Transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation (Palmer Luckey and an interviewer) discussing the morality of building defense technology. The speakers acknowledge that such products can kill people, debate the necessity of someone doing the work, and Palmer Luckey cites a Norwegian armed forces recruiting commercial to argue that the goal is deterrence — hoping nothing happens.
I need to ask you about the morality part of this.
Please do.
Someone has to do what you're doing.
That's right.
I believe someone has to do it. And maybe that's your answer. But part of you has to be okay knowing that your products are going to kill people.
How do you. True.
What's. What is that? What's that conversation like internally?
You know, Norway actually did an armed forces recruiting commercial that I think put it better than almost anyone can. I should send you a link. This incredible. And they do this commercial and has all this soaring music and it says like, you need to join the Norwegian military, you know, and why do you need to join? Why do we need you to fly fighter jets? Why do we need you to man all these tanks? Why do we need you to become a precision marksman that can take out a guy at 10 kilometers? You know, what are we hoping is going to happen? Nothing.
Nothing.
That's what we're hoping for. And so on the one hand, yeah, you're building things. You have to be aware. Yeah, this is designed specifically to either destroy ships, kill people, blow up tanks, whatever it is. But the flip side of it is I think the people who are doing it are the ones who have the most invested in making sure that doesn't happen. Right. Like the US is not engaged in any large scale conflicts. Your whole bet is that you spook the other guy so that they never need to get used. I know everyone at my company, that's how they feel. Nobody's there saying, like, I'm so stoked that my thing gets to kill people. It's like, I'm so stoked that I get to build the thing that is so good that the other guy is so terrified of it that he's not willing to step over that line. People will come from time to time. They're like, what's the morality here? Do we really want to build tools that are so powerful? And I say, look, do you want NATO to have squirt guns or rifles? At some point you have to say, you know what? We're not going to keep these dictators from expanding their power unless you meet them with credible threat of violence. It's the only language they understand. Have you heard of the idea of the end of history? It was this idea that was popular almost a century ago, Pre World War II. There were people who were saying, ah, well, post World War I, economic intertanglement on the European continent means that war in Europe is impossible. It's the end of history, that the lines will Never be redrawn. The countries, their borders are fixed. War is an impossibility forever. Now and then. I think people after World War II realized that was bunk. I'd say pre UK Ukraine war, there were a lot of people who told me and they told my company, you're wasting your time. Because in the modern world, countries are so economically intermeshed through international trade. You know, you have Germany buying billions of dollars in Russian oil and gas. You have America buying many billions of dollars in Chinese electronics. In a world like that, war is just impossible. It's not even worth thinking about. They'd say war is outdated. US Military isn't needed when the United nations can just write a really sternly worded letter. And, and of course, Ukraine showed that that was all bunk and that we don't live at the end of history, that there is still a lot to come. And until we live at the end of history, we're going to need weapons. And I prefer that the good ones are in the hands of the good guys and there's people who disagree with me. I'll tell you my very big picture, and this is going to sound mean, but here's what it really is. The people who think that we don't need weapons and that we don't need a better military than Russia and China, they are only able to have that belief, that crazy, irrational belief that doesn't make any sense in the real world because there's so many people around them who understand what the real world looks like. It's a. It's a luxury belief. If everyone thought like they did, we'd be screwed overnight. They're only able to have that opinion because Russia knows that most Americans don't agree with them. They're only able to have that opinion because they know that most NATO allies don't agree with that. And. And so, I mean, God forbid that those views ever become pervasive, because I'll tell you, the second they do is the second that China invades Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, the list goes on and on. The second that they believe. The average NATO member is a person who thinks, oh, I don't think it's right to build strong weapons, that's when they move on.
