Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Oculus Founder On Apple Vision Pro w/ Palmer Luckey | EP #50

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

In this episode, Peter and Palmer discuss Apple’s Vision Pro, How it will change the future of VR headsets, and Facebook’s response to Apple.  08:32 | The Power of Virtual Reality 32:44 | Innovative User Interfacing 35:26 | Is Facebook's Push On VR Premature? Palmer Luckey is a visionary entrepreneur and inventor known for his groundbreaking contributions to the virtual reality industry. As the founder of Oculus VR, Luckey revolutionized the way we experience immersive digital worlds with the development of the Oculus Rift, a pioneering virtual reality headset. With a passion for pushing technological boundaries, Luckey's innovative spirit continues to shape the future of virtual reality and its applications across various industries.  Check out Apple Vision Pro Visit Anduril's Website  Support the Wildfire XPRIZE  _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover.  Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

UV rays don't skip a day. Neither should your SPF. Introducing Daily UV Moisturizer from Umbrelle. Broad-spectrum protection and all-day hydration in one lightweight formula from the number one recommended brand by pharmacists and physicians. It's the unskippable SPF for your unstoppable day. New Umbrelle Daily UV Moisturizer. Now available online or at your local retailer. That's the sound of unaged whiskey

transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Palmer Lucky invents the Oculus Rift, and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world through the power of the metaverse and everything is great and everyone loves it. Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky. The one, the only, the founder of Oculus, the founder of Andreal, Palmer Lucky. He created

Oculus. Andreal Industries founder, Palmer Lucky. I'm always looking for what I call user interface moments. Something gets built that transforms the world. Do you see the Vision Pro as a user interface moment, a transitional moment in this field, or is it not that significant? I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that way. You're going to see a huge number of people that are wearing headsets used for AR and VR. And just like that, boom, something that was lame will become cool. Before VR can become something that everyone can afford, it must become something that everybody wants. And I think that's the approach Apple is taking. Hey, Palmer. Good to see you. Good to see you too. Yeah. A few months since A360. I have to tell you

at A360 this year, you were the hit of the entire summit. Oh, there were a lot of good people. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. People loved your message. And my mission here is to get entrepreneurs to think big and to go after moonshots, right? Now, I count at least three moonshots we'll talk about, and you probably have others. If not publicly stated, I'm sure you have. I think you said you had a list from like high school of all the big things you wanted to do in the world. I do. I have a list of things I need to get done before I'm dead. Well, I'm working on extending that. So make sure we get a lot of those done. Let's begin by framing the moonshots, describing them and then diving into them. So the first

moonshot was obviously what you did in your late teens and 20s. It was Oculus VR. What would you describe as the moonshot you're going after? What was the vision that you were almost religious about that vision, weren't you? I still am. I mean, the goal there was to bring virtual reality to life and bring it into the mainstream and set it on its rightful throne as the final computational platform.

The final computational platform. Awesome. And we said that since the very beginning of the company because we saw it not just as the next step in computing or the next step in gaming, just another stone on the way to something bigger. We saw it as really the next step in gaming, you know, just another stone, you know, another stone on the way to something bigger. We saw it as really the final step.

I've said many times that once you have perfect VR, you need not perfect a lot of other things. It's one of those things that can completely emulate and aid and replace every form of media that's come before and most of the forms of media that we imagine coming in the future. And the idea that you can modulate people's reality and allow a person to experience anything that a person is capable of experiencing. Once you do that, all these arguments around phone screen size or whether you're sitting or whether you're standing or what exactly the form factor of your computing interface is, they all go away because you have the infinite freedom to do anything. And that was a pretty

wild dream, not in the big picture. Lots of people believed VR was going to get there in the long run. There's a reason it was kind of a science fiction staple. The moonshot was making it happen on a timeline that was short enough to make a company that actually survived doing it. And that was the real moonshot. And back then on an incredibly small budget. Really, really small budget. Yeah. So we'll dive into that one.

The second moonshot, we're here at Andoril Systems in Costa Mesa. And by the way, I have to tell everybody that you are the true Tony Stark. Well, Tony Stark got out of making weapons. So hopefully I can be different than him there. But other than that, I love the comparison. Yeah, well, it's true. As we walk around here, and we've got in the vision here a few of the devices. But oh my god, beyond this amazing stuff, it's a defense company.

We got a good showroom. And there's a bunch of stuff in there that we haven't even publicly announced. So the name Andral Systems, I love the name. When I looked it up, it's the elven god in the Dragon Age universe. So some interesting origins. Did you ever consider calling it Stark Industries instead? You know, I think that probably would have been a lot more dangerous in a post-Disney Marvel world. Disney's not famous for sharing their intellectual property by any means.

This is true. I forgot to- But the fact that I've thought that through is the answer. Anderle's moonshot. What is Anderle's moonshot? I mean, we're trying to reinvent the defense industry, both on the private side and on the government side. We're trying to make sure that America and our allies have the tools that we need now and in the future to deter the conflicts that could destroy everything that this coalition of nations has fought to build. Yeah. We'll get into that. You know, one of the things we discussed in the past, and we'll dive into this, is the way that the government procures things today compared to the way it used to is very different.

And a disadvantage for a lot of us, for everybody in home defense. Well, it's very, very different in the big picture and in the specifics of how the actual contracting is done. How the contracting is done, there's a lot of cost plus contracting where companies are paid for their time and materials and then a fixed percentage of profit on top, which incentivizes them not only to propose and build systems that are more expensive than the optimal solution, not only to propose systems that are expensive enough to even be worth them working on,

but also to make more money by doing things more slowly, doing things less efficiently, using more expensive parts. Because the only way to make more plus is to make more cost. It's insane. And then the really big picture, if you kind of look past even the contracting specifics, is that the US used to have this muscle where we could take

small, innovative companies, and we could grow them into large powerhouses of our defense ecosystem. And that just doesn't happen anymore. You know, pre-Andral, there were only two defense companies that had achieved a valuation of over a billion dollars since the end of the Cold War, 35 years. That's insane. It was Palantir and SpaceX, and they're both founded by billionaires. And not to be a little arrogant, Pierre, but billionaires can do whatever they want. It's not a good model for the average entrepreneur. And on top of that, you have these other issues like 80% of the defense procurement budget going to just five companies. And 30% of major weapons system contracts have only one bidder. That means only

one company even bids to build the system. How can you have competition? How can you have efficiency when that is the industrial base you're working with? And for folks listening to give a sense of the size of Anduril, started in 2017? That's right. Five years ago, you're somewhere near a $10 billion valuation today. I don't know that you publicly disclosed it, but that's what I could find on the web. That sounds's right. Five years ago, you're somewhere near a $10 billion valuation today. I don't know that you publicly disclosed it, but that's what I could find on the web. That sounds about right. So congratulations on that. Third moonshot we'll talk about is you were the first team to register for our $11 million XPRIZE wildfire.

That's right. We're going to end wildfires, at least the destructive ones. Love that. There are wildfires that are important to keep in forest management and so forth. But the ones that take down your home, let's get rid of those. Well, and ending the destructive ones is the key to being able to manage productive wildfires. If you talk to any wildlands firefighter, they'll tell you their job is not to get away from fire existing at all. It's to make sure that you're using it as a tool rather than having it use itself as a weapon. Okay. So we're gonna talk about those three moonshots. And I really want along the way for you to extract the lessons you've learned and the advice you have, right?

Oh man, I'll try my best. And I'll pull them out. But our job is to kick entrepreneurs in the butt. It's like, please, not another photo sharing app. Go make a dent in the universe. Go solve a grand challenge. Before I jump into that, I've got one question. How many Hawaiian shirts do you own? I don't know, about 60, 70, something like that. 60 or 70. Do you ever wear anything but a Hawaiian shirt? You know, I just, I don't really have need to. I mean, I've got my black t-shirts.

Look, it's my, they're comfortable. I like wearing them. And people expect them of me. If I had showed up in something else, I'd be getting static over it. All right, let's jump into Oculus. So I'll take you back to the origin. If you could, when did that original idea come into mind? What was that origination moment that inspired you? You said, not only do I need to do this, but I can do this. Oh, man. Well, those are two pretty different moments. I started working

on VR when I was 15 or so, because I became convinced that virtual reality was the future of gaming, the future of computing, that it was this final step. What convinced you? What was going on that you saw? Well, I was- What year is this also? This would have been like 2008, 2009. I decided, you know, I was a PC gamer. And so I'd been building my own gaming rigs. I was into modifying game consoles. I ran a game console modification forum called ModRetro as a teenager. And I started to realize that everything that I was doing was focused on what the next step was. So I had like an eight monitor PC gaming setup with AMD iFinity. And I started to think to myself, okay, well, what's the next step? It's not 10

monitors, it's not 15. You know, it's not just higher resolution. Those are all questions about the next step. What's the final step? Where's this all going? What should I be working on that's kind of the end? How can I work on the end game and not just an intermediary step where it's all throwaway?

I'm just on this, you know, rat race treadmill of always trying to be a little better. And it was clearly VR. And that was when I decided to work on VR, period. My work was really bad at the beginning. It took years, three or four years before I finally made something where I said, okay, I actually can make something that can pull this off. It's not just a cool hobby, a thought experiment about the future of gaming. This is something I can bring to people now.

So this is what Elon would call sort of first principle thinking. Where is it all going to end up? Yep. And start working on that now instead of on the iterative steps. Yeah. And you had convinced yourself that the tech to make that happen existed or was going to come into existence? I was convinced it would come into existence. And I intended to be on the forefront of it, even if it took a long time. So, I think if you had asked me in 2009, if I thought that VR was going to be viable in, let's say, three years, I think I would have been a little more pessimistic, especially based on my early prototypes and their relatively low quality. When I knew that I had had something is when I started showing it to my friends, and they started to tell me that what I was building was actually cool

rather than that I was wasting my time, which was actually the consensus opinion of my circle in the early years. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is if you're building something with the technology that exists today, by the time you get it to market,

it's out of date, right? And it's really skating to where the puck's going to be. And so you saw that coming. So you create the DK1. It goes on fire. You sell, what, like 55,000 of them to developers. That's right.

That's right. So yeah, I mean, DK1 was never intended to be a consumer product. We're very clear about that. You had to check a box during the order process that I am a game developer using this for the purposes of game development and understand that I will not be receiving any content support, installation support, whatever.

