A Conversation with Author of "Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan"

You got to hang out with the one and only Palmer Luckey. What was that like doing research for your article?

Well, like with most things, I spent a number of months or, you know, at least several weeks thinking and reading up about him. And, you know, partly why I wanted to write about him, it wasn't that tech founders were like a category of person that I wanted to cover. And I, you know, had 5 and narrowed it down to 3 and then chose Palmer. It was It was really just about Palmer specifically. I think mostly because, you know, I was familiar about the, with the Oculus history and his murky, bizarre exit from what was then Facebook. And, you know, that was back in the 2014 timeframe. And then around 2017, 2018, I was in the Army and I was deployed in the Middle East and Central Asia. And I had just started hearing about this company called Anduril. That had come out with this new software program called Lattice that was meshing, you know, sensor fusion with a bunch of other kind of AI technologies. And AI back then was not really much of a buzzword. It still seemed like, you know, kind of sci-fi, but also kind of a loser segment of the tech industry. But they were having a lot of kind of rapid early success with their AI software that was powering their Sentry Towers. Which got a contract with Customs and Border Patrol, and then they were moving into drones. So I got interested there, and then I just kind of always kept tabs on him. And the more I learned, the more I felt like he was a kind of, you know, more interesting and more misunderstood figure than I think people knew, even though, you know, at least in Silicon Valley, he had already reached kind of legend status.

Yeah, I mean, I already knew he was a legend and strange and peculiar in his own way. And definitely one of my heroes, I think, uh, in just how he approaches things. But reading the first few paragraphs of, of your article about Palmer, just how peculiar he is, you know, world's largest video collection that is in a, you know, former U.S. Air Force nuclear base, uh, the unenclosed toilet on the wall. What did you mean exactly by that? Is there like literally It's just, it's attached to the wall or what?

Yeah. I mean, I assume he wouldn't mind me answering that question since he showed it to me while we were on the record and everything, but you know, he's got this cool workshop garage where he's got his cars and his motorcycles and other kind of hardware that he works on. And on the basement level of that, he built an unenclosed toilet on the wall of his workspace. So I guess he can just, you know, be conducting his hardware modification experiments and then go and take a dump and then go right back to work. And I just thought it was one of those things that was just, you know, he's, uh, he's, you know, even though he's, he's 31 and he's a billionaire and he's founded two unicorns, there's a kind of boyish quality to the way he curates his life, which is charming.

There is, there's a boyish quality. There's a, um, you know, not following rules quality as well, as well, which makes him so special. It's like, you know, if he was living with his parents, they'd probably tell him, No, you can't have your toilet out there. But yeah, it's interesting the way you, you, the way you frame it is just his workshop. I think of like my grandpa just fixing motorcycles, except he's working on like drones and, you know, all this fancy stuff. So just a normal dude with a, you know, billionaire, right? Yeah. Do you, do you think Palmer, does he purposely portray himself as, as like a supervillain kind of character, you know, the wolf, I guess you could say.

You know, I got the sense that he had spent the first 5 years of his success, so we're talking roughly age 19 to 24, being a whiz kid and being everybody's favorite whiz kid, including at Facebook and everywhere else. And I think while it lasted, he probably enjoyed it, right? There's a part in the piece where I talked to Trey Stephens of Founders Fund and of Vandal, and, you know, he kind of theorized that Palmer has this innate, inborn sense of vengeance and desire to be the supervillain. And when I told Palmer about that, he, you know, he didn't disagree, but he kind of qualified it a little bit by saying before he got fucked at Facebook, he had no desire to go after people or to seek vengeance or to do any of the— anything like that. He was, you know, happy delighting people with the toys that he was making and his reputation for being this kind of magical wonder kid, you know. And, and at least the way he tells it is he developed that kind of supervillain superego later on after he got screwed over. And which has been useful to his work in a field like defense technology. All of that said, as you know, I also cover in the piece, his favorite character growing up was Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh!, who is definitely the anti-hero of the series and is a brilliant kind of, you know, hardware engineer and has a weapons manufacturing empire and builds virtual reality video games. So you know, we started from what I understand following that when, you know, he was as young as 6 years old. So there's something longstanding.

