Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones | SRS #171

[Music] Palmer, lucky welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so incredibly stoked to be here.

I'm ped to have you here. It's so different when it's not on a screen, yeah, know. Do you watch it? Do you watch the show?

So I don't watch podcasts regularly in general, but I I I I've seen yours from time to time. Of course, I had to tune in for Trump, um, and uh, it's just it's it's it's a, you know, I'm a virtual reality guy, and so you know I understand the difference between thing that's on a flat screen versus 3D, but it's it's just so cool to to be here in person.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. We'll do the next one in VR. We'll teach me how to do it.

Well, I would love to be the first one to do that. I I I'll set it up. I'll set it up right on. Yeah, so we you're a tech Titan, and uh, we had Joe Lonsdale on a couple months ago. Amazing human, amazing, and people should just know my bias: Joe is one of the First Investors in my first company, Oculus. So back when I was a teenager, he put millions of dollars into my company at a time where very few people did. This was his last VC firm, Formation 8, which has now kind of evolved into 8VC. So uh, I I I love I love Joe, and uh, I like to think Joe loves me, and we've had a really we've had a really productive and profitable relationship over the years.

Very cool. Well, he was a fascinating interview, and then and then you came up up, and I was like, dude, we got we've got to get this guy. He's like the Tony Stark but real. So Tony Stark, except Tony Stark got out of building weapons and I moved into it, so you know we're a little bit in reverse, but uh, but I I I I I like I like the comparison.

Yeah, yeah. Well, everybody starts off with an introduction here, so here we go: Palmer Lucky, from a from garage inv venor to Silicone Valley Titan, a true innovator and disruptor in technology and defense. Founded Anduril Industries in 2017 to radically transform defense capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing AI with the latest Hardware advancements across many domains. Designer of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and founder of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion. Attended Golden West College in Long Beach City College at the age of 14 and studied at California State University Long Beach before dropping out to build Oculus VR.

That seems to be like a that seems to be the thing with all of you Tech innovators, as you drop out of school. And the only difference between me and all the other Tech guys is they were mostly going to school for Tech degrees. I was, if you can believe it, a journalism major. I was the online editor, the Daily 49er, which was the Cal State LA. Be sh me going to do journalism? Not I was going to do journalism. I was even as a teenager are frustrated with the state of Journalism in America, particularly technology journalism. I think the thing that radicalized me was this CNN piece about a uh about this, I think this was back when you had the the iCloud hacks, and they were reporting on how forchan was affiliated with it, and uh, they had this technology analyst who's paid six figures, which was a lot of money at the time, you know, when I was going to school. He paid six figures to live in New York City and analyze technology, and the anchor says, so who is this for Chan? And I'm like, oh my God, what this is this nuts? And then what does he say? He says, well, we don't know the details yet, but he's some kind of system administrator, someone who knows his way around computers and how to hack things. I was like, oh my God, like technology journalism is going down the, and I wanted to be part I wanted to be part of the solution. So it's it's a I'm glad that I I'm glad I decided to build technology rather than uh report on it. I think being the man in the arena is a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding. But yeah, it's interesting to imagine a world where where I'd be I'd be in your chair.

Yeah, yeah. Well, who knows, maybe one day, maybe one day when I'm all when I'm all when I'm all old and used up, I can I can I can uh I can uh I I can get my own studio, and I I'll have you on.

Cool, known for your unconventional approach, love for gadgets, and belief in using technology to push boundaries, whether for entertainment or national security. So man, I don't even I mean we're going to do a life story on you. Fascinating human being, I can already tell with what the 30 minutes that you've been here, just when we're down shooting the thumbnails, and and uh blessed to have an interesting life. So couple of couple of off-the-wall things that came up there down there. So you are look, we had a little conspiracy theory talk down there. We talking about Trudeau and Castro, and let's go into that before we get we'll jump right into the crazy. All right, so I mean I look I'll I'll put my I'll put my biases right out there: I think Justin Trudeau is Castro's son, but you can almost set that aside because that's not the issue I really care about. Like, is it really Castro's fault uh sorry is it really Trudeau's fault if he's Castro's son? Like I don't believe in the sins of the father, right? I mean I I like I don't think he really should necessarily have to live his life burdened by that if it was true. Like I can understand why someone would want to hide that, and like that's one issue. I'll set that aside. The real question has always been for me, why is this conspiracy theory reported on it the way that it was? And we were talking about this like let let's say that it's let's say it's not true, okay, fine, but if you go and you look at any of the press coverage of this conspiracy theory, they make you believe through their reporting that anyone who believes it must be truly nuts. They're like digging deep on this conspiracy theory, and then what follows is the most surface level thing that takes every official communication at State value and doesn't even look at the evidence that conspiracy theorists are actually analyzing. You know, they'll say, well, you know, it's very clear the records are clear TR, you know, uh, Trudeau's mother didn't even visit Cuba until four years after he was born. It's like, but that's not the conspiracy. The conspiracy theory is that in the flight logs that one trip that was logged as Caribbean island and doesn't have a country name unlike every single other thing in the log that that was Cuba. The conspiracy theory is that maybe was when she went to his house in France. Like like that's the conspiracy, and they they literally don't mention it, and it makes me wonder why are they going to such great lengths to make this seem not just that like because you can analyze those and say, well, actually, here's why, and you know it was probably filled out by the by the by the by the FBO, and they just didn't know where it had been, and like there are reasonable ways to go after it, but the way they've gone after it is to pretend that you're insane if you believe this conspiracy theory, and I think that really gets back isn't that just about every conspiracy theory?

I mean, it's certainly the I mean, you know where the phrase comes from, conspiracy theory? Well, I mean, the the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation. And again, it gets to this thing. I okay, I set aside whether or not there was a second shooter, whether there was anyone on the grassy. All let's say that the official story really is accurate. It's pretty extraordinary that conspiracy theory conspiracy theorists are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy. Uh, it's it it makes it makes you wonder. People say, well, sure, the CIA had 30 media assets back then, including you know national news anchors, but I mean that's not how it is today.

Yeah, right? Is it? Is it right? Yeah, that that's why I like the Trudeau theory, and you know there's other ones like we talked about the Kamala Harris DNC pipe bomb and like that. Yeah, what I didn't I haven't followed that much. You've got to look into this one because and I'm I'm very I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have uh we have people coming in the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this, but you the official story according to the government, which is that there was a live active and dangerous pipe bomb planted by extremists outside of DNC headquarters on January 6th that Kamala Harris passed within just several feet of that bomb, and that they managed to save her, diffuse it, and then destroy it. But there's so many problems with this story. For example, you'll remember that originally Kamala Harris through her Council testified that she wasn't even at DNC headquarters on January 6. You'll also see in the video footage that's captured of the pipe bomb that after it was called in and after Secret Service was on site, you have Secret Service and Capitol Police just standing around the bomb with their thumbs in their pockets talking to each other. At one point, the Capitol Police walk to their car and eat their lunch. A group of children walks by. They don't block off the street. They don't they don't be like, hey, don't walk by that pipe bomb right there. It it it the whole thing is it reeks. It it couldn't possibly be what they say happened. And then this gets to kind of the second layer. Okay, again, ignore whether it was planted by the feds or planted by somebody else or planted by extremists, or maybe they found out it was planted by some foreign government agent that's a government they like. It's hard to pick exactly which conspiracy you want to believe in. There's a simple question: why has Kamala Harris never talked about it even one time? She has so much to say about January 6, so much to say about people who are just protesting at the capital, nothing to say about the feds who were planted in you know in that whole op. But but like why focus on things like the people who were protesting in front of the capital building when you could just say, oh yeah, they literally tried to kill me. Like right-wing extremist planted bombs outside of my party headquarters and got within 5 feet of killing me. Like wouldn't is it wouldn't you say that? Like imagine if that happened to Trump. Trump would be meling it for all it's worth, and I love the guy, but I mean he'd say and they almost got me, you know, maybe it wasn't 5 feet. People say it's 5 feet. I think it was 2 feet. You know, maybe I looked at it, maybe I looked at it and said I think that's a bomb, and maybe I'm the one who caught you. He would be he would be he would be talking about this, and the fact it's not talking about like someone has realized that it's not a good idea to talk about whatever happened because it's probably not what they told the public. And so to me, this is like one of the most interesting conspiracy theories because it's very rare for them to touch people at Kamala's level, right? It's there's lots of conspiracies about like what what an ATF unit does or what some group of State Department goons did. It's very very rare that the vice president, the United States, has their proximity and seal of approval on the actions of the day.

Yeah, that's a damn good point. Yeah, you've got to look into this and and and watch the video. I think like you you're your your uh your Watchers would probably love to see like you could just ask yourself like, wait a sec, if if they if they know it's a live pipe bomb like you're watching like how why are they doing what I'm watching them doing? How like this only makes sense if it's a bizarre conspiracy.

I can't wait till everything comes out on all this stuff. You know, so concerned that it's going to be like the JFK files. There's going to be two missing boxes, and they're going to say, oh well, it's I think a lot of people are worried that the the shredders worked overtime before they got in, and the digital shredders and all. Have you ever been involved in litigation?

No, so one of the things that's interesting, particular with criminal criminal I I've so I've been through I whenever you make money, people come after you. They come out of the woodwork, and they sue you for you know, oh, you copied my idea, oh, you're infringing on my patent in Germany, um, and uh, I've won all of the cases that mattered in the end or got them thrown out by the judge. But one of the things that I had to learn over the years, and by the way, I've been to a verdict in federal court twice, so uh, you know, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm unfortunately I've I'm pretty well well acquainted with the rules: if you destroy evidence, the way that the court interprets it is in the least favorable light. They basically assume that whatever was destroyed is as bad as it could possibly be. Otherwise, there's an incentive to destroy. Like if you assume, oh, it's not the worst possible thing, what was destroyed? Maybe it was only halfway there, and that's how we're going to wait this. Yeah, unless it's the government destroying the evidence, and and that's one those like I wish that they would look at it that way and say, no, no, when a box of evidence is missing on something and it's the government and they were committing these actions happens to be the JFK Force you like you should you should the I'm not even saying that we should assume the worst as people. I'm saying the criminal justice system should assume the worst because otherwise they're going to keep doing this. Like you need to say, no, the box of missing papers does not get you out of hot the box of missing papers is the indictment. It is the thing that you go to prison for life for when you lose the files on the JFK investigation. Like that is that is way more important to the National Fabric and unity of America and and people's trust in government than any simple crime ever could be. You know, like that cover-up is so much worse than anything that people go to prison for life for every day.

You think they're going to do it? Or I guess it would be already gone now that now they you mean they are they going to hide it?

Yeah, I I I think it's what you said. I think the shredders are working overtime, and I think I think they're looking what's happening with us Aid, and they're probably saying, oh, you know, the Doge boys are coming. They're coming here next uh we we we got to do something.

Well, I mean, they they already I mean, do are you familiar with Blackwater at all?

Oh, very familiar. And yeah, and I've I've had the pleasure of meeting Eric Prince a few times even before I started Anduril. I asked him what should Anduril build.

Um, what did he say? Yeah, should I say? I think I think I I think I can say it. Um, we talked about a few different things, but one of the things that he thought would be a good technological innovation would be artillery that is actively cooled in such a way that you don't have any cool down intervals. Like what if you could have an artillery piece that works at maximum mechanical uh, you know, interval? Like it has a very high cyclic rate artillery that never needs to cool down and never goes down for uh, you know, never goes down for maintenance, like something that could like auto swap a lot of the consumables. And his point was uh that artillery is limited a lot in that in that respect, and that you can only get off so many rounds at a time from a single piece, and that it would be a huge game changer on the battlefield. And at the time, it was that was not the type, you know, I was looking at how I could apply mostly artificial intelligence and autonomy to AI, like the name of my company, Anduril Industries. You'll note the acronym is AI, but we had to hide it because back then AI was a kind of a dirty word in Tech. Everyone thought it was never coming, never going to work, so we couldn't talk about it. Um, I ended up not building it, but I look back now and say, you know, that probably would have been a really useful thing to have in Ukraine, especially in the early days of the war. Yeah. Um, but yeah, and then of course, read his read his book, Civilian Warriors.

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Yeah, so the reason I bring it up, we were talking about the government deleting evidence, and so you know kind of the downfall of Blackwater was that Nisour Square incident. I think it was back in 2007 when they they tried those guys. That was when they were taking fire, and then they responded, and they were there ended up being civilian casualties. Yeah, they made it out to be like a big like a bunch of Blackwater cow. They made it look like they made it sound like they just rolled into an intersection just like did like a drive-by shooting or something. It was in that so they deleted the drone footage.

Really? Yeah, there was actually a somehow that hadn't even made it into my long-term memory. Yeah, a lot of people don't know. And so the the there was a Green Beret unit that was actually taking contact just just uh I can't remember if it was like a couple kilometers or a couple thousand meters away, but um but basically when that they had that drone on station, so they brought it over, and they've they deleted there's like a 5-minute, 10-minute segment of drone footage where you actually see the vehicle. So short enough that this clearly wasn't just like lost data. It's they didn't want that the very specific like portion of the drone footage that showed the actual gunfight was deleted. You can see where the vehicle rolled up, and then it cuts out, and then it goes away. And you can even see where you know where the radio fluid and stuff had been had been leaking out from the vehicle getting shot up. And in court, they're like, well, where is this drone footage? And they said, oh, we routinely we we routinely delete drone footage uh just to save memory. And they're like, so you just happened to just delete the just that just the 10-minute segment that shows the actual gunfight and everything before and everything after still there. And those guys wound up getting pardoned by Trump, but they sent one one to prison for life, three for 35 years. The actual guys in the Square, not the people that deleted the drone footage.

To be yeah, the guys in the Square who deleted the drone footage, I don't think they I don't think they did. I mean, those guys ran out of money. That one of the attorneys that was on the case was kind of doing a pro bono by the end of it. And see these are the things that undermine confidence in of just America for Americans. People wonder why we lose confidence in our institutions. Like it it is like that like that's almost worse than those guys going into prison is the fact that everyone watched people in the state do that, get away with it, and probably do it again.

Yeah, I mean, it's not even at the highest level. Then we then we brought in this guy uh Captain Brad G. He was the he was the commanding officer, Naval Special Warfare Training Center, which is BUD/s. Couple years ago, they had that um they had that BUD/s candidate uh who died in training, and they so it turns out he likely died from performance-enhancing drugs that he was sourcing from out of the country. In fact, he had like a cooler in his car with all this, and they made it sound like the training was too hard, and it was all this all Captain Gir's fault, and they reinvestigated it three different they basically just they reinvestigated I believe three times Y, and they just kept doing it until they got the performance-enhancing drugs out of the investigation. And once through some procedural error or we weren't allowed to have that, then they pinned his ass to the wall, and we wound up exposing it on the show. Now the case has been totally dismissed, and looks like he's going to get his retirement and his ranking. I I don't know where you fall on this. I need to look more into that one. I don't know where you fall on this, but generally like we should be allowing these guys to use performance-enhancing drugs, and it should be on the level where we know about it and it's monitored and like yeah like that that because like the real people are going to be using these things, and there's ways to use them that are pretty safe and probably increased their probability of living in general. But we've just we've treated that whole category like the whole C or of making your body you know better is just like it's it's just it's just not I'm not against it, but it's got to be done right. And if that played a part in him, well, the key is it has to like we should be doing it, and we should be doing it right. We should we shouldn't be driving it into the Shadows so that people are hiding it from their doctor, hiding it from their unit, hiding it from everybody, and now nobody has like I mean I don't want to be like I don't want to be I don't want to be like too mean here, but like do you think Marines are the right guys to be you know measuring out dosages of this stuff? You know, I'm I'm I'm I'm being unfair, but like you know you you you can play to the stereotype really easily here. It's like like are is is that the guy you trust to get it right every single time to get the math just so and you know with with with with people's lives on the line? No, you should like you should have a Doctor Who's responsible for that, and they should say, hey, your job is not to is not to you know have the stuff hidden from you. It's to make sure that it's being done in a safe way that's increasing their combat effectiveness, increasing their probability of living to see their families.

Yeah. All right, so uh so I got a a Patreon account. They're basically are it's a subscription account. There are top there are top

Supporters have been with us since the beginning, and, uh, we built we built quite the community over there. Behind the scenes segment that you did up, yeah. So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Mel: My 15-year-old son thinks you're amazing and inspiring. My son is really into electronics and building things, but not as much into coding. What advice would you give him that might help him and other kids like him when he's thinking about when he's thinking about building skills early to do epic things like you with his life?

Well, good news for him, I'm not much of a coder either. I'm more of a hardware guy, more of an electro-optical mechanical guy. Um, and so my I think he's in a fine place to not necessarily be a great coder, especially with how things are going with AI. Like the actual act of coding is going to become less and less important to being able to build things. Really, I'm I'm not saying that you're not going to still have programmers. I'm not saying that you're uh going to have everything done by AI, but when you're talking about, you know, the types of coding that I had to learn to do, like gluing together bits of firmware, making my Arduino—well, the Arduino wasn't big when I was when I was his age—but you know what what did you just say? Arduino. It's it's the thing that all the kids are using these days. It's it's a it's an it's a quasi open-source microcontroller kit that allows you to interface uh different types of sensors with comput—like like if you wanted to build an automated bird feeder. In my day, you would have gone out and be like, okay, I'm going to build a 555 microcontroller circuit with a timer and an interrupt, and I'm going to build a thing where the bird flies in and put dispenses feed, or it dispenses feed, you know, every 12 hours if no birds come by. We would have done that all by scratch. These days a kid would go and buy an Arduino, and they would probably plug in like the motor and they plug in the sensor, and then they would write a little bit of code that says if if the, you know, if the uh resistance level coming off of this sensor, you know, if the resistance drops to this, that means something's blocking it, that means that it's probably a bird, then trigger this motor, you know, fire this relay, give it the voltage for this long, this many seconds. Uh, like the that that's the kind of way you would do it these days. And so I'm saying that type of coding you don't need to be very good. Like you you you you need to know enough to get by. Think about like, you know, you might not know enough to design a car engine, but you know enough to clean a carburetor. That's the type of coder I was. And so, uh, I think his son is in a perfectly fine place.

The most important advice that I can give people is to work on projects that you care about. Don't look to school, whether it's college or the state-mandated, you know, younger educational system; don't look to them to tell you, "Here's what your electronics projects you should be working on; here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things," cuz one, they're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing, so you're going to be learning how to do things that are ancient. Two, when you're working on something that you're only doing for yourself, you're going to make way better decisions. I generally find in what you teach yourself, in how you do things. Like when I when I hire people at Andal, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do, because that means they're the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time because they want to bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And to me, those are the projects that people like—that's what drives you to learn the most; it's what drives you to have the right attitude around all this stuff. So I would say like don't don't do what I did, which was like I I did some I, you know, I started going to college; I was 14 or 15, and I took some robotics courses, which in hindsight, like I I don't regret taking them, but I think the time that I spent taking those robotics courses would have been better put into self-guided, self-directed uh uh efforts. And that's especially true in the modern day of the internet, all these things that like in my era were not as widely available, and you kind of had to go, you know, talk to a professor about it. There's a YouTuber who can teach you even better; there's an Instructables guy; heck, there's probably a lot of people on Patreon, you know; there's there there's bet there's a I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of creators on on Patreon who are who are putting out really interesting guid—really inter—education. So yeah, I I would tell your son like encourage him to work on the things that he's interested in, and don't rely on other people telling him what he should be working on, and don't sweat the fact that he's not doing much or any coding. There is lots of stuff you can create in the technology world when you're a bad coder. It just means he's going to have to go find a really good programmer as his co-founder. That's all right.

Right on. Right on. Well, I'm sure he's going to get a lot out of that. So, got a little gift for you.

Oh boy.

Yeah. Yeah. Those are uh Vigilance gummy bears. Little something for the flight home. Now, there's no like caffeine in these or anything, right?

No. No funny business. I mean, there's a bunch of that's unhealthy for you, like sugar. So what's good? What's good about these? What's—

Taste them.

All right, I'm going to taste them. Open them up. I've uh I've been a big fan of European gummy bears in the past because they don't use uh they don't use um all the stuff that they use in the United States. These are good. Those are made right here in the United States uh and you're not using a—I can tell you don't have like a bunch of mineral oil on these as an anti-caking or anti-sticking agent, do you?

Dude, don't ask me about the ingredients. All I know is they taste amazing.

They do. They taste—

I asked was I'm interested in food science before before starting Andal. One of the things I was considering doing was starting a company to make synthetic food out of petroleum—they would have zero calories and therefore allow you to eat as much as you want without getting fat.

Interesting. And so U I had to learn a lot about, you know, food science, but in particular the science of foods that you're not really supposed to eat, like mineral oil. And a lot of these gummy bears, they put anti-stick, anti-cake agents in them, and if you have too many of them, they give you diarrhea.

Yeah. Yeah. And I can tell you I can tell I don't see it on the ingredients list, and I I can feel it like they don't have like that slimy sheen. So you can you can eat as many of these as you want, I bet, without having a bad day at the toilet. Something to think about.

You got a gift, right?

I do. So this is something that I put a lot of time into, not for you specifically, just generally. Um, this is a Mod Retro Chromatic. For about the last 15 years as a side project that I put a little bit of time into here and there, I've been building a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. So this is a hardware clone that is basically what Nintendo would have made if money was no object. So it's got a custom 1:1 LCD that's the exact same resolution as the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Uh, it's a modern modern totally custom LCD sapphire screen lens, so not glass or plastic; it's the same stuff you'd see on like a high-end Rolex. And the shell is made of an aluminum magnesium alloy, compatible with any Game Boy game. I I gave you a couple games too that are sitting over in the studio. So uh it's a it's a pretty it's a pretty fun it's a pretty fun bit of hardware. And this one's this one's signed by me.

Dude, I was a Game Boy fiend. So so it comes bundled with uh it comes bundled with Tetris. It's a new edition of Tetris. It this was actually played at the Tetris Classic World Championships last year. Um, we had a tournament for it, and in my opinion, it is the best version of Tetris that's ever been made.

Oh well. If you want the batteries, it runs on—not rechargeables—runs on double A. Nice. So you'll have to twist those out of the packaging.

I'll do that later. But uh I'm going to frame this one and put it in the studio. And you have another one in the studios that you can actually play. So I'm I'm not going to let I'm not going to let it be trapped.

You gotta gotta get back into Tetris.