Because we also weren't staffed up for that. We weren't staffed to run this like a consumer electronics company. But there was nothing else. But there was nothing else. And then I think we had a lot of game developers buy it. And then quite a few just really early, early adopter type people who were willing to, you know, lie about being a game developer and buy something that said, we're not going to give you any real support. And nonetheless, they wanted that glimpse of the future. And so you get a call one day from Zuckerberg. Well, how did it come? How'd that come down? You know, that was quite a ways quite a way. You know, that was a couple years later after we started the company. At that point, we had much better hardware, especially on the research side.

We built a system that had full positional tracking, low latency displays, much higher resolution, OLED displays. We were deep into our controller development process, which I was actually leading at the time. controller development process, which I was actually leading at the time. So I was, I was kind of leading the control team because I believed that virtual reality input was going to be as meaningful as VR output. You know, I want to talk about haptics and a little bit for sure. And, but, you know, that was, I, we actually, the, the first, the first connection to Facebook actually came through Mark Andreessen, who was, who was, who was,

who was on the board of directors at Oculus very recently because he had led our series B. And so that was, that was how that connection, how that connection happened. And it's actually took quite a while for that connection to go from first meeting to any, any kind of acquisition offer,

or even, even interest. But you know, once you, once you start using VR, if you, you can see, you can see the potential. So Mark says to you, Zuckerberg says to you,

I want to buy the company after some engagement, yes? He offers you a billion dollars. You say, nope. How long before he came back and offered you two billion? No, he disappeared for a few months. So, and that was fine with us.

I mean, to be clear, we weren't looking to sell the company. And we made that clear. We were looking to build the next major computing platform. We believed that we were going to do that. We weren't interested in being part of someone's scheme to just set up a gaming platform or to have a cool Halo product. We're going to try to be the next Microsoft. We're going to try to be the next Apple. And the thing that convinced us when he came back wasn't going from $1 billion to $2 billion.

The real thing that convinced us was the commitment that they would commit to putting in billions of dollars every year for the next decade. And that was the thing that really got us, they would commit to putting in billions of dollars every year for the next decade. And that was the thing that really got us excited. And they did. And they did. And they've more, they've more, they've more than made up on that particular promise. On that, they've done it. They centered their company around the technology. That's right. I mean, yeah, I mean, now they're, now they're meta and they're spending many

billions of dollars a year on bringing VR to life. And it hasn't even been quite 10 years since the acquisition. So that promise they did keep. And that was what was exciting to us. We knew that doing what we were doing was going to cost an enormous amount of money, more than we could reasonably raise, and more than we could organically derive from profit on selling hardware and software. And so we knew that doing this ensured that VR would happen. It ensured that we would not get wiped out by factors beyond our control. And it's worth noting, there were a lot of people who had different visions of VR, which I respect greatly. But, you know, let's look at Sony. Sony had just announced their PlayStation VR. They were going to be a really serious competitor for us because we knew that in the long run, VR was going to be

the future of all computing. But in the short term, when the quality is not that great and when the content is relatively limited, you're kind of limited to that tech lover, early adopter, and hardcore gamer audience. There was a real risk that we were just going to get smothered in the cradle by Sony's vision of VR. Facebook was someone who believed in the future of VR that we believed in, that this was the next major computing platform, and that they were going to beat everybody to the punch by investing like crazy into it. You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and healthspan. And how do you add 10, 20 health years onto your life?

One of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep. And there's something that changed the quality of my sleep. And this episode is brought to you by that product. It's called 8Sleep. If you're like me, you probably didn't know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep. Those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept. Yeah, temperature is often the culprit. Traditional mattresses trap heat, but your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening and then

heat up in the morning. Enter the Pod Cover by 8sleep. It's the perfect solution to the problem. It fits on any bed, adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed based upon your individual needs. You know, I've been using Pod Cover and it's a game changer. I'm a big believer in using technology to improve life and 8sleep has done that for me. And it's not just about temperature control.

With the Pod's sleep and health tracking, I get personalized sleep reports every morning. It's like having a personal sleep coach. So you know when you eat or drink or go to sleep too late, how it impacts your sleep. So why not experience sleep like never before? Visit www.8sleep.com. That's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com slash moonshots. And you'll save 150 bucks on the pod cover by 8sleep. I hope you do it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now back to the episode.

So as a moonshot entrepreneur going after this, you've gotten to a point, you've got momentum, you've got a sizable exit, you've got a sugar daddy, for lack of a better term, that's going to fund it and grow it and help it scale. Did they promise they'd leave you alone? Because I mean, yeah. I mean, I'm not even revealing anything new here. We talked about this, the explicit deal is that we would be run as an independent company, that we were in control, that it was our vision. And the reason that it could be our vision is because our visions were aligned. And to their credit, that is how it went for a few years. It wasn't until later that they really started to centralize control, not just of Oculus,

but of all of their acquisitions. We're not a unique story. You look at what happened with the founders at Instagram. You look at what happened with the founders at WhatsApp. And all of them have similar stories. Do you have a club? We actually do. But it wasn't so much that Oculus had the deal changed on them.

It's that Facebook changed what they were and how they wanted to run their company. And that impacted everybody. When you're talking to an entrepreneur who's considering selling their company to a large acquirer and has the benefits of an exit and deep pockets. Yep. Any advice to them? Well, usually the advice I give is ahead of the acquisition, but I encourage people to think about if they would sell their company

long before they are actually getting that offer because they should have some kind of principled understanding of why they might sell or why they might not sell, which is something I had to develop on the fly. And I think I would have been better served by coming up with a better answer. What I tell people to consider is ahead of time, early, is is your company really better off

as an independent company? Or is it better off as part of a larger company with more resources? And those resources might be a bigger brand. It might be better marketing. It might be more money. It might be more people. Resources can take many forms.

But there's a lot of companies that people start where they are clearly going to be better as part of a major company. There's others where they would be better if they can remain independent, that they'll only see their full potential on their own without being compromised by somebody else's interests. And it's totally different on a per company basis.

I'm not religious about it, though. I don't tell people never sell or you'll get fired and you'll get screwed and you'll be lost to the sands of time. Nor do I tell them to always sell out and take the money. It really depends on what you're doing. So I'm going to come back to Facebook, but a couple of weeks ago, finally, Apple debuts Vision Pro. That's right.

You had tried the headset before at an earlier stage. And then- I talked about that in abundance. And then everybody dug up my comments, which they had to kind of miss the first time. And then everyone was digging it up because I guess I apparently I'm one of the only people who was willing to willing to say something

so did you see the debut as well oh of course uh good and what did so what up what do you think hey did they nail it I think that there's things that I would do differently if I were Apple but uh what did they do right? And that's what I was going to say. They did basically everything right. They didn't do anything terrible. I mean, I think Apple's going after the exact right segment of the market that Apple should be going after. So the thing you have to remember is different companies, I think, have different products

that are right for them to be building. I think if Apple had tried to go after the low end of the market, that would have been a mistake. They are taking the exact approach that I had always wanted Apple to take, and really the approach that Oculus had been taking in the early years. Actually, when Apple launched the Vision Pro, I retweeted a tweet of my own from 2015, where I said that before VR can become something that everyone can afford, it must become something that everybody wants. And I think that's the approach Apple is taking. They're trying to go balls to the wall, the highest possible

resolution, the highest quality possible displays, the best possible ergonomics. And they're going all in on that with little regard for it being affordable for everyone. And I think that is actually the right approach for Apple to take right now. That approach will change. Obviously, they're going to do a cheaper version in the future. It boils my mind when you have all of these pundits coming out and saying, this is a blunder. It'll never go anywhere. Who the heck is going to spend $3,500? A lot of people. Well, that's the real secret. There's a lot of people who are going to spend it. But more importantly, there's a hundred times more people who are going to spend a quarter of that when it gets to that price. That's really where you need to be looking at this. The price

right now, it's kind of irrelevant that the people who are going to buy it at $3,500, we would have bought it at $5,000. We would have bought it at $2,000. The price just doesn't matter for the group of early adopters that they're targeting. But what they're going to do is inspire lust in a much larger group of people who, as I dreamed all those years ago, see VR as something they desperately want before it becomes something they can afford. Yeah. People have to desire it. I had this experience when I was trying to price my zero G flights. I wanted to get the price below 2000, couldn't get there originally. And I had it at 3,500 and then realized that the same number of people would pay 5,000 or 7,500 bucks. And having a viable company and product that people aspire to is super valuable.

And then eventually get the price down as we always do. What are the features that you think are the most important that surprised you in the Vision Pro? Oh, man. Let me see. Things that are surprising. I don't want to sound arrogant here, but most of the things are just things that I can imagine. I totally expect. You've been.

Yeah. I mean, what they're doing, when I say they're doing it right, they're doing things that people have talked about as the right thing to do for a very, very long time. I mean, I found the- One of the things, okay, you know, one thing I'm surprised on a little bit is that Apple did go for having the external puck tethered to the headset. To be clear, that is the right way to do things. And I was a big advocate of this in Oculus. Unfortunately, it was a battle that I lost

in my waning years. And they went all in on putting the battery, all the batteries, putting all the processing in the actual headset itself. And not just in the headset, but in the front of the headset itself, which hugely increases the weight of the front of the device itself, which hugely increases the weight of the front of the device

and the asymmetric torque load. And it's not a good decision. The fact that Apple did that was something I was afraid they wouldn't do because it does look less cool than having it all in one kind of magical thing that you just put on your head. But getting the weight off of your head is so important,

especially for the future. I think the real reason Apple got the battery off of the head is not because this device couldn't have had a battery on, let's say the back of the headset and been fine. It's because they are setting that expectation in people that it's okay to have it off of the head so that in the future they can add more processing, that they can add more radios, they can add more batteries to an external puck rather than keeping it in the headset, because that's what's going to allow the Apple device to become basically, you know, a thin pair of glasses. As long as you're keeping all your processing and all of your battery and power in the headset, there's a limit to how small it can be. And that limit is somewhere around the size of VR headsets that you kind of see today. So take me there. Where is this going? I mean, what would you not be surprised by a decade from now? What's VR look like? Well, you're going to see a huge number of people that are wearing headsets used for AR and VR

every single day. They're going to be using it continuously to blend the real world and digital world seamlessly. They'll be going between the to blend the real world and the digital world seamlessly. They'll be going between the two frequently, sending data between the two frequently, communicating with people who exist across both of those two planes continuously. And I think that we're likely to spend more of our waking moments with our reality augmented or mediated or whatever you want to call it. There's a million philosophical distinctions. They were going to spend more time looking at that augmented view

than an un-augmented view. So, living in the virtual and augmented world. And do you think the headsets will get down to a pair of sunglasses? Here's the thing. I think that the headsets can get down to pair of sunglasses. I don't think they will. The reason for that is that you have to make certain trade-offs that get more and more extreme as you get to the far end of what you can do in terms of making a lightweight headset. I'd say think more kind of chunky sunglasses is probably where things are going. But when people say, is it ever going to get to, you know, this thin pair of glasses? I say, you know what?