Yeah, I particularly love the line from the piece, and I'm quite concerned that I'm doing what I was programmed to do when I was 8 years old. If you like Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Power Rangers, can you really do anything except build virtual reality and tools of violence to enact your aims while feeling superior? Probably not, he said. You probably just have to do it. I absolutely love that. As a kid growing up, you know, Pokémon, just kind of going on adventures, right? And then Phineas and Ferb as I got a little older. And every day, like, the whole plot of that show is, you know, what are we gonna do today? Let's have an adventure. And, and that was always my goal, was like, get to a place where I could just have adventures on the internet and, and make stuff every day. And it's, it's interesting how the, the early stuff kind of programs us.

Uh, the kind of question of free will is something that was clearly on his mind and kind of came out unprovoked. And it came up a few times in the time we spent together. And it's, you know, something that clearly he thinks about a lot is, is he actually as free as he feels he needs to be or likes to think he is? Or is he actually kind of living out a predetermined script that was curated when he was a young boy? And, you know, it ended up kind of becoming a major theme of of the profile. How free is he? Does it really matter how free you are? Are there things that are actually more important than free will, etc.?

Yeah, that is really interesting. I mean, like you said, uh, he would have rather been making toys, uh, so, so how free are you if, uh— but there's this idea of like, uh, it's Venkatesh Rao, if you're familiar with the writer, uh, great writer. Had him on my podcast a couple years ago, and Uh, it's this idea of like, would you rather be an obvious wolf or a wolf in sheep's clothing? Personally, I've always preferred be the obvious wolf. Say the savage things, make the, make the memes, do the silly stuff. Don't pretend to be something I'm not. And I, I think, I think Palmer is definitely that, the obvious wolf where he is wolf, right? He's up for vengeance. And, uh, I, I think it's underrated, man. Like I spoke to some high schoolers this week. You know, 30 high school kids all building tech companies, startups. And I told them like, you gotta be okay making enemies, you know, like your life is like a movie. Would you rather be some boring movie or would you rather go out there, make some enemies and, and be the hero? Uh, if you're not making any enemies, probably not a good thing. Uh, I've always, always stood by that.

Yeah, I, I've seen Palmer talk in some other forums with you know, Defense Department, Air Force, Navy SEAL types, and, you know, in forums where they also have the heads of the defense primes, the more traditional defense contractors. And you can imagine the kinds of people who become CEO of Lockheed Martin. They're quite different from someone like Palmer. But you also probably won't be that surprised to hear that at the end of a forum or a panel or a talk like that, who's the person that everybody in the audience, all the military officers, all the people who— all the program executive officers in the Pentagon, who do they all want to talk to? It's Palmer. And it's the reason is because they can sense he's clearly the one who's willing to be the most frank and the most honest. And even if they disagree with him or they think he's wrong, that's valuable, you know?

Yeah. And Palmer's definitely made some enemies along the way. Obviously, Zuck, you think of Zuck, he's definitely the wolf in sheep's clothing.

I'd say I did think it was interesting that You know, he provided a statement for this story. It was the first public comment he's made about Palmer in, you know, nearly 8 years. You don't quite know how to read that. Was it a kind of olive branch where he was willing to in some way acknowledge this in public? And the kind of last line of the statement was, you know, to the effect of, I hope we get the chance to work together again. That could just be like corporate PR bullshit nonsense, or, you know, you could kind of read it as a tacit nuanced acknowledgement that maybe something went wrong.