I will. I will. Thank you. This is awesome. I love this stuff, man. I love putting stuff from guests in the studio. That's all—this—you have so many cool things. Most of stuff in here is all from prior guests and all has like a deep meeting at least to me and um well I've got a lot of my heart and soul in that and the the the name for the Mod Retro Chromatic—Mod Retro is actually the first business I ever started. So when I was a teenager, like 13 or 14, I started an internet forum called Mod Retro for game modification enthusiasts. Very and uh you know it's it's it's it's pretty fun to come back to it today.

Thank you. Thank you. But um all right, so like I said, we're going to do a life story and then get into all your business ventures.

Let's do it. At least some of them. I don't know how many how many businesses do you have right now?

You know, right now I'm 99% focused on just Andal. Um, I mean, I sold Oculus to Facebook for a few billion dollars, and I was up in Silicon Valley for a few years before they fired me.

So I don't have that one anymore.

Yeah. And Mod Retro I've had, you know, since I was 14 years old, and I'm uh I'm very lucky where I found a few other people who are putting their full time into it because I just couldn't put time into it anymore. But uh I'd say and and and rolls and rolls—my my baby—that's the thing that I'm putting all my time into.

Like that company is awesome.

Thank you. It's awesome. Well, like for people don't know, it's we're we're not a defense contractor; we're a defense product company. So we use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever a ever able to do with weapon systems before. So our business model is that we build these things using our own money, not taxpayer money, and then we show up to the government not with a PowerPoint saying, "Hey, here's this thing I want you to give me money to build from scratch." I have this working tech, this working product; buy it from me.

That's awesome.

All right, so where'd you grow up?

I grew up in Long Beach, California. Um, my my dad was a car salesman; my mom was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me and my three younger sisters. Um, I ended up moving down to Orange County to start my first company, Oculus, but I spent yeah, I spent my to Childhood in Long Beach.

You were homeschooled?

Yes. Tell me about that. Why were you homeschooled?

You know, there's lots of reasons. Um, wait, how do you how old are you right now?

How old? I'm 32 years old.

You're only 32?

I'm only 32. Holy yeah, I'm I've had a had a pretty intense run. Um, but I was homeschooled probably because I was uh not the type of kid who fit into the public education system. Uh, I was, you know, probably these days they'd say that I have ADHD, uh, but back then it was just called being a boy. Yeah. And uh and uh I think I think my parents identified that uh of me in particular, out of my sisters, was proba going to do better in a homeschooling environment than in public school. And my my my sisters, they were homeschooled for various periods of their childhood, but all of them at some point actually ended up going back to traditional schooling.

Really? But you didn't?

Yeah. And I look, different things work differently for different kids. Um, some people really like the formal structure and and the formal formal education process and being told exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it, and I was not one of those people. And I I think it turned out pretty well for me.

I think so. It—you don't mind if I eat these the whole time, right?

You got—if you need more than two bags, we got more.

All right. But um my wife's going to love them. She loves jelly beans.

Do you have kids?

I do. I have one kid. He's six months old.

Congratulations.

Yeah. It's really great. I'm I'm a I'm a big pronatalist. I definitely believe you need to have kids. Like if you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation and our ideals. CU you're you're basically outsourcing responsibility for the continued existence of our nation to other people's, which seems like a super elitist attitude. We like, oh, I think I just want one kid, like you elitist, you you you—it's like a mentality almost thinking like, oh, like like yeah, I'll let the you know I'll let the C I'll let the cattle reproduce, you know, they can keep up the population, but my time, you know, I I don't want to raise more than one. It just it it seems like an abdication of responsibility for our nation's future and direction that I I just can't get behind. Of course, that that like ignores people who have like a real reason, like a medical reason or a health reason or some unique economic circumstance, but like if you have the means to do it, it's crazy to me to not have at least 2.1 kids. So you could say I did my part. I I met replacement rate. That meeting replacement rate should be the bare minimum, you know. If you're going to die, you should at least if you plan on dying, you should at least replace yourself.

Six months old, huh?

Yeah, six months old. So he's uh so he's uh he's sitting up and looking around and and and and uh and loving life.

That's cool. How do you like being a dad?

Well, I'm really lucky because my wife is really tra, and so she's doing most of the hard work right now. I'm still I'm still lot, so I I I get to see him in the morning and I get to see him at night, and uh we've oriented his napping and sleeping schedules where where where I get to spend some time with him every day, but uh for the most part, she's the one she's the one doing most of the work, and that's uh that that works out well for us.

How long you been married?

Oh, man, since uh summer of 2019. So uh so I mean how how many years is that now? I guess almost six years, or is that almost—

Almost six years. Yeah, yeah. So but but but we've been we've been together for a really long time. So my wife and I met when we were 15 years old.

No.

And uh we met at a uh at a debate camp in in Maryland at a at a law school that ran a policy debate camp that ended with a debate tournament. And the first time that we met, she was crying within minutes of meeting me because it was my debate team versus her debate team, and we were arguing about whether or not uh not formally debating whether or not DDT, the pesticide agent, should be legal in the United States. And her team was completely unprepared for our argument, in particular, which I can get into if you want, but it was it was a novel argument that none of the other teams had ever seen. We ended up beating all of the other beginner teams, all but uh all but one of the other intermediate teams, and several of the advanced teams. So we went way further than we should have because of this novel argument. Anyway, they they were so unprepared and that they they literally started crying in the middle of the debate. And uh somehow that we went from that to her uh getting married to me. Uh, so it's it's it's it's a really strange world, isn't it?

Very cool.

Very cool. She realized I wasn't a mean person; I was just really good at debate.

Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. I could see that already. So you you said you had three sisters?

Yep. Yep.

No brothers?

No brothers. And that's why I'm so glad to have a boy. I know you're supposed to love them all equally and not care which it was, but I was clear from the very beginning. I said it; I'm I'm praying it's a boy. Please be a boy, because growing up in a household that was, you know, my day-to-day was my mother and three sisters—look, I always say you're supposed to go to hell after you die—all right, it it's it can be intense. And so I was so so worried that I might be on a track where like I'm only going to have daughters, and then all of a sudden I'm stuck in my childhood again. And so now that I've had a boy, I'm I'm happy to have either, but—

When's the next one coming?

Um, as as as fast as biologically reasonable.

Nice. Nice. Nice. So what were you into as a kid?

Oh, man, you know, I I started out as an outdoor kid when I was a kid, you know, so running, surfing, swimming—like I I was into all the outdoor stuff. And it wasn't until I was like 12, 13 that I really seriously got into electronics and engineering, and then I quickly became an indoor kid. Like I just I I ceased to I ceased to be useful on a physical capacity.

Were you were you building forts and all that kind of—were you building were you building weapons?

So I was—I mean, I I I actually I just dug up a bunch of the first weapons that I built. Um, I built a multi-stage electromagnetic accelerator, uh, basically a coil gun. So not not a not a not a rail gun. Rail guns, you know, put past the current through the projectile directly, which making a magnetic field that accelerated uh accelerated nails and shot them out of a tube. Um, the first thing that I ever built was a uh it was a a stun glove. So it was a Home Depot leather glove that I mounted a capacitor charging circuit—I I like 11 or 12—capacitor charging circuit and then a bunch of photo flash capacitors in a gauntlet, 330 volts. You could dump the whole thing through this big thick gauge wire to two spring-loaded pegs uh on on on the front of the fist. And like if you punched like like if you punched a plate metal, it would leave hu a blast of Sparks, a loud, you know, loud explosion, shower Sparks; it would leave big pits in the metal. And uh I did use it on myself a couple times, and you know, it doesn't blow holes in you; it just really really really works your muscles. And I was too young to recognize that high-amperage electrical weapons are extraordinarily dangerous. I had absolutely no idea how dangerous what I was building was. I I knew I knew enough to be dangerous and not enough to be safe.

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Did you hit anything with it?

Oh, just myself. Just myself. That's myself. Um, I ended up building a covert version that was a uh it was a was a highlighter pen that I put three photo flash capacitors into the body of—kept the front of the of the of the highlighter insides—it was still a working highlighter. And then on the end, it had two tiny little metal prongs, and I could touch it to an external charger, charge it up, and now I had a pen I could carry in my pocket, and if you touch that to somebody, it it was it was it was just awful. Um, and uh it would it would like it would leave like real serious burns on your skin. And uh I'm I'm I'm very lucky that I didn't wipe myself out then and there. But yeah, so I was I was into building weapons; I was into building building uh I was doing a lot of game console modification. I started Mod Retro because I was really into this hobby called portalize, which is turning vintage game consoles into self-contained handheld portables—like portable Nintendo 64 handhelds, uh portable Super Nintendo handhelds—combining the best of modern technology with these retro systems. And uh that was that was kind of the the foundation that led to me getting into virtual reality. Which—how how did you—I mean, how do you get into that? What age are you?

So I got into VR when I was about 14 years old.

Not VR, just the regular weapons.

Oh, regular—not regular weapons. I thought you were going to say bow and arrow and spears. See, for me, I was I was never really even interested in like the wielding of the weapon; it was in the building of the weapon. Like when I watch a James Bond movie, the cool part that most appealed to me—like I'm not imagining that I'm James Bond; I'm imagining that I'm Q—like that that's the that was cool thing to me. It was it was building these things that did things that nobody expected, that nobody had ever seen before, allowing James Bond to do things that, you know, would allow him to outmaneuver or outsmart or outgun his opponent. And so that that was that was that was kind of—that was—I was interested in all these weird, exotic weapons, like high-powered lasers.

And high-voltage stuff and electromagnetic accelerators, not because they're effective weapons, but because they are a potential path to weapons that allow you to do things conventional weapons can't. If I had just been interested in weapons, I would have just bought a Glock, right? You know, that's—well, it's hard to buy a Glock when you're 12 years old—but you know, that's if you actually just want to, if you just want to shoot somebody, you know, existing weapons are pretty good. They're pretty good anytime, outdoors or anything. Yeah.

So, you know, I grew up uh, sailing small boats, so like dinghies. The boat that we sailed in in Long Beach, it was called a Naples Sabot, which originally was like basically designed as like a tiny, very short little boat that you would put on the back of like a, you know, like a sailboat or a power boat and just used to get back and forth between land and the boat. And then someone decided, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we uh, we made kids race these in a racing league? And uh, that's that's more or less how it all started. Um, so I was racing Naples Sabots when I was a kid. Then I later got into a type of boat called Lasers, which are, they're an Olympic sailing class boat, um, and I liked sailing those. I then later tried team sailing, where you know you're one of multiple people on a boat. I didn't like it because when you're on a team boat, it's possible to succeed or fail on the basis of other people's work. Like you can fail and the boat still wins, uh, or somebody else can fail, or you think they fail, then you blame your loss on them. And I found it was healthier for me to be a solo sailor because then if I win, it's all me, and if I lose, that's all me too. Like you can't, you can't, can't make excuses for yourself and say, "Well, the only reason I lost is because of, you know, you know, Alex on the other side of the boat," you know, "that's why we really lost, 'cause that guy wasn't pulling his weight." When it's just you in the boat, you're like, "I lost. I didn't try hard enough. I didn't practice hard enough." And so, uh, that was that was a—I really like sailing. It's a phys—it's a physical and mental sport, which is—I haven't sailed in years. I I I've thought often about getting back into it, but I'm just so busy with everything and like, sailing to me is not a fun relaxing activity. It's it is an intense competitive sport, and I am so out of practice and so physically inept compared to what I was that I know I would be totally non-competitive. And so I, it's hard for me to, it's hard for me to go and go and do it. I'm I'm kind—I think I'm going to get back into sailing once I'm once I'm all old and used up, once I've once I've I've I've made my contribution to society, the candle has burned down to just the puddle of wax, I'll get back into sailing. Nice. Nice. I like power boats too. That's the other problem is—yeah, I heard you got a Mark V. I do. You've probably been on Mark Vs before.

I've been on a lot of Mark Vs. So I bought a I bought a Mark V Special Operations craft from the U.S. Special Warfare guys, and uh, I bought it—it was it was like "as is," no warranty, just like getting rid of it. And there was no use certificate because they were basically selling it as scrap metal. And the nice thing about that is I was able to get it and then put a ton of money into reactivating everything, getting it going again. As far as I know, I'm the only civilian owner and operator of a working Mark V. There's a guy who has one with no engines in it that's sitting on the side of the freeway, uh, in in a in a boat yard in San Diego, but I I I think I'm the only guy who's actually spent all the money to to to make one go again outside of the government. And I'll tell you that boat was that was that boat was made for people with government wallets, not not a not not not civilian wallets. But I mean, it's such a cool boat, right? I mean, it's it's ridic—it's the fastest boat that the Navy ever built. So so uh, you know, it was built explicitly for Navy SEAL insertion and extraction, uh, so really, really fast, tons of storage, really, really durable, really, you know, incredibly bulletproof drivetrain and and engines, and it'll do—you put any weapons on it. So that was one of that was part of my saga is they cut off all the weapons mounts, even not—they they took off the weapons and then cut off all the weapons mounts uh and hard points because that would have been like, you know, ITAR restricted arm type stuff. But we were able to find the contract number for the people who made the original mounting brackets, and so we just contacted that machine shop and said, "Hey, we need part number 46 2571, do you still have the CAD for that?" They said, "It's not even in CAD. This is, you know, this is like this is all draw paper drawings." But yeah, we got the drawings and we said we we want you to make us four of that part, and so we got uh brand new weapons mounts made, and I've and I have a I have replica M2s that were made by a company that makes Hollywood props that I keep on it when it's just parked in front of my house, but I keep the real M2s nearby so that if we go out into uh, you know, out of California state waters, we can put the real M2s on.

Yeah, that's awesome. It is really awesome. It's one it's one of those things where it's just when you're out there on that thing and you're blasted along at 50 knots and you're just eating up waves like it's nothing. We've gone on a few really cool trips on it. Uh, there was one trip where when when the hurricane was passing by California recently, there were these huge, you know, waves and swell offshore. We said, "You know what, we're just going to take it out." Like, supposedly this thing could do 40 knots in Sea State 4; we're going to go do it. That was the craziest I've ever done on a boat. It was insane. I mean, think like coming off of waves, diving bound into the next wave, and the whole thing goes over the entire boat, and you shoot out the other side and you're still going 30 knots.

Um, we also went to go see the USS Kitty Hawk, the last of the U.S.—very cool U.S.—last of the United States conventionally powered super carriers, so not nuclear powered. They were towing it from Bremerton, Washington, down around the bottom of South America, then back up to Galveston, Texas, for for for scrapping. And uh, they didn't have any transponders on the boat or the tow because they didn't want—L to come do it, and they were doing it offshore—you know, they didn't want people coming out to get in the way. And uh, we we got a hot tip from a buddy of mine as to when it was leaving and how fast they were going, and so we charted out where it was going to be, and we guessed pretty well. So we just went out uh when it was passing by Southern California, and we eventually found it way offshore. And it was so funny because we were approaching the towboat, and before they could make visual contact with us, they must have seen us on radar and they radioed us and said that this was a military tow operation and to stay clear. But I knew for a fact from talking to my buddies that it had already been cleared from DOD possession, and this was just the tow company talking, and like they they were like arguably illegal what they were saying. And so we just didn't respond. And then about, you know, one minute later, we make visual contact with them, and they see, you know, big, you know, gray Navy boat blasting towards them at 50 knots, and they shut up and they didn't say another word. I think they were like, "Oh, like damn," they were like, "We shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't have uh shouldn't have, you know, puffed ourselves up like like that." And uh, so we—it was really cool. We got to we we we ripped right by the boat. We got some really good pictures. And then we launched a fixed-wing drone off the back of the Mark V, and we did a touch and go on the runway of the Kitty—oh my God.

Bet those people are—their pants—the thing is you'll never get another like—the military is not really in the business of letting you fly your, you know, remote control airplanes off of aircraft carriers. It was so cool. And because we're in the middle of the ocean too, so it's not like we're doing it like off like, you know, a dock ship or something, which they have done that with like the USS Midway in San Diego. They've let people take off little RC planes from the deck, but it's just sitting at the pier. It's so cool to be flying an RC plane, FPV, and you know, going down, approaching the carrier, touch and go. And uh, unfortunately, we we tried to land the plane back on the Mark V, but we we we uh we we messed up, and the plane went into the water. So I—the drink—we had to come back around, and I had to jump into the water and get the plane and keep it—I had to hold it above my head to keep the memory card out of the water so that it wouldn't uh so it wouldn't get destroyed. But we got the video. We got the video. Very cool. Very cool.

So when you were—did you—when you were homeschooled, I mean, how how do they keep up with you? How did your mom keep up with you? I was really lucky in that there were certain things that I was—I had—I had to have beat into my head. There's other things where I was just interested for my own reasons and very, very good at self-directed learning. Like I mean, I've I've read—I read thousands of books before I was 13—literally thousands of books.

What kind of books? Everything, right? The classics, science fiction, *The Art of the Deal*, you know, I just like the entire gamut of everything that you'd want. So like we were we were uh, you know, check—I was checking out lots of books from the library, also lots of people giving me books. Everyone knew that Palmer liked to read, and so people would sometimes buy me new books, but more often, you'd have uh, especially like adult friends, just like dumping massive quantities of books. My mom also uh, you—she she managed to get uh, on whatever registry Barnes & Noble uses for uh for teachers, and so she had the educators' discount for buying stuff in Barnes & Noble. And so you're—I I forget what the discount was, but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes & Noble did a lot for a lot for teachers, especially back then. And so uh, yeah, I just read and read and read and read. And so certain topics I was pretty—I was—I was—I was okay with—like I loved science, I loved engineering, I loved chemistry, math—like like real math—never really a fan, um, you know, they were like uh uh uh handwriting, which, you know, at the time that was actually still still a thing that they were insisting that kids needed to learn in school, um, and you know, doing cursive. And they're like, "Oh, you're definitely going to use cursive now." They don't even teach it anymore. What what what a waste of time that was. But uh, yeah, I was—I was—I would say my mom didn't keep keep up with me on the things that I was interested in, but she didn't need to try. She knew that I was going to be fine on those, and uh, on the other stuff, you know, my mom was able to was able to beat me—be beat me into submission, right? Right on. Right on. You—my mom's no dummy. She has a master's degree. Yeah, she's she's a she she's she's a she she's a sharp—she's a sharp one on her own. Yeah. Yeah.

So did you grow up in—I mean, did you grow up in a middle-class family? Yeah. So my dad was a car salesman—sometimes new, sometimes used—it depend—depended on the time. Uh, you know, like like the 2008 financial crisis was really, really tough for the car industry. So there were there were there were some times where it was really tough 'cause dealers were laying—you can't keep all your sales people employed when people aren't buying cars. Like it's it's just the way that it is. But he sold mostly domestic cars—so Buick, Pontiac, GMC, Hummer—and then later uh, he kind of had to shift into selling uh import vehicles because that was the only thing that was actually moving volume. So like had to had to get into selling Korean and Japanese cars, and it wasn't really what he wanted to do, but it was it was the only it was the only way to make it work. And uh, my parents decided, you know, my mom would stay at home and he would work, so we were a single-income household. I I don't want to say like we were poor or anything, but like when you when you got one person working, yeah, and their one job—they're working as a car salesman—uh, you know, you got to you got to you you got to sharpen your pencil sometimes. And sometime—like one of the things my dad would do is in his spare time he'd buy used cars. I know it's funny—you sell used cars all day, then you go home, you buy used cars, and you fix them up, drive them around for a few months, and then you sell them for more than you bought them for, and that gets you a little little more cash. That was that was one of the ways that I ended up becoming mechanically inclined was helping my dad work on, you know, motor homes and vans and uh, you know, old old crusty BMWs. You you you learn a lot when you actually interact with the world and machines with your own two hands.

And you went to—you started college at what age? You know, I I I honestly, I'm not sure. It was when I was 14 or 15. It was it was it was around—it was that summer, um, but I don't I don't remember exactly. It would it would have been right around when I was either turning 15 or almost 15. So was that remote, or did you actually go? No, no, I went—because yeah, I was a I was a commuter student. I wasn't like I wasn't on campus, you know, I was still living at home, um, but no, I was I was I was actually going to school. And it was the funny thing is when you're—so here's the way it works in California: high school students are allowed to attend community college courses and state college courses by law. The law says you have to allow them to take those courses, um, but there's two requirements: one, it has to have sign-off from the principal of your school—this is why most kids don't do it—and by the way, taking college courses when you're a high school kid, it's amazing because you get college credit and high school credit at the same time. It's like AP courses, except a lot of these college courses are actually easier than AP courses in my estimation. Um, it's just true. Look like like AP kids are all motivated. Community college, you get everybody. Um, so the good news is my mom had—you—she like we were registered with a homeschool group that basically just signed off on all the paperwork. They're like—so I I just got everything signed off on. And normally like schools don't want to sign off on this—principals won't sign off because they lose out on revenue proportional to the classes you're not taking at school. What like what principal is basically going to sign off on a bunch of kids going to all the local community colleges when his school's going to lose the money? So it's a totally up system that incentivizes keeping kids trapped in the high schools rather than allowing them to specialize and take community college courses. The second thing you have to do is you have to—you basically have last priority for enrolling in classes. Like you you know when you were enrolling in classes, you know, there's a popular class where you had to be like on you had to be on your on your game and actually like enrolling it quickly, right? You couldn't like wait two weeks and then get around to it because the class would be full. The problem is that when you are a high schooler taking college classes, you don't even—the the enrollment window doesn't open until it's been open for like four weeks for all of the proper students. And what that means is that every course you want to go into generally is already full. And so the only way to make it into a course is you have to go and petition into the course. You have to show up on the first day of class with your petition form, and then usually like you you're there with maybe some other people petitioning, sometimes not, and then at the end of the class, you talk to the professor and try to convince him to let you into your class. And uh, so I had to get really good at that. Every single course I did, I had to, as like a 15-year-old kid, talk to the professor. And I would make sure to do research on them. I would make sure to do research on work they might have done in academia, and I would—I'd have—I'd have to play the game like, "Oh, Professor K, I'm such a huge fan of your work on the local geologics of the estuaries in Long Beach. I've been reading your papers lately, and I really think you make the argument better than your colleagues at UCLA." They say, "Oh, well, thank you." I say, "Mr. K, I would really love to take your geology course. In fact, I have to take it for my general education requirements. I know your class is full, but is there any way that I could, you know, that I that I could—we could add an extra seat? Is there any way that I could stay for a week or two while we wait for students to inevitably drop out, and I can take their seats?" And actually, nine times out of 10, I I was able to make it work. And there there were times where I was, you know, just sitting in the back of the class or standing in the back of the classroom for the first week or two. Bam! And then someone would drop—bam! I got my seat, and I wouldn't have to stand anymore, which is good because I was fat at the time. This was—remember, I became an indoor kid. I stopped exercising. And so uh, yeah, that's how I—I know that was a long a long ramble—but when you're a kid going to college, it is—is it is as weird as you'd think. It it it is—it is like—it is like a situational comedy every single day 'cause you're like a 15-year-old kid, and like it's obvious too. I wasn't like a I wasn't one of those kids where I'm like, you know, a towering brute and who knows if he's 30. Like it's it's like, "What's that 15-year-old kid doing? This guy's still going through puberty over here." It's a—that was exactly the situation, and uh, it was especially funny in things like when I was going to Long Beach City College and taking robotics courses, and you basically have a whole bunch of people who are like, you know, older guys mostly getting uh, you know, post postgraduate master's degree type work, and you have a 15-year-old kid. And the way the class works is you're all on teams building robots, and so you have to pull your weight, like—and like nobody really wants you on your team when you're a 15-year-old kid when you're kind of going in blind. You're like, "Why do I want to be gimped by this teenager when we're all like, you know, professional-level people, often already working jobs and taking this taking this night class?" And so I really had to work hard to stand out and and prove and prove that I could keep up with with the adults.

