Joe Lonsdale

And so probably what you'd want to do with a satellite is you'd want to blast this, and you'd blast it a certain number of miles away. And then you could just adjust slightly and the thing's not going to know how to hit you. Same thing, a cargo plane's a better example, probably, right?

So I think if you've got a big, slow cargo plane and the bad guy's trying to take it out, which is key for contested logistics, you can put one of these on it. You know, you always see the movie where the missile's trying to follow the guy. You blast the missile. Now it's a dumb missile. And then you turn.

So there's things like that we're probably going to be doing for defendant planes and things like that. Wow. So these... These might be deployed on planes. I think some version of these will definitely be deployed on planes at some point if we're going to be having battles. Now, the question is what type of planes and drones we have or use in 10 years.

But yeah, you definitely want cargo planes no matter what, I think. So you definitely use them.

Boat ships are... I mean, our company Ceronic, which is building the, you know, hopefully thousands and thousands of these smart, autonomous, weaponized vessels you're going to want. That could be one of the things you put on an autonomous vessel, obviously, during a battle is to be able to go around and turn things off with this. So I think you're going to have stuff like that, too.

So the ones that are Leonidas is a certain size, which takes out a certain distance. It's much farther. If you wanted to, for example, if, for example, this was put in an Androil Roadrunner, if we did that kind of partnership, there's only a small cone inside the Roadrunner.

So there's only a certain amount of stuff you could put in there that might only shoot things effectively like 20 or 30 meters, for example. But that might be okay because the Roadrunner can fly up, fly next to the swarm, and shoot a bunch of times, then go back and land again. I love that video that Palmer made with the guys on that. It's such a cool weapon.

So combining it with stuff like that would be great. Man, can you go into the Roadrunner a little bit? So I'm lucky to be an early investor in Android. Brian Schimpf, Trey Stephens, Matt Grimm, a bunch of our superstars from Palantir co-founded this with my friend Palmer. Palmer before had started Oculus, was the VR company. And I actually backed him at the beginning of that. He was like,

crazy kid, like 20, 21 years old. We met him and he had this prototype and we're like, this is too crazy. Let's give him a little bit of money though. It's so impressive. And then we actually co-led the next round because it was starting to work and then Facebook bought it. And he very famously got kicked out of Facebook for being a Republican. That's a longer conversation. What?

You didn't know about this? I didn't know that. Yeah, no, he put up a billboard against Hillary and was outspoken. I mean, listen, you're all of a sudden a billionaire in your mid-20s and you have opinions and it's right in the middle of woke Silicon Valley. So Facebook's famously on the other side of it. So they just attacked him like crazy and all these people were really nasty to him.

A lot of people have come out from Facebook and apologized to him now because he's now this really important leader in our country doing great things and they realized they were wrong to treat him that way. So it's like a whole saga in his life of being beaten down and out and discarded. Not badly, he's a billionaire. Just because we're talking about Palmer, I was at his wedding.

You're not going to like this, maybe. I was at his wedding, and I was sitting next to Peter Thiel and Senator Cruz and all these people, and it's a beautiful, beautiful wedding. He's a very wealthy guy when he's getting married. And all of a sudden, all the music goes off, and Top Gun music comes on, and then a helicopter flies over us. We don't know who it was.

And it lands behind, and Palmer's flying it. He comes out in tails, and he never dresses up nicely. The helicopter goes away, and then the normal music comes back on. His wife comes in normally with her dad. But that's the kind of guy. He's just hilarious. Damn, that's awesome. He's basically America's Iron Man. He's a hilarious inventor guy. Amazing guy.

So he invented all this hardware for the first real VR in America that worked. And then... And then he partners with my Palantir guys and they start Yanderel. And so Yanderel has all these crazy cool products and they're running circles around the primes. They're basically like the next new prime, right? They just raised like billions of dollars at like, you know, 15, $20 billion valuation range.

And so one of their new products, which is amazing, It reminds me of Elon's rockets. It's a missile that can open up, launch, and if it's not used, it comes back and lands and waits and gets used again. Which is not something that I think the generals knew to ask for, but if you think about warfare, it's all about dollars per effectiveness.

If you have a bunch of things attacking you, fire 50 of these things, use 10 or 20 if you need, and have the other ones come back and use them again. It's way better, right? And by the way, this thing is like a tiny fraction of the cost of similar competitive missiles. He's literally competing against stuff that costs, depending on what it is, one to three million.

I think we're selling them for 250k now and still have much better margins than our other guys. Which is why you want to let people not do cost plus, because you want to have them re-engineer from scratch, what makes the most sense. Because if you charge someone cost plus, your job is to make it as expensive as possible because you get to keep a piece of that cost.

But if you don't charge cost plus, then you have this whole better framework.

There's still some really, really amazing expertise in our military industrial base. It's like America's military industrial base that's important and that exists inside some of these primes. I don't want to say they're not going away. We don't want them to go away. As much as the military industrial complex, like you talked about, is an issue,

you have some stuff we need to know how to do to keep America safe and to be the best in the world. And so these companies are going to be important, but in terms of anything really new and innovative, anything with really hard software, they just don't have the cultures they used to have. And they don't have the top people they used to have, for most things.