Yeah. Yeah, it seems like Zuck has changed a lot. I mean, he seems pretty happy person right now, so maybe there are some regrets. I'm not sure. I'm curious, what do you think is the place in tech journalism right now? Because there's been a lot of hatred for journalism in general by the same people who actually were the ones retweeting and posting your article, right? And, uh, I thought that was very special in my opinion, when you see people who hate on journalism for 2 years and then they're like, okay, this one's good. And I felt the same way. I mean, I'm, I was a reporter and, uh, switched to the dark side of writing for founders, uh, because it's, I like that. But, uh, yeah, I, I read your piece. I was like, wow, this is one of the first good, good tech journalism pieces I've read in years. So it was awesome, man. I really—

no, I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think tech journalism has just been in the same place as all other journalism. It's a dumpster fire. It's bleeding money. It's attracting a very particular kind of person who's much more concerned with status and perceived influence than they are with making money or having job stability, which selects for a very peculiar kind of person that tends to come out of the Ivy League and tends to have wealthy parents. I'm generalizing. Generalizing grossly, obviously there's lots of exceptions to this, but, you know, and I think the traditional media outlets, including the tech ones, were, you know, shocked and humiliated by the total destruction of their business models by Google and by Facebook and by all the rest. And this set up a kind of what they think of as a principled adversarial relationship with the tech platforms that they see as profiting off of the content they generate. And there's a version of that story that you could tell that is true. It's still, I think, their fault for not recognizing this in the early 2000s, you know, just being too stupid to recognize what was going to happen. But, you know, you will never, almost never read, you know, an admiring or even fair assessment of tech founder or tech company in like the New York Times or whatever, unless that person or that company is heavily associated with giving lots of money to the correct political candidate or the correct political party. Palmer obviously being on the complete opposite end of that, right? It doesn't get any worse than, you know, getting caught donating to Trump and then being outspoken about your support for Trump later on. And I think that was kind of what interested me in the first place, not the fact that he supports Trump, that I feel like is neither here nor there. I don't give a shit. It's not particularly interesting. 75 million Americans voted for Trump last time. It's clearly not like a niche opinion, but it was more the, you know, the way in which his, what I see as kind of earnest interest in virtual reality, uh, and being in that, in that tech for all the right reasons got destroyed for reasons that I think are quite obviously nonsense and how that changed him and how that led to his second unicorn.

Yeah, yeah, it was quite biased, unfortunately, and most of the media landscape is at this point. But it was, it was very refreshing to read something that was techno-optimistic, was, was admiring of a tech leader, especially somebody like Palmer. A lot of people still are against the idea of working in defense, which is really fucked up in my opinion, where like somebody's got to do it. It's important, like, you know, supporting The military, like, is not a bad thing. Like, we need one, obviously. And, uh, we've hit this point of, like, wokeness where, you know, even if you are, uh, just supporting a Palmer who builds weapons, like, you're a bad person. It's like, oh, we shouldn't have those at all. And it's, it's, it's very frustrating. Um, but I feel like the tech community has been largely moving back towards, you know, pro-defense. And I mean, that's where tech has its roots. Silicon Valley has its roots, obviously, like government contracting and working in defense.

Yeah, exactly. Steve Steve Blank, the Stanford professor and entrepreneur who I spoke to in the piece, he has a great lecture that your listeners can look up on YouTube about the history of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the Defense Department, how it evolved over time. He doesn't go into kind of how it fell apart quite as much. But, you know, there are some legitimate reasons or reasons that you can, you know, at least sympathize with for how it started to break down. During the Vietnam War, how, you know, kind of techno-optimistic engineers did not want to be working with the Pentagon at that particular point in time for that particular war. But then there was this like weird carryover effect where the Cold War ends. American companies by and large start thinking of themselves not as American companies, but as global companies that do not have any particular loyalty or responsibility to the United States. You know, this was the era when we're rewriting WTO laws to accommodate China. There's a stampede of American investment into China. Uh, and so, you know, you get all of that culminating in— after 2010, you get this new generation of engineers graduating from college who come up in, you know, a much more woke politically correct ethos. And so you get the two kind of meshing together. And, you know, one of the things I mentioned in the piece is the well-known Project Maven at Google. You know, everyone knows the part of the story where the Google employees demanded that Google withdraw from the project because they did not want to be building, you know, drone footage technology for the Pentagon, the kind of more forgotten part of the story is just like within the same, you know, couple of months, Google had announced that it was going to work with the Chinese government at an artificial intelligence research facility in Beijing, which of course got no protest from inside of Google at all.