Did you have a problem keeping up? No, I had no problem. Did they have a problem keeping up with you? I think that as soon as it was—I did a good job of making it clear that I could keep up pretty quickly, and as soon as that was clear, then I was like the most hilarious novelty ever—ever—everyone thought it was just the fun thing ever, you know, uh, as I as I got older, and then I'm like 15, then 16, then 17, 18, now I'm just the age of all the freshmen, and it's not interesting anymore. But at the beginning, it was definitely pretty interesting. But you're not in freshman classes at that age—um, not at that point. Well, it depends. So what I—the way that I did this and the way I would actually recommend basically everybody do it if you can scam your principal into signing your paperwork is the moment you are eligible, when you're 14 years old, start taking community college courses. And what you should do is take all the general education courses first because they're generally easier. You have to do them no matter what you're going to do as an adult, right? Like if if I become a journalist or a mechanical engineer or a pilot, I'm still going to have to take history. So just start with all that crap and just do a few years of the crappy—all general ed courses—and then you can decide at the end what you're actually going to do, and you can then transfer all those units to where whatever school you're actually going to. And that's what I did. I transferred all those units from community college to Cal State Long Beach and went into the journalism program.

How did you make friends? I mean, you know, it doesn't sound like you're surrounded by anybody your age; everybody's older. So a few things—one, I was—things that you can't do—I was lucky. I, you know, I had a lot of local friends. So like I I'll admit it, I wasn't making my friends at college, right? Like people are fine with the weird 15-year-old kid on their robotics team, but they're not going to go hang out with them after school. Like nobody in their 20s is like, "Oh, I just love hanging out with 15-year-old kids." And if they are, something's wrong, right? Uh, I was—I was lucky. I wasn't running—I wasn't running into any any of those guys, um, but I was lucky. I had a lot of friends I grew up with, had a lot of friends from doing homeschool stuff. But honestly, most of my friends were internet friends. Like I was running an internet forum called ModRetro. I think all my best friends were internet friends. And uh, that actually worked out pretty well for me. It's like when I started Oculus—and I started Oculus when I was 19 years old—almost everyone who worked there—this Oculus—my virtual reality headset company—almost everyone I hired was friends and moderators and administrator staff from ModRetro. We were all teenagers. Like we're all a bunch of teenage dudes who have known each other for like five or six years on the internet, and we basically decided to start a VR company together. I I'll never forget when I called up my friend Chris H, who was one of the early administrators and moderators on ModRetro and a good online friend—I literally never met him in person—and I called him up and said, "Chris, what are you doing this fall?" He said, "Oh, I'm I'm I'm probably going to uh I'm probably going to work all summer at the local pizza place, and then I'm starting school this fall. I'm going off to college." I said, "No, you're not. You're going to come with me, and we're going to start this VR company that I've been working on—Oculus." And that was on a Friday, and that Monday I rolled up in my crappy minivan to his house, which is 2 1/2 hours away from mine. He piled all of his stuff into it, and we drove away. And his mom couldn't believe it. She she

My God, he told her mom, "I'm uh, I'm dropping out. I'm not going to school. I'm going to start a company with Palmer from the internet instead." And she's just like, "Okay, like sure." And she didn't understand that he was like imminently doing it that Monday.

And so we moved into a motel that is now condemned and has been torn—it was later condemned and torn down—but we moved into the SeaPort Marina Inn, and we lived there for the first few months of Oculus. Like, literally me and my internet buddies living in a crappy motel room starting this company.

And so I, I, I believe I didn't have a problem with with uh, making friends; we just had problems uh, seeing each other in real life. How old were you? That was—I was 19, 19 years old. Yep. And did you complete college? No, I dropped out. Um, I, I went through, you know, I, I, I, I had basically one semester and summer school left to get my degree, and and I had a series of technological breakthroughs in my virtual reality hobby, which I've been working on—like I said, I started building VR headsets when I was 14 or 15 as a hobby—and I would become obsessed with virtual reality technology and trying to make it better. I, I, I believed that the existing systems, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were very heavy—I believe they were, they had missed something. I knew this had to be a crackable nut, and there weren't very many people working on VR tech. It was kind of a laughing stock at the time. Everyone thought, "Oh, this dead, you know, technology that'll never happen." Uh, it was just a ridiculous fad of the 90s, and I still believed in it.

And over the course of years, I got better and better and better, and then I had a series of technological breakthroughs that made my headsets much cheaper, much lighter, much smaller than anything that anyone had ever made. And for the first time, when I showed it to my friends, it—instead of them seeing my prototypes and saying that I was wasting my time—they said, "Oh, I actually get it now. This is cool." And so I had a choice: I could either stay in school and get my journalism degree, or I could drop out of school and start this company. And there was, there was actually—it was kind of two options: I could either drop out and start this company, or I could stay in school, get this degree, probably have to make use of that degree. And I was terrified that in the process of delaying me working on my real passion that somebody else was going to figure out what I had and they were going to do it before I did. I, I, I don't have the time. I need to get this into the world right now because anyone—there were literally thousands of people in the technology industry who could have had the insights I had. The insights I had were not like Einstein-level insights; they were the natural conclusion that any smart person who was looking at the VR industry in 2011 and 2012 would have made. Basically, there were certain components becoming available; computer power was increasing in a certain way where I could compensate for optical distortion in real time on a graphics card shader and not have it take up very much of my graphics rendering load. And I realized that if anyone smart happened to glance in my direction that they were going to have all the same conclusions I did, and I knew I needed to, I needed to take advantage of that. Good thing I did; it was a wow. And actually, even better, it—I was right. So Sony ended up launching PlayStation VR a couple years later, and it was more or less built on exactly the same principles that I had. Now, I think they copied a little bit from what I made public, but they also had internally been working on VR for years. And so it turns out there were people in major companies who literally had come to the same conclusion I had. In fact, Sony made me a job offer before I launched Oculus.

Um, I was open-sourcing all of my work, publishing on the internet. And when, when Sony—why were you doing that? Why were you putting open-source information on the internet, or if you were worried people were going to steal the idea? So a few things: first, remember VR was just kind of like a joke at the time, and I was working on it not as a job; I was working on it as a hobby, right? I got into VR like I just wanted to work on VR and make it good, and it's about—it's, it's not about—it's—guess there's two ways to look at this: one is that if I put stuff out there, other people put stuff out there, right, and then we all move faster together as a collective than me hoarding all my information to myself. But to be honest, it was just purely cultural, and I never thought it through. Remember, I started the retro forums, CU. I was interested in modifying game consoles, vintage computers. The social currency of an internet forum is knowledge, right? How do you show off on an internet forum that is built around engineering and product you like building projects? You show your projects, and you don't just show them; you say, "And here's why my project is better than anyone else's. Let me tell you in detail how I built my power management system. Notice how I modified this LCD to not use a compact fluorescent illuminator but instead uses the latest white LEDs from Nichia to achieve much lower power consumption." And then all the other nerds say, "Oh my God, this guy is a God!" Like that is the, the social currency of nerd forums in the 2000s was prowess. And so if you didn't prove your prowess, you're nobody. And so I, I honestly, that, that was the culture I grew up in on the internet; that's, that's how the internet was back then, and it's very different than today. Today it's about flash and style; you make a cool video and like—it's, it's, it's not really necessarily about going deep into the technology that you did or the design decisions. Also, you know what was common in the 2000s you wouldn't do it today: where you go on and you post, you know, your final completed thing and hope it goes viral on TikTok. You would post updates in a forum thread like every week: "Here's my project update thread, guys. Here's how's it going. Here's what I'm doing." People would say, "You're an idiot; why are you doing it that way?" And and sometimes you'd say, "You're wrong, and I'm going to prove it." Sometimes you say, "He's right; I was doing it a stupid way," and you would adapt. And so it was just a totally different culture, and that was the approach that I—when I started working on VR—I'm like, "Well, that's, that's what you do; that's you, you share your work, and people are impressed by it."

Um, and so how did Sony get on? How did you get on? So what—that, that was that—I, I got really lucky in a series of chains. So I, I, I don't, I don't want to say that it was all luck because I think people make a lot of their own luck. Like you might not be able to make a coin more likely to land on heads or tails, but you could increase the number of coins you get to flip in life, right? Like you could, you could do things that increase the number of interactions you're likely to have with people. I think publishing in the open, for example, did that; it means that I didn't have to personally meet every person who would be helpful to me; they could just see my work out in the open and then come to me. And in this case, it was a guy named John Carmack—um, who you should have on the show, honestly, probably the smartest engineer in the world that I know. Can you connect me with him? Absolutely. Um, John is more or less the creator of first-person shooters, the modern 3D game engine. Like if you've played any—if you've played Call of Duty, if you've played Battlefield, if you play anything, it all goes back to Doom. He was the original creator and lead programmer for Doom, and uh, he—oh, dude, I love Doom—he is a wizard, and he was so far ahead of his time. I mean, not just building 3D games, but also one of the first people to conceive of networking those games over the internet to allow people around the world to be in a single virtual space and play games together. Like John was bringing that out—like people had online games, but they typically were not real-time; you know, they were things like online chess. He figured out how to build net code that would allow you to have people in a fast-paced action game where milliseconds matter and allow that to function over the internet. I mean, like—and so John was an extraordinarily brilliant guy. Everyone in the games industry, the tech industry at large, knows who he is. And uh, he would give these—he would, he would give these uh—actually, he would also publish all his personal notes and technical notes in—in—in a lot—like he would literally publish them online and just let anybody see them because he also believed in sharing information; everybody goes together, and he wasn't worried about people running faster than him because he was already running twice as fast as anybody in the world could ever run. John Carmack had been looking at virtual reality for years, but he had always concluded it was too expensive, too uh, low field of view, too much latency; it made people sick. Uh, and he had every few years he would do another new look at VR and see if where it was, and I got lucky where he came on to this internet forum and he was researching VR, and he saw my project threads, and he contacted me and said, "Hey, Palmer"—actually, no, our first interaction was he posted asking, "Hey, I want to modify this Sony head-mounted display that I have to be lower latency because you can't play games with it or you'll throw up. Um, does anyone have any tips on modifying this thing?" And I gave him a detailed response where I said, "John, I've already tried to do exactly what you're talking about. Here's all the technical challenges; the way Sony has implemented the display pipeline makes it impossible to get rid of latency unless you drive the displays directly with your own brand new controller. Here's why you're not going to be able to do that." And so I laid all that out; he looked into all my other posts; he saw my Oculus Rift worklogs; and he contacted me and said, "Hey, you seem to really know your stuff. I see you have this Oculus Rift prototype. Can I, can I buy one from you?" I said, "I'll do better than you—better than that, John. I'm, I'm a huge fan of yours; I'll just send you one for free." So I sent him one of my Oculus prototypes for free. He adapted that into Doom 3 BFG Edition; he basically made his game run on my headset, and he showed that at E3, which is a major gaming trade show in Los Angeles; it takes place every year. That was where Sony saw it. Sony saw that prototype, and there was so much attention being given to this at this point, 'cause it was the best VR demo of the world that ever seen. Like John even explicitly said, "This is the best VR demo the world has that has ever been created." Sony saw that and they said, "Oh my God, John, like who the hell made this? What company did you buy this from?" He said, "I bought it from a teenager on the internet who I've never met," and and he, and he just gave it to me for free. And so he put me in touch with Sony. I met with them, showed them my technology, and they offered me a job running a VR research lab in their Santa Monica PlayStation studio, and uh, I ended up turning them down to start my own company. But uh, but—and what I didn't know at the time is that they were already running a VR project, and what I didn't know is that I was already in a race against the clock. I didn't even—when I turned them down, I didn't understand that—like I thought turning them down is like, "Oh, I need to do this on my own before Sony, you know, gets into VR." I didn't know that they were literally already in a race with me. It was a, it was a really wild time. When did you find out? You know, I kind of knew that there were PEs—so all the VR work back then was being done by a group called Sony Liverpool. Uh, so over in the UK, they had an office that was doing most of their 3D work; like they were doing all their 3D ports of various PlayStation games; those were kind of the guys leading the charge on VR as well. And I found out that they were working on VR right before—right after I turned them down. But then Sony Liverpool was shut down just a few months later. And so all of a sudden the people who had been working on it weren't working on it anymore. But what I didn't know is—like—and so I, I, I basically found out they were working on VR, then thought they weren't working on VR, then I found out maybe a year later that there was an entirely separate VR project going on inside of Sony out of Japan, and I found out about a year later. And then you won't believe this: the day that we announced the acquisition by Facebook of Oculus, literally the same day was the day that Sony announced their PlayStation VR. Literally the same day. Wow. Yep. It's really like—which gets back to like—it was clearly an idea whose time had come, right? Like I was very lucky that I had the insight that I did as just a random guy in his garage. Like how wild is it that there's like me, a 15-year-old sitting in his garage, has more or less the exact same insights on this dead technology that a huge team of advanced display researchers in Tokyo have at exactly the same time? Like, man, that's how you know that it's the right time to do something. That is crazy. And who, who was your friend that you—by the way, John Carmack—just to tell you a little more, more about him: he also, at the same time he did the software, ran a rocket company that competed in the X Prize, and they built the one of the first vertical takeoff and landing rockets, way years before SpaceX did. They were, were more or less the inventors of modern control theory around doing vertical takeoff and landing rockets. So he did that as his hobby; he also built like twin-turboed Ferraris as his hobby. And then I hired him as the CTO of Oculus. So I convinced him to leave his own game studio to come and be the CTO of Oculus, and then eventually, after I was fired, he left, and now he's working on trying to build super-intelligent general artificial intelligence. And he did this before the AI boom. So like, I know that seems like, "Oh, well, of course he's doing AI, like all these other, you know, hot people just following the trends." John was doing it when everyone thought he was crazy. So I mean, he's, he's, he's way ahead of the curve. Damn, I would love to talk to him. I'll connect you guys. John is—John is—John is brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. So who was your, who was your friend that you had co—out of going to school?

So that's my friend Christopher Dkas, who was—uh, I said earlier that I had never met him in person; that's actually not true. I just remembered I had met him one time in person at San Comic Con. Um, we were, we, we, we, we both met up while we were at Comic Con. Nice, nice. So was he a co-founder? Yeah, so he was, he was—I mean, he was the literally the first person that I called before I called anybody else, and he was, you know, guy—a lot of the like same hobbies as me, same uh, same, same interests as me. And I mean, he—so he was employee number one at Oculus; literally employee number one. I don't count myself as employee number one, 'cause you can't employ yourself. Um, or maybe you can. Anyway, we've always said that he's emplo—we've always said that he's he's employee number one, uh, 'cause he was. And the crazy thing is Chris was also employee number one at Andril, my new weapons company. No, so when—this is a whole long story on its own—but when I was fired by Facebook, Chris was the guy who took a stand and said publicly, "Hey, you firing Palmer is totally wrong; it is, it is absolutely insane; he has done nothing wrong, and I can't be at a company that is like this." And so he quit his extremely highly paid job at Facebook to come and join my next company, even though that company didn't exist yet, had nothing to its name. And uh, you—he's, he's, he's one of those, he's one of those, one of those friends who is probably more loyal than he should be, which is what people should do. Wow. So you developed Oculus; how many people were on the team? Well, started with just me in my garage. When we were shipping our first product, the Oculus Rift DK1, we were up to about 25 people. When we shipped our second product, the DK—Oculus Rift DK2, we were up to about 75 people. And that was when we were acquired by Facebook. And then during my years in Silicon Valley working on VR at Facebook, you know, they basically—we were run as a kind of an independent operation owned by Facebook. Um, we grew it to a couple thousand people. Holy. Yep. And so how did it—how did it pop up? Were you trying to sell the company? How did it pop up on Facebook's radar? So there were a few things. Um, we were not trying to sell the company; we were planning on staying independent, but then a few things happened. First, it became apparent to us that we weren't running a race on our own. We started to hear what was going on at Sony. Like when Sony announced PlayStation VR, we knew it was coming. We knew there were other companies that were that were going to be entering the space with way more resources than we had as a startup. And look, we're, we're a group of like 75 guys who managed to raise a little bit of venture capital. How do you compete with multi-billion dollar companies like Sony or Microsoft or Google or Apple? It's really, really hard. And uh, that was—so that was one thing; we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally: how do we survive in the long run? We, we, we have the jump on these guys, but how do we turn that lead into something that persists rather than just being the people who are first and blazing a trail for everyone who then comes in and outspends us? And it's pretty easy to outspend people in the games industry. Like here's a very real concern: what if they came in and all the video game developers who are making games for our platform—what if they just came in and gave them piles of money to not support our headset and be exclusive to their headset? Sony did just that. And by the way, I have no ill will towards them; they—it's all business, right? They're strictly business; they were trying to compete with us. There were titles that had announced for the Oculus Rift as our launch titles; Sony came in, gave them money, and they said, "We're not going to be on your platform; we're going to be on Sony's now." So we were very, very vulnerable because nobody wants to buy a game console that has no games, right? You, you, you really need to, you need to be able to make sure that developers can justify financially being on your platform. So that was all going on, and then incomes—you—like I say, there was lots of interest from obvious people—like Microsoft coming in and Google coming in. The interesting thing was when Facebook came in. And a few things happened: first, I think Mark was truly convinced that VR was the future. He saw what we were doing, and he said, "Oh my God, this is the future of computing; this is the future of gaming. I truly believe in your vision; I want you to be a part of Facebook." So well, you know, we're not, not really that interested at this point, but like maybe we could team up in some way. Um, and the thing that really convinced us in the end was two things: one, Mark promised not just to buy our company but to invest a minimum of a billion dollars a year into research and development for the next decade. That was really the thing. Like when you're someone like me who's used to working with garage budgets and scraping money here and there and trying to keep your thing going, imagine what that sounds like: someone comes to you and says, "I'm going to give you a billion dollars a year for the next 10 years of your life to try and push virtual reality forward." It's a really compelling pitch. In fact, I remember exactly what I wrote in the email to the team after we met with Mark: I said, "We, we might be getting played, but if so, Zuck is Van Halen. Like he, he's saying he's hitting all the right notes; he's saying exactly what you want to hear, and he's doing it in a way that really makes sense." Uh, the second reason that we were persuaded is because they made a pitch to us and said, "Look, Microsoft, if they buy you, is just going to cut you up into pieces and use you to sell more Xboxes. They don't actually want VR or AR to be the next major computing platform. They like—Microsoft's pretty happy with how things are. Same thing with Google; same thing with Apple. They're already at the top of the food chain, right? They're making iOS; they're making Android; they're selling phones, or they're selling, you know, Microsoft Office and they're selling computer operating system licenses. The people at the top don't want to shake everything up; they don't want to shake the snow globe and see who comes out on top; they kind of want to maintain things the way they are." So his point was, "If you get bought by Google or Microsoft or Apple, they are not going to try and shake up the whole world and make VR a thing as fast as they can; you're going to be a tiny part of their 10-year plan. But Facebook, on the other hand, we don't have an operating system; we don't have a hardware platform; we don't control these gigantic, you know, store—like we don't control the iOS store; we don't control the Google Play Store—but they want to have a platform." And so Mark's point—pitch to us was, "Look, you go to those other guys, they're not going to be motivated to make your thing change the world. You come to Facebook; we are deeply motivated because we want to shake the snow globe; we want to make the whole universe move to VR and AR, and even if we don't end up on top, we'll probably at least be in second or third place, which is a heck of a lot better than today where we're way down here." And I think that it was, it was—he was—it was just obviously true, right? Like you could look at it logically and say, "Yeah, that, that's actually right; they, they do—to figure out a way to shake things up; this clearly is that way, and they're committing to spending a billion dollars a year on the thing that I am passionate about." So uh, you'll notice that nowhere in there is "I did it to get rich." Uh, I, I, I will address that really fast because I know people are thinking—I know they're thinking, "Well, Palmer, what about the $2.3 billion dollar that Martin gave you for the company?" On the one hand, uh, like that was some tiny factor, but remember that I had other companies that were making offers too. My investors were telling me not to sell; they were saying, "Palmer, no, we'll, we'll fund you; we'll give you as much money as you want." Like I could have done that instead. And also, I believed that Oculus was going to make tons of money all on its own, right? Like we, we were the hottest things in the games industry. So in my mind, I was already going to make…

As much money as I would ever need, like, like, like. So people, they often say, “Well, Palmer, you really just did it for the 2.3 billion.” I say, “No,” like, if, if this is about $2 billion, I could have just made that myself. Uh, but Mark was, was offering $10 billion in research and development, and me getting $2 billion from somebody doesn’t do that. Yeah, doesn’t do that. Wow, interesting, interesting. So was like, if, if I could flip it on you, like, not, not, not to play the interview, but like, what are you most passionate about in life? CU, for me it was VR at that point. This, this, this right here. What if someone told you that they were going to give you $10 billion to do this for 10 years? Yeah, like, would you just pick, “Oh my God, like this is the opportunity of a lifetime!” And I know, like you probably want to remain independent, but if someone told you, “I’m going to let you remain independent, you’re going to make all the shots, and I’m going to give you $10 billion over the next 10 years,” you’d say yes to that.