It's possible to make a virtual reality headset or an AR headset within the laws of physics that fits in that form factor. But the quality of that experience is going to be so much worse than something just a little bit bigger that I think most people will opt for the thing that is a little bit bigger and a radically better experience. The real key here is a changing of social expectations. I mentioned this in abundance. The real way Apple is going to make their headset cool and acceptable to wear in public is not through engineering. It's still pretty big. Social engineering. It's social engineering. It's marketing. They're going to put it on the heads of the right celebrities. They're going to put it on the heads of the

right influencers. And just like that, boom, something that was lame will become cool. And it doesn't have to get any thinner or lighter. Will.I.Am was at A360 speaking this year and he wears these very large red glasses that could be a VR, could be a rehearsal. Lady Gaga did the same thing. You know, she really kicked off a trend a few years ago wearing huge oversized sunglasses that are way too big for reason. Getting ready. And that made it cool. I think Apple's going to do the exact same thing. They're going to make the big thing cool. And so by the time we have the chunky sunglasses, I think we're going to be well past the question of, will people wear on this? People will look back on this discussion as a quaint relic. They'll say,

man, can you believe people, there were people who really thought that nobody would ever dare wear VR or AR glasses in public. It's just, it's going to be, it's going to seem bizarre to young kids. The social analogy is, I remember the first time I watched people with earbuds walking around the street talking to themselves. And it seemed just weird. Yep. And now it's totally socially acceptable. I mean, you can go back even further. People thought it was nuts

when people were walking around with cell phones, even just talking on them. The idea that you would just be out in public using a piece of office telecommunications hardware seemed pretty bizarre. But now it's totally taken for granted. You literally would not even, not only would you not think twice

when you see it on the street, you don't even think about it. Yeah. It's fully accepted. I remember Tom Furness at the Human Interface Lab up in Seattle had a vision of what he called the virtual retinal displays, where literally you would raster scan with the laser across the back of the retina as a way to shrink things down. A virtual retinal display that doesn't form any image plane except on the retina. Yeah. So are those possible? They're possible. It's one path to the future. It's not the one that I'm betting on.

I think we're just going to keep brute forcing it through higher and higher pixel density on relatively traditional silicon process displays and micro displays. I could be wrong there. The thing that people don't quite understand about VRDs, you know, these retinal displays is that you still have to project onto your eye from a wide angle. So a lot of people imagine that VRDs can, from a small lens, project, you know, a large field of view. That's not possible with any reasonable permutation of the technology. It could change in a few decades, but for now, any VRD with wide field of view needs to also have a large lens that is going over your eyes.

Until we bypass and go directly to the cortex. Until we go bypass and go directly into the brain, which I'll be honest, I'm cynical about. I think we're going to... You haven't signed up yet? So I'm a big believer in BCI for like arbitrary data transfer. So, you know, basically like psychic power levels of augmentation. Think in Google. Yeah.

And that, and also, you know, like, you know, knowing directions, having random data input from different systems, you know, reaching out and controlling things. But when it comes to replacing the visual system, I think it's extraordinarily hard to get a BCI with the particular type of bandwidth that we need to do that sufficiently well. I think it's more likely that we are just using glasses. I see a future where we have near-perfect brain-to-computer interfaces for controlling our computers. We're still going to be wearing head-mounted displays. That's my opinion.

And what are we doing with our hands? What do you think about the hand gestures and lack of haptics? And where do you think haptics are going to go? Well, it's no secret that I'm a big fan of VR input. I think that's probably one of the things I would have done differently than Apple. On the other hand, they have a plan for VR input that goes beyond just the finger inputs. I think they're taking a focused marketing approach, but I think they have a broader vision for the future than everything just being eyes and fingers. So I'm a big fan of haptic input. I'm a big fan of haptic props. I'm a

big fan of especially finger held tools that allow you to do high precision interactions that you simply cannot do with your eyes or with the binary inputs of touching fingers. Do we have a lot of room to grow there? There's a ton of room to grow, a lot of room to grow, a lot of room to specialize. What I like to use as an analogy is the keyboard. You know, look, looking at things and touching your fingers, that's a human interface. But a keyboard is a superhuman interface. It allows you to do things faster and better than you could do them with your voice, than

you could do it even with your with your eyes. And a mouse is also to some degree a superhuman interface. These are things that require a lot of training to use. They're not natural. Like keyboards are not natural. You'd probably agree. Especially the QWERTY. They take a long time to learn. But when the QWERTY, that's a whole separate mess. But, you know, let's pretend that the keyboard hadn't been crippled by QWERTY. You know, it'd be even better for everybody. I think you're going to see similar devices for AR and VR in the future.

Devices where they are specialized, where they require training, where there's a high skill ceiling, but they allow you for, you know, beyond human, superhuman levels of input and output. They're not going to be used by everybody. They're not going to be used all the time, but they are going to be used for dedicated, specialized use cases like gaming, like productivity, like CAD modeling, like military combat. And so I'm still very excited about the future of haptics. I don't think that tapping your fingers together is the end game. I'm always looking for what I call user interface moments.

These moments in time when something gets built that transforms the world. So when Andreessen creates Mosaic on top of ARPA, it's a user interface moment. All of a sudden, people can use this incredible, powerful tool. When Steve Jobs created, you know, the App Store, that's a user interface moment. Google was a user interface moment on top of all of the web sites in the world. Do you see the Vision Pro as a user interface moment, a transitional moment in this field, or is it not that significant? Or is it going to create sort of a step change in approaches and usability of the virtual world?

You know, that's actually going to be hard for me to predict, mostly because whether or not it becomes a step change moment is totally up to developers more than Apple. Apple's come up with a really powerful UI, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable betting against all of the other developers who are trying to come up with their own schemes. I've seen some other schemes that people have come up with around some crazy ways to interact with computers using VR headsets. And some of them I think are actually have advantages over what Apple is doing. So I'd say what Apple's done is great. I suspect that if someone beats them, they're also going to adapt

that. I mean, the app store is a good example. The app store was not part of the original vision of the iPhone. Steve Jobs was famously anti-native apps. He was all about web apps and not really giving anyone access to the core hardware of the system. One of the people who was actually going toe-to-toe with him on that was John Carmack, who was previously the CTO of Oculus and before that, obviously, started id Software. He was one of the people who was really aggressively pushing jobs to allow native applications on the iPhone. And I think I had a Nokia N800 mobile internet device running Mamo. And so I had my mobile app repositories on my little Linux device. And I mean, I basically had everything that the app store had years ahead of time. I think that, uh, I think Apple in that case, it was one where they got it wrong and they

realized that they had gotten it wrong. And they said, okay, we're going to do the app store. We're going to copy what a lot of other people have done, but we're going to do it really, really well. And that was transformational. So I guess I would say, I'm not convinced that what Apple is showing right now is that step change. Whatever that step change is though, you know, Apple's going to be on it. I don't think that they're going to, I don't think they're going to be stubborn about using the best. An extraordinary company, their MO on just driving to perfection. That's right. You know, it's going to be expensive. It's going to be white and it's going to work really well.

That's right. Last question on this topic. That's right. Um, last question on this topic, you depart Facebook. Yep. Um, what would you have done differently since, uh, on Oculus? Oh man, that's a long conversation, but I think, uh, a few things, a few things I probably would have done differently is I would have, differently is I would have shipped a different set of hardware focused on a different set of people. And I probably would have staged it a little bit differently. There's been this consistent push at Facebook to make VR something that everybody is interested in using. But I think it's come somewhat prematurely.

I wrote a blog post years ago called Free Isn't Cheap Enough. And in it, I lay out an argument for, I laid an argument, not really for, it was an argument against the idea that the thing holding VR back is cost. It was this idea that if you make a VR headset cheap enough, then everybody will want it. And that might be true in the limit.

You have to make the technology accessible and affordable if you eventually want to have a billion people using it. But to do that, you have to first hit a certain level of quality. There's a certain level of hardware quality, comfort, ergonomics, resolution, and especially, critically, content library in breadth and depth that you have to have before the average person will even care about VR. So the argument of free isn't cheap enough was that if you took current VR headset technology, as of a few years ago, and you lowered the price to $0, meaning you literally gave it to everybody in the world, I argued that the majority of people would cease using it within a few weeks. The only people left would be the hardcore techno heads, the super geeks, the hardcore gamers, you know, a group of people I fall into myself. But I pointed out that cutting the cost doesn't get you to the mainstream if you're not at that

particular level of quality yet. And so I'd say that was, I think one of the mistakes was trying to go too mainstream too quickly to the detriment of the growth trajectory. And you might say, oh, they're just trying to get it to take off, period. But I think that you kind of, these things have to kind of come in stages. And so that, I think, I think kind of leaving the high end and the hardcore behind was too early, was a mistake. And I think things like, look at Facebook Horizons or Meta Horizons now, like Meta Horizons is not the thing that is going to convince the masses to use VR. And you could say, well, you got to start building it now. To which I would say, no, you don't.

You need to build the things that the people who will use it at its current state will use. You need to maximize your sales at every step of the way rather than build. There was a thing that I said right before I left, which was that I pointed out that in the marketing and targeting discussions, there was too much Starbucks and not enough Mountain Dew. I don't even have to explain it for you to understand what I mean. Yeah, that's hilarious. You know, it's Larry Page's toothbrush test, right? Build something that people need to use twice a day and you'll get success. That's right. And I think that things like Quest Pro were actually kind of a step.

Directionally. Directionally, I think it was a good step, but I think it was also, it was too late and not implemented particularly well. Like one interesting thing about Apple is their headset has all of these, you know, face tracking and eye tracking features that they're doing incredible things with. I mean, you saw these demos of how they're using it in incredible ways. Compare that with, did you even know that Quest Pro had eye tracking? I did not. It did.