Insane. Insane. Google is, uh, God, I can't imagine working there. It seems terrible. How do you like working at Tablet? What's that been like? Um, how long have you been there? And I didn't realize Actually, you were in the Army as well. So going from Army to journalism is a rare breed these days. I mean, that's some Hemingway shit.

Yeah. Yeah. It used to be a more common pipeline than it is. Yeah, I was in the Army for 5 and a half years, and then I was actually in the State Department for a year and a half right after that. And then I actually had no particular interest in like a career in journalism or anything for the same reasons we just discussed, right? It's a terrible field to go into. Especially, you know, if you care about job stability or, you know, having colleagues that you can trust or whatever. But I was really interested in Tablet. I love Tablet. The story there is started out as a Jewish magazine in 2009. The basic idea was, you know, the internet was going to eviscerate all of these Jewish magazines and newspapers that had been around since like the late 19th century in the English-speaking world. Tablet was going to be the kind of clearinghouse for all of that talent. And that's how it started out. And then it kind of ballooned over time. It eventually became just a national general interest American magazine that has a Jewish identity and a pro-Zionist bent. On any given day, you look at the magazine, there might, it might be all Jewish content. It might be no Jewish content. A piece like the Palmer piece is kind of typical, right? Where it's like, on its face, it's like, why is this a Tablet story? What does any of this have to do with Tablet? But, you know, if you make it through what turned out to be a very long piece, I go into kind of the implications for. Israel and what Anduril's technology might and might not mean after October 7th and so forth. So Tablet's great. It's the best magazine in America. It's insulated from a lot of the bullshit that you see elsewhere.

And yeah, yeah, we talk a little bit more about that actually. So yeah, it was, it was interesting how in the beginning of the piece you mentioned, I think, pro-Zionism maybe once, and then you don't hear about Jewish stuff for the next 30 to 45 minutes of reading the piece, right? It's probably an hour-long piece. It took me around that. And, uh, and then at the end, kind of tying that back in, I thought that was just very well done where anybody could enjoy it, not just Jews, um, and why it had a broader appeal.

But yeah, I think it's, it's a quintessentially American story, and even more than that, maybe a quintessentially Southern California story. That draws on an American cultural history that was very good to Jews and very hospitable to Jews. And when that started to come apart in the last 10 to 15 years, you know, it affects lots of different kinds of people, Jews being one constituency that I think suffers from the degradation of American national identity being this big tent where lots of different kinds of people of different faiths and ethnicities and backgrounds and geographical locations and all that can all kind of be a part of the same national identity that powered us through World War II and the Cold War and the, in the early post-Cold War era. And so, you know, I think it's kind of of natural interest to Jews, even though it's more narrowly you know, a, an America and a Southern California story where, you know, Palmer is at the center of it.

Yeah. Yeah. It definitely, uh, American dream, uh, Palmer. Uh, I mean, living in a, what, a trailer park? I love how he was homeschooled. I wanna homeschool my kids. I talked to my wife about that. Um, it was like, I don't know, I think it gives you more creative freedom. Um, but I'm curious, uh, what, uh, what new articles are you working on? Anything else cooking?

Probably nothing I can quite talk about yet, but it's, It'll probably come out at some point before the election. Basically going to be covering some of the weirdness behind the US-led negotiations between Israel and Lebanon over this maritime border issue and how it factors into US relations with Iran and the lead up to October 7th. There are some figures in the, in the US government that had a lot of overlap with this and also with Ukraine policy. In the second Obama administration term. So, you know, I think a kind of interesting story of American foreign policy being driven by people with, you know, primarily personal and domestic interests. So we'll, we'll see when that comes out.