Absolutely, I would. In fact, that’s a, that’s a discussion we’re having right now. So, if I’m, I’m so stoked to hear that, and I, I’d say to anyone listening, it’s not $10 billion. Well, I’ll tell you, if, if you can find somebody who will give you $10 billion to do what you’re passionate about, take the deal. Yeah, it is, it is like that. It is. And like, did it turn out well for me? I mean, in the end, I ended up getting fired for absolutely political reasons.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you, guess what? VR is a multi-billion dollar industry. I’m having the last laugh. I, I, I wanted—Mark changed the name of the company to Meta and literally made AR and VR the core of the company. Like, in the end, Mark didn’t acquire me; I acquired them.

It’s a damn good point. So how long—so Facebook bought it, you moved over. How was it working at Facebook? Facebook, things were going great. I mean, we, so we, we had a bunch of metrics that we needed to hit in terms of sales, user retention. Like, we needed to get 10 million users on the Oculus platform; we needed to hit—I forget it was some number of millions of hours of monthly users—and we had these different levels where we basically got bonuses paid out on the basis of our performance tied to those metrics. We had something like five years to hit the top benchmark of 10 million users; we did it in less than 2 years. Like, we were, were kicking ass. Wow. And so everything was going great. I earned all my bonuses; I got great performance reviews; everyone loved me, and I, I got along pretty well with everybody despite moving to the Bay Area, which was a very, very politically left place at the time. I’ll say, like, I, I’ve long been a Libertarian-minded person. Politics were always something I had thought about but really didn’t do anything about. Like, I had given $40 to Gary Johnson. Right, like, it just, it, I, I don’t want to say politics weren’t important to me, but they just weren’t that important to me. I cared about VR; I was the VR guy, right? And so here I am; I’ve sold my company for billions of dollars. Few years pass, and all of a sudden, Donald Trump’s running for president. Now, Donald Trump is somebody who I had long had respect for. I actually wrote a letter to him when I was in college and 15 years old, telling him that he should run for president.

You might not remember this, but he had been on TV, and they were asking if he was going to run against Barack Obama. Um, and he said, he said, “Well, I might have no choice; I might have to run. I don’t want to run; no, nobody wants me to run; it feels like, but if I have to do it, then I have to do it. You know, if people tell me that I have to run, then maybe I have to do it.” And so I wrote him a letter. I said, “You have to run; we need someone who’s signed both sides of a check; we need someone who is not a part of this giant government bureaucracy; we need someone who understands what it’s like to build a business, not to be a community organizer.” And uh, I wrote that letter. I, I, I don’t even want to say like I thought too much of it, right? I, I, you know, like, I, I did it on an impulse because I saw him say, “If, if enough people tell me I have to run, then maybe I’ll do it.” Years pass; Trump’s running for president, and I said, “This is, this is f—fantastic; I’m, I’m so stoked that Donald Trump is finally running for president.” Was there—hold on—was there any—did you get a response?

No, I, I never got a response. Okay, which is, which is, which is fine. Like, I, I, I don’t want to act like I was like put off by it. I also, I’m, I’m so glad I did this. I posted on Facebook about it too, and I said, I said, I said, “Looks like Donald Trump might run for President; we convince him; this would be awesome.” I’m so glad I did that because now I have proof that I supported him when I was 15 years old, all those years ago. Uh, because otherwise, this just, this would just be like a ridiculous story; you’d never be able to prove it. Um, when I had Trump at my house years later for a fundraiser—which, by the way, was the biggest presidential fundraiser for a Republican that had ever been held—I, I put that, I put that little Facebook post up on the screen uh, before he came up. Um, anyway, so look, Trump’s running for president; everyone in Silicon Valley was losing their mind, right? I mean, it’s, it, like I know you probably remember, but there’s probably people listening who don’t remember, or they’re too young to remember. 2015 and 2016 was insane. The media hated Trump; everything was being twisted in these absurd ways. You remember when he said, “They’re sending us—they’re drugs, they’re criminals, they’re rapists,” and they said, “Trump says that Mexicans are rapists,” and their quote is, “They are rapists.” It’s like you can literally just L watch what he says, and it, like, it, it doesn’t even make grammatical sense for that construct. Also, he’s literally talking about the criminals and the drugs and the murderers and the rapists, and I mean, it was like, it was insane. There was no ethics being used; it was, it was, it was, it was a pure attack blitz by the media against Trump, and a lot of people fell for it. And so, uh, I ended up giving $9,000 to a pro-Trump, anti-Clinton group. And it’s so funny because this started a media storm that I’ll get into in a moment, but I have to tell you what they actually did. I gave them $9,000; they ran one single billboard in Ohio, I think in Columbus, Ohio, that was a picture of Hillary Clinton and it said, “Too big to jail.” And this was after she got away with mishandling classified information. You might remember, at exactly the same time, you had US submariners being put in prison for decades for much less expansive mishandling of classified information. You were like, it was, it was an obvious double standard. You have the Deep State, State Department apparatus protecting Hillary, and on the other side, you have a serviceman going to prison for something that was not nearly as bad as anything she—so, “Too big to jail.” So would you agree, like, that’s pretty reasonable political discourse, right? That’s not, that’s not crazy. I’m not, I’m not saying Hillary’s a, like, you know, it’s, it, it’s very reasonable.

So two things happened. First, the media found out about my contribution, and a few media outlets reported on it somewhat accurately. Like, “Palmer Lucky, the guy who started Oculus, this Facebook executive, has given $9,000 to this pro-Trump, anti-Clinton group that’s running a billboard.” Then a handful of people on Twitter—literally, it was a completely made-up story—said, “Palmer is funding white supremacist internet trolls to attack Clinton supporters on the internet.” It expanded from there. “Palmer is funding anti-uh, anti-Semitic memes; Palmer is funding misogynist troll squads; Palmer is funding a—I believe RS Technica called it—a title wave of racist memes on Reddit, Facebook, and beyond.” It was literally fabricated; none of it ever happened; it was a completely false story, and it was reported by dozens of outlets: CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, RS Technica, Wired Magazine, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, The Washington Post. Taylor Lorenz reported on it; I mean, it was everywhere, and they all, they all just had this, this lockstep narrative: “Palmer Lucky is a racist, misogynist, anti—” which is so funny. I’m actually a radical Zionist, and I’m, and like, it, it was, it was even in the moment, it was, “What is a radical Zionist?” I strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Like, i, i, i, people are like, “That’s so problematic, though; it’s so, it’s so ethno-state adjacent.” I say, “I don’t care. After what happened to them in World War II, they deserve a place where they can do their own thing and protect their own people without getting wrecked by everybody else who hates them.” And you know what? Maybe someday everyone who hates Jews is going to be gone. We are not living in that world today, and I, and people, they, they, “It’s a slippery slope, though. If they can have it, why can’t the KKK have their own state?” I say, “That’s not going to happen. Like, like, it’s, it’s absurd for us to even have this discussion.” It is very reasonable for the Jews to have a place that is theirs. And they say, “Oh, but what about the Palestinians?” You know what? That’s a separate political issue. Like, the existence of a Jewish state—which is what Zionism is, like, the belief that they have the right to a Jewish state—the existence of a Jewish state is separate from the issue of what do you do with refugees from some political, you know, from, for some, from some physical area. So it was so funny to me, with like, “Palmer is this anti-Semitic guy,” because it was literally made up. Like, it’s not even like there were like screenshots, or made-up screenshots. Journalists just said it was true with zero evidence, and they just repeated what each other said. And I know people are going to hear this and say, “This, I must be—Palmer’s ignor—like he’s, he’s glossing over something; he must, he must have like said something about Jews on Twitter.” And they were like, “Are you Jewish?” “No, I’m not Jewish; I just believe in the existence of a Jewish state.” Um, and, and I bet even some of your listeners probably won’t agree with me on that, and that’s fine; we don’t have to all agree on everything, but I will say it was pretty ridiculous in the moment where like, “Palmer is an anti-semitic guy.” I’m like, “No, I love the Jews more than like anybody! Like, you Democrats hate me for how much I like Jews, you know?” Like that. You—anyway, it was—but what happened was, as a result of this reporting, like, looking back, I should have pushed back. What happened is I wrote a statement saying, “Hey, this is all false; none of this is true; here’s what actually happened. I gave $9,000 to this pro-Trump group; they ran a single billboard; everyone is lying; this is literally fake news.” And that was when “fake news” was like a new, a new, a new phrase. Facebook told me I couldn’t publish it. They said, “We won’t let you make this statement; you cannot make this statement because it frames the media as the bad guy, and in a world where Donald Trump is attacking the fourth estate, we can’t appear to be aligned with him.” I said, “Well, you guys don’t have to appear to be aligned, but I will be. Like, I, I’m, I’m fine if people think that I’m being unfair because this is literally character assassination. Like, they, they are, they, they are trying to destroy—” And they, they kept reporting, as of Thursday at 3:58 p.m., when reached for comment, Palmer Lucky is still employed by Facebook. Like, that’s how they ended the articles. It was, it was explicitly a scalp-taking operation from the very beginning. All the articles were ending with, “Palmer’s still employed; Palmer is still employed; according to Facebook, Palmer is currently still employed,” and they just couldn’t wait for the follow-up where they could take my scalp.

So Facebook tried to get me to resign, and I refused. They tried to get me to not say anything. Eventually, they wrote their own statement for me that basically just said, “I’m sorry for the negative impact this is having on Facebook’s uh, reputation, and I want to—uh, I’m going to be taking a voluntary leave of absence.” In reality, they told me I couldn’t come into the office until after the election. It was, it was that explicit: “You can’t come in until after the election.” Their thinking was, okay, Palmer is like the leader of our virtual reality organization; they knew they actually needed me; getting rid of me is not a thing that they could easily do. And their thought was, okay, we know that Palmer didn’t post these racist memes. Like, Facebook did not know—Facebook knew none of this was true, right? So they knew that this was just a media invention, but they didn’t want to push back; they didn’t want to say anything. Kind of like where, you know, you, you see Mark now coming out and finally saying, “Okay, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, maybe, you know, that wasn’t good,” but this was 2016; it was, it was a different universe. So they, they were hoping that I would take this leave of absence, disappear until after the election. They believed Hillary would win, and then if Hillary won, they thought all their employees and the press would kind of forget about this whole thing because it would just be this crazy time that Palmer supported that fringe candidate who lost in a landslide to Hillary Clinton, whoever—she had a 95% chance of winning. So now, I told them, “This is a bad strategy.” I said, “Guys, what you don’t understand is Donald Trump is going to win,” and they thought that I was just like insane. They like literally, when I said that, they said, “Wow, I thought you were a smart person.” I’m a—“No, guys, I am a smart person; Donald Trump is going to win. Like, I will accept that there’s a possibility he won’t, but all of the signs are that he is going to win. Like, the problem is that the media is reporting on Donald Trump the same way that they’re reporting on me: an absurd, totally baseless way that is out of touch with reality. Don’t fall for that.” And uh, they said, “No, no, you have to stay out of the office till after the election.” So the day after the election—Trump, Trump had won—they said, “Actually, you can’t come back to the office.” “Are you serious?” “I’m serious.” They said, “You can’t come back into the office.” And that was when the machinery went into motion to get rid of me. They realized that with Trump in office that—and like there were Facebook executives publicly saying, “I will not work with Trump supporters; I will not have them on my team,” which is, all by the way, illegal in California, but you know, you, you have to bring a case about it, and especially back then, Republicans weren’t really—I think we weren’t punching square. I think that most of them were like, “I just want to get done; I just want to get paid; I’m not, I’m not trying to be a professional victim,” right? Like, what, what, what red-blooded Republican man wants to basically go into a courtroom be like, “They’re so mean to me; they said, they said that they don’t like me ‘cause I voted for Trump.” Like, doesn’t that just sound like this, like, the dumbest little fest ever? Like, wouldn’t everyone laugh at you even if you won? And I think, and so people didn’t—people, people wanted to, they wanted to get work done; they didn’t want to, they didn’t want to be a professional victim and put themselves out there as the whiny, you know, whiny little boy who, who, who’s sad his co-workers don’t like him in a hostile workplace environment.

Did you have any conversations with Zuckerberg in person? No, because the lawyers were very—like, they, they, they very quickly isolate things like this. Like, the moment they realize that this was turning into a problem, they like, they’re like, “You cannot come to the office; you cannot send any messages; you cannot send any emails; you may only communicate through attorneys.” Like, there, there is a lockdown protocol to minimize, to minimize accountability on these things. And so it wasn’t until—and so they, they told me that even, even after the election, they said, “You can come back; we really need you; like, we all recognize that you’re the guy, and that you’re, you’re a critical part of the team; we just need you to stay out of the office for a little longer, and we’re going to figure this all out.” And then January rolled around, and uh, their attorneys called my attorneys and said, “You’re being fired; you’re being terminated without cause.” Oh, that was the other thing I forgot; they launched an internal investigation into me. They wanted to try and dig up some kind of policy violation; they wanted to try to find a reason to fire me that they could say had nothing to do with politics. And so that went for months, and they dug through all my emails and all my communications, and they interviewed dozens of Facebook employees, being like, just like full Gestapo style, you know, “What have you ever heard about Palmer Lucky doing something bad? Like, what, what do you know? What have you ever heard?” And I was like, “I literally have never heard Palmer mention politics; he’s just like a VR guy; he gave $9,000 to this Trump group, I think on a whim because he has billions of dollars. Like, like, this doesn’t seem—he, he’s—NE—” And so they, they tried to find something on me, and they found literally nothing. So their investigation concluded, and I, I remember being in the room with—because it’s a formal process—and they, they let you know when you’re being investigated, and in the end, they said, “We just want—we uh, we found no violations of Facebook policy at any point in your tenure,” and I, and, and like, so that was when they realized they were going to have to fire me without cause. They just said, “Well, we were paying you tens of millions a year, and we just decided for no reason we don’t need you employed anymore.” And uh, it was, it, look, it was, it was totally ridiculous; it was totally trumped up. They didn’t ever ask me about people who were discriminating against me for my politics, right? And they, they were, they were saying, “Oh, we did this investigation, and Palmer was not fired for his politics.” Like, “Well, you never asked me about it! If you would have told me, ‘Palmer, are you aware of any instances of people being discriminated against for their politics?’ Like, yeah, I can give you like two dozen.” If they ask me, “Palmer, were you fired for politics?” Like, yeah, I can literally give you the emails and messages where people explicitly state that they will not work with me because of how I—and so like, it was, it was, it was insanity. Like, they—and they were—the worst part is they were even telling the media this; they were saying, “Oh, no, it was, it was Palmer’s decision to leave.” Literally untrue. I was, I was terminated. They said—they told one journalist uh, off the record, but you know, “off the record” doesn’t mean anything—they told one journalist off the record that uh, it was something like—they said, “Look, leaving was his decision; it’s not like this is Soviet Russia where you say something, you say some the wrong thing about the wrong politician and then get disappeared.” It was, it was literally just like that. Any—I’m sorry, I seem worked up about this, but just like, I, I, I hate getting back into this headspace because it was just—it would be pissed if I was you too. I mean, it—you got to remember this was, this was—sorry, I need to do some water—Oculus was everything to me. All my friends worked at Oculus. Remember I told you it was started by me, and all my, all my friends worked there; all the friends that I made working over the course of, you know, half a decade on that particular product were, were there; my reputation was there; my work was there; all of the technology that I’ve been developing since I was 13 years old for VR was owned by that company. Yeah, everything—like, I was Oculus, and then they said, said, “No, we’re taking it all away from you, and you can’t even talk to anybody, or we’re going to come after you, and if you say a word of this to anyone, we’re, we’re going to come after you.” And so for me, it was just, it was a catastrophically destructive event, and I, I wish that I would have acted differently in the moment, but the mistake I made was trusting that people could have different politics from me but still treat me fairly. And I didn’t realize that when they told me, “Oh, you’re still an important part of the team,” I didn’t realize that was a pure manipulation tactic to prevent me from leverage. Like, I had leverage; there were things that they needed from me; there were things I was doing; they basically were just manipulating me to try and squeeze the last little bit of juice from me for a few months before just getting rid of me.

Wow. Yep. Anyway, that was, that was how that all went down. What would you have done different? So first of all, I would have put out my own statement, which, which I had already written. I, I, I, I should have just put it out. And the thing is, I realized later—I didn’t know at the time—that political activity outside of your employer, like, outside of your job, is protected, at least in California. They cannot do anything about politics. Like, they cannot tell you to not endorse a candidate, for example. You—they can tell you you can’t do it wearing a Facebook shirt; you can’t do it while you’re on the clock at Facebook, of course. Lots of Facebook employees do that, you know. They—Hillary Clinton was, was everywhere; they were literally using the campus print shop to print “I’m with her” posters that they were plastering all over San Francisco. Like, if you were for Hillary, it was absolutely no problem. But I should have said, you know what, that, that aside, I should have just gone out and said, “Hey, the media is lying; they are lying to all of you; this is completely false; this is a, like, this is fake news to the ultimate degree; the press is lying about me to try and take my scalp.” And I think that would have probably caused—a lot of it would have pissed them off because I wouldn’t have been allowing them to run the PR strategy. But the way that it’s supposed to work—just if you’ve never worked at a big company—the trade you’re making when you allow the company to run your PR strategy is implicitly that they’re not going to fire you, right? Basically, it’s, it’s okay; the trade is, “Do things our way, and you get to stay safe,” because otherwise there’s no incentive to do things their way; otherwise you do just go off on your own; you say, “I’m going to do whatever I want.” I shouldn’t have made that trade; I should have gone out, gotten the truth out there, and I think people would have been pissed that I didn’t let Facebook, you know, do their preferred option, which was to say nothing bad about them. They literally told me I couldn’t—I said, “I’m, I’m against Hillary Clinton because I think she’s going to drag us into World War III; she said that she’s going to enforce the no-fly zone in Syria,” which is like, that is saying, “I’m going to shoot down people.” Think, “I will enforce a no-fly zone,” means you just like say words, and it’s like—mean to pretend you have the authority. No, enforcing a no-fly zone means that a Russian aircraft is going to enter Syrian airspace, and the United States is going to shoot it down. And I, I was, I was looking at—I was like, holy—I, like, I’m one of the people who want us to get out of the Middle East, especially at the tail end of things. I’m like, that will drag us back. Can you imagine doing, doing this all over again with the Russians in the Middle East? And they said, “You can’t say any of this; you cannot say anything negative.”

About Hillary Clinton, you cannot say anything positive. About Donald Trump, and I should have just realized, wait a sec, I this is literally a I should just put it out there: they would have been upset with me temporarily that I didn't follow their strategy, but it would have been much harder for them to fire me in the end. The master stroke of their strategy was that in refusing to deny the allegations against me, they became true. Right, perception is reality. My refusal to address them and Facebook's refusal to point out that it was all made up in the minds of everybody—they said, "Well, it's it must be true. He is funding white supremacist troll campaigns. He is funding people to attack other people on the internet. He is funding a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes all over the internet," because why wouldn't they believe it? I never even said that it wasn't true, and I I think if if I had made clear that it wasn't true, they I probably would have gotten through it. Wow, it's a it's a it's it's a what a crazy place to work, it really well.

And you know what was even crazier? Was that they maintained for years and years and years that I was not fired for my politics. Got asked about it when he was in front of Congress. Um, yeah, it was Ted Cruz who asked him. Uh, Senator Cruz, uh, you know, why why did you fire Palmer Luckey? And he said, "Oh, I I don't think that's an appropriate this is an appropriate form." He said, "You have to answer the question," and Zuck said something like, "I I I can only commit that it was not uh it was not a political matter," or something like that, which was, to be fair to Mark, I don't think he was lying. I think that his team had correctly properly insulated him from from it. Like when when when you're illegally firing employees for their politics, you don't bring that to the most important people in the company and basically poison them. Like that's poisoning the king. Like to show if you're like, "Hey, King, here's this thing uh we're performing illegal activity," like you you've just screwed them over now because now they do know. And uh now am I to say that there's no there was no suspicion or, you know, a kind of understanding as to what would happen, of you know? I I wouldn't go that far, but it was crazy how they maintained for years and years and years that Pol—they literally—their CTO, Andrew Bosworth, publicly on multiple occasions said Palmer's termination had nothing to do with politics. It was not a factor in any way whatsoever. And they were telling people they started telling me that I was fired for cause. They're like, "Oh, we can't tell you why he was fired, but believe me, we had no choice. He did something that was just beyond the pale. We had to fire him. We had no choice." Um, I did, by the way, sort of get victory on this, so uh I will give credit to him. Andrew Bosworth, about a month ago, did po—post on Twitter. He said something like—you can pull up the exact one if you want and put it up on the screen—he said something like, "I want to apologize to Palmer Luckey. I've been saying things about him in the past that weren't true. I just want people to know that I was misled by others and that we are sorry and it shouldn't have gone down that way, and I was wrong." So they are actually finally acknowledging that the story they were putting out there that politics was not a factor and that I was fired for any reason at all is is nonsense. But uh, you know, it's a it's a it's a it's sparse comfort a decade on. Yeah, wow.

So you leave. Ian, are you involved with any VR now? A little bit. We've got some big news coming soon. Big news on the Anduril side. I know you we're going to break that here in a little bit. All right, let's take a quick break. Let's do it. When we come back, we'll get into Anduril. Sounds good. I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force-feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at the Shawn Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter, and the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad. She's made two different appearances here on the Shawn Ryan Show, and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists: how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up up to. And here's the best part: the newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign-up links in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.