That's the crazy thing. They put out this headset. But when I was at Oculus, we did something called feature prototypes. We would put out publicly, we'd show a prototype hardware, a hardware prototype that incorporated one new feature and we would show to developers how you could use it. We would make software demonstrations of how you would do this. So whether it's positional tracking or controllers or low persistence, we would show how this particular feature could be used and get devs thinking about it, get them excited about

it so they were developing for it ahead of time and then coming up with concepts they could use once the hardware was out. And we would never release a new feature in our hardware without showing it to devs way ahead of time and showing the public what could be done with it. Quest Pro came out like, hey, we have eye tracking, we have face tracking.

The only app that supports it is Horizons and we have no other demo applications. We have nothing that shows you the magic. We have no UI examples that show you how to use this. There's no games that support it. There's no way you can actually even play with it, except in this one app that none of you even care about. And that was a big mistake.

I think Meta could have basically owned that entire eye tracking, natural interaction moment, because the idea of looking at things and touching your fingers to interact with them, that isn't a new Apple idea. But they're the ones that brought it out and said, we're putting a stake in the ground. This is what we're going all in on. If I were still around, I probably wouldn't have shipped a headset without any demonstrations of the killer feature of that headset.

Anyway, I could complain all day. I'm sorry to the people at Meta for giving you guys a hard time. I know you guys have a lot of issues and I understand some of the interpolitical dynamics of how these things ended up this way and why they ended up this way. I'm not ignorant of the challenges,

but I can't help but look and think that I would have done things. I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that have done things. I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that way. I at least would have made different mistakes. But you know what the good news is? You left and you started Anduril. That's right.

I mean, if you had been, you know, had rain and continued, you might still be there building that out. But so you leave Oculus and you start a defense company. I mean, like, where did that come from? That feels like a right turn in life. It was, but you and I have talked about this quite a bit. But I want people to hear about this. It's an interesting conversation and an important one for entrepreneurs to hear.

I mean, I'd say a lot of it came out of fear and the rest was a sense of obligation and patriotism. Would you call those deep emotions for you? Oh, yeah. Can I make a point here that doing anything big and bold in the world, taking on any moonshot has got to be connected with emotion. I agree. Because it's hard otherwise. Well, moonshots are almost never the right risk-adjusted move.

They don't make any sense if your goal is to make money or start a successful company. There has to be some, you know, extra realistic factor, you know, outside of the reasonable and rational risk management process. And it can be a positive aspiration, like, oh my God, I want to open the space frontier, or it can be fear, and I cannot allow this to go on anymore. But that drive... And that was really the combination of things. I mean, look, there were specific technologies that I had in mind that I wanted to make. There were things that I knew I could bring into the world that wouldn't be brought into the world otherwise. But the driving force for Anderle

was a recognition by me and other people that I respected that America used to be really good at building the tools we needed to defend ourselves and to deter conflict. We used to be good at equipping our allies and partners around the world with the same, and that we had lost that, that we weren't in the lead on a lot of important technologies, that we didn't have a system that would allow our existing defense primes to lead in areas like autonomy, artificial intelligence, network systems, swarming systems. And most importantly, I realized that our big tech companies weren't refusing to work with the DoD largely because they were beholden to China. At the same time, new startups couldn't raise money because investors rightly said that there was no chance of success. They said, look, why would I invest in

the defense company when there's only two examples of success, both founded by billionaires who can really do whatever they want in the last 35 years. And I mean, that's a kind of terrifying landscape. And it was something I felt like I had to try to tackle because nobody else was going to do it. So, first of all, I think for listeners, it's important to note, when Palmer was on stage at Abundance 360, he got, when he announced the mission, he got, you got cheers. You had people standing up and applauding, which, you know, I'm proud of that, but I was also a little bit surprised. I mean, there was an emotional reaction that was evoked. Well, I think there's a few things driving that. First of all, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia,

I think has been a game changer. Wake up call. That's right. There are a lot of people who I think bought into the idea. You've probably heard this phrase that we lived at the end of history, that all the borders are static, that the commerce is too powerful. Economic entwinement is going to keep us safe. Exactly. That there'll never be a major war again because there can't be because peace is too profitable. And it's a really beautiful idea. And I've had a lot of smart people lecture me on how my vision for the future

was somewhere between immoral and a waste of time. I got some people saying that Andoril was wrong. I got actually more people saying it's a waste of time. Like there's not going to be any more wars of significance. There's no fights of consequence to deter. You're just wasting your time. And I think that Russia's actions have been a wake-up call. I think that Xi's feverish drive to secure the heavenly mandate and take back Taiwan has been another wake-up

call for people. And I'd say another big wake-up call is this self-reinforcing loop where I believe that five years ago, when everyone was acting like Andrel was controversial, when Bloomberg was running articles saying we're the most controversial company in tech, when we won Wired Magazine's worst company in Silicon Valley. Wow. What year was that in? That would have been 2018, so a year after we started. But when all of this was going on, I honestly believe that nine out of 10 people in the tech industry did support the military. They did support the idea that our military should have better weapons than China and better weapons than Russia. But all of those nine out of 10 people believed that they were one out of 10. And I think that they wouldn't have cheered five

years ago for that reason. They were worried about what their peers might think. They were worried about what the public might think. And I think that really, we've seen this tipping of the scale where that nine out of 10 feels free to say, you know what? This is important. We do need this. America is something special. We do have a particular role in this world. And there's nothing wrong with recognizing that the world needs to be met as it is, not as we wish it was. That's beautifully stated. Listen, it's still a right turn in life to go from Oculus to defense. Oh, it's true. It's been tough mentally.

And I want to take you back to that moment because I want to hear that story. I mean, Oh, it's true. It's been tough mentally. around Mars, then landing a greenhouse on Mars, and he goes to Russia to buy a rocket, and he realizes there are 50-year-old ICBMs, and he's being charged a fortune for it, and this is a dead industry he could reinvent. And that's a moment in time, an experience in time that led him to create SpaceX. That's right. What's yours? What was going on that led you to say, I need to go and reinvent the defense industry? I need to enable it.

I think probably the biggest recognition was, you know, I believed in tech. I believed in the tech industry. But I realized that our technology industry, which was really poised to revolutionize so many areas, transportation, energy, computing, obviously, was completely abdicating from any responsibility to national security. And I think that was the real thing that was driving me, the realization that Google was not going to work with our military to protect us or our allies, the realization that Facebook was not going to do the same, the realization that really, you had a whole generation of our best engineers, not working with the

military and that that was a unique moment in U.S. history. This terrified me. Imagine if this had been the case during the run-up to- But was it a dinner conversation? Was it an event that occurred? You know, it was, I'd say it was more of a slow burn and it was also a development- Just evidence mounting and mounting. Exactly. I mean, look, there was a time where I didn't even think about these things that there was no one moment. I mean, look, I was part of the problem to a certain degree. I manufactured millions of virtual reality headsets in China. And, you know, I spent time in China. And as time passed, I started to realize that this was a really unprecedented situation. There'd never been a situation where a foreign adversary

had more influence over our innovation ecosystem than our home nation. I mean, that's extraordinary and unprecedented. I wish I could point to a particular meeting or a particular moment. Probably one moment for me that was a big deal was a moment that was a big deal for a lot of people, which is it's not really a rational thing, but it's a psychic and mental thing. It was when the F-35 program surpassed $1 trillion in budget.

Oh, my God, yes. I remember that. I guess if I could point to one thing when I realized things were broken, it was that. And it wasn't just me. It was you. It was everyday Americans. It was people in Congress. They said they were just going about their lives. It was that. And it wasn't just me. Yeah, it was you. It was everyday Americans. It was people in Congress. They said, you know, they were just going about their lives. When did that happen?

And if it had been 990 billion, I think nobody would have thought about it quite the same. But when it surpassed a trillion, a lot of people said, what the heck are we doing? How did we get here? How did we let this happen? Are we really going to let this happen over and over again? I'd say that was a big moment for me, even divorced from the problems I saw China creating in our

economic incentive structure. This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different.

All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app.

So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24-7. I wear it all the time. It really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself, but my friends and my family, that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So check it out, levels.link slash Peter. Give you two additional months of membership.

And it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. I want to get back to the way that the government buys products and in particular in the defense industry,

because it is so broken. And I love the fact that one of your- I'm glad that a trillion dollar program broke people's minds too. I mean, think about how much more frustrating it would have been if it was something where I got frustrated and maybe you got frustrated, but it kind of just passed everyone else by. I'm so glad that that was one of those things where everyone got it. What I feel right now, my, one of my moonshots is I'm pissed at

the healthcare system, how absolutely ineffective and inefficient and broken it is. Right. And so I've got my own set of disruptions wanting to do there, but I see that you did it here. And let's, let's talk about that. You know, you said a few things earlier that I think are important for people to hear. The defense industry, let's narrow down on defense versus government in particular, is really bad at buying from entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, yeah. I mean, the incentive structure doesn't reward it. Their contract structures don't allow it.

Yeah. What else do they do poorly in contracting? Oh, man. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things. What's egregious in your mind? So a couple of things are pretty egregious. One is, I think, one of them is relying on the Fox to tell you how to kind of- Build a hen house.

Not just the hen house, but the business plan for the hen house and the supporting farm and how you're going to hire all of the people who are going to protect the hens and what exactly they're going to- The self-licking ice cream cone. Exactly. I mean, this manifests in really destructive ways. For example, until very recently, the United States Army, their plan of record for remotely piloted and autonomous vehicles was that they were going to begin fielding them in the late 2030s. And they were really not going to be fielding them at scale

until the 2040s. But the reason for this is that they had the, basically the Army was relying on the representations, not of cutting edge technology companies, but of large defense companies. And they're saying, this is how long it's going to take us. You're going to have to give us billions of dollars a year for decades. And then eventually we'll build vehicles that are able to do some of this. And now, obviously, a lot of entrepreneurs have come in and with a tiny fraction. And again, we're spending a lot of money on self-driving cars.

It's a tiny fraction of the money that the defense ecosystem wanted the taxpayer to be giving them to do the problem over a much longer period of time. And luckily, now those schedules are getting pulled in. I'd say that's pretty egregious. I'd say here's another really egregious problem that nobody's talking about except me. I've been hitting people up in Congress on this for years people in oversight roles for years and it's our patent system

I like to refer to patents as Chinese instruction manuals you're basically taking your best technologies and your best approaches and you're putting them out in the public domain and saying these are the things I think are most important and valuable and the problem is that we have told our commercial companies that in order to protect their ability to compete in the private sector, they must put into the public domain, which is really the Chinese domain, everything that they think is important. And to a company like, let's say, Google, that makes sense.