Yeah. I'm curious, what has kind of been your thought process around the PR war of Israel, Zionism? In general. It's been very weird to see Zionism get turned into an insult. Uh, I mean, maybe it was before, but growing up, you know, I'm not super religious, but I was in BBYO, like Jewish youth groups and stuff, and like being a Zionist was like the best thing you could do, right? I lived in Jerusalem for 3 months. I spent a lot of time in Israel, and, uh, it's weird, like now on Instagram, uh, when I go viral, I look very Jewy. And so people comment and call me a Zionist, like that's an insult and it's not an insult. Like I'm not insulted by it. I think the Jews deserve a homeland and need a safe space. So what's kind of been your thought process around the PR war, uh, around this kind of stuff? It's been weird.

Yeah. I mean, Israel's been losing the PR war on multiple fronts for decades. Uh, you could even say that Jews have been losing the PR war for thousands of years. So this is definitely something that we're not good at. I mean, the particular issue of Zionism, you know, this is relatively new in America. It has a very long history, 100-year history in the Soviet Union. Stalin, interestingly, was Israel's earliest backer and armed the Jews of Palestine with Czech weapons in 1947 and 1948 to fight against the you know, at that time, British-backed Arabs. And he saw it as a way of kind of breaking Anglo-American power in the Middle East. This quickly got scuppered after Israel, you know, although socialist, was clearly going to be a Western-aligned democracy and then becomes a more formal American ally in the 1970s. But there's a long, long history of Zionism being an epithet in Soviet propaganda and, you know, all the associated communists and other far-left intellectuals in France and elsewhere in Western Europe. It's a relatively new or comparatively new import into American discourse. I mean, you're right, in the 1990s, the number of people who would consider, you know, someone being a Zionist being equivalent to someone being a racist or something would have, you know, that was very, very limited to a small number of academics. The fact that it's now kind of the default position of maybe an entire generation, a dominant part of the most powerful political party, that's pretty new. Um, the, the way I generally think about it is, you know, the Democratic Party— I don't mean to get too political, by the way, if this is something your, your, your listeners are not interested in. Um, and I, I mean this all as descriptively and objectively as I see it. I don't mean this necessarily in a personally disapproving way, but the Democratic coalition was made by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and it hadn't been remade in a very, very long time. And the person who did remake it was Obama, and he was right that it did need to be remade because America was a different country. The economy was completely different. The political coalitions in the North and in the South, in manufacturing and services, had all changed completely. Labor unions were much weaker. You know, grad students didn't used to be like a political constituency in Cold War America. Now it like, it clearly is, right? Because we produce way too many of them. So Obama remade the Democratic Party along lines that made a lot more sense for America in the 21st century. But I do think ways in which it was remade along kind of sectarian symbolic representation. So, you know, these slots go to these people and these slots go to these people. You know, maybe under the previous Democratic Party, you would have thought it's like, it's union workers, it's immigrants, it's Jews, it's, you know, whatever else. In the New Democratic Party, it's like Jews have been swapped out for Palestinians. Maybe trans have been swapped in for gay people. Grad students have been swapped in for autoworkers. Illegal immigrants have been swapped in for migrants. So there's just, there's been a lot of shakeup. And I do think the Jews are the big kind of losers of, of this political realignment within the party. And Zionism now becoming definitionally you know, synonymous with racism and with sexism and with transphobia and all of that is kind of a natural outgrowth of that. And I don't personally think it's a good thing, but there we are.

No, I don't think so either. Um, I don't know if you're familiar with Zach Sage Fox. Um, he is a comedian, uh, influencer kind of guy, Jewish. You've probably seen his stuff. He goes, uh, did Gaza University where he he, you know, interviews, uh, kids.