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I have one more thing actually that's fun along those lines. I recently got the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. Have you seen those, the little camera glasses? And uh, it it once it's all set up, it says, "Ask Meta about anything." Just say, "Okay, Meta," and then ask your question. It's like, "Okay, Meta, when was Palmer Luckey fired?" It goes, "Palmer Luckey was fired on March 29th, 2017, after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property in a trade secret lawsuit," and then it links to a story on ZDNet where the guy says, "I was found guilty of this crime," but he's literally wrong. It literally didn't happen because, first of all, being found guilty is for criminal cases, not civil cases. Two, I literally won on all of the charges around trade secrets. Like we literally won, and the judge threw out all the damages against me and said, "Yeah, he's not guilty of any of this." So like, but what's crazy is, of course, like the average person, like you ask these questions, and these things that journalists write are being brought up years in the future as the basis for AI knowledge. And like you, if you ask these AI systems, as far as they know, it's all true. It's all true. So you know, according to these AIs, I was fired after I funded a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes. Geez. And it's just and like and how do you undo that, right? It's like it's it's this persistent harm that just lasts forever. Like let's say that I could get them by sending my lawyers after them now to remove these stories. Well, there's still these huge AI models that have been trained on a decade now of reporting and re-reporting. How do you how do you undo that? It's a it's a it's a big problem when you've got so much that's been put out there, a tidal wave of it. I'd say maybe the majority of it—well, I think the the good news is I think the majority of people now know that legacy media is complete—well, that's why the media is so freaked out. Yeah, yeah, it's they're trying they're now trying to replicate podcasts. Yep. You I mean you you you saw the bit where Elon was saying to people, he says, "You are the media now. In the modern world, you have the tools to get your message out, and people can amplify others based on who has the closest proximity to the real information, who actually has the activity." Like we can be primary sources. We don't need intermediaries. And then you have like the National Press Club. You see this speech where they have this guy up on stage. He says, "He doesn't matter what Elon says; they are not the press. We are the press." I'm like, "Oh my God, this guy's so he's so out of touch with just the American moment. Like like who's going to hear that and be like, 'Yeah, he's right. How dare citizen journalists without credentials report on things?'" Yeah, wow.

So you get so you're done at Facebook. You get fired from Facebook. Yep. And then you move into Anduril. So how long is the how long's the gap here? Same day. I literally I literally picked up the phone, and I had been talking with people—well, I got to backtrack a little bit. Before I started Oculus, when I was a teenager, I had worked for almost a year on an army project called Brave Mind. Have you ever heard of this? No. It was at the ICT mixed reality lab. Uh, there was a project that was being worked on called Brave Mind that was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. The idea was that you could put them into virtual reality simulations of things that would trigger their PTSD, uh, and you could teach them coping exercises, thinking exercises to mitigate their physiological responses under the guidance of a licensed therapist. You could also expose them to things that they might be exposed to in the battlefield ahead of time to help them learn how to cope with that ahead of time. And uh, I was not doing any important work on the program. I don't want to make it sound like I was like one of the key researchers. I was the cable monkey. I was the lab technician. I was making making stuff go, making head-mounted displays work, designing stuff to kind of support the program. But that was my first exposure to how the government uses technology, the good that it can do in our military, but also how broken a lot of the procurement systems are in terms of how they buy things, how they procure things, the incentives that happen when you have Cost Plus contracts involved. Cost Plus contractors involved who make more money when the contract runs long, more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster, more efficient decisions. And that experience, small as it was, stuck with me through my whole career. And I had a lot of conversations with friends who did work in defense, whether working literally, you know, uh in the military or building tools for the military, who gave me these stories that you would just never believe about how broken things were, how much money was being wasted and grafted and misspent. And so when I made all my Oculus money, one of the first things I did was try to find small defense startups that I could invest in that had a shot at changing this. My thinking was, "Okay, I've made all this money. I don't have the time to work on this problem at all, but I want to find companies that have a shot at changing the proving that you can apply technology from the tech industry and bring it into you know bring it into uh into these defense spaces in a really meaningful way." And I ended up not really making any investments. There was a couple tiny things, but nothing material because I couldn't find anybody who was doing things the way that I wanted. I couldn't find anyone who was trying to build basically the next Lockheed Martin or the next Northrop Grumman. I mostly found companies that were building some little gizmo or gadget, but like a part of the bigger machine, but they weren't going to change anything, and they weren't out there trying to change things at a big scale. And so I made some friends who were doing a similar thing. So one of those was Trey Stevens, who's one of the co-founders at Anduril. He was at the time working full-time as a venture capitalist at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's Venture firm, or one of his Venture firms, rather. And uh, he was full-time trying to find exactly the same thing I was. He was meeting with hundreds of small defense companies trying to find ones that were had a shot of really becoming something big and meaningful. And uh, we ended up becoming friends. I met Brian Schimp, who was director of engineering at Palantir at the time, uh, and a few other people, my friend Joe Chen, who was an early Oculus employee, former paratrooper, really interested in trying to figure out how to use technology to make D better. And so what happened was uh after these years of meeting all the time and just complaining, "Oh my God, isn't this all screwed up? Aren't we wasting so much money on nonsense? Isn't it a shame there's no company that could come in and really go toe-to-toe with these big guys and you know give them a threat?" And uh, the day that I was fired, I picked up the phone. I called Joe and I called Brian and I called Trey. I said, "Hey, you know, guys, we've been trying to find a company that we could invest in that does this. I think we should start it ourselves. I think now's the moment." They said, "Palmer, we're all so busy, like you know, running engineering at Palantir or being a venture capitalist or, in your case, running Oculus." I said, "You know, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." And so that was really that was so they had no idea. I I I I let I let him know, but you know, it was it was um that's a sacrifice I'm willing to take. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And uh and so I I I'd say like the early the early Anduril crew is like that group of people that had been thinking about these problems, uh some people from Oculus who resigned when they fired me. There was there was a there was a pretty large contingent of people who said, "What you did to Palmer is up and wrong, and I refuse to be part of it. I'm out of here." And uh, the funniest part is that of that contingent, kind of the the people who left because of the way Facebook treated me, then many of them came to work at Anduril, and they said, "Palmer, what are you doing next? Like I I want to be a part of whatever it is." And then some of them, when they found out I was starting a weapons company, never talk to me again. They were they were huge fans of me. They believed I was treated unfairly, and then when they found out that the thing I thought was most important me for to work on, which is to build better tools for our national security, save taxpayers hundreds of billions by making tens of billions, they they literally concluded that I had become an evil person and never wanted to talk to me again. Some of them have then come back around as world events have shifted. Like you know, this is 2017, so as it became more clear that China is an aggressor and not a benevolent fountain of money, as it became clear that Russia is still an expansionist dictatorship and not a reformed quasi-Western gas station, uh, people have come back and said, "Okay, I was wrong. What you're doing is not evil." But at the time, it was very controversial. A lot of people believed that anything you did with the military was either useless or evil or warmongering. The fact that you were saving them money was actually to the detriment. Like I said, "Guys, we we're spending way too much money on these weapon systems." They said, "Oh, so you're going to make it so they can buy 10 times as many weapons," wow, as if that's better. Like, "Well, guys, if you hate the military, like if you hate NATO, for example, like should they be armed with water balloons? Should they be armed with slingshots? Like like what what level of force are you okay with them having? Like if you if you believe that NATO has any reason to exist at a level beyond like kids with water balloons, then you should probably want them to be armed with things that can actually beat our adversaries." And the problem is, at that point, people just they stop talking to you and say, "You fascist," and they move. Like you can't reason someone out of an opinion that they didn't reason themselves into. And and when people when you start to try to pull them out of the Matrix, they are often unable to unable to make the jump.

It's a great quote. So Anduril started—so Anduril started. We wanted to build not a defense contractor but a defense product company: use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, decide when it's done, and then sell products based on those technologies to the United States government. I was a strong believer, and I I I get to look like a visionary today, but back then I looked like a crazy person. I was a strong believer that the entire future of warfare would be defined by artificial intelligence and autonomy. This fundamental decoupling of the one-to-one ratio from shooter to weapon, from pilot to plane, to allow smaller numbers of people to wield many swords was kind of the was kind of the thinking there. I knew that would that would change everything, not just with small, cheap drones, but even with large-scale systems. Like if you can get people out of harm's way, and if you can allow them to leverage their own intellect beyond what they can hold and steer with their own two hands, if you can basically become a person who manages weapons at a higher level while they micromanage the second-second execution of your commands, you can fundamentally change warfare in a way that I think is very creative to us interests and very very against the world that let's say China or Russia wants to exist, largely because I think these advantages accrue mostly to the defender. Uh, if you're trying to build a military that is designed to turn your allies into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, like you have in NATO or most US operations, uh, that's that's really useful. If you're trying to build a military where you you need to, let's say, go into Taiwan with landing craft and get millions of soldiers there and invade and then occupy their territory, all of the stuff I just talked about is a nightmare for you. Like it doesn't actually help you. The ability to wield many swords per arm is not that useful for occupying a resistant hostile land. It's it's it's a lot better for you know, slug it out, large-scale, great power fights, and that's what the United States needs to need need needs to focus on winning, for the most part, at least right now.

So were you how were you aware of how it works then with the military-industrial complex? Oh, yeah, I mean, look, like maybe how did you know that going with with all the VR stuff you were doing? I I like I said, you know, I had exposure from the Brave Mind stuff, and I become interested in the problem, but I'd done a lot of research, and I'd kind of been building a theory of how someone might be able to fix this. I'm not—but there were a lot of assumptions I made were that were wrong somewhere, right? Like I I don't want to make it sound like I came in day one and I understood the whole landscape, but you I had my I had my beautiful mind charted up on the on the wall with all the all with all the strings and all the pins connecting where I thought where I thought bad was and where we could be going after um, and I I was right enough. Like I was right I was right about enough of the problems that we were able to actually get some traction. Basically, our bet was simple. We decided we were going to put all of our money into building this AI called Latus, which is a military-focused AI that is built to the standards you need for military, the reliability you need for military, that could act as a tool that would be the brains of dozens of products. So basically, make Lat a lattice, you know, being something you can build other things on top of. They always build this lattice AI as a sort of core software product, and then you can build on top of it autonomous fighter jets, autonomous tanks, cruise missiles, small arms, surveillance systems, security systems, drone defense systems, and they all kind of share this common brain. And so we started by building Latus, and we started building products on top of it, uh, some of them for the military, some of them for Customs and Border Protection. Actually, our first major program of record, which was with CBP, uh, and uh against all odds, we've actually managed to make it work. Like like today, Anduril is still making Latus, and we have over two dozen different hardware products that are all using that same AI brain. Wow, wow. Like one of our big wins recently—so you basically you're talking about Skynet from The Terminator. Yes, that like I mentioned earlier that I read a lot of books, and I read a lot of science fiction. One of the things that I've realized in my career is that nothing I ever come up with will be new. I've I've literally never come up with an idea that a science fiction author has not come up with before at some point, which makes sense. There's a lot of them; they've been around for a long time, and they don't have to make things, and they don't have to wait to the right moment. You remember I started Oculus at just the right moment for it to succeed. A science fiction author doesn't have to wait for something to be possible to think about it and to write about it and for people to be excited about the idea. And so every time I've come up with something, I've been able to find usually many, sometimes one, science fiction pieces addressing literally exactly that idea by some guy who just thought thought about it like 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 70 years ago. Some of the stuff that I'm building today, for example, in the AR/VR space around augmenting the vision of soldiers, these are ideas that are from 1959, like Starship Troopers novels, right? Like these are old ideas that have only very recently become technologically feasible. The idea of autonomous fighter jets—that's been around for about a hundred years. The idea of making a computer that is so good you can program it with a general intent at the

Beginning, and then it executes on a mission all on its own. Like people have been thinking of this since computers were programmed with punch cards; they were imagining a punch card computer that could do the whole management of a bombing mission during World War II. The tech wasn't ready, but the idea was. So you you're bringing up Skynet, and I think that uh, like Skynet makes a ton of sense except for one critical mistake: they gave it control of the United States nuclear arsenal. Um, like I I always like to think how Terminator might have gone if uh, one, you know, Skynet wouldn't have achieved sentience, but even more to the point, what if they just would have used it for the weapon systems that actually make sense for AI to control? Right, there's there's actually not a lot of gains in having an advanced artificial intelligence have control of your nuclear weapons; it's like it's all risk and no upside.

Mhm. There is a lot of upside in allowing people to get out of, let's say, tip-of-the-spear fighter jets where they are going to need to fly into areas that are very well defended by surface-air missiles, and you know you're going to lose a large fraction of your of your of your fleet like that. That is a job for robots, not for people. And so like one of the things we said we were going to build to start the company, and probably our big win that we've had as a company so far, is a recent contract we won called CCA. Uh, so we won a spot on increment one for CCA, competing against Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. So it's us toe-to-toe with the big guys saying we are going to build a fighter jet powered by AI that is better than all of the systems being proposed by these people who have been around for a century. And guess what? We beat all of them.

Damn.

Congratulations.

Thank you. It was a huge moment for our company. You just see in the office, people were screaming and cheering and throwing chairs; it was—and we did it because we managed to build this very powerful AI system and all the expertise we needed to build a fighter jet that is capable of going toe-to-toe with all of these other companies. Like no, we've built in eight years from like, it you know, Chris Dius was employee number one at Oculus and employee number one at Anduril; he was the first guy to, you know, he he he got right out of Facebook, said, "You guys are up, I'm going to do whatever Palmer does." We've gone from me hiring Chris Dius as employee number one to being selected against Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop—companies that have a stellar, you know, stellar reputation for building really sick aircraft for the better part of a century. We've done that; we we've gone from me and Chris Dius to that in less than eight years, and it's because we are taking the best of modern tech technology development practices, including many that I learned while I was at Facebook in Silicon Valley, and bringing them to defense manufacturing, defense production. Like what we're doing is like I I we're not Supermen here, right? I'm not saying we're like these brilliant Einstein-level geniuses. What we're doing is taking techniques, approaches, and people who used to be making AR mustache emojis in Silicon Valley and putting them to work on problems that actually matter, ones that actually get them stoked in the morning to to to come to work. And if you take the best technologists in the country and you put them to work on a problem that they actually care about and they really believe in, you're going to get extraordinary things come out of it.

So did this idea develop from Skynet?

I'd say Skynet was maybe part of it.

Like, no.

Well, here here's what it really is: Skynet itself is not actually a unique idea. Like the idea of uh, of kind of AI management systems that are able to manage large numbers of autonomous weapons, they've literally been around for a hundred years. Like Skynet was Skynet was just the one that happened to kind of capture the public imagination, uh, but there are lots and lots and lots lots of examples. I mean, like not not to say that this is the best example, but look, like Star Wars episode one, you know, I don't know if you remember, do you remember Star Wars episode one a little bit? Well, you the the the crux—people who haven't watched it, which you know they're not super missing out—episode three was great; episode one you can you can you can skip it if you're not a Star Wars person. But the Trade Federation imposes a blockade on Naboo, and they send down all of these robots, and they're all controlled by one central AI that's up in the ship that's orbiting above, and they have to destroy that ship so that they can shut down all of the robots. Now, by the way, there's something to be learned from that, which is: put the AI brain in each of the robots; don't require a data link that can be jammed or hacked or broken or a central command post that can be destroyed. Anyway, they didn't know that on Naboo; the Trade Federation really screwed up, and they had it all going on in the cloud, but like uh, for some reason nobody remembers nobody remembers the Trade Federation; they all talk about Skynet.

Wow. So you develop you develop the AI mind, but you also develop—and what we could—what's cool is we like we develop that AI mind, but we can basically optimize it for different things and train it how to do things that normally they would have been done by not just a person but an expert person. For example, we use Lattice to pilot our fighter jets; we are training them how to do things based on data from the world's best fighter pilots. And we are using Lattice to power our underwater submarines; we make a lot of underwater submarines for the United States, but AI also really mostly for Australia right now. And that submarine is able to listen to things, differentiate things; it can basically be an expert sonar operator and an expert submarine pilot and an expert energy management specialist. And you could basically take all of this expertise from hundreds of different roles and jam it into one brain; you can build one system like Lattice that is the world's best fighter pilot, submarine pilot, sensor reader, and small arms operator that the world's ever seen. And to to be able to cram that all into one brain, it's a it's it's a powerful thing.

Wow. So you're developing the mind; you're also developing the aircraft, the autonomous aircraft, the autonomous submarine in some cases. So one of the most common misconceptions about Anduril is that Lattice is only a brain for the things that we make. We do make a lot of hardware; like we make surveillance towers, we make fighter jets, we make submarines, we make loitering munitions that are being used in Taiwan and Ukraine. But what are loitering munitions? So basically think uh, think like uh, weapons that can go somewhere, observe a target, and then choose when and how to strike it. So not like not like artillery, is not loitering—a thing that like a missile that flies to an area, then pops out wings and orbits overhead for 10 minutes watching what they're doing and figuring out what it's going to do; that that would be a loitering munition. Okay. Um, and uh, we we've actually had a lot of success in Russia, like between Russia and Ukraine; uh, we—on the Ukrainian side, obviously—they've been using our munitions to strike at things that other weapons don't have enough range or can't get through jamming bubbles to attack. So the Russians, for example, will be jamming communications, so other drones can't get in to destroy these targets; our drones, because they're piloted by AI, can fly in orbit above, let's say, you know, a jamming truck or a surface-air missile launcher, and then figure out the right time to go in and strike. Get destroyed, and the mind is in the aircraft, and the mind is in the aircraft. That's—but but um, so you really—sorry, what I wanted to finish and say is the common misconception is that because we build these hardware products on top of Lattice, that Lattice is only for Anduril hardware products; that is not the case. We have we have integrated Lattice with over 100 existing DOD platforms. So we're taking these brains and we're hooking them up to systems that are already used by DOD, so like vehicles, they already have weapons, they already have sensors that they already have; we're basically taking everything, not just our weapons, but everything that they have, and we're trying to glue it all together into one common hive mind so that all the people, all the vehicles, all the robots have a common shared view of the world, basically in real time, seeing everything that's going on on the battlefield. So you know where the good guys are, you know where the bad guys are; you're able to predict what's going to happen in the near future so that you can have everything kind of, you know, skating to the puck as it were, rather than reacting to what happened 10 minutes ago. And uh, it's it's a really powerful thing to do, to take these systems that used to be siloed and, you know, just be their own little stovepipe worlds, and instead bring them into one gigantic brain.

Holy, that's incredible. It's some good—one of the things that I've started working on lately is a project—I I've never wanted to build humanoid robots, not myself, because there's so many other companies that are doing a good job building humanoid robots, and I've just been I I I've known for a few years now that they're on the edge of being real, and I've been waiting for that to happen because humanoid robots are not good enough to, let's say, replace a Navy SEAL, but they are good enough to replace, let's say, an elderly man. Like they can hobble around and pull levers and push buttons with about the same ability as a guy in his 90s is. I'd say where most humanoid robots are today. It turns out that if you can put a brain like Lattice into one of those robots, you can basically use that as a way to convert legacy weapon systems into AI-powered weapon systems. So imagine that I have a an old Soviet-era surface-air missile launcher, and normally you need a bunch of guys to stand around it watching a screen, picking out targets; they have to turn on the generator, right? You know, you have to pull the lever, you have to prime the pumps, you got to put the choke and, you know, start the whole thing up. But what if you could have a humanoid robot doing all of that? All of a sudden this thing that used to have a bunch of humans that made it a really really juicy target, now you can put it up on a hill and say, "Oh yeah, it's just a bunch of robots," and I've networked it into the greater hive mind. Now the data that it's collecting is being shared out to hundreds of other weapons in real time, and so I'm pretty excited about humanoid robots, not for what they can do at the high end, but more for just taking a lot of these legacy systems—like imagine if you have an old Humvee, right? How cool would it be if instead of having to build a brand new AI-powered vehicle with like AI actual—you rope—you have all these new cars that Tesla's making that are capable of steering themselves. What if, instead of buying all new AI-powered cars for the military, I can take a humanoid robot, I can tell it to walk over to that Humvee, get in, and drive it around as an autonomous vehicle? It doesn't make sense for consumers; for consumers you should just, you know, uh, just buy an autonomous car. But where the military already has literally trillions of dollars in inventory—like remember we we have a we have a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but the military has trillions and trillions of dollars of hardware that they've already bought. I am not out to make them rebuy all of that; some of it they'll need to rebuy, but I want to make sure we're leveraging all these tools we already have as well. We need to bring AI to everything, not just AI to new weapons.

Wow. You have completely revolutionized warfare as we know it. And by the way, you can see where with their current business model—like warfare—but also think about like the amount of money here. The first page of our first pitch deck said, "Anduril will save taxpayers hundreds of billions a year by making tens of billions a year." If you're in the business of making those trillions of dollars of hardware, you're probably pretty spooked by a company like Anduril coming in and saying, "Well, maybe you actually don't have to buy rebuy a bunch of stuff; maybe you can actually keep using a lot of the systems you already have, or worse, maybe you can buy stuff from Anduril that's a tenth of the price of the stuff that you've been buying from the other guys." It's—we are, as taxpayers, paying way too much for everything. I mean, how—like when you were in—you probably had to pay government prices for for for for for for for for various things—like you're familiar with like companies will literally charge the government a different price than they charge civilians, or—and I know technically they're not allowed to charge government more, but they have like the government version, right? It's like a special government paint—like, "Oh yeah, the special government paint version of this of this like optic that's gone on this rifle; it's going to be $4,500," meanwhile, as a civilian you can go buy something for $500 that is just as good. I mean, we we have to stop doing that as a country.

Very familiar with that. Eisenhower was right when he said that in a very real sense, every rifleman, every bomb dropped, represents a child deprived of education, a library never built, a hospital never constructed. Like I feel like a lot of people forget that those two things are tied together. It doesn't mean we need to be hippies about it and pretend that war is never going to happen, but we need to be spending the right amount on these things. We cannot we cannot treat it as—right now it's almost like you can't question it because you can't question—like if you question defense spending, you're questioning the existence of the military; that that like that's that's just that's that's just crazy to me. There's no other part of our society where you can get away with that, where you like, "Oh, you can't—" No, that's not true; education, you can't question education either. You can't say, "Aren't we spending too much on education for how bad it is?" and be like, "How dare you attack our brave teachers who are educating all of our children?" It's like, "No, no, I'm not attacking the teachers; it's just, you know, it seems like we spend a lot of money for kids to get grades this bad; like the kids can't read good or do other stuff good, too."

So could the Navy SEAL be replaced?

