getting that advice, because I’ve expressed an openness to doing a podcast with her. I think it would be pretty funny, but I think you’re probably right.

You are working on something pretty cool, among the many things you’re building. It’s a new Game Boy — the Chromatic. We talked a bit about this a few months ago. Do you think there is something just kind of shitty about today’s consumer devices? Or are we just feeling nostalgic, and that’s why we’re missing things like the Game Boy?

I think there are things that have truly been lost. Our games industry has become hyper optimized around making money. The people who decide what games get made aren’t the people who make games, or even the people who play games. It’s a financialized operation. The budgets for these things are so big that you have to cater to the middle of the road. You can’t make a thing for an audience anymore. You have to not offend anyone, appeal to everyone, and in making something for everyone, you’re making something for noone.

I think you see that in the microtransaction takeover. I think you see that in the push away from physical games. People are like, digital games are so great because they’re good for the environment. And the companies are pushing them for all these spurious reasons. But it really just comes down to — it makes them a few extra points of margin and they don’t care if you can’t play the game in ten years. They don’t care if you can’t pass it down to your kids. They don’t care if you don’t get the inherent joy of getting to interact with the physical manual, the physical poster, the physical cartridge.

There are so many layers to this. The thing that I’m making, it’s the ModRetro Chromatic, and it’s basically an ultimate tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy. If you were to make a Game Boy where money was no object, using the absolute latest in technology to perfectly mimic everything about the Game Boy that made it a Game Boy, you’d get the Chromatic. For example, instead of a plastic screen lens, it’s made of lab-grown sapphire crystal. Instead of a plastic shell, it’s a magnesium aluminum alloy shell that’s much stiffer, lighter, and stronger.

Actually, the screen is pretty funny. It’s the worst screen probably made in years, anywhere in tech. It’s a 160 by 144, two-and-a-half inch screen that is exactly the same size, resolution, pixel structure, and even color gamut as the Game Boy color display. We had to purposely shittify it with custom color filters on the LCD that are not standard RGB. They’re copies of the bad color filters they had to use in the 1990s on the Game Boy Color, so that when you play Game Boy Color games, they’re actually the right color shade, and they’re actually the right tone.

I mean, it is very much a nostalgia play. You want to experience your childhood again. I won’t claim that Chromatic is gonna solve the games industry. I’m not saying that Game Boy games are the future of the games industry. But there is a lot that we genuinely have lost in the games industry over the last decade.

I think you’re seeing even GameStop capitalize on this. You know what the biggest GameStop tweet of the last few months has been by a lot? It was right after Microsoft announced they were shutting down the Xbox 360 online store and people were going to lose access to it. They did a tweet with a picture of a whole bunch of physical games and on one side it said, “What you inherited,” and it’s a whole bunch of, like, your older brother’s game console, his Super Nintendo and piles of physical games. And on the right, it says “What your kids will inherit.” And it’s like a bunch of passwords and a failed-to-log-in notification. And they said, “Never forget what they took from you.” And it got a huge amount of engagement. People are getting it in a way they did not a few years ago.

Yeah. This is a much bigger thing. With the internet, we were promised a world that would live forever, and it’s turned out to be totally the opposite of that. It’s an ephemeral, malleable world that changes in real time, and you lose everything you have on there. That is a problem in itself, but the bigger problem is that we’re losing the analog as well. We abandoned the analog years ago.

I do want to focus on just the Chromatic for a second. You were talking before about how these people don’t care that you can lose your games or whatever. I’m trying to play Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. They cost hundreds of dollars on Amazon, and then you have to find a Game Boy.

You said nostalgia is the drive. It [also] seems like it’s love. They’re running a business, whereas you actually just love this.

It is. It’s a tribute. I love the Game Boy. I love a bunch of those games. I wanted to make the thing that is the ultimate way to play those.

We’re actually re-releasing a whole bunch of old Game Boy Color games, working with the publishers. The publishers, it’s worth noting, almost never manufactured the cartridges. They outsourced that to Nintendo. They never had their own manufacturing teams; Nintendo did all of it. And so we’re going to them and saying, “We will literally make new runs of modern physical Game Boy Color games.” And a lot of them are really supportive of us.

I’m trying to make it easier for me to relive my childhood, but I also want to make it easier for new generations to experience what was in the past. Because, to your point about Pokemon Red being hard to go back and play, think how hard it is for a kid today. If you want to see what books were like 200 years ago — easy, right? You can download the book and read it. If you want to know what gaming was like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you have to be an expert in technology to track everything down, find a working system. In the case of Pokemon Red and Blue, it probably has a dead save battery by now. And so it won’t hold your saved games. You have to open it up and actually solder in a new battery.

It’s kind of crazy how games in particular, their past has become inaccessible. And that has not been the case with movies or music or text. It’s like a whole lost generation of experience that nobody can experience anymore.

Yeah, it’s crazy. And it’s completely under-discussed. But the broader idea of a digital world that we’re living through and losing seems like one of the most important issues of our generation, that we should be talking about every day. And we never really are. How do you think about that?

