Palmer Luckey

And then what you're really competing with is what they have in three years after they look at what you've built as you start to eat some of their customers.

And then they're going to build something in response.

So you got to kind of think two or three steps ahead with these things.

And if you've built something that's totally different, they're going to have a very hard time adapting to it.

Maybe one good way to look at it is it's a lot like bacterial infection.

If you build something that is the same shape as existing things, it's going to be a lot easier to get infected.

If you can build something that is a radically different structure, it's much harder for people to copy what you're doing or attack what you're doing.

It mostly comes down to an incentives problem.

Everyone has the wrong incentives and organizations and people and organisms usually do what they are incentivized to do.

So government bureaucrats don't get fired for doing things the way that their predecessor did them, even if that's the wrong way to be doing them.

There's not competition in many of these government agencies.

So it's not like they're worried about a more efficient competitor.

There's no FDA II and Pentagon II that's competing with them and trying to drive down costs and accelerate schedule.

The incentives on the government side are out of whack.

The incentives on the private contractor side have been created by government, which largely is awarding cost plus contracts, which incentivize contractors then to have high costs, to build the most expensive systems they can justify, to never reuse work.

Because if you reuse something you've already built in the past, you're not getting the plus on the cost of building a brand new thing.

And so I'm not saying that people wake up saying, ah, I'm screwing taxpayers today.

But you naturally build an entire organization that is incentivizing people to spend as much as possible.

and to do work over and over again as many times as can be justified.

That combination of things was really the problem.