Oh yeah, I know this guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zach's great. So I, uh, I met Zach the other day and, um, yeah, might be a good, good interview for the tablet actually. He is just so passionate. He went into, uh, Ramallah actually in Gaza and stuff like that to, to film and interview people. Um, very brave and, uh, passionate kid. Uh, well, I guess not kid, he's a couple years older than me, but yeah, I, I think something that he talked a lot about, which I think is not a lot of other people think about this that aren't Jewish, is like, it's an algorithmic war. And what there's more of is what the algorithm pushes. And we are a very tiny part of the population. Like, people who are not Jewish who are listening to this, you might think that Jews are— there's a lot of us, but like, we're what, 0.1% of America? Like, even smaller, maybe. Like less than 10, 20 million total, I think. I don't know the exact stats. Meanwhile, the Arab world that hates Jews, and, and a lot of them, there's billions, right? And so in this algorithmic war, you know, the social media platforms push what there's more of. And why it's more and more important for Jews to be speaking out about this kind of stuff and, and sharing their thoughts. And, and what motivates Zach actually to be making these crazy comedy videos is because that's the only way to break through a lot of the time, the memes, the comedy. Like, that's the only way to break through all the noise, you know.

That's interesting. I mean, just think about, you know, if World War II had been algorithmically driven in the way that you're talking about. Not to compare it at all with the current war in Gaza, because it's a stupid comparison, but just imagine, right? Like, by the time Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945, there had been rumors about the Holocaust, there had been some reports, there had been whispering about it, but no one No one knew the full scale of what was going on, right? Because it was mostly being done, you know, without our current technologies, but also, you know, largely in secret about what was actually going on at these camps. Then on the flip side of that, imagine, you know, an algorithmically driven war where the United States and the British Air Force are firebombing Dresden, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Obviously, you know, the firebombing of Tokyo, the, the, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, you just imagine if we'd had current technologies back then, it would be incredibly easy to portray the Allies in the war as by far more responsible for more civilian casualties, for unnecessary civilian deaths, for rampaging murder, all while, you know, the crimes being committed by the Axis were being kind of deranked by the algorithm or whatever. It's, I mean, to fi— I mean, this is, I think, one of the things that the Israelis have had to do and that they'll always have to do. Like, they, you can't actually fight a real war that way. But it's, I think it's that, that front of the war is probably one they're never going to.

Yeah. I think at a certain point they've given up on trying to win the PR war. It's like, let's just win the real war because that's actually more important. Um, and we're never going to win. The hearts of people who hate us. So we just got to stay alive. You know, it's definitely sad seeing some of the images out of Palestine, but it's war. Like, this is, this is war. And there are going to be winners and losers. And that is, that's just a natural cause of war. It's weird. I don't think people were— maybe they were, maybe I'm totally wrong, but I don't think people were protesting, you know, the nuclear bomb drops as much. Maybe they were, I don't know. Um, but when you see— yeah, maybe it's just the algorithmic thing, uh, and the sad images everywhere where people are hating on us. Um, I'm curious, to change topics just for a bit, um, what, uh, what, what kind of books have most inspired you? What kind of writing has inspired your writing as well?

Oh gosh, man, I guess, uh, Well, for magazine writing, which is its own genre, and I would say is the quintessential American form of nonfiction writing, is long-form magazine writing. We, we kind of invented it. And not totally, but I think it's ours, right? You know, from kind of Mark Twain, uh, Ralph Ellison, uh, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, uh, David Foster Wallace, David Samuels, one of the greatest magazine writers ever is, you know, I have the privilege of working with at Tablet. He's our literary editor. He also runs a kind of 19th century style print-only newspaper called County Highway, which I highly recommend. So those are all the kind of classics of magazine writing. God, there's so much. I mean, anything I'd say here would just be so cliché because I think the, the typical Western canon is more or less accurate, right? Like those really are like the 200 best books ever written, you know. Uh, Moby Dick, Proust, all that, you know, uh, all that kind of stuff is, is it really is spot on.

Yeah. The Western canon. I just finished up, uh, Patrick Radden Keefe's, uh, some of his work. Uh, I think Rogues it's called.

How'd you like it?

So good, man. Like a fantastic writer. And then I read Snakehead about, um, some of the, the smuggling. Human trafficking into New York. I do think the art of magazine writing is really, really cool. And in the long-form pieces that you're able to do, the profiles— like, I grew up reading GQ and Wired profiles a lot, and I do miss that a lot in tech and feel like Wired is definitely tired. There's none of that.