Oh man, this is an interesting one. I don't think so, on a quite long timeline, for a few reasons. First of all, it's a bit—it's it's the nature of the job. Like I'll tell you—here's someone who will be replaced: that hilltop surface-air missile operator, right? Like he's—that is a crazy dangerous job; you're the first thing that everyone wants to take out before they can get through to everything else; like you're going to die. We have to get rid of that guy. But then you look at what like a lot of Navy SEALs do and what like—or or like look at what Green Berets do: it's so much about interacting extremely closely with people, around people, among people, in infrastructure that was designed for people. I think it's going to be really really hard to make robots that do that set of things. It's it's—remember I said robots can do the jobs that a 90-year-old man can do? Okay, they're going to eventually do the job that a 70-year-old man can do, and then eventually they'll be able to do like an average-in-shape 50-year-old man can do. To build humanoid robots that can do what a Navy SEAL in the prime of his life, you know, probably secretly uh, secretly roided out—like that's that's a really high bar for a robot to hit, especially when it comes to his ability to break the rules or make a decision that wasn't programmed or decide that he's going to do something that a robot's just never going to do. It's it's my my intuition here is like that's going to be the last job to be figured out. Um, it's it's a little bit like—it's not a perfect example, but it's like the the, you know, is AI going to replace like the jobs of our politicians? It's like, you know, that's probably like the last thing to go, like in in a in in a in a very real sense. There's certain parts of our society that are almost like envoys of America; they represent what we're doing, and I I I think that we're not going to outsource that to robots any—so so we're a long ways out from replacing a a tier-one assaulter. I think we're a long way out, and that's—and what is a long way out? Thirty, forty, fifty years minimum. I—there's some things that move fast and others that that don't. But I—because here's here's the other thing you have to remember: I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but you're also able to augment people. So the the the the right comparison is not Navy SEAL of today versus robot 10 years from now; it's what could a Navy SEAL look like in 10 years in terms of their uh, biological modification or conditioning, in terms of their mental modifications or conditioning, things like exoskeletons, things like more advanced mobility, things like more advanced small arms; all of those are going to make the Navy SEAL a a moving target as well. So the robots would have to get not just as good as a SEAL of today, they're going to have to be as good as a SEAL of that era, and I think we're going to keep investing in—I think we're going to keep investing in the guys, and hopefully a lot more than we have been.

You're involved with exoskeletons, correct?

Well, we I I don't how invol—I I just ran a sub-eight-minute mile for the first time in my life, and I'm usually I'm usually the guy who's wheezing to do a sub-ten-minute mile, uh, and last night I ran a sub-eight mile in an exoskeleton that uh—ran—I basically it ran out of thermal capacity two-thirds of the way through the run, so uh, the last third of the run I was actually going slower than I normally would run, but the first two-thirds were so fast I still actually—when I go home tonight I'm going to be making some mods to the cooling system; uh, the company—I don't want to badmouth the company—I think that they made a mistake on the cooling system, um, and so I'm going to be doing some mods tonight that I already have the parts sitting in the garage for, and I'm going to run—I think I'm going to run a sub-seven mile. Anyway, I'm I'm I'm like an out-of-shape fatty, and I'm—if I'm able to just like put on an exoskeleton and run a seven-minute mile, imagine what that could do on a Navy SEAL. Um, the same thing for augmenting vision, you know, right now the night vision capabilities that we give our war warfighters are not that far removed from what we had in the 90s, right? It's still Gen 3 night vision; sure, it's white phosphor instead of green, and it's a little higher res and a little higher gain, but it generationally it's the it's the same. Imagine what happens when you can take that Navy SEAL and you can put on a visor that gives him full peripheral vision at night in the thermal spectrum, the visible spectrum, the ultraviolet spectrum, the hyperspectral spectrum; he's able to identify individual materials, components, vehicles, see all of his buddies, see all of the bad guys, and have information seamlessly shared between him and every other weapon and robot and vehicle on the battlefield. Like that is where the Navy SEAL is going to be in just a few years. I think it's going to be hard for robots to compete with with that guy.

So how does how does the exoskeleton work?

So different exoskeletons work in different ways. Um, this particular one basically is sensing your motion uh, based on your actual motion, and then it tries to predict—it actually has an onboard AI algorithm that is trying to predict what you're doing, and then it applies force that matches—like you you you use power steering, right? Mhm. You make a motion, it feels that torque, and then it adds more power to it to zero it out. It's actually not that different than that. Imagine if you had power steering, but instead of just for turning a wheel and grinding your tires, imagine it was every joint on your body. So you say, "Okay, I'm lifting, I'm doing this," and it says, "Oh, he's trying to do that; I'm going to add more power." There's more advanced techniques that start to actually read your muscles before they even move. CU—when you tell your muscles to move, it takes time for them to respond. That's going to be the future of exoskeletons; it's going to be measuring your body so that instead of there being a delay where I move, it feels it, and then it helps me, it's going to be seamlessly integrated with you, maybe even starting to move your arm before your natural muscles are doing it.

Wow. That's what—like I'm—and like then the crazy thing is eventually someday—and I think this is way out, just for a variety of basically invasive surgical reasons—eventually you'll be able to read those signals right from the brain directly. So I'm at—like right now you have a lot of latency in your in your motion that you you don't perceive it; you think there's no latency in your body; there's actually a couple hundred milliseconds of latency in your movements that your brain just ignores and tells you is fine. Imagine a world where you're wearing an exoskeleton where the moment your brain is telling your arm to move, the exoskeleton starts moving your arm; you could potentially make someone who's literally ten times faster at moving or reacting, and you—that again, you see where I'm getting—like this is that—that's going to be the Navy SEAL of the future, and that guy is going to be a beast.

Holy. I've actually got a a very small-scale version of this; I built a system that uh, measures when you are trying—security guys running around with this stuff—you are—we we have a great security team, but I probably shouldn't I probably shouldn't talk about methods and tactics on them. Um, I I built a device many years ago, and I've I've I've I've screwed around with it a lot of times; it basically is a small sensor that you can mount that is able to tell when you are flexing muscles on your face, and I hooked that up to another electrical actuator. You ever—Ed—like a TENS unit for like therapy or so—it's—I hooked up something that's a lot like a TENS unit, but it's just rigged a little differently so that instead of making your muscles vibrate, it is made to just trigger individual muscle groups, you know, like it can just basically make you, you know, pull this finger or pull that finger. And I made it so that whenever I even barely start to flex a muscle up here in my face, it sends a signal wirelessly to a patch I have on my arm that fully fires this tendon and makes me uh, makes me pull my trigger finger. Now, the thing is, if I do this normally, like if I normally am telling my my my trigger finger to go, that signal has to go from my brain down my spinal cord, out through all these nervous cords out into my arm; that actually takes a really really long time. It's it's your—it's your—there's something called nervous transit velocity or nervous conduction velocity; it's how fast you can send signals down your peripheral nervous system. By building a bypass for it, I can make it where I can actually—if I want to pull the trigger on my gun, I can flex that muscle on my head, which is much closer to my brain, therefore a much much shorter pathway, and I can actually shave a ton of latency off the delay between when I see something, when I pull my trigger. All of a sudden I've now reduced—effectively—because you you're fam with like lock time in a—

Firearm. It's like lock time is a time between when you pull a trigger and when the round is actually going. And different, you know, if you if you have like a really heavy hammer, you can have a higher lock time. And so if you're looking at a target, you're pulling that trigger, you have some inaccuracy that is caused purely by the lock time—you told it to fire and when it actually fires. And you can learn it out to some degree by kind of predicting all this together. I can not only be faster, I can even be more accurate by just removing that latency.

Lock time. We pretend it's actually just a gun. Your real lock time is the signal from your brain to when you pull the trigger to when the trigger reacts. And there's a lot of things we can do. So when when I talked about biological modifications and mechanical modifications, there's things that we're going to be able to do that are going to eventually have your brain, you know, telling you to fire some weapon, and the weapon will be fired and out the barrel and hitting the target before you before before you would have a traditional guy would have been able to even pull the trigger. So it's it's an exciting future. Wow. Um, totally mind blown, right? That's that's holy. It's it's it's it's

How long do you think it'll be before we see exoskeletons on the battlefield? So I I I do have to admit that I have said in the past that exoskeletons, the time has probably come and gone. I like I I've I've this is a public prediction that I've made. My my belief was that exoskeletons were probably something that made sense in the 80s and the '90s if we would have invested in them, but that at this point we probably should just move to humanoid robotics and just have them remotely controlled by people, like by—I will say by the way—we're going to have remotely controlled Navy SEAL robots long before you have, you know, the AI-controlled robot. Uh, but I've recently seen some technology that has me questioning that. Uh, I I I think that we're going to start seeing this tech in kind of tier one groups like just about now, like less than a year would be my would be my would be my estimation.

When when does it get controlled robot? Uh, sorry, no exoskeletons. Exoskeletons now, they're going to be a little less cool than people expect. It's not going to be like an Iron Man suit. It's more like a suit that maybe helps one or two of your joints, like that helps you run better, maybe to run faster, or maybe just to use less, uh, so that you can run longer. Like, I mean, I'm sure you were in situations where would you've liked it to have been able to like go take a jog carrying a whole bunch of stuff to a place a kilometer away and then get there and not be tired? Like that'd be a huge deal. I think those are going to be the types of exoskeletons we see. It's not going to be like I put on my Iron Man's suit and I'm carrying 300 lb of vibranium armor and the bullets are blasting off me. I think it's going to be more like, hey, you can like you can run up a whole flight of stairs to the top of a 10-story building because all the power's cut and there's no elevators, and you're going to step out on the on that last landing you'll be like, oh yeah, that was that was a little that was a little tough as opposed to feeling like you want to collapse. And that's a huge deal.

Eventually, I do think we will see the thing that everybody wants, which is, you know, you put you put on the suit and you're Superman and you punch through walls and the bullets are coming at you and and nothing happens. I it's going to it's going to be a plus before that happens. One of the problems being any suit that can do that can also kill you. Just think about it this way: like a suit that basically helps out your legs, it's only as powerful as your legs are on average, you know, climbing up some stairs. So like if it malfunctions, like you might hurt yourself, but you'll be okay. If you are building a suit that is capable of, you know, doing Iron Man style like I'm going to punch through this building and walk through the brick wall opening, that's a suit where if it malfunctions it could rip your arms out of their joints. And you really need to be you really need to be careful when you're building something like that. It's not the type of thing that you build over a weekend. I mentioned earlier like I'm modifying this exoskeleton tonight so that I can run faster. Uh, that's not the type of thing you do with an exoskeleton that is able to rip your limbs off. You know, it's is a is a very different development process. So it's not it's more like a medical device and less like

Little contradiction maybe you would mentioned first we were saying no, we're not going to see remote controlled or robots. Yep. Now you're saying we might see before the exoskeleton. I guess uh before you had asked uh like you had asked about um you had asked about like AI Navy SEALS or robot Navy Seals. I have to add I I missed in my mind there is going to be an intermediary step, which is like you're not you'll have robot bodies that are piloted by people. So they're still using, you know, human judgment and like that's going to happen a lot sooner than, you know, the the AI robot Navy SEAL. That is

How do you see that working? Um, is it going to be you're going to put on a VR headset? You're going to put on a VR headset? You're going to strap on a suit that does full motion capture of your entire body and you'll be like it's probably going to handle the leg logo motion because that's something you can't really remotely do very well. It's going to have to use local sensors to scan the terrain and do a better job than you'd be able to see anyway. So imagine like downward shooting Lars building a 3D model of all the terrain that's within 10 ft of you, so you know what to step over, what you could trip on, you know what you need to avoid. Um, and then everything on the top you've got a guy who's just operating the whole thing and you know, oh so this will be so they'll be controlling these from a totally separate location.

Yeah, I mean like and so casualties be essentially zero human casualties if it's a if I will admit like there are there are problems with this like the reason you want to move to an AI brain eventually is largely because of communications links problems. Like if I if I have a command center that has to talk to a robot, that means that all they have to do to make this robot stop working is jam that link. If they jam the link, the robot is like all of those battle droids in Star Wars episode one, they just fall over and they're useless. Um, so but for missions where that's okay, maybe like maybe we have links that can't be jammed by that enemy, maybe it's short range enough that we can just power through. Uh, yeah, that's the that's going to be a thing.

Actually, have you seen the you've seen the Tesla humanoid robot demos, right? With Optimus? Yeah. So most of those demos I I I hate to I'm not trying to I'm not trying to piss off Elon, sorry Elon, I'm going to I'm going to let people know all those demos with the robots pouring drinks for people and being enders, those are all actually teleoperated. It's not an AI brain that's doing all of that. There's a there's a guy who's doing what I just described, wearing a VR headset, wearing a motion capture suit, and he's pouring drinks for people, walking around, doing all kinds of stuff. And uh, yeah, that that that is definitely going to be a thing that our military is doing a lot of in just the next few years. Holy, if not at the level of a Navy SEAL. Wow. If not the level Navy SEAL, but like uh if you if you need to serve drinks, you know, like that's that that's that's going to be happening soon. Wow. Damn dude.

Let's talk about I got to throw out one more thing, which is uh I I write a little bit of speculative sci-fi from time to time. Um, I don't publish, just for my own my own note keeping and entertainment, but I did write a bit a bit uh years and years ago about um a tier one operator who basically uses robotics to continue operating even into his 70s and 80s, the being like he's got a broken body, but you know he's still he's still the sharpest the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to his his instincts and his knowledge and his ability to get stuff done. And it's really interesting to imagine how that might actually work in the future, cuz if you've got a guy who's really good at remote controlling robots, it doesn't really matter if he gets you know if he's getting older and older and uh older and breaking down, at least not as much. So as long as your brain's there, I think you I think people will still be useful. Man, this is this is it's going to be a wild future. Yeah. Oh um Wow.

Let's talk about the missiles. Let's talk about it. What how does how do those work? So the so the way I understand it, you can you're basically taking away missiles that don't need to expend, come back and land. So there's a few things that we're doing. You're probably thinking of Road Runner, which is a reusable missile of sorts, vertical takeoff and landing. It can go out, attack targets and come back. And we have some versions that are suicide attack aircraft. We have other like where they're carrying a bomb. We have others where they have payload where they can go out, do a mission and then come back and be reused again. M um we're doing uh we're doing a lot of interesting stuff on that front. I think because in the past a lot of like we're we're also building long-range cruise missiles. We have a line of missiles called Barracuda. We have a Barracuda 100, 250 and 500, different ranges, different payloads. And one of the cool things you can do with AI-powered missiles is send them into an area and then have them do precision targeting, collaborating with each other, even if you don't have a person there who's let's say steering a coated laser target designator. Like in the past you would have needed somebody to say like get get out there, shine a laser at the thing you want it to go after, and then it goes after that laser dot. Well, what if instead you can have a missile show up somewhere and say oh that's a Lee Yang Destroyer. I know that the engine room is right there and I know that the thinnest part of the deck is right there. If I approach at this angle and this speed from this direction, I can punch through the engine room and destroy engine one. And if that's successful, another one's going to come in behind me from the other side to destroy engine two. If I miss or I don't make it through, I'm going to have it instead go for engine one and then the next one's going to go. That's the type of intelligent targeting that has been the stuff of science fiction until now, and now we just do it.

Uh, like we're doing this type of stuff in Russia right now where we're hitting targets where they have jammed communications links that would make it impossible to remote control systems and where it's at ranges where you can't get a person into these areas. Like you can't get a JTAC forward to L these R R targets. They they would they'd mow you down with machine guns or landmines before you get even close. The other side of what we're doing with missiles and it's it's it's less interesting than the AI stuff, I know, but it's just manufacturing. We are making our missiles and our submarines and really everything we do in a much more reasonable way. So like the way we make our submarines looks a lot like you make uh a car. Like we're we're basically using we're using processes, robots, assembly lines that you could use to build a Tesla, you can use it to build our submarine versus more traditional techniques that require huge teams of specialized human welders and huge pieces of infrastructure that that allow you to really really slowly build pressure vessels. Um, same thing with our missiles. Our missiles have 90% fewer parts than our competition. We've very aggressively designed them to have very few parts, to have those parts consolidated as much as possible into individual pressings or panels that would like we might have one part that is 10 times as big as the parts that you would have in a competing system, and it does all of these different things. And the reason that's important is because right now in US war games, we're predicting that we'll run out like US war games against a hypothetical Chinese Chinese invasion scenario in Taiwan, we run out of missiles in less than eight days. Like we have eight days and then we are we're completely out. So eight days of pain for China doesn't mean very much to a country that thinks in hundred-year timelines. They're like that's it like there will be eight days of pain and then it will take the United States literally years to rebuild that arsenal. Oh well, we could just go win. Let's just go do it like like like just put the cannon fodder out there, soak up the missiles and then we win because we have years to operate with impunity until they get their together. We have to fix this as a country. We have to get back to where things are actually manufacturable as a country. We've slipped into this problem where we build so few arms that we build really expensive, really exquisite things that take years to complete. We need to get back into more of a World War II mentality where we can build weapons faster than we can use them because now China has to think about day 8, day 80, day 800, day 8,000. That's how you're going to deter them. They need to look and see that you are a continuously present adversary that there is a credible threat of violence that extends beyond the weekend. Uh, that that's the only way we're going to keep them from running rough shot over everybody. And I this is maybe more political, but I'll say it anyway. Taiwan is not the end state for China. And all the people who think that this fight over Taiwan is the real fight are missing the point. They believe that the Philippines is their territory. They believe that Korea is their territory. They also believe that North Korea is their territory, but they like them as a buffer state with South Korea, but that would change the moment they could actually capture South Korea. And they even think that most of Japan belongs to them. They think that it's theirs. They they've tried red over and over for thousands of years, and even today like even publicly they won't say they own all of Japan, but they do maintain they own part of Japan. Like like no no maybe we don't own all of it, but but like that part that's definitely ours. It is really dangerous to let people with millennia-long ambitions of ruling those areas go unchecked because like like even if you don't give a about Taiwan, which you should because our whole modern economy runs on chips from them, and until we figure out to make them better or as good ourselves, like we have to keep them around. Like even if you don't give a about Taiwan, there's a lot of reasons to make sure we're spooking China on day eight, day 80, day 800. Wow. So I I people like talking about the AI part of the missiles, but honestly, if our missiles had no AI and we're just able to make them 10 times faster, that's pretty good all on its own, even if we were doing nothing else. Geez.

Do any of do any of our adversaries have this type of technology that you're developing? China definitely has the technology in terms of manufacturing press. They know how to make stuff fast. They know how to make it cheap. They have automated cruise missile production facilities that are capable of turning out more cruise missiles in a week than the entire United States turns out in a year. I mean like it is do you know do you know the multiple for Chinese ship building capacity? So so China China has more ship building capacity than us. They can build ships a lot faster than us. If if we start blowing up boats in the Pacific, they're going to be able to build more. What how much more ship building capacity do you think they have? How much more? Five times? You think it's five times more? You think it's 100 times? What do you think it is? I honestly have no idea. Make a crazy guess. 20 times? It's 350 times. They 350 times more ship building capacity than the United States, an equivalent ship. So no it's so it's worse. People will try to argue with me that sometimes they'll say but Palmer all of that is commercial ship building capacity, so it's unfair to compare, you know, uh all of China with all the United States because you're counting all of China's commercial shipping, but you know why it's fair because in China the law says that all commercial vessels have to meet military standards. If you are building a roll on rolloff passenger ferry to for transporting people in cars, you have to have deckplate supports that are strong enough to transport tanks and armored vehicles on. They are requiring even their civilian vessels to all be military standards compliant because they foresee a world where they're going to nationalize their entire domestic fleet and use it in a whole of China fight against the west. And it's funny, people like oh they're just doing that just in case. Just in case. It's not just in case. China understands how much more it costs for every single ferry to support military operations. They are taking that cost on because they expect to do it. They're not going to basically spend billions of dollars for absolutely no reason in an economy that knows how to cut corners like no other. Like they are doing do this cuz they they believe it's a core part of their strategy. So yes, when they're not quite equivalent like I would say US ship like ship for ship our ships are better, but quantity has a quality all its own. And when you're talking about a 350X difference, people will say oh well the Chinese Navy is only twice the size of our Navy. Well, yeah, today, but on day 10 they're going to be probably a lot bigger. And then every day we're going to crank like we're gonna crank out a ship a month, and they're going to put out 350 ships a month. Like you can see where this just becomes an impossible problem for the United States. And so what really happens is we become an ally that is unreliable that says we're there for our allies, but only in the way that people say they stand for things, right? Like it's very easy for us to say oh of course we stand with Japan. Okay, well what's that going to mean when every single one of our ships is at the bottom of the ocean and we have one new ship coming off the line a month? It's a meaningless promise. And so our adversaries see that and a lot of them are going to our allies and China is saying hey you know the math, you can do the math, you need to end up in the sinosphere. And like and the US can say they love you all they want. Reality is they can't back up, they can't cash those checks. And so uh my my belief is uh that the United States should stop being the World Police. We need to stop sending our people all over the world to fight everyone's wars for them, and we need to become the world's gun store. We need to just sell them the guns that they need to defend themselves, and we need to make sure that we actually keep those shelves stocked because if like look at what's happen in Ukraine, we're not sending them more stuff partly for, you know, various partisan political reasons and strategic reasons, but we're also out of stuff to send to them. Like we we're out of artillery shells that we can spare to Ukraine. We're out of a lot of M like we don't have any Javelins to send to Ukraine. We're all out. And so how can our allies stay allied with us if they think that they're going to get into a conflict and we're just say oh sorry, actually we forgot how to make things. Uh we forgot like a hundred years ago. Sorry. Geez.

Do they have any of the technology? So manufacturing wise, which I just talked about, they're ahead of us. You're talking about like AI, the sensors, do they have that? Luckily, we're ahead on that. Like the United States is ahead of China on a lot of this advanced sensing technology, on a lot of advanced AI. Now China like don't underestimate them. You know, we've seen like with Deep Seek and stuff, they're doing very interesting things in the AI realm. I don't think that they're like a decade ahead of them in technology. We have what I'm doing at Andal is ahead of what China's doing in most ways by a few years, but that's it. I'm a few years ahead of them. I hate to admit this, but I was part of the problem for a long time. I made millions of virtual reality headsets in China. That's where we made Oculus Rift. That's where we made Gear VR. That's where we made Oculus Quest. Millions and millions of those things. And I know how good they are not just at manufacturing but at the actual technology development side. They understood exactly what what we were doing. They knew how we were doing it. They were able to rip it off. They were able to do it with their own domestic companies. When we were developing cutting-edge technology, we were never more than a few months ahead of China. Like anything that we figured out, they would be able to copy it and figure it out very quickly. Now I I think they don't have a culture that's particularly good at leaping beyond what we're doing, but you don't have to leap beyond what we're doing to be a threat to us. If they're really good at manufacturing and they have way more people and they have tech that is about as good as ours, that's all you need to win.