They say, well, look, I don't really mind if the Chinese military rips me off on an economic level, right? It doesn't hurt Google's business if, let's say, well, look, I don't really mind if the Chinese military rips me off on an economic level, right? It doesn't hurt Google's business if, let's say, the Chinese military... You're not depending on that market share anyways. They're not competing for that market share anyway. They were never going to make money off of the Chinese defense contractors ripping off their technology. But the United States used to be better about this.

We used to be better at finding certain technologies and saying, hey, this is of massive strategic importance. This is the difference between winning and losing a war. We're not going to let you take this technology and put it out there. And there is actually a process by which you can obtain classified patents. But that process is extremely limited, very difficult to navigate, almost impossible for any startup to utilize. One of the things I would really like to see is for the US to take a proactive approach and say, you know what, we want, like the whole idea of patents is you get a monopoly on your idea for a period of time in the United States, and you get to protect your idea. And in exchange, you have to give that idea

away to people who should have it. I think that we need to limit that a little bit and say, you know what, the goal of this is that you have to put it out there and you have to share it with people who we don't mind having our strategic assets. Like I would love to see maybe not a classified patent system, but a US only accessible patent system where if you're going to go in and see this stuff, you have to be a citizen or you have to be a citizen of an allied nation. And they're going to keep track of who's accessing these things. You're not allowed to just print it all out and put it out there into the public domain. And look, I know this sounds controversial. Anyone who's kind of an open source, can't stop the signal, information wants to be free type of person. But the things that I've seen China take

out of our tech companies' patent portfolios and then put into the field as military technology terrifies me because we are slow at developing and fielding new military technology. China is fast. We can't afford to also be their R&D lab. Wow. Let's educate the world here, at least those listening, about the procurement process of what a cost plus contract is and who's taking the risk compared to the way contracting used to be done a hundred years ago. Because it's changed a lot, I think mostly because of World War II, where the government just needed to pour money on companies. Well, they needed to pour money on companies and they needed to get a bunch of companies that were

not in the weapons business into the weapons business. And those companies fairly said, listen, I don't know how much it's even going to cost me to build this airplane, this tank, this weapon system. Because that's not what I do. I can't model it as well as I can building, let's say, a bunch of cars. And the government said, listen, we'll just pay you a fixed, we'll pay for the cost, whatever it is, and then we'll make you a fixed percentage of profit on top. And that was a good system for a society in total war mode, where nobody ever would have dreamed of slowing down or pushing up expenses or trying to come up with something that was going to take twice as long as it needed to. It just, it simply wasn't going to happen. But we've kept that contracting system, even as we've moved into, you know,

times of relatively incredible peace. And that was a mistake. And trillion dollar contracts. And trillion dollar individual contracts for individual weapon systems. And of course, the problem is with a cost plus contract, when you get paid for your time and materials and then a fixed percentage of profit on top, and especially where the government is taking on the development risk, what it really means is you make more money in some cases by failing than by succeeding. You make more money when you're over schedule. you make more money in some cases by failing than by succeeding. You make more money when you're over schedule. You make more money when you're over budget. You make more

money when you buy the most expensive parts, the most exquisite architectures, and when you sell as many of something as possible rather than simply the right amount. And it's just a totally- Wrong incentives. It's a perverse incentive structure. And I've talked about this many times. I'm not saying that people in the defense industry wake up in the morning and say, ah, another day, another chance to screw US taxpayers using cost plus contracts. But the incentive leads to natural incentive structures that reward certain types of thinking, certain types of behavior. And pretty soon the people who naturally, because of those incentive structures and ways of thinking, the people who drag out the contracts, the ones who figure out how to come up

with exquisite systems that make money, they're the ones who end up running the system. Because the people who are extremely efficient, extremely fast, they don't make any money in that system. They often don't even get a chance to participate in it. And so, unfortunately, it's a self-reinforcing problem. Yeah. And before World War II, most people probably don't realize that companies who are bidding on a government contract had to post a bond. They had to put up money for the right to bid and get the contract. And if they didn't perform, they lost and the government was made whole.

That's right. Very, very different. These were called performance bonds. They were called bid bonds and payment bonds. Well, it was also very common to have people accountable in other ways. They would structure contracts such that they would have multiple vendors

building the exact same system so that if one of them stopped performing, they'd say, you're out. Your business, the volume that we allocated you, they'd say, you're out. Your business, the volume that we allocated you, it's going to somebody else now. But again, in a world where 80% of the contracts go to five companies, where 30% of the major weapon systems have only one bidder. That's insane. How can you do that? Exactly. And the companies know this. They say, you literally can't take it away from me because there's nobody in the entire country who will build this. And even if there are people who

maybe could, most of the people who could compete with me, the tech companies, refuse to compete. I don't have any competition. I don't have to worry. I don't have to look over my shoulder. By the way, there is a model and a solution, and Anderle will be one of the solutions here. But looking back, I spent my first 30 years in the space business, and it was Lockheed Martin and Boeing. And then, of course, they combined to create United Launch Alliance. That's right. And there was Orbital Sciences and Thiokol. And this massive consolidation occurs until there's only two suppliers.

Yep. Right? But what changed was Elon and Jeff Bezos come in, and then a whole slew of small entrepreneurial startups. Yep. it back, but that's a different story. So I'm massively impressed with the way Anderle is doing it. And just since it hasn't been explicitly said, like, I guess I think we've talked about how bad the other types of business models is. I mean, our primary business model is using money to build products, which we then sell to our customer, which is the government. Let's slow that down because it's really important people to realize what you're doing is amazing. And it's also the 180 degrees, you know, out of phase with everybody else.

It's risky, but it gives you the freedom and it's the best thing for America. Well, and I think the best part of it is you're right. It is risky. It is novel in the defense world. But the thing that really makes our business model special is how unspecial it is. It's not like we're coming in with this new concept, like software as a service. That was like a new idea as a model. What we're coming in and saying, we're going to do business the oldest way that business has been done. And the way the tech industry has been doing it forever. Oh, I'd say, I mean, the way that commerce has worked for thousands of years. It's the

way thing where I use my money to make a thing and I stack it up in the marketplace and I wait for people to come and they give me money and I give them my thing, you know, my clay pot or whatever it is. That's really what's so powerful about the model that we're pursuing is it's not really new. It's only new in the recent history of the United States. And so, it's really just getting back to the basics. And that's why I'm such a believer in this model. We're not trying to get people to shift over to some crazy subscription software as a service model that has a short history of success. Most of what we're doing, they're things that have actually worked out for a really, really long time. And I think it's a good model because you talked about speed. I mean, there's a reason that we were the youngest company to win

a federal program of record since the end of the Korean War, the AST program, the Autonomous Surveillance Tower program, a $250 million program with its own line item in Congress's budget. There's a reason we keep winning major programs of record. The reason we're able to move so fast is because we're not going to the government and asking them to fund our white paper and then fund a prototype and then fund an evaluation program. We're going in and saying, hey, we believed in this ourselves. We use our own money. We moved 10 times faster than you're able to move because you're not able to give money away as fast as we can spend it.

And then we're coming to you with the problem already solved. I think that's a really powerful model. And I think it puts the risk where it should be on the people who are making the decisions about what system they're building rather than on the customer so you enter this marketplace uh with very strong principles right i think so no they are they are and and their opinions on me vary but i i sure think i sure think so um i'll stand up and applaud um and what do you enter first? I mean, let me ask,

let me give some perspective here. How many products, contract services do you have to the extent that you can say because you deal in the defense world? Well, we've got about a dozen hardware products, about half of which

are publicly announced. So a lot of the new stuff we're doing, we're not able to talk about yet anyway. But our core product, the thing that touches everything we build is Lattice. announced. So a lot of the new stuff we're doing, we're not able to talk about yet anyway, but our core product, the thing that touches everything we build is lattice. It's kind of the AI platform that ties all of our things together, that merges data from all of the sensors that we have, all the sensors that we plug into that are not made by us, that allows people to command and control these systems, that allows small numbers of people to plan, simulate, and eventually manage and command and control large scale conflict with huge numbers of

autonomous network systems working alongside people. I mean, that was the first thing we worked on. And we started day one. What percentage of the company is software or AI based? We have twice as many people working on software as hardware. That's a thing people don't quite understand about us often is that we're really a software company wrapped in hardware. If you've seen Silicon Valley, the HBO television program, do you remember the box Gavin Belson signature edition?

I mean, we joke about that a lot, where they took this compression algorithm, they just put it in a box so it could go on a rack, and that was really the incredible business model. As soon as it was in a server rack, they were able to sell it. That's honestly a lot of what we do. I mean, yes, we sell hardware products. We sell, you know, strike drones and we sell surveillance systems. We sell robot submarines. We sell anti-drone systems that protect military bases and critical infrastructure. But at the end of the day, all of those things are really just hardware extensions

of an artificial intelligence platform that we've been building for the last six years. We've got a couple of your products here in the room. You mind just pointing out what's here and what's over your shoulder? Oh, sure. I mean, you know, over here, we've got our Ghost. It's a tactical drone. It's basically a small helicopter. It can fly for a couple hours on battery power, six and a half hours on a hydrogen fuel cell, totally silent. But the really, it has an enormous payload relative to quadcopters. Also very quiet. We call it Ghost because it's acoustically inaudible at about 100 meters.

Fully autonomous or is it hand-drawn? Fully autonomous. Now, there is a manual control override, but it's used for maybe 1% of our flights. The vast majority of the time it's operating totally autonomously. And the cool thing about it is you treat it less like a remote controlled plane and more like a really dumb helicopter pilot inside of a helicopter. You can tell it, go find this vehicle, go look for this thing. Tell me when you find it. And until then I can go and do my job. I don't have to micromanage you. And you can have one guy managing dozens of ghosts, covering a huge area, finding things, looking at things, striking things.

And to be able to do that with one or two people versus a huge group of hundreds of people in a piece of fixed infrastructure is a huge deal. This is Altia 600. This is an air-launched effect and loitering munition that we build. It's able to carry a significant warhead or a significant ISR payload. Flies for about four hours. It could be shot off of a helicopter, shot out of a ground vehicle, launched by an individual ground troop.

