Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril Won't Build Humanoids | Moonshots Live | EP #295

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

This episode was filmed at Moonshots Live 2026. Learn more at https://moonshots.com/ The mates sit down with Palmer Luckey on Moonshots Live to discuss autonomous weapons, AI risk, Anduril’s approach to humanoids, the real threats posed by AI, VR’s peak, and what’s next for the future of technology. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR and defense technology company Anduril Industries, known for helping pioneer modern virtual reality and later building AI-powered defense systems. – This event is presented with Google and Circle Future Vision XPRIZE Partners:  Salesforce, Ark Invest, Xsolla, Range Build with Gemini XPRIZE Partner: Google _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Join Salim’s 10X Shift Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack  Spotify Threads Connect with Palmer:  Website X LinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS:  Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on September 25th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wow, it's so much brighter out here. It is. It's, you know, the future is bright. There's lens flare in the future. Yeah. So, welcome everybody to the Oscars of optimism. That, of course, we're opening up the summit with the King of Autonomous Weapon Systems.

All right. So I want to start with the fact that we're awarding three X prizes this week. Palmer, congratulations for winning our... wildfire XPRIZE. Thank you so much. Yeah. This one's been a long time in the works. It has it. Let's get the slide up here. So Palmer won two point two million dollars for Anderrol. As if you needed. A million of that from Lockheed, which was kind of interesting. We do a lot of work with Lockheed. Yeah. We also compete with them, but we, in the defense base, it's a, you know, we, we compete with their fighter jet division and we

partner with them on some of their payloads. And so we do a lot of stuff together. But me and you have both been trying to get those autonomous firefighting stuff going for a long time. For a while. I mean, you got this prize announced back in 2019. It's been a long time. Andrels, one of our first two products,

was an autonomous firefighting tank that we started building in 2017, finished in 2019. It's insane that we let fires become conflagrations before you put them out. And it's kind of insane that people are saying, oh, the technology's finally made this possible. And I'm not going to correct him too often in public. But it's, I mean, this has been possible for over a decade.

Yeah. It's just that it's become politically, politically impossible to ignore the problem now. I'll watch a one minute video clip of what your team achieved. And if you'd walk us through it here. Sure. So this was an example of what we were doing at the test site, where we were detecting fires, classifying fires. What you don't really see in here is that you also need to reject false fires.

That was part of the test as well. So you have to know, who's a guy smoking a cigarette? Who's a guy, what's a campfire? What's a road flare? And then what's something that shows the characteristics of real fire? That's what you need to flag to people. That's what you need to flag to emergency services.

And then you need to match make the type of fire to the right asset that's in the area. And so you want to basically use the most cost-effective thing that can respond and get there in time. And if something's growing faster, you might need something different, if it's in woods versus on a brush hill, you might need something different. And so, you know, it's about detection, classification, rejection,

matchmaking, and then going and hitting the target. And the last thing I'll say is that with most of what we do, our work with the military, you go through many of these same steps. But if you find a target, let's say it takes you, you know, an hour to get to somebody versus 10 minutes. It usually doesn't make as much of a difference. When you're talking about fire, though, the difference between 10 minutes and an hour response, totally different tools you're going to need to respond with.

You know, a bomb is a bomb whether or not it takes a day or an hour or a minute to get there. But when a fire is masticizing, you need to pick the right thing that can put it out before it gets too large. Amazing. You know, we're going to be announcing something in a month's time. that you're funding a new X-Prize, and it's going to be secret until then, but we're going to tease it now. Another $10 million prize. Would you share with us what we're going to do? Sure, you know, we should keep the details secret because there's some good twists.

But suffice to say that I'm not interested in joining the race to push AI forward with my money, I think that the artificial intelligence side of models is pretty well covered by plenty of people. I think we've not been doing enough understanding biological intelligence, particularly beyond people. And so this is going to be a prize around understanding how animals think and making so that we can communicate with them 10 times better than the current state of the art for the current smartest species. And not just trained animals, but wild animals in their own language. Amazing. And I think that there's actually a lot that we're going to be able to learn.

I mean, if you look at large language models, they're kind of this, you know, they're based on humanity's way of thinking and communicating distilled. And I think that there's plenty to learn from all of the other species that are on this planet. And I wouldn't be surprised if it has applications for AI, particularly AI, where you need to be more efficient, more power efficient, more time efficient. You know, a different point of view. Two pets are better than one. Whatever metaphor you want to use.

Love it, love it. All right, I want to kick off the first official question here. P-Doom. You're in the AI industry, the defense industry. What's your P-Doom? I'm just not worried about AI-dooming. I guess I'm not worried about AI doing the killing. I'm very, very worried about evil people

using moderately competent AI to do evil things. Exactly. And I am kind of frustrated by a lot of people who are new to the dooming hobby. It's sort of like how we had to deal with the war in Ukraine happens, and all of a sudden all these people who have had the dumbest opinions you've ever heard about the military for their whole life

and people who believed we lived at the end of history that we had moved past conflict, that we lived in a world where you could just write a nasty letter in the UN, forgetting that that only works if it's backed up by credible threat of violence. And then all of a sudden they change their minds. You're seeing this with AI. People who have not thought about this problem for more than a couple years or maybe even just a couple months are saying, oh, my God, this is the biggest threat to humanity. These are people who have spent almost no time actually analyzing what the largest threats

to humanity are. They haven't spoken to any of the experts in this area. They certainly weren't buying freeze-dried food and building prepper bunkers, you know, like me and many of my buddies who have indulged fantasies about what Doom could look like and also thought realistically about it. And so, yeah, the AI Doom is way down the list for me. I'm a big optimist. I think it's going to massively reduce the cost of resource extraction, processing, transformation.