Yeah, I mean it's my understanding isn't a Chinese law that anything that gets developed in that in that country that could help their military has to be that's right. Has to be shared. So you're you're you're you're talking about a particular provision of a policy, a legal policy that they call civil-military fusion. Uh, anything that is civilian is inherently military as well, and if the military wants to use it, they have all rights to it. You cannot deny it to them. You you cannot tell them no. You cannot refuse to sell it to them. They they are basically saying the military apparatus and the civilian apparatus are one and the same, and you may you cannot operate within the Chinese social contract unless you equally support both. I'm actually glad that the United States has given companies the freedom like like you know I'm I'm I'm a libertarian-leaning guy. I think it is good when you have the right to self-determination. If I decide that I want to be a pacifist and never sell a single thing to the United States military, I should absolutely have that right. I think that people should berate me for it. I think that's the wrong opinion, but isn't it good that you're allowed to make that decision that the state can't come and say you have to work for me if I want you to? That I I'm glad about that, but we have to recognize that there are disadvantages to that. One disadvantage has been the way that the United States technology industry has treated the United States of America for the last 20 years. I mean I I know it sounds crazy today when you have Mark Zuckerberg begging Congress to ban TikTok and you have all these tech companies saying that China is a huge threat to them, but let's get in the time machine for a second. Let's travel back 10 years to 2015. What was going on in 2015? Google was trying to get into China. Facebook was trying to get into China. Microsoft was trying to get into China. China had convinced all of these companies and more, Apple too, that they were ascending to be the world's dominant economic superpower, that they were going

To surpass the US in short order, and that these companies could make trillions of dollars by working with China the way China wanted them to work. So, making, for example, have you heard about Project Dragonfly? That was Google's project to make a censored version of Google's search engine for the Chinese market. They would appease the Chinese authorities; it was used to censor search results and also collect and report on information on any dissidents, to pipeline that to the Chinese government. So anyone who would be using it to try and search for things they shouldn't, it was going to alert the Chinese authorities and tell them how to find them. You basically had, for a period of about a decade, a total abdication of responsibility on the part of our tech companies to do anything for the United States. They were all refusing to work with our military, protesting our military. Google famously pulled out of the Project Maven contract because their employees were about it; that was a project to use Google's AI to do better targeting that would better avoid civilian casualties, and their employees protested, and they gave in. The execs said, "Okay, we won't do it; we're going to pull out of working with the military."

Actually, YouTube banned the Andal YouTube account about two years into our company; they banned it. They said that our company promoted harm of people. We said, "Guys, what, like that's what war is like; it's it's either it's either threatening you're going to harm somebody or actually doing it, like that that that's the whole game." And they said, "Sorry, uh, this is this this is this is not allowed under our threat of harm policy," and they didn't actually unban us until years later when they, uh, in the midst of this new reignment of tech with our military and and our government, uh, when they launched the new Google Federal team doing government work and they realized they needed to integrate with something that we made. And I told them, "Guys, I'm not integrating with Google Federal until you unban our YouTube account, like like I'm not that cucked, right?" Could you imagine what a cuck I'd be to to like let them integrate with our weapon systems even though they literally banned me from the largest video platform and deplatformed me from the largest video platform in the world because some shitty pencil-pushing blue-haired person in San Francisco doesn't like my politics or my company. And to their credit, they did unban us; we've been unbanned for years, so like, good for Google.

The point I'm trying to make is people are coming back around, and they're starting to say they're going to work with the military. Google is saying that, Meta is saying that, Microsoft is saying that, Apple is not saying that—pay attention to that—but there was this period of time where we ran a very dangerous experiment, which was decoupling our most innovative, most valuable companies from the military entirely, and that's an experiment we've never run as a country. Has there ever been a time where our most innovative companies didn't work with the US military? Could you imagine how World War II would have gone? Could you could you imagine if General Motors and IBM and General Electric had said, "Well, we're not going to work with you; we we we think that's we think that's wrong; in fact, we're going to work with Imperial Japan because we think that's a huge revenue growth opportunity for us in the future, and we think manufacturing is going to be cheaper there." That's what our big tech corporations were doing. Imagine if during the Cold War, if all imagine if Zenith and RCA and Westinghouse had said, "You know, we love America in an abstract hypothetical way, but actually we're going to team up with the Soviet Union, and we're going to manufacture all of our chips there." Like, could you imagine what would have happened to America?

And so I I was, when I was in Silicon Valley, this was one of the things that it was rolling through my head was, "Oh my God, I'm sitting amongst the best technologists in the world, and none of them care about our military; none of them care about America, and they're thrilled to work with China." I'm so glad that China I I think China's actually made a misstep, and I'll end I'll end this rant with this: China has made a misstep that we should take advantage of. They tricked all of our tech companies and our media companies into believing that China was this revenue opportunity, and so they basically caused our technology innovation economy to decouple from our government and our country and our national responsibilities. What they should have done is actually given them a slice of the Chinese pie; they should have let Google in; they should have let Facebook in; they should have given them some money and then a little more and a little more and a little more to keep them on the line, you know, like basically to just to string them along, keep them in the Communist bucket. But what they did instead was they eventually said, "Haha, we tricked you; we're not going to allow you in, and we're going to subsidize ByteDance, and also ByteDance is going to sell TikTok to you guys, and it's going to take over your entire social media industry." And that was when all the tech companies flipped, when they realized that China was not their friend. So Xi is making a tactical error; he basically should have kept controlling them by allowing them to get a few dollars here and there. We should take advantage to the fullest of this mistake that he's made. And when people have asked me, "Palmer, why why are you like forgiving? Why are you forgiving Meta or Google or Microsoft or Apple? Like what why are you letting them get away with changing their allegiance from China to the US?" My point is we need to let them get away with it; like the whole point should be to persuade them to do the right thing even if it's for the wrong reasons. And what we need to do is take advantage of this moment in time and say, "Hell yeah, you're on our side; let's go," and get them so integrated that they don't really have a chance to change their mind in the future. Because if we push them away and refuse to allow them to engage, they're going to eventually divorce themselves from the US interests again. Wow, that's smart; that's really smart.

It is interesting to think about the Apple one in particular. Yeah, like Tim Cook, I have nothing against the guy personally; like if I were him, I would feel a little humiliated that I can't say anything about China, despite supposedly on paper being one of the most powerful men in the world. Like he speaks out against climate change, and he speaks out in favor of diversity, and he puts all this money into like ads for Mother Earth, and he and he and he tweets about how we all need to, you know, respect the rights of Black people in America, and we need to solve these law enforcement problems. So he he's he's politically engaged. Imagine what would happen if if he said something like, "I believe concentration camps are bad," like China on account of the weaker Muslim issue would immediately lock them out of the country. Like he can't say that; isn't that crazy? Like the most powerful executive in the country running our most valuable company, on account of the whims of a foreign ruler, can't say things like, "Human rights are good; concentration camps are bad; I think you probably shouldn't lock people up for their religion." Like he he can only comment on our domestic issues because here our government says you're allowed to say whatever you want about anything. And I I if I were him, I'd be I'd feel a little humiliated about that; I'd be like, "I'm not I'm not the big boss man; I'm not actually powerful; I'm actually just the stooge of the country that makes the thing that I sell," because they they they can't do it. If he did this, like imagine what would happen if Xi locked Apple out of China; $2 trillion in market cap gone just like that. Almost everything they make is made in China, made with Chinese parts; like that would be the end of Apple. The most valuable company in American history exists day-to-day at the whims of the dictator that runs China; isn't isn't isn't that like an insane situation? Could you imagine if that had happened during the Cold War? Imagine if the Kremlin could have just like put out a single legal document that would have destroyed what was the biggest company during the Cold War in America? What would it have been, man? I have no idea; would it have been an oil company? Would it have been a manufacturing company? I don't know; like pick any of them, whether it's General Motors or Exxon Mobile or uh I don't know who else was really big back then. What was the smoking company? What was the smoke—Marlboro? Yeah, wasn't it—was Marlboro is owned by somebody, isn't it? Like imagine if imagine if that could have just been shut down because uh a dictator in Russia is like, "Oh, I I don't like you anymore; I'm going to destroy you." Anyway, that and then during the Cold War, we understood this at a political level too—not to bring it back to Trump—but like Trump instinctively understands this in a way that the globalist elites do not. They thought that outsourcing everything was just a great thing; it's amazing; they're against tariffs. Like why why would you make it in the less efficient economy? Why wouldn't you make it wherever it wants to be made according to the global interdynamics? And the problem is they forgot that once you can't make anything and once your companies don't make anything, you have no leverage, and you've just handed it away to everyone else. Like Trump understands that if we don't make things in America, we're actually just everyone else's, and like like what what's the price on that? It's easy to complain about tariffs making cars more expensive because the parts can't come from China, but like what what value do you put on the fact that a dictator in China could destroy our economy overnight by signing a few pieces of paper? Like is it isn't that situation that we should just be like humiliated by every day as a nation? Like shouldn't we be wake up saying, "Holy like everything I'm enjoying is because Xi hasn't decided to screw us yet," and and and Xi's going to do it, like when he—people think that the first missile to fly is going to be a Chinese ship firing at a US ship in the Strait of Taiwan; that's not the first missile; the first missile is going to be Xi calling up of his buddies in the United States and saying, "If the United States government tries to fight this, I'm going to destroy your economy; I will do it; I will do it tomorrow; I will kick all of you out; I will give away all your special waivers; we're going to steal all your factories; we're going to nationalize all your workers, and then we are going to sell iPhones to the entire world, and you will become irrelevant." Like that that is actually what he has in his quiver.

Jeez, that's scary; it's heavy stuff, right? Yeah, it's and and and the worst part is that—not to via VIA caricature—like nobody's talking about this; like when was the last time you you heard this you know discussed in an open like and it's all obviously true; like does anyone dispute that Xi can just destroy Apple? I don't think anyone disputes that. Does anyone dispute that Xi could literally destroy millions of US jobs and trillions if not tens of trillions in market cap literally overnight with the stroke of his pen? Like I don't know; I I I I I I feel like maybe maybe how people felt a little bit during the Cold War, you know, just being under the the pressure of, "Oh man, the nukes could launch at any moment." Uh I I it feels like it feels a little bit like some lesser version of that. So yeah, I'm a Libertarian who's pro-tariffs now is the is the real conclusion. I'm pro I'm pro-tariffs until we have our own house in order; like like I I like t i i i I'm not a fan of tariffs, IDE—how long would it even take to get our house in order? That not even that long; I mean, you've probably seen what people say, "Oh well, maybe tariffs work in theory, but I mean it'll take years or decades to set up factories." That's bogus; look at what we did when we transformed this country during World War II; we went from basically being a mercantilist quasi-agrarian society to being the world's most powerful manufacturing hub in like a year and a half, two years. Are you really telling me we couldn't do it again if it wasn't a priority? I I just don't believe it; it's easier than ever to set up a factory; I've done it in China; like it is easier than ever to set up advanced manufacturing; it's just a matter of will. And you also need to staff it; like, you know what we've done, we've built a country where, through globalism, no smart kid wants to be a manufacturing process engineer, for example. Is there any world where Palmer Lucky—let's say I was 18 years old, I'm deciding what my major is—why in the world would I major in anything to do with manufacturing knowing that there's hardly any manufacturing going on in my country, right? If I'm a smart kid, I'm going to go work in finance or biotech or uh what what what else are kids doing these days? I guess maybe working in video games. If we don't manufacture here, then our smartest people aren't going to want to work in manufacturing, and so like this is a problem that's go—like at least when we got out of manufacturing stuff and call it like the the the like globalized the globalized decline starting in the 90s to now—at least back in the 90s we still had all the leftover people from the Cold War; now they're all retired, and now we don't actually have anybody. So like this is a problem where we can build the factories quickly, but the hardest part is going to be uh training the kids; like we're going to need to basically get serious about training people to run factories well, efficiently using modern techniques, and we we we do have a we do have a lack of those. I am a big—have you heard of the idea of Defector visas?

No. It's one of my pet political ideas. Um, during the Cold War, we gave a lot of visas to people to come to the United States to immigrate here from hostile powers like the Soviet Union. If they were in a critical role in those countries, you'd say, "You're important over there; you are one of like the the puzzle pieces that keeps everything held together for, you know, their missile program; come over to the United States; we'll give you a job at NASA, and uh and we'll give you you we'll give you a visa; you can come; you get you can get an American life, an American wife; it'll be it'll be fantastic; you're going to love it." I think we need to start doing that again; I think that that's one of the ways that we can beat China, cuz there's a lot of people in China; they're there, but they don't really want to be; there's a lot of people who hate what China has become. I would love it if we could say, "You know what, we need a lot more people in America who know how to manufacture; I want American jobs," right? To be clear, I'm not saying we need to import people because we can't survive without immigration; I'm not one of those people. But if we can steal their very best manufacturing engineers, deprive China of those people, and then put them to work here helping us catch up with China on manufacturing, I mean that's a great trade, you know? Let's haul over their best plant managers, and then let's have a thousand jobs created by each of those guys here in America. Uh I I I think we need to bring back Defector visas; we need to own it, and it seems like a type of immigration that even the really anti-immigration people can get behind because the point is like, "Look, we're not trying to bring in millions of fruit pickers; we're trying to steal the very best people from our great foe; surely we can agree that that's usually worth doing." That it's it's better for us to have those people than for them for them be running the missile factory. That's—there was a little bit of a debate on that uh what not too long ago, correct? Like the skilled immigration versus not, so that's true; the difference there is that H-1Bs are about whether or not there—like on theory, of course, there's so much H-1B abuse you would not believe what I saw when I was in Silicon Valley; it is insane; it's it's obviously a program to try and replace US workers with basically slave labor that can't ever escape; it's like it H-1B abuse is crazy, but in theory H-1Bs are to create a job for an immigrant if there is not a person who can be hired to do that job in the United States. A Defector Visa adds an additional requirement; it has to be something that they care about that you're ripping away; so like it's not just that there's a need for them here; it's that it's going to hurt China by taking them. If if if China had like if China has a million people that do something, like let's say like let's say that we need more rice pickers here and China's got more rice pickers uh China's got plenty of rice pickers; taking taking a rice picker is not going to hurt; taking the head of an advanced silicon manufacturing facility that can make cutting-edge computer graphics chips, that is going to really really hurt them. So I I say that that was the part of the debate that I didn't see present is using immigration not just as a tool to help the United States but to harm our adversaries. I want it to I I I want to stop focusing on the plow and start turning it into a to double win, exactly. And and cuz there's a lot of people around the world who would rather be here who will cause catastrophic consequences for their home country if they leave; like here here's here's like a fun one; think about the guys who are running the Wuhan—it would be like if China plucked you—yes, like that that that's a great example. Imagine if I had no national allegiance and they made an offer over there and I really wanted to live in China and they just yeah they got they got rid of me; that would cause so much downstream damage. And the best—like I don't want to go to China; in fact, my company is sanctioned by China on account of our sales to Taiwan, and so—conations—if I go to China or Hong Kong, I'll I'll be arrested; it's it's fantastic. Also Russia or Belarus; if I go to Belarus, I will be I'll be arrested, I would imagine. But uh how do you know that? Oh, they put it out publicly that I'm that Russia has the so-called poison list where they say, "Here are the the individuals that are under extreme sanctions, personally, individually as individuals," and uh and Belarus also recognizes the uh I think Belarus and maybe one maybe one other one other like weirdo Baltic breakoff; I can't remember what it was, but there's a handful of countries in the world where I where I literally can't go. But like uh think about like not even just China; like let's look like is that public? Yeah, it's public; I even tweeted about it; I I I actually have the I have the notice framed in my office. I was just going to say I want to get that have you sign it and I'm going to frame it in—I will definitely send one to you; I have one in my office. My dream is to get it signed by Vladimir Putin somehow; like just I just like want to get it on his desk somehow, or you know like like a signing or something. Um, by the way, he deserves a bit of credit on this AI stuff; he was saying before I even started Andal, "The country that wins in the sphere of artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the entire world." Like I know that today that sounds like not that interesting, but this was nine years ago, and everyone thought everyone thought AI was crazy. Ping said that too, so right. And like you have all these world leaders who are saying like could you imagine—let's say like uh could you imagine like Hillary Clinton having an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago? Absolutely not. Could you imagine Joe Biden like putting a a stake in the ground and it's like of course not. It's like—anyway, even ignoring China, like look at Venezuela; let's take whoever's running their like oil and gas machinery over there; imagine what would happen if we identified their top 10 most competent people who are running their oil and gas organizations and we gave them all Defector visas and said, "Come to America, and you can work at Exxon Mobile on like industrial refinement systems, and we're going to pay you twice as much as you make in Venezuela." You would destroy the whole Venezuelan economy overnight, and you just have to take like 10 people. So yeah, immigration is a sword; we need to be doing way more of this because an American passport is worth its weight in diamonds, right? It is; it is so valuable to these people; they desperately want it. Culturally, we've dominated the world, right? Everyone loves America; even the people who hate America love America; even the people who hate America love our movies, love our music; they love they all want it; they all want to date American women; like let let's take advantage of that. Let's talk about Andal and the IVAS program—the IVAS program. So when is this coming out? I don't know yet. All right, roughly roughly probably in a couple weeks. So IVAS is a program that is the modern instantiation of a very old idea; this idea that you are going to augment the vision of soldiers and give them superhuman perception abilities. The idea is you can see at night; you can see thermal signatures; you can see hyperspectral signatures; you have extraordinary superhuman hearing; you're able to mark targets in the environment without projecting anything in the environment; you can seamlessly see in your heads-up display where all of your friends are are where all of your foes are, where all of the innocents and non-combatants are, and have that all just seamlessly presented to you as if you're Superman; you know, you can see through walls; you can see through night; you can see through fog; you are Superman. This idea has been around for a very long time of putting a heads-up display, a computer, and a radio on every soldier. You can even go back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, and that was really the concept behind the Mobile Infantry; they're wearing these kind of mech suits with fighter-jet style heads-up displays that show them where all their targets are, that show them where all the good guys are, that help them do ballistics calculation, showing where bullet impact is going to be in a much more intelligent way than just, you know, putting a red dot that's quack line, but actually saying like, "Here is the impact point, factoring in the wind, factoring in your motion, factoring in what the other guy is doing." People have tried this over and over again through history, and the tech just never quite been ready, and they've also not maybe worked on it in quite the right way, but most importantly, nobody's ever built a software backend that could make it work. Even if the helmets were okay, they didn't have this kind of system, whether it's AI or something else, they could understand the whole battlespace, taking in sensors from everybody—so my helmet, his helmet, his helmet, and that airplane, and that airplane, and that satellite, and that ship, and you get what I'm saying; you're taking—building one common fused view of the world in real time has never really been properly accomplished. And so you have programs like Future Warrior and Net Warrior and Connected Soldier and Land Warrior; you have all these different programs where the Army has tried over and over; IVAS is sort of the latest the latest the latest attempt at this kind of individual infantry vision vision augmentation system. When the IVAS contract was first awarded years ago, it was a really big deal, and I was really excited about it; uh I would knew I couldn't compete with it because unfortunately it was being awarded right around the time that I was starting Andal, so when the IVAS program was kind of running through the wickets, Andal was 12 people; obviously I was not going to be able

To win this contract, but as an AR/VR guy, I was really excited that the Army was moving in that direction, and they were putting a lot of resources behind it. IVAS is a $22 billion contract; it's enormous. The plan is not to put this on the heads of one person, or, you know, one top-tier unit; it's to put it on the heads of every single person in the Army who's bearing a rifle. Anyone who's making contact with the enemy is going to have superhuman augmented vision that allows them to never miss anything, never miss their shot, never hit the wrong thing. You, you, you, you probably, more than almost any anybody, can probably understand how what an incredible tool that would be.

Yeah, um, the problem is that even IVAS has been plagued by many of the problems that have hit a lot of these other systems. You didn't have the back end that could provide all of that data to make it a useful thing rather than just a heads-up display. You didn't have the hardware working as well as it could have. There were a lot of soldier reports that it was making people sick, that it was making people dizzy, that it was causing signature problems. There were quotes from soldiers in evaluations who said, "This is going to get me killed." Uh, it was just—it was running into a lot of issues. Anyway, the punchline is, uh, over the last year I've been working on an angle to try and get the EYE program into a better place, to try and make it everything that it should be.

A few months ago, we teamed up with Microsoft, which was the company that had won the IVAS contract and that was using something based on their HoloLens system, which is now discontinued, to build the IVAS product. We partnered with them to integrate Lattice, our AI system, with their heads-up display. So, uh, we, we, we integrated that; we did it very quickly. It was actually a less than 3-week process. We went from teaming up to having LCE feeding all of our three-dimensional tracking information into their existing IVAS sets of display. We did a soldier touch point with it; they used it in some exercises and some trials. They said, "Oh my God, this is incredible! I can see drones that are coming to attack me; I can see what their attack vectors are; I can see where the people controlling them are; I can see where I need to go to be safe in an amount of time that is reasonable before that drone actually gets to me." Really, really powerful stuff.

Wow. But here's the really big deal: As of just about now, Anduril is taking over the IVAS program as the prime. Microsoft is transferring all of the employees, hardware, IP, facilities—everything—to Anduril. We are now going to be the prime on the IVAS program. We are going to continue to integrate LCE into it, and we are building a totally new system on the hardware side that is going to be better than anything that anyone has ever seen. It is going to be, by far, the best AR/VR/MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built, in terms of resolution, in terms of field of view, in terms of graphical fidelity, in terms of sensor quality, and what you can do with those sensors. It is a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus. It is a jump that I think cannot be overstated.

I am very aligned with the Army's vision in terms of this being something that should be on everybody, but I think my vision goes maybe even a little further. I don't just want this on every person who's carrying a rifle; I want it on every logistician, every loadmaster, every rotary-wing pilot, every fixed-wing pilot. I want it deployed with everybody across every service, every branch, so that every person is eyes for everyone else. If you—what about police? I think that police is going to be a very interesting—it's going to be an interesting, but adjacent, challenge. So, for example, police: You're trying to make something that they can wear all day, every day, and they're also interacting face-to-face with people. Like, let me put it this way: You can't put a RoboCop helmet on most police officers; it's too heavy, it's too much protection; it's, you know, for what they're doing day-to-day. But the software back end is certainly going to inate. Like, I, I, I'll give an example: I think that probably what you're going to see on law enforcement officers is going to look more like a pair of Oakleys that is still running LCE; it's still showing them where they are, but it probably doesn't need the ability to pick up an attack helicopter 15 clicks out and then flag them where they need to go. Like, I probably don't need that type of expensive sensing on there; I probably need things that are much more, you know, of a local web. But, uh, that's definitely going to happen, and it's something I'm very excited about.