Comes out of a tube. Yep, shoots out of a tube, unfolds itself, pops out the wings, extends the wings. It's an extremely efficient design. But the thing, again, that makes it really powerful is that we've integrated autonomy that makes it less of an RC plane and more of an AI pilot that works alongside you. So before, systems like this have existed. But let's say that I shot one of these out of a helicopter to scout ahead and look for surface-to-air missile launchers as I'm flying through some air corridor. You would have had to have a guy in the back of the helicopter

dedicated full-time to flying it around, looking at the screen, trying to find things, flying and orbiting around, talking to the guy in the front. And if you want two of them, you need two guys now. Very quickly, you end up with an entire helicopter with a team of dozen people in the back who are just flying these things around. Now you don't have anything left for that helicopter. And so Lattice provides all of that. And Lattice is the tool that lets the pilot push a button, launch 12 of these to cover a huge area far out in the head. And he doesn't have to do anything. He waits for them to find the, to find the threats. It waits for them to say, Hey, there's something that's come up. You need to alter your course. Or alternatively, I'm going to take out that SAM site and then you're going

to be able to get through here more quickly. That's the type of thing that's only possible with autonomy. There's huge swaths of tactics that do not work when you have a one-to-one ratio of systems to people. You have to turn that on its head and have a lot more robots than people for these tactics to work. I think I do remember the scene from Iron Man, but that's a different story. Any, any... Well, I mean, that's actually a fun fact about Iron Man is he's like, they don't really stress it in quite this way, but Iron Man is only able to do the things he does because he has Jarvis. Of course. And Jarvis is not one entity. People think of Jarvis like, oh, he has one person who's assisting them.

But Jarvis distributes across all of his systems, across his suit, across a lot of his other weapon systems, even across individual munitions and submunitions that his suit launches. All of those are actually guided by individual instances of the artificial intelligence. individual instances of the artificial intelligence. And so you have Iron Man multiplying himself into a powerhouse that's, you know, people think of him as the one, you know, the one man pile driver. He actually is a man who's amplified by AI. And that is something that we are building as well. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine, well, first of all, I imagine that Jarvis as a version that's going to empower the warfighter on the ground and in whatever vehicle flying suits ever I mean look they're they're already sort of viable today I mean gravity is doing this jetpack industries which I guess is now um mayan aviation um the physics totally work

out and I've energy densities work out the energy energy densities work out I think one of the real problems is less the flying part and more the man part um I think there was a point in our in our history probably sometime in the early 80s through the mid 2000s where exoskeletons flying suits uh you know kind of super soldier super soldier exoskeletons made made some sense. Unfortunately, the type, and when I say unfortunately, I mean, unfortunately for us as science fiction fans.

That's geeks, right? The types of wars that we're likely to fight in the future are not the ones that are going to win by that. And here's the thing. If you can build a system that's good enough to wrap around a person and that you and a person can control it and keep that person safe,

you probably should just have a person remotely piloting that. Yeah, which goes to our advanced fighters. I love it. I love keeping the soldiers safe. But look, I mean, I want the space marines dropping out of orbit into the drop zone as much as any science fiction fan. But unfortunately, I suspect that that time has passed. There was a brief period where the AI wasn't quite good enough.

The sensors weren't quite good enough. The communications links weren't quite good enough to imagine having fully robotic systems performing the role. We're now getting to the point where the human is the limitation, not the enabler. And as unfortunate as that is for us as science fiction fans, we should be thankful for it from the perspective of keeping our guys alive. And it's the reason we're going to go to fully autonomous fighters instead of putting the,

you know, the, the smushy meat body in the middle of the thing. Exactly. And it's, it's the same thing. Like I, I don't,

I don't like it from a, you know, boy, isn't that cool perspective from a boy? Isn't that cool perspective? I want manned space fighters. I want guys, you know,

with, with, with, with, with, uh, perfluoro, with perfluoro, what is it? Perfluorocarbon. Yeah. I want, I want pilots for fluorocarbon in their lungs, sitting in their liquid G beds, pulling 400 G turns in space. Like, that's what I want. But it's not what it's going to be. You'll do it in the virtual world. But it's not what it's going to be. But you'll do it in the virtual world. And it's really a shame because there was, again, a period, I think, probably in like

the late 70s through maybe the late 90s, where it actually may have made sense to have things like manned space reconnaissance planes, maybe even manned fighters. But unfortunately, the- Well, it's going to take us out of the question, does it make sense to take man to Mars or out to the outer planet? Well, I mean, I'd say that's a philosophy question. You know, there are people who say, why send a man to Mars when out to the outer planets? Well, I mean, I'd say that's a philosophy question. You know, there are people who say, why send a man to Mars when we can learn everything we need to do with robots? And that really comes down to, what do you think the role of man is? What is man?

What should we be? Where should we go? And I'm like, yeah, sure. We definitely could just send robots instead of people. But I don't think that's what we're here to do. I'm a Star Trek fan all the way down. So five-year missions, baby. Let's talk about something where I have a disconnect with you and I want to drill through this. Following your purpose versus following what you are best at. So I'm out there saying, listen, if you can do anything big and bold, it needs emotional energy. You need to be driven by that. And having something that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night and is purpose-driven, right? And you're saying what?

Well, I've told a lot of people, you shouldn't follow your dreams. You should follow your talents. You should follow your skills. And I would say we might disagree with this, but there is a way that it can come around to your way of thinking. I mean, the problem is, and this is general advice, if someone has a really good dream and they're equipped to make it happen, then they should pursue it. The problem is, one, there's a lot of people with dreams that they are not equipped to

pursue. They don't have the relevant talents. They don't have the relevant skills. I don't think that there's a lot of value in bashing your head against a problem that you do not have the skills to have. So you have kind of two choices at that point. Either you can go after something that you do have the skills to do, or you can change the set of skills that you have. If you are really so passionate

about something and you recognize there's a certain set of skills to do, you could change your skills. Or you could surround yourself with the right group of people. I mean, the number one job of any executive is to make yourself obsolete. And I'm all about that. But like, I know a lot of people where their specific dream doesn't lend themselves to that goal. And this is something, I think I mentioned this at Abundance 360. One of the really, one of the things that gets me down about society is how bad people's dreams are. You know, we started telling kids, and I did a review of the literature, when did we start telling kids, follow your dreams? And it was actually during the 60s and the early 70s that that really took off as an idea. It was a space program. And the number one most desired job for a kid in the late

60s was astronaut. Sure. And that was great. And that was me as a young kid. I was born in the 60s, but that dream drove everything I've ever done, right? It was, I reached, I did my calculus when I was at MIT saying, okay, my chance of becoming an astronaut are like one in 5,000. I have a better chance of being an NBA all-star. That's right. And so, okay, I want to go to space. The government can't be the only way to do it. So, I'm going to go and pursue commercial space. Yep.

So that dream drove me to start XPRIZE or National Space University, Zero-G and everything else. Well, you had a good dream. Most of the time, the reason that I tell people to not follow their dreams and follow their talent is because a lot of people, and I'm talking broadly, not to the most brilliant entrepreneur in the room. I'm talking to everybody. There's a lot of people with really bad dreams the number

one most desired job today is YouTube and then after that it's influencer so like why would we tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams are so bad it's not like not not yet they're less likely to become it successfully than an NBA all-star and it doesn't matter. I mean, like it's this idea of, I, I, I, I'm so, I'm so re repulsed by this idea. By the way, everybody's listening to this conversation on YouTube right now. Look, but I'm so repulsed by this idea that we have to tell people to follow their dreams and that anything that they want to do, they can do. And that if that's what they feel they want to do, then they should do it. I feel like it's this ultimate

manifestation of the, you know, get rich quick, feel good. You're good. You're the best. Everyone gets a ribbon. Everyone gets a ribbon and whatever dream you have, of course it's good. And of course it's worth pursuing. And I have to tell people, no, your dreams, most people's dreams suck and they shouldn't pursue them. And it's also going to lead them to unhappiness. They're also going to fail at them. If you're a kid who isn't particular, let's say you have an average kid. The average kid is not particularly charismatic. He's not particularly good at video editing. He's not particularly good at any of the things that he needs to do to become a successful YouTuber, even if that was a good dream. Why did we then go and

lie to these kids and tell them, if you just follow your passion, anything's possible. You're lying to the kid. If he pursues that path, his life will be miserable because he's doing something he's not equipped to do. He doesn't have the talent to make it happen. Think how much happier he would be if he could look at his skill set and say, what can I do? Or at least what skills could I acquire? And then what could I do in the world where I have the skill to do it better than everyone else? Where's something where I can go do it and I am punching above my weight?

But having a skill and having a dream are not out of line, right? I can have a skill and apply it to a particular industry that I dream of. That's right. Right. Oh, and I would say like, and you can definitely, look, that's definitely true. Unless your job is, unless your dream is to be a YouTube influencer, you know, but let's say your skill is actually that you are very good at running financial models. You know, it's, there will be a certain disconnect

where that kid, I'm going to say, listen, kid, I know what you want to be right now, but you might want to get a different dream. Okay. Because, you know, there's probably better things you'll do for the world and for your psyche if you pursue the dream that you can equip yourself to excel at rather than the dream

that's been implanted in you by society. That's my concern. Now, look, I'll make a compromise with you. Okay, please. The second that the number one job is astronaut again, then I'm going to start telling kids to follow their dreams. I'll be all about it. And by the way, you can buy your ticket to space now and it's going to be coming down. I believe in Starship. I believe I'm, you know- Oh, when I say astronaut, I don't mean a government astronaut. I mean,

we've got private astronauts now, right? The FAA gave out wings. Yep. We drove that with the XPRIZE. And, you know, my mission, I don't want to go to Mars. I want to go to the moon. I want to go and start a city on the moon. I think I want to take a role of mayor of my own city on the moon. That's an awesome dream. Yeah, absolutely. And you know what else is great? And asteroid mining. That's the other part. And the best part is, I think you've probably got the skills to make it happen. We'll combine those two. It's a good thing my dream isn't being the mayor of a city. I don't think...

It's not for me. You'd be a benign dictator. Oh, there we go. Yeah, you know what? I could be the guy who has the mayor in my pocket. How's that? Let's not talk about that in the context of the defense industry. No, no, no. You're a different mayor. A different mayor. A different mayor. Hey, everybody.