We are living in a world where things are just disappearing and history is being rewritten. Like, it’s kind of crazy that you have an album like Elephunk, which was an award-winning bestselling album with the song “Let’s Get Retarded,” being eliminated from iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, even [Black Eyed Peas’] official YouTube channel. The Wikipedia page has been retitled to “Let’s Get It Started.” And there’s just like a brief passing mention of an earlier version of the song.

We’re living in a world where history is being rewritten, and people don’t know. And it’s being rewritten so that — like in this case — it’s almost worse than just a game not being available. They’re rewriting history because they want to look like they were more palatable to modern tastes than they ever were at the time. The whole point was that they were edgy, but they’re trying to rewrite history, [saying] “No, we weren’t edgy, but we still want the popularity today.” They’re rewriting the foundation of their success.

I know this seems like a tiny thing. My wife, in particular, is like, “Palmer, nobody cares about ’Let’s Get Retarded.’” I’m like, “You don’t get it. You don’t understand. ‘Let’s Get Retarded’ is just one example of a thousand, or a million, to come where you literally won’t know what was true and what happened. You will be unable to experience the past.”

Like Disney, [and] what they edited out on their new release of Lilo and Stitch. My favorite Disney movie is Lilo and Stitch. And they edited out a scene where Lilo is hiding in a dryer because, like, that might make kids hide in a dryer, and then someone might run the dryer, and then they’ll die.

Things like this are just going to keep happening. They’re gonna rewrite history until there’s nothing dangerous and nothing offensive left. And I wouldn’t mind that so much, if the goal posts weren’t always changing. Like, I’d be okay with a one-time purge. Like, “We’re gonna purge all this crap, and we’re gonna make a little Wikipedia page about everything we purged, so you know what was changed.” But that’s not how these things go. It never is.

I have one last question for you, which is more personal. You were talking about leaving something for your kids. How do you think about rebuilding the technological world in a way we don’t lose it?

I think you just have to be aware of that when you are building something. I’ll use one example, it’s self-serving, but the Chromatic does not use rechargeable batteries, it uses AA batteries. We have a rechargeable battery pack option you can use, but it’s always able to accept AA’s if you pop it out. That isn’t a nostalgia thing. I’m not doing it because it’s retro. I’m doing it because I want this thing to be functional 50 years in the future, 100 years in the future. If you build batteries into something and you can’t replace them easily or at all — like my phone, it’s glued together with adhesive and has a built-in battery — it is going to be unusable in some single digit number of years. And I’m not really a fan of that.

That’s also the reason that Oculus Touch, the controllers I designed when I was at Oculus, use AA batteries. We didn’t use rechargeable because we didn’t want to deal with the fact that they were going to become an unusable thing that doesn’t power on anymore.

Batteries are not the end all be all, but when you’re building something, you have to think, is this something that will last? Is this something that will survive? And if you don’t ask that question, you should expect that it will be lost.

In your recent Tablet interview, you said, “Having fewer than 2.1 kids is traitorous to America.” How many kids would you like to have?

Well, you have to have at least 2.1 because that’s the replacement rate. I have one so far. I mean, I know it boils down to three. Like, hypothetically, I’d be okay with something like you and a group of friends all agree, and one out of 10 of you has to draw straws. If you really formalize it, I’d maybe be okay with that. But we cannot afford to be a deflating country.

People say, “But Palmer, what about immigration? What about bringing people in?” We are responsible for our own fate. We cannot outsource our future to the idea that hopefully people will come here forever and it will always be the best place. We cannot outsource our stability as a nation. And I’ll tell you this: we need a billion Americans because 500 million Americans is not enough to compete with billions of Chinese people, or billions of people in India, or anywhere else.

Eventually you shrink to being like Motorola. A company that was once large and once important, and now you’re economically irrelevant. The future of an America where people have one kid per couple is the future of Motorola. It’s a dead brand that technically still exists on paper, but everyone just goes about their day without thinking about them once. I’m not okay with that.

Can you describe the America that your grandkids will be living in, if everything goes to plan?

I like what Ronald Reagan said about being the shining city on the hill. It’s not just about being good in absolute terms. It’s about being a beacon to the rest of the world. I want the rest of the world to look to at us and say, that’s the best place. That’s what I need to be more like. We all need to be more like them, more like that.

I’m hoping my kids are able to grow up in a world where they can make their own decisions. I hope they’re able to grow up in a world where they can say what they believe is true. I hope they don’t end up on a deadbeat dad chain gang by my own hand. Wouldn’t that be a twist of fate? “Oh yeah, he ended up on one of the Luckey gangs, famously pushed by Palmer. Yeah, Prop 99, the chain gang act.” I hope for all of those things.

Maybe this is going to sound too trite, but I don’t think I need that expansive of a vision for America, because I think most people actually agree on the things we want, right? We want to be able to have families. We want to be able to entertain ourselves. We want to make cool things. We don’t want to be locked up in prison. I’m not one of those people who’s like, my vision of America is a transhumanist cyborg hivemind. I’d be pretty fine if like the 1960s version of America is the 2060s version of America, generally in shape and feel. I think that would probably be fine. I’d be okay if a bunch of Apollo astronauts came to the future before I died and said, “Yeah, this seems pretty good. This seems pretty good.”

Amazing, thank you so much.

It’s always good to see you, Mike. All right, I’m getting out of here. I have to go have dinner with my wife.

This interview has been edited for clarity.