Also, like you look at things like body cameras; like you could make body cameras that are way better, that do 360° capture. And right now, a body camera for a law enforcement officer is really just a tool that gets his ass in hot water, right? Like, that's, that's basically its job. Nobody—not enough people—look at footage from these body cams and say, "Oh wow, this guy was totally in the right in what he did," right? If the footage exonerates their actions, then everyone ignores it, and the media says nothing. And if it shows that he made any mistake, then they're going to, they're going to, you know, they're going to hoist him by his own petard. What I want to see is body cameras that are a tool that law enforcement officers are excited to use. I want something that's watching my six; I want something that's watching for threats that I'm not seeing; I want basically a guardian angel on my shoulder that is able to do what backup would normally do for me, and at a superhuman level. Like, imagine if you could have not just eyes in the back of your head, but what if you could have a hundred eyes all throughout your head, all looking out into the world, and at the slightest disturbance being like, "Holy—I think someone's opening that window and firing—like they're aiming a gun from that window!" It should be telling me not like, "Hey, you know, be aware that someone might be shooting you." It should be giving you even more direct commands than that; like it should, like, throw a red threat alert and show you a direction you need to throw yourself immediately to not get shot, to get behind cover. Like, you're going to see very tight integration between man and machine on these things.

Anyway, IVAS is very much a warfighter-oriented system, and it's oriented towards the things that people at the tip of the spear are doing. I think you're going to see similar ideas, but oriented around maybe a different form factor for law enforcement. What does it look like? What does it look like? It looks like a—so one of my beliefs with the, with the previous IVAS system, uh, it was not very tightly integrated into the helmet. So you wear your ballistic helmet, and it basically straps on top of it; you like clip it on the brim here, you run a strap to the back; there's a big battery, packing, compute module back here; there's a big sensor brim you clip onto the helmet. Um, the problem when you're trying to clip onto an existing system is it ends up not very tightly integrated; lots of snag points, lots of, lots of snag hazards; it ends up being very heavy and, and, and misbalanced, where it's really, really torquing your neck. The thing that I'm building is an all-up integrated ballistic shell that integrates hearing protection, hearing augmentation, vision protection, vision augmentation, all into one seamless ballistic shell that protects you from air bursts, direct fire rounds, all you blast and concussion—the whole thing in one integrated seamless product. And, uh, I'm, I'm not quite ready to show the actual thing, but true to Anduril Product Company fashion, we've been investing a ton of resources in this for years at this point. So I knew that I wanted this to happen years ago; I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it happen, but we started putting millions of dollars into this years ago, so that if it happened, we would be ready to go and not, you know, trying to catch up from the start. Damn. Anyway, this is going to be crazy. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty—so the first, the first fully integrated system, meaning it has all of the different sensors, all of the different compute and vision augmentation systems all integrated into one thing, is going to be done at the end of March. So right now we're basically in systems test where we have individual systems that we are, you know, doing, doing development and testing of, but the first fully integrated helmet with all of this stuff actually working, like actually working, tied together, tied together with Lattice feeding tracks—like that's all going to be done in, in, in March.

And like, just to give you an example of how useful this might be: Like, if you want to mark a target for somebody else, you'd have to use a laser, right? What if you could mark it digitally, and you don't emit any signature for anyone else with NODS to see? And what if everyone else can see it? Here's an even crazier—like, and this is when I say crazy, I don't mean like a hypothetical—like you could just do this with this tech. Imagine that you're doing some kind of pincer, and you have some guys over here, some guys over here, and I can't see a guy behind that building, but you can. If you're seeing him, it's taking that track, it's taking that enemy mark, and it's now putting it into my vision. I can now see through the building, through the wall, and I can see the guy coming around the corner before he's—so they're all talking to each other; it's all continuously. And it's not just the helmets; you're also—anything that's seeing data is talking to you. So if there's a drone overhead that sees a guy five clicks out that way, coming up a hill, and he thinks he's going to set up on top of that hill and pop you—imagine if it sees him, it notifies you; you look at him coming over that hill, and you bring your rifle on target literally the moment he clears. You're taking out that threat. That's the type of combined sensing and combined arms tactics that this enables. It's going to make robots and people work together so seamlessly like they're just one cohesive, effective unit. And like, this is also the way that I think you're going to have, you know, robot dogs, robot soldiers integrated with human force. Imagine if you see a guy who's, you know, running around a building; you lose sight of him; you can't deal with him because you've got something else. What if I can now task another robot and say, "Hey, just stay on that—don't let that guy get into a position where he can fire at me," and if it looks like he's going to, let me know, and we'll make him a priority. Now I don't have to spend my very limited vision processing and engagement capability just tracking that potential threat who might be running away or might be just repositioning. Like, isn't it great if I can just tell the drone overhead, "Hey, watch that guy—if he's really just running away in his sandals, like I don't care about that right now." Maybe we're going to go track him down later, but I don't really care about him right now. Today, it's really hard to make that work; you end up with people getting basically pulled onto all these different tasks, and they have to make split-second decisions because they don't have unlimited bandwidth. When you have computers watching all these sensors, and you have an unlimited amount of attention that a computer can give you, you can have that computer doing everything for you. You can say, "Watch every single one of those windows and watch every single one of those doors, and just let me know if I need to worry about it."

I got a question. By the way, that's amazing—by the way, be so good—but would you be able to—would, would there be any way to do, let's say, something like the Bin Laden raid? Yeah, would there be—would there be a way to integrate some type of facial recognition, so if you—if you were—if it was a capture/kill mission or potentially a hostage rescue, um, would, would, would the system—would there be a way to, to basically identify, "Hey, this is—that's the hostage"? You know, that could—that stuff can get tricky depending on how they're dressed, what their ethnicity is. I think so. I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition, mostly because the situations where it works, I believe, are pretty limited, and if you're wrong, it's such a spooky thing. Like, like what if it tells you the wrong thing? Like, what, what if it is wrong? How do you, how do you, how do you delegate responsibility for that? And, uh, what about—but, but I will tell you this: Like, here's how I would handle that problem. I probably wouldn't use facial recognition if I—and I'm just making this up on the fly; I haven't thought this through very well, so you'll have to forgive me. First of all, going into something like the Bin Laden raid, I probably would have set up drones around that whole site with things like wall-penetrating radar systems that are flooding that whole area with, with RF energy, so that I can actually see people moving around inside the buildings, behind the walls. If I can do that, then I can—like, if I'm a hostage, I can probably guess—like a guy up against the wall, you know, who's staying there even when shit's going down, probably not someone I need to worry about as much as the guys who all of a sudden start scrambling around like flies the moment that we land in the yard. So that you're going to have a pretty good idea, even just from like that. But if it were me, my understanding is during the Bin Laden raid there was a live video feed from the team back all the way to the situation room. Is that—is that correct? That's what—that's what I hear. That's what I—well, that's that's what I hear; that's what I hear. I would love to see a situation where you basically have the feed from everyone's cameras being fed back to a talk, and you've got a bunch of analysts in there who have seen this guy 100,000 times on every bit of one of bit, you know, on all their intel; they've built a pattern of life on this guy; they know what he's wearing every day when he goes to take a piss in the yard. Like, I would want a guy where, instead of facial recognition trying to make a guess, I can look at somebody, and there's like 10 angels over my shoulder in the form of human intel analysts who'll say, "That's him—that, that's the guy that you want." I mean, there, there could be other things. Let's say—let me give you another example: Maybe there's a CIA asset that's on the ground or on the target at the time of the raid that's going to be for—so you know, or, or you have the bad guy's phone, you know, in—it's, it's just constantly tracking his phone, or, or the, or the CIA that has some type of a, some type of a beacon that appears into the imagery that you're looking at, so it just helps with the—that will definitely happen. And like you think about like, uh, like I think for that, like CIA asset, he's probably not going to be wearing the full—the system that we're building is called Eagle Eye—he's not going to be wearing a full Eagle Eye, you know, integrated ballistic visor, probably. He's probably going to be wearing more something more like Oakleys that just look like he's just a normal dude, but it's presenting him with, "Hey, that's the target; we're tracking him." What I'm—maybe I'm misspeaking here; I'm talking about—okay, let's say it's—I don't know—it's, it's the target's doctor, sure, who is reporting to the agency, and he's the one that has the go switch that's saying, "He's here—yep, now's the time to do the hit; I'm on target; I'm in the same room as him—yep, don't shoot me; I look just like everybody else." You're saying some kind of marker so that we know that it's—that's super easy. I mean, like, you basically just—so like with Eagle Eye, you actually have that inherently; all the helmets—and I can't talk about how they do it, 'cause, you know, not great information to be out there—there are multiple ways for the helmets to know who is who, even in really tough environments without the, you know, without the bad guys being able to pick up on how that works. But basically, if I'm wearing this helmet, if I look over into those bushes and my guys are over there, it's popping up their names above their heads. Well, I don't mean they couldn't be wearing the helmet because they're undercover. Yeah, and what I'm saying is it would be trivially easy to make something where if you know what the guy looks like and, like, you know what he's wearing, yeah, you could have it just scanning for that, and it's looking like—I'm all, you know, it's like, "Man and doctor and white lab coat," and it's like, "It's Dr. F in the white lab coat, and he's going to be wearing his tortoise-shell glasses." Like, that is something you could definitely do where you enter the room, and it says, you know, it outlines him in blue and it says, "Dr. F, probably." Um, the, the thing—no, the thing is just makes the decision-making—well, the situation you're talking about—that's, that, that's even a little different than facial recognition specifically. Like, I'm actually a huge fan of height recognition. So one of the things—and when I say height, it's not even height; it's actually like skeletal recognition. So face recognition is hard because you need pretty good—you need a good capture; it needs to be relatively dead on; it needs to be—lighting—is it good enough? I'm a huge fan of being able to differentiate between different people on their skeletal pose. Like, if I have a drone that's way overhead and it sees some guy walking through a doorway, especially if I know how big that doorway is, uh, I can take that video, run it back, and I can basically build a model of how long his wrist-to-arm joint-to-shoulder distances are. And we're all different; like, we're all uneven, too; like my arms are slightly uneven. Uh, if I can basically say, "Oh, look, it's a 6'1" guy with an arm that's 2" shorter on this side, and he leans a little bit to this side," like you can be pretty freaking sure that that's the same guy that you saw get into the car. Stuff like that is paired with facial recognition, a lot more powerful. And what you're describing, it's like almost like clothing recognition, you know? It's like, yeah, he's got a white lab coat; he's got the glasses, and he's got the face, and he's got the hair. And like, if, if you have all of that, but the guy is only like four feet tall, then it would say, "Oh, that's—that's not Dr. F; it doesn't—I don't—I don't care what his face looks like." Yeah, basically, I'm just looking at like an identifier, something to identify, and it shows—now are you imagining—and you're imagining that this is like happening on the—like we can't give him a beacon or something ahead of time, 'cause if he has a beacon, it's really easy. If we can give him—it would be easy to get an asset a beacon. If I can give you—could implant something in the inside of them, you could—you give them a water bottle, you know, that has something in it, or I don't know, honestly; like there's, there's so many ways. So I mentioned like hyperspectral vision, using hyperspectral cameras; you can look at things, and they can tell you what it is made out of based on its spectral response across multiple frequencies. So you can say, like, "That is stone; that is glass," and they—you can have—you ever seen hyperspectral cameras that are used for detecting drugs? They can just look at something and, like, "That's cocaine." Mhm. It's really wild. There have been attempts in the past to use hyperspectral cameras for doing covert marking of vehicles. So, like, you'll have an operative walk by a car, and they basically take a piece of invisible paint that you can't see with your human eye, and they just, like, smear a line along the hood as they walk by, and it looks just like a smear of, you know, dirt to a normal person, but on a hyperspectral camera, it shows up as a bright orange streak on it. You could just say, like, "Hey, I'm going to give you a hypers—like a pen made out of hyperspectral stuff"—I mean, like, out of a weirdo material, like a chemical you would not normally see in a pen—"You could say, 'I'm going to give you these eyeglasses,' or honestly, you could give them some makeup; you could have them smear some, yeah, you know, some of the right compound on their head, and you could have a system just see that and say, 'Oh, it's—it—like that—that—that it's that guy.'" Don't—we're going to outline anyone who has this on their forehead; we're going to outline their whole body in blue as a hostage. There's a lot of interesting things you can do there. I haven't thought that much about these applications; I got to admit, I've, I've mostly been thinking about it from a, you know, more big army versus, you know, special tactics. I mean, it'd be—I mean, you know—well, that's the world I come—we'll have—we'll have to bring you out once we have the—un-developed it.

Well, the cool thing is I talked earlier about LCE; the goal is to take—and like maybe you can see where, like, my, my grand scheme is all coming together here. Like when I started, we said we're going to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars; we're going to make our warfighters into unstoppable technomancers; and we literally said we're going to build augmented reality heads-up displays, fighter jets, smart cruise missiles. Like, the things we're building today are literally what we said we were going to build eight years ago. But remember I talked earlier about how LCE was basically taking all this expertise of the world's best operators and boiling it down into an AI model that can help you—imagine if you're an operator who's wearing something like Eagle Eye IVAS, and imagine if I not only have a system that is watching my six and telling what's going on, imagine if it can look at an aircraft that's coming to engage us, and then LCE, like on board the AI, has the expertise of the world's best fighter pilots. Like, isn't that extra—or you best rotary-wing pilots? Like, by building all this expertise in, you're potentially building a guardian angel that is like the superhuman, superintelligent thing. Like, imagine if we could look at it—says, "Oh, that's a Russian pilot based on the, tactics that it's observing or the way that it's working," says, "Oh, he's going to come back around to do a low attack run." Like, this stuff is way beyond just, "Oh, there's a dot, and there's the enemy." If you have the world's best expertise of the world's best warfighters distilled into one super AI, it's like you're rolling around with a whole team of experts sitting on your shoulder telling you what might happen next. And that's just—I'm so excited to live in that world, because I imagine that's not the world you live in, right? Like, or lived in. Like, I bet there were plenty of things you did where you said, "Man, I wish that we had the world's leading expert on X, Y, or Z here with me to tell me what was going on." And, uh, and so like, you have—you've probably played with the AI stuff where you're like, "Hey, like, you know, who won the 1960 World Series?" Like, that's, that's, that's fine, but what if you could say, "Hey, how do I defuse this bomb?" Like, we—like, like, like—or like imagine, like, seeing a vehicle, be like, "How do I hotwire this car?" Damn. And if it can just have all of that on tap for you and say, "Oh, well, either here's how to do it, or just say you're out of luck; you can't hotwire this car."

The five minutes that you have, you need to move on. Really excited about living in a world where everyone's working with access to the best information. I need one of these helmets. We're going to—so it's interesting, this is a little bit of an off-topic bit, but people have inter-inter-ally been discussing this: Are we going to sell this to civilians?

And it's one of those really shitty situations. Like, I'm a gun owner. I own about 400 guns, and I own a bunch of other gun-related type systems as well. So like, I'm I'm I'm really down the rabbit hole, and I'm a big fan of weapons companies, especially gun companies that sell the same things to the military that they sell to civilians. That that's great. Like, I I I hate it when they say, "Oh, we're not going to sell this to you; we're only going to support the government." The problem—and I, when I was like, when I was not in the defense space, I was always pissed about this. I'm like, "How dare they not sell me the cool—how dare they not do that?" But then I'm realizing anything that I sell to civilians, I effectively also selling to Chinese Special Forces, to Russian Commandos.

Now, I'm not saying that you'll be able to—that they'll be able to get enough to outfit their whole Force, but anything you sell to civilians is eventually going to get sold to a traitorous American. It happens way too often. I hate that it happens, but you've read these stories, right? You know, some guy sells on eBay night vision—that is top-of-the-line night vision—to like, literal Russian Russian cutouts. And so I I I would hate to build this incredible capability and then all of a sudden it's in the hands of the top-tier units that we're potentially going to be fighting against. And also, I don't want them reverse-engineering it. Like, I don't want them using it and learning how it works, learning whatever might problems—like, because there will be problems. I am going to do my very best to minimize the impact of those problems. Like, I I know I'm—something is going to be wrong with our system. I would prefer that I don't have a bunch of, you know, Russian cu's walking around and trying it every day and realizing that there's a way to, for example, you know, trick the Dr. far facial recognition so that it swaps the two things. Like, not that I'm—not that I'm going to let it do that anyway, but you you get what I'm saying.

So I've been struggling with this. I want to sell to civilians, but I also know that the National Security impact is actually material and real, and I haven't figured out how to reconcile that yet. One would be to like, sell a more limited version to civilians—um, you know, maybe it doesn't do everything. Like, you probably don't want the civilian version to include the model that includes the weapons tactics advice of the best Master Chiefs and the best pilots and the best Admirals of you of History, right? Like, that's probably a dangerous thing for our allies to—or for our adversaries to have. Yeah. Um, you probably don't want it to be able to—it takes about five seconds, and it's in cartels' hands. I I yeah, I had not even run through my mind now, but like, that's another thing. We we do a lot of work with CBP. Uh, we actually have our AI—so our Lattice Sentry towers are along about 30% of the border now. We're covering hundreds of miles. We are responsible for hundreds of thousands of apprehensions that would not have happened otherwise. Wow. I am so proud of the work that we do with Border Patrol. And could you imagine if they start going up against cartels who have helmets telling them how to evade our systems, how best to bypass them, sharing tactics on when to send decoys across to distract him, and saying, "Okay, based on the average transit speed of a Humvee in this terrain, we think you have 16 minutes before they are able to get line of sight on you"? Like, that's what I want to be doing. And I I don't want to just tell soldiers what's happening now. I want to tell them what's probably going to happen. I want to do predictive analysis and use data processing to say, "Hey, like, based on what we've seen in the past, tactics we've seen for the from this enemy in the past, this is what's—they're going to be doing 10 minutes from now." I do not want the cartel having that. Could you imagine if you were to say to Facebook, "What do you mean—there—you mean this wouldn't be happening?" It's an interesting thing to ponder, but you know, Mark's come around. Mark's based now. It's pretty interesting to watch.

Sure. You you you you you've seen this going on for—oh yeah, I've seen it. It's a it it's—I think it's a reflection of a lot of things, you know, like the world's changing. It's clear China's not our friend. It's clear they're not the friend of our corporations. Uh, it's clear that there's crazy people running our media, crazy people running our politics, and eventually people who are smart—and Zuck is smart, right? He's not—he's not an idiot. At some point, you—at some point, you come out of the Matrix, right? And I I think that's what I meant was—Andrel would have—Oh, you mean if I wouldn't have started Oculus 100%? I I mean, I don't want to—I don't want to complain too much here, but one of my biggest beefs with the US defense system is I could not have started Andril before Oculus. I've only been successful with Andril because I'd already made billions of dollars at another company, and that's kind of an indictment of our system. If you look at history, we have a long history as a country of finding the best technology wherever it is and then building those people and those technology up into incredible parts of our war-fighting apparatus. Are you familiar with like, uh, the Samuel Colt story? No? Or Smith and Wesson? So like, Sam Colt was about to go bankrupt for the second time when he was handmaking revolvers out of the back of a covered wagon, and then he got an order from the Texas Rangers for like two dozen of his pistols that paid his bills for the year, and then after that, the United States Army adopted his revolver as the standard service weapon because it was so obviously superior to anything else that that had come—come before. So like, the six-shooter of the time was an extraordinary sidearm, and he went in his life from almost being bankrupt working out of a covered wagon to arming the entire Western world with his weapons. Like, the designs that he made went from out of the back of a wagon to literally tens of millions of units spread across America and Europe defending—defending America against Nazis and the Japanese. Like, isn't that like insane? Isn't isn't that amazing that our country used to be able to have those stories of finding the right guy? And so my like my question to people is always, "Could the United States military effectively buy something, even if it was a game-changer, from Palmer Lucky of 2011, back when I was a teenager building Oculus?" If I had gone to the military and said, "I've changed everything. I've built a VR headset that is better, faster, cheaper by an order of magnitude. It's $300, and it's better than your best $100,000 headset and a tenth of the weight," do you think they would have been able to buy it or use it? Like, no. We—it's this muscle we used to have that we've lost as a country. We're we're only willing to bet on people who have already made it, companies that are already big. Nobody wants to take any risk, and in doing so, they take more risk than they ever should. You know, a bureaucrat doesn't want to risk his job, so instead he just risks our national security. It's it's—and so my—the point I always make to people is we need to fix our procurement system so that the Palmer Lucky of 2011 can successfully sell into the military. We should not pat ourselves on the back because—and people are—they're saying, "Oh, well, I'm so glad things are changing. The success of Andril shows that we're really getting our together." I'm like, "Guys, like, that's a good first step, but let's not pat ourselves on the back for a billionaire successfully starting a new company, right?" That—if—if America—like, that is not the problem America has is that billionaires aren't good at starting companies. Like, if you have a billion, you can do whatever you want. You can start an ice cream company; you can start a defense company. But we need—we need to—we need to open it up to a lot more innovation that doesn't come from people like me.

Man, I love that you just said that. And uh, I got to be honest, there—I had a lot more than I want to talk with you, but I think this is a perfect—I think this is a perfect place to end this, and um—well, it's an important one, and I hope that people who are listening are considering working on National Security problems because even if you think that you are not relevant or not helpful, you're probably wrong. Like, if you are good with computers, there are places that desperately need you. If you are good at Metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, there are places that desperately need you. If you're just good at talking and good at sales, there are places that desperately need you. Like, there's there's a a whole new wave of new defense companies that are nipping at the heels of the big guys. Now is a great time for someone who cares about the future of our country to shift out—out of, you know, building parking apps and into building things that are going to keep people from getting their heads blown off, right? That that that is where we need our best and brightest, and it feels—it feels like—I hate—I hate to be uh—I hate to be mimetically aligned to this degree, but the vibe shift is real. Like, I I—and I I think people should take advantage of that. Definitely is—definitely is. Would you come back 100%? This has been a lot of fun, and I got—I got to get you into an Eagle Eye, though. I would love that. We let you know as soon—as soon as it's—as soon as it's uh—as soon as it's cleared by—as soon as it's cleared by the Army for us to start showing people. Perfect. Well, we won't release that—we won't release this until the announcement comes. Perfect. And I—and I think it will come in time. I'm—I'm telling you ahead of the announcement, but the announcement, I believe, is going to get cleared by the customer before—before this air, so fingers crossed. Perfect. All right. Well, Palmer, I really appreciate you, and damn, what a fascinating interview. I'm just wow. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. [Music] [Music] You, no matter where you're watching the Shan Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.