This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are

transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandist.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So I'm going to get to the third moonshot of ending destructive wildfires, but I want to just read something I wrote here. I said, I believe that the smartest minds are not yet geared towards solving humanity's grandest challenges. It's something I'm trying to lead a wake-up call for people to find something

big and bold and significant and go after it. We have so many incredible entrepreneurs out there in the world. Yep. And I still wake up every day saying, where are they in going after the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities? How do you think about that? Do you agree? I think that a lot of the world's biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities.

that a lot of the world's biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities. At the same time, at the same time, I think there's a lot of huge business opportunities that people have not even yet begun to explore. I mean, VR is one of them, right? Like that people didn't know that that was something that needed to be, you know, made a priority. They didn't know that it really even could be done in the near term. And so like that was something that came out of the blue. I think there's a lot of industries that people have not yet realized are going to be absolutely massive industries. I mean, like, this is like, just just one of one of many examples. I mean, everyone is talking about things like healthcare and the economic impact that it has on our nation. People are talking about how we're going to solve that people are talking about, you know, how do

we bend climate to our will? How do we make climate what we need it to be rather than just whatever it happens to be on the basis of what we accidentally do or even what nature does. But I'd say like right now, there has not been maybe a focus on things like birth rates. You know, there's a lot of nations in the world that have hugely negative birth rates. And that is something that catches up with every nation in the long run. It causes huge demographic problems. It causes huge economic problems. That's something where I think not enough people are talking about it today. It's actually a huge opportunity. I think we're going to see huge companies built on solving just that problem. How do we get birth rates up? How do we build stronger family units that are

able to stick together and provide an environment where it's good to have rising birth rates up? How do we build stronger family units that are able to stick together and provide an environment where it's good to have rising birth rates? And of course, there's people who agree with what I'm saying, but I don't think there's enough people who are looking at it as a business opportunity. Sure. And for those who don't know the numbers, 50 years ago, it was something like 5.7 children per family globally. That's right. Right. And this is when the Population Bomb book comes out and the Malthusian, you know, fallacies are portrayed. And today we're globally down to 2.4. The replacement rate is 2.1. The U.S. is below the replacement rate, as is Canada, as is most of Europe and much of Asia. Italy's at 1.27. Yeah. I mean, that's like free fall. That's like not existing

in a hundred years. And Japan has huge problems here. It's an enormous, enormous problem. And I think of it not just as a problem for us here on earth. I also think of this as a problem for expanding into space, partly because I think one of the big economic impetuses for expanding into space is- Is more territory. Exactly.

Where are the people going to come from? And I also look at it as even a national security problem. I mean, how- Oh, for sure. Like the United States is a dominant economic superpower, hyperpower. But I feel like there's people who believe that the United States is a nation of 500 million people, will somehow be able to economically compete with another nation like China that has 2 billion people in the future. And I think to myself, how could that possibly be the case? I mean, it could be the case right now because we have a head start and because we have a higher quality of life and because we don't have,

you know, this kind of challenge of pulling a country up from nothing like China has. But it takes 18 years to bake an adult. Exactly. And like 100 years from now, with 100 years of baking, how could a 500 million person nation possibly beat a competent $2 billion person nation? You basically have to bet on their incompetence. You have to bet on them to stumble. That's not really a bet I want to make. And so, at the end of the day, our national security and our ability to self-govern itself is directly tied to how many of us there are relative to the kind of democracy of the world, if you will. You know, at the end of the day, those 2 billion people, they get a vote over

our lives, whether they're part of our democracy or not. That's a problem I think people are not sufficiently worried about. So yeah, like definitely the biggest problems that people have recognized, huge opportunities. I think there's all kinds of huge business opportunities that people have yet to become sufficiently alarmed about. I think that if you give it 10 or 20 years, people are going to be even more concerned about the birth rate than they are climate change. Let's talk about perceived and real problems. So Jeffrey Hinton leaves Google and he's raising alarm bells about the progress of AI. I was recording a podcast recently with Mo Gadot, who is the chief business officer at Google X, and he wrote a book called Scary Smart.

And there is a lot of concerns- Great title, by the way. Yeah, it is a great title. And it's a great book. There's a lot of concerns around not necessarily around, not necessarily AI becoming, you know, the billion fold. Yes, I was going to go to Skynet, but... You can just jump straight there. All right. Skynet's going to destroy us, but it's the use of AI in the interim. You know, elections are coming up and AI is going to be used by evildoildoers to use Reagan's term against us. And one of the questions is, are we building AIs that have a, because they're built around defense or offense,

a dystopian nation that could become a dystopian intent that could become a Skynet? How do you think about that? Any concerns? Do you have those conversations? I'm concerned about it, but to be honest, I'm way more concerned about bad, evil people using very primitive AI than I am about where the extremely smart AI is necessarily going to bring us.

I think the really bad outcomes are by people with rational but destructive self-motivation. China's actions are very rational. They're just destructive to their neighbors and to the rest of the world. And I think you're saying the same thing with Russia. Like people think that Putin is mad, but I would say the fact that he's gotten away with so much with, you know, with so little in pushback relative to what he's done shows that he actually may have actually made a smarter bet

than people gave him credit for. He's pushing the edge, but not stepping over it. Exactly. Yeah. And people say, oh, he's crazy. Look how he's been punished. I say, what punishment? I mean, he's getting away with it. And to be honest, the only reason he hasn't is because of the bravery of Ukraine fighting him. If Ukraine were to collapse, that would be the end of the real punishment for Russia. I mean, they would just win. And return to normal status in five years. You think that the European Union is going to pick up where Ukraine leaves off? Absolutely not. And that's why Ukraine is fighting the way they are, because they know we won't, because they know that they are the backstop. But anyway, setting that aside, look, I'm concerned about advanced AI and the things

that it might go, but I've got a long list of things that I'm terrified about. One of them is homebrew bioweapons. I think homebrew bioweapons are a huge threat. I think they're becoming more and more accessible. Especially using AI to brew them. You know, people do point that out, but I think AI maybe makes it a little bit more accessible in terms of the timeline for making it easy.

But all it does is it kind of pulls in the timeline. In other words, you know, maybe instead of five years from now, people are able to do it two years from now. But then there's going to be another hundred years after that where we need to figure out how we're going to deal with the fact that two guys in a garage can build a targeted bioweapon that targets people of a particular race or ethnicity or, you know, neuro proclivity, or at least they're going to think that they can. There's a question as to whether they can actually build something that does what they want, but they might believe that they can. And that's, that's almost a danger. Or maybe they'll understand that they can't make

something quite as targeted as they want. And they're okay with collateral damage. I mean, this, these, these, these are things that terrify me more than the kind of, you know, ultimate AI, super, you know, new physics type of stuff that people are worried about, or, you know, attacking our financial system using AI. I'm optimistic that we're going to be okay there, mostly because I think there's things I'm more afraid of in the next 10 and 20 years, which is, I think, probably the time where I'm also most afraid of bad AI stuff. Yeah. And the question is, can we get over the hump where super advanced AI is actually peaceful, looking towards supporting life and an abundant future? I'd say peaceful and defensive. One open question, an ended question right now is,

can we develop AI that is smart enough, like right now, protecting things like our energy infrastructure from cyber attacks? That's my concern, right? Something that takes out Wall Street or energy grid. And the key is that we're going to have to apply these technologies to building defensive systems. And the good news is that unlike manned systems, I think that artificial intelligence does accrete to the defender. You actually do have a home field advantage of sorts, whereas with, let's say, people committing terrorism, the defender has to be right every time. The terrorist only has to get through one time.

I think that AI is one of those things that does lend itself to the nation state actor on the defensive posture side. So I would hope, for example, we have amazing AI protecting our energy grid from attack long before we have hyper advanced AI that's attacking our energy grid. I'm pretty optimistic about that based on the things that I've seen, based on the things that I know, and based on the posture of the United States in this. The United States has been behind on a lot of things. We've missed the boat on a lot of things.

One thing that I do not think we are poised to miss the boat on is AI. I mean, this is something where it's a whole of society recognition. And Mark Andreessen wrote a beautiful blog. I don't know if you saw it about how AI will save the world. And the point he's making is AI is the ultimate defense. Are you concerned about AI stealing jobs? Well, this starts to get into my libertarian bent where, you know, is there such a thing as stealing jobs? Or, you know, is whatever price the market offers, by definition, fair? Look, people were concerned about the same thing for a hundred years.

We've seen it for a hundred years. And I mean, people were concerned about the same thing. For a hundred years. They've seen it for a hundred years. And I mean, people were talking about this when, like, there were people who were, you know, film backdrop artists who would draw these beautiful backdrops. And they tried to say, oh, my God, these computer tools, they're going to destroy all of these jobs. And then what happened? The size of the industry exploded. There's a hundred times more people in the business of making motion graphics and visual effects than ever existed before. To use a trite and old example, the automobile. People said, I can't believe this. All the coach builders, they're going to go to business. And now the automotive industry employs a thousand times

more people than that coach industry ever could have possibly employed. And so I think that it's without all the horse manure filling the streets. I think what it really boils down to is that man is a beast of burden and he wants to work. And I think that as holes get filled and as that work becomes automated, people will find work that is meaningful. We always have, I think we will for quite some time.

And the nature of that work might change. I think that probably you give it, look, if you talk to like truck drivers, I see people using truck drivers as kind of their rhetorical example. Usually these people, by the way, don't even know any truck drivers. Here's their argument. All the dumb, stupid, poor, redneck truck drivers are going to get crushed by AI. Don't you care about those dumb, poor, stupid, redneck truckers? I do. And I asked them, do you even know any truckers? Do you know what they think about AI? Because all the truckers that I know have a totally different view than that kind of like intellectual elitist view. So most truckers in the United States are independent operators. I don't know if you know this. They don't work for somebody else. They

work for themselves and they run a truck. And their dream for many of them is to run more trucks, to have a fleet under them where they're managing it and where they're able to kind of be in a more manageable. All the truckers I talk to say, I would love it if AI could take over the part where the truck is being driven around. That's not the job I want to be in. I want to basically be in the moving things around business. I want to have a whole fleet of AI trucks. I want to be managing them. I want to be repairing them. I want to be making sure that they're, you know, that they're efficiently moving

stuff, not breaking down on the side of the road. That's what they want. They're not thinking AI is going to destroy me. And my value in this world is that I'm able to turn a steering wheel and push on a brake pedal real good. That is not where truck drivers see their value. They see it as this much larger ecosystem and constellation. And I think that that's what we're going to see with AI. You know what? AI is going to get rid of the part where you turn the steering wheel real good, but all those people are going to move on to doing other jobs that are of much more value and they won't have to spend any time doing the part that they see as commoditized. Amazing. All right. Third moonshot, destroying or getting rid of destructive wildfires. So some numbers for folks. In the past 20 years, we've seen the average size

of wildfires increasing by 40%. Some numbers from 2018, wildfires in the US in 2022, 7.6 million acres burn and globally, something on the order of the size of India in terms of total burned land area. And what hit me five years ago is the way that we're fighting wildfires hasn't changed in 50 years. It really fundamentally hasn't changed. And I was being evacuated from our home in Santa Monica. And I was like, this is ridiculous. Didn't they see when the wildfire started? And why didn't they put it out at the very beginning? Yep.