Yeah, GQ, Wired, Esquire, The New Yorker— I mean, this was kind of their bread and butter, you know, in the 1990s were these long stylish profiles of weird interesting people. Yeah, none of them quite do anymore, but I was glad to see there's still a market for it, right? Like, I had no idea— is this— is anyone going to read a 15,000-word profile of this defense technology founder? Is anyone going to care? And, you know, I think at least at Tablet we felt vindicated by the fact that— and, you know, we can see like time on site, are people just clicking on it or they're actually reading it. It's like, man, people actually read it. Like, that's, that's fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, you, you did a fantastic job hooking people in there. It was, it was so good. Yeah. I, I miss those. And I wonder, I think there's a lot of writers now doing individual pieces. You know, I have my newsletter, whether it's Substack, whether it's whatever it might be. Um, I'd love to see some more of those detailed profiles. I, I wonder if also part of it is like, we know so much more about people today from like social media and podcasts. Like, is there a reason to do as much? And I think your article proves there, there still is, for sure.

Well, it's like part of the, the Martin Gurri book is, you know, part of what the internet has done is it's informed us so much more about public figures. And the more you know about basically any public figure, the less you like them the less impressive they are, the more demented or deranged they seem, right? And so this has actually made the reading public or the voting public or whatever else much more cynical about anybody who's achieved a certain level of success. And so, you know, part of what I wanted to do with the piece was not to deny or avoid any of the shortcomings that someone like Palmer has, but You know, this is part of what I think is so appealing to so many people about Elon, right, is that he does not try to virtue signal away his shortcomings or his weaknesses, right? His— all of his weaknesses are right on the surface, and, and his ego is paper thin, right? I think his critics try to use that to be like, see, he's a hypocrite, he's a liar, he's whatever. But I think for most normal people, they see that and that's, that's the part of them that they actually connect with, right? And so people who are willing to be vulnerable in that way, I think, you know, they open themselves up more to attack, but they also open themselves up more to people developing some sort of earnest, authentic connection with them.

Yeah, yeah. Vice signaling is a lot more trustworthy, uh, than virtue signaling, I find. And, uh, if you're willing to share your vices or just some of your, your struggles and whatever it might be, like, ah, man, it is such a more real connection. Cause you know, like you're just having fun. You're just being you. You're not trying to please people necessarily. And I, I think definitely a super powerful, not just like PR strategy, just like a social media strategy in general for, for anybody is like sharing those kind of moments and, and dark side. Like I, I have no problem cursing. I have no problem, you know. Memes or, you know, sex humor, like whatever it might be. I think a lot of people are afraid to do that right now. And showing that is powerful. Not hiding it makes you more trustworthy in general. I have one more question. Are you going to extend this into a book by any chance? Is there a Palmer book coming?

I got an offer. I don't know. I don't quite know. I mean, And, you know, part of that would depend on his participation. But it's just kind of thinking a bit more about it. Maybe the way to do a book is to really write more about the history of the rise and decline of California told through the early biography of Palmer Luckey. Part of the weird framing about a straight biography is that Palmer's 31 and he's, he's really just kind of in the middle of things or maybe even at the beginning of things. Right? So it's like, it feels a little too early, although, you know, I guess it's been done, right? Ashley Vance had that great biography about Elon. I think that was maybe, you know, even before Tesla got, got going and before SpaceX had won its first big contract. So it's doable, but, uh, you know, maybe there's a way to couch him in a larger—

that's really interesting. I think the, the rise and fall of SF especially too would be very poignant for what's been going on and definitely be able to capture the heart and mind of like pro-capitalism people, which is a lot of us actually. It turns out capitalism's not that bad. Well, I hope it comes and if it does happen, I also think a movie about Palmer Luckey, a young Palmer as a boy in a movie would just be amazing. He would be pretty sick. I'd watch that movie. So, man, I really appreciate it.