And so I ended up going to a friend, Dick Merkin. I said, Dick, I want to create a wildfire XPRIZE. He gave us half a million dollars to design it. It took five years to get the funding for it, which is ridiculous. It's been a long road for you guys. It's been a long road, but persistent, consistent. We finally got PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, the Hilton Foundation, Lockheed. We got the Gordon Moore Foundation, Mindaroo out of Australia. We raised $11 million in prize money.

And a few months ago, for those who didn't see it, I was very proud to have Palmer with me on stage in front of the Capitol building announcing that he was going to be the first team to compete for this. We're at 100 teams now. And to win this prize, what teams have to do is monitor 1,000 square acres, identify a wildfire at ignition. If it's two meters or larger, if it's moving, they shouldn't be moving. Put it out autonomously within 10 minutes. So those are the current rough rules. We'll do another iteration on it. You need to get your additional feedback on the rule set. And you registered. We have a hundred other teams. Hopefully we'll get maybe another hundred along the way. Talk to me. This is not the first time you thought about putting out wildfires. No, I mean, one of the very first

hardware products that we built was, uh, in it alongside the Andoril century towers was the Andoril century tank. So it was a tracked firefighting tank, basically a large tracked vehicle with, uh, with, uh, with, with heat resistant armor. They could carry a few tons of water or fire retardant and then fight fires in areas where you would never put a person. So having it fighting in the hottest parts, right on the fire line, right next to where it's burning

in places where you would have evacuated even the hottest of hotshot firefighters. And unfortunately we weren't able to- So you actually built this? Oh, no, we built it. We have two of them. So, I mean, we built this this we're on the cover of popular mechanics we invested a lot of money so you go you go to who'd you go to to show it to oh man well this is probably i don't i don't think that everyone would appreciate i don't think the customers would necessarily appreciate if i

told you but i'll tell you this they were government i mean the problems we ran into were not technological they were political there were people who were very concerned about the jobs of firefighters getting automated away. And they were more concerned about those jobs than the fighting of the fires. And I'd say, right, the good news is that over the last five or six years, the calculus has changed. You know, as you've pointed out, wildfires have been getting worse. There have been some really destructive ones that have made people realize that we need help no matter what. In other words, you know, we don't, we don't need, we don't need to, we're not doing this to try and automate away the jobs of firefighters.

We're doing it so that they are not overwhelmed by destructive fires that they have no hope of even beginning to manage without help. Yeah. Does the technology, so the goal here is a fire gets detected. Which by the way, sentry tanks, not what we're going to be using for the competition. It's not a good fit for your particular rules. Because we want to get to it fast. Right?

We want to get to it fast. But we've got something good. And I've seen it and I'm under an NDA, I can't disclose it, but it's amazing. It sure is. It's amazing. It's definitely Stark Industries. And for anyone out there who's wondering which system it is, I can't show it to you guys yet, but it's none of the systems that are on our website.

It's nothing even close. It is a radically different system. One of my favorite things that we're working on right now. By the way, I like to say the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. That's right. Right. I got that from Bert Rutan. And this is a crazy idea that, holy cow, has a chance.

So do you believe the objective of ending destructive wildfires is possible? Absolutely. I think that people have taken a pretty defeatist approach over the last few decades where fires are only a problem that can be kind of managed as opposed to, you know, truly the problem is considered solved. I'm hoping that we can look at destructive wildfires the way we look at polio. It's just, it's not a thing. We beat that. It's done. I think that that's totally possible, not with the technology of a century from now, but with the technology that literally exists today. It is a matter only of building products out of it and then getting those products into

the places in the wilderness that they need to be. If we can do that and if we make that a priority, we win. That's it. Amazing. Amazing. We're running short on time. I want to respect your meeting schedule. If you were to give me an honest answer, which I know you would,

how many moonshots do you have in you? Order of magnitude. That's interesting. I mean, you probably have a number of them under. Well, the crazy idea list, a lot of them are not moonshots. To be clear, there's a lot of things where they're very, very specific technical implementations or solutions to small things that are not actually all that important. Moonshots, I'd say there's about a half dozen that are real moonshots on there. About a half dozen

that are really big things that if they could be done, would be a real game changer for humanity. If I can pull off even a couple of them, I will consider myself to have lived a life well led. Well, I think you have lived a life well led, and it's just beginning. And if our longevity work goes well, you'll have even more life to live. My last question, you're competing in an XPRIZE, but if I said to you, Palmer, I'm going to fund whatever you want. And, you know- A new X Prize?

Yeah. What X Prize, what grand challenge do you want to inspire entrepreneurs around the world? And you don't have to limit yourself to one, but, you know, what do you want entrepreneurs around the world thinking about in their shower time and scratching their heads on and pursuing? Oh, man. Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. I mean, you know, you know, there was a period where I was really interested in trying to solve obesity. But I think there's a lot of people who are working on that problem. And there's some good, some good drugs and even some good gene therapies coming. Exactly. So that a lot of people are already on that maybe less than they were five years,

six, seven years ago, and I was looking at the issue. I mean, one of them is the birth rate problem. You know, we talked about that. If someone can figure out how we can get our birth rate up, I think that would be great. But I mean, you guys want to do stuff that isn't going to be incentivized any other way. I think that there's going to be literally hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives to that side of things within the next couple of decades. By the way, governments incentivize children, right? They do. And I think one of the problems that we've seen is that the government incentives don't really work.

You know, the countries with the strongest incentives are some of the ones with the lowest birth rates. It's a whole bunch of other problems. There are also religious incentives in some cases. And I'd say it's all kinds of things. It's religious incentives. It's even national fervor incentives. You know, there's a lot of people who are calling on the

leaders of Italy to set a better example and say, hey, if you really care about kids, why is it that out of your entire cabinet, there's only one child? Oh, my God. This is kind of a problem, right? You hire basically... If this is really... Guys, start having sex, please. Yeah. And you could also say, you know what? if it really is a priority, and it is, in Italy, they're trying to figure out how do you get around a 1.27 replacement, you know, birth rate. And one thing they could do is say, you know what, we're going to show that people who

have families are just as able to succeed. I'm going to go out of my way to say, you know what, my cabinet's going to be all people who have, maybe not, if not large families, they're at least not the people dragging the numbers down. But like, you know, that's something, that's not even, that's not even like a government subsidy, but it's a role where government can model. They can model it. I mean, that's what we want, right? We want our leaders to be the best version of us. Elon's 10 kids, right? And then I'd say, but like, if I were going to do a new XPRIZE you know

something that's not just going to be done that is only going to be done if it's incentivized by people like you whose job it is to make people dream I would love to see

an XPRIZE to raise another species to human or above levels of intelligence so just the classic science fiction concept of uplift

wow take a species learn more about how intelligence works, learn how their mind works relative to a human mind. And it's one of those things where the doing itself is not the learning, right? The point isn't, hey, I was able to take African gray parrots and make them as smart as people, and that's the end game. It's everything you have to do to get there. You have to really start to understand what intelligence is.

You have to understand what consciousness is. You have to understand what the mechanisms of the brain that make us who we are are. And you are now building a new benchmark to compare against people, not just AI, not just computers, but another biological form. I think that if you could, if someone could get another species to human or above levels of cognition, the learnings along the way would be priceless. There was a movie about that. It did not end well for us humans. You know, but I'd say this is true for almost every science fiction concept.

It's all dystopian. Well, I talk to VR authors about this all the time. I talk to people who've written all the classic sci-fi novels about VR. And I say, hey, do you really think VR is going to lead to a horrible, dystopian, broken future? And almost universally, their answer is, of course not. But I have to write a story. And stories need conflict.

By the way, I- Nobody's going to read a book where the plot is Palmer Luckey invents the Oculus Rift and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world through the power of the metaverse and everything is great and everyone loves it that's just not an interesting story so instead you gotta you gotta write a story where vr destroys everything you know my one of my favorite books the unincorporated man vr is illegal in the future because it destroys humanity you recommended the book to me i loved it it was a fantastic book it

is fantastic but you know i think books fiction, they can be good warnings, but I think that they serve a better purpose as inspiration. So, let's build, let's build, what do people joke about on Twitter these days? The terror vortex. You know, let's build the terror vortex. All right. Last question. Recommendation to those listening. Entrepreneurs who want to take on a moonshot, want to do something significant in their life. They've got a dream.

Let's say they have the capabilities, either tech skills, capital skills, or whatever. Any thoughts on having done a number of them? Any advice? For people who want to take those skills and apply them to things that actually matter? Yes. Rather than the people who want to be YouTubers? Or make better photo sharing apps. You know, one of my biggest pieces of advice, assuming you're working on the right mission already. I mean, that's the first thing. You pick something that you're...

That you're passionate about. That you're passionate about. That you're dreaming about, that you're passionate about, that you either have the skills or can obtain the skills to work on competently. And then I'd say like the biggest advice I would be is your job is to make yourself obsolete. I mean, you talked about it. You got to find a team of people. You're, if you are the best at anything in your company for any period of time, I'm not talking about the day you start the company. I'm not talking about the first year where everyone wears lots of hats. But if in the limit,

you are the best in your company at anything, it's because you've been negligent in your hiring process. I see this sometimes in companies where it's like, oh man, like the founder, he's still the best programmer in the company. I say, what the hell is wrong with them? Like what kind of bizarre ego game is being played

where the guy who's in charge of being the fundraising backstop and the HR backstop and, and everything else is also the best programmer in the company. What are you talking about? And I feel like you, you have to consciously do this. And this was tough for me because I remember when I was launching Oculus, I struggled with it because I did want to be the best person in the company at the things that I liked doing. And I realized, you know what? I can play house at optics and board layout and all this other stuff. But I need to hire people who are not just better than me, but who radically outclass me. I need to hire people who run circles around me and grind me into the dirt at the things that I like doing.

And then I need to do everything else. me into the dirt at the things that I like doing. And then I need to do everything else. And I think if you can get your head around that as an entrepreneur, and if you manage to hire those great people who run circles around you and everything that you like doing and everything you don't like doing, you almost can't fail. Yeah. Beautiful. Palmer Lucky. Thank you, buddy. Thank you. This was so much fun. That was fun. All right.