You're going to see every part of society. subject to the same economies of scale and efficiency that automated industries that automated without AI have seen. So think like agriculture or textiles, you can buy two weeks of calories for less than one hour of federal minimum wage labor. That's crazy. Let's give it up for Palmer here. You're going to see that for everything.

Dave. So I got a really pressing question on my mind. I'm kind of a feeds and feeds and chips and AI foundation models guy. And so when you're putting systems in the field, weapons in the field, you can put the intelligence inside it. And this has always been a big problem for the Air Force. If we're going to start flying drones instead of pilots, who's going to unleash the weapons and how's that decision going to get made?

And the downside of transmitting it back to headquarters is you have latency. The upside is you have a lot more compute. What you can put locally in a device, in a robot in the field, in a plane is limited, but it's really, really fast. So what's your philosophy on, like, you know, I think a lot of people would say, well, are we going to have self-contained decision-making weapons wandering around enemy territories,

or are we going to have, you know, control at the head? Yeah, how's it work? More or less. The real concern isn't so much the latency or the speed of computation. The problem is that if you rely on, you know, a central location to do your compute, you now need to have command and control

that has a good high bandwidth communication back and forth between you and potentially thousands or tens of thousands of active assets. And if your enemy jams your communications or intercepts your communications or hacks your communications, you're done. Or worse, they just skip targeting all the stuff in the field and they go for the place where it's all being controlled.

We saw this. There was a, there was a, there was a, there was this, documentary that George Lucas was working on and the Trade Federation. They had their central AI command and control blown up. And that was how the Battle of Nabu actually resolved was all the battle droids lost. Oh yeah, they all fell over. That's right. They all fell over. And so I think that that's the practical reality that's driving, the need to have autonomy living, not back home but forward. There's other areas like you go underwater. You can't talk to them. And sometimes you could talk to things, but you don't want to. Having radio emissions actually exposes you

necessarily. And so for better or for worse, you're going to need this. I actually don't think it's as much of a shift as people think. There's a lot of people who look at, they say, oh, my God, Pandora's box is being opened. You're going to have weapons that are making their own kill decisions. And they don't recognize the reality, which is that that's been the case for decades. You look at the, you look at the, you look at the, you look at the Aegis system on destroyers. It has a fully autonomous mode. You can flip up. a button and it will shoot down anything that comes within whatever range you programmed it with without any human confirmation.

You look at SeaWiz and C-RAM for shooting down incoming missiles, incoming mortar, incoming artillery fire, incoming missiles, or incoming speedboats. Same thing. You can put them in fully autonomous modes. And, I mean, going back to into Vietnam, we had missiles that you could launch from an aircraft. They flow over the horizon, tried to identify the right radio emitters that they believed corresponded with a surface-air missile site and then struck them without any, you know, the person had to decide, I'm going to send it in this area, they're going to look for this

signal, and I know that there's this probability they're going to get it right. That decision is going to remain with people, but autonomous weapons are widely, widely, there's a whole other talk we're not going to have today, but I do have a rant about this, where actually autonomous weapons have existed for thousands of years. If you look at, and they're defined as kind of weapons that can execute the intent of what you program to do independent from the operator or the engineer. You look at, for example, pitfall traps that allow people to walk over them, but then capture the commander on his horse when he walks by and it's heavier. You look at certain poison traps that would kill people who had certain characteristics,

not kill people who had other characteristics or not kill animals. You look at many types of landmines and sea mines and even torpedoes. And so it depends on your exact definition, but even going into myth where people are creating golems that can you go out and fight on their, fight on their behalf or defend their city. I guess my argument is we've had autonomous weapons for a very, very long time. It's just a new set of technology that's making them better. So technical question on that, the foundation models that go into those remote systems. Right now, yeah, well, right now the open source models are all Chinese.

So I'm pretty sure you're not going to be putting Chinese models into remote weapons. Are you going to build Anderol foundation models, or how are you going to get AI in those devices? I mean, we've been doing it since 2017. So we're way ahead of everybody. We're a decade beyond that question. I think that we also don't, the foundation models that people are building are not the types of models you want to be doing this. They're not, they're largely non-deterministic. They're non-auditable.

It's a very different category. The thing that we are building, unfortunately, has very few consumer applications and vice versa. There are, of course, are LLM use cases for defense that make a lot of sense, but it's not guiding my missile or classifying radar, radar feeds. I mean, we're also, we can't build models that ingest text and then spit out text. I need to process raw data data feeds. I need to process sonar data from passive listening stations on submarines. That's it's pretty highly specialized and I will take some credit here

All these people who are talking about how AI is going to change everything They are mostly recent converts and real industries. You might notice the acronym is AI So and that was not that was not a mistake Alex jump in. Yeah, I think maybe dovetailing on our discussion of driving bench we're now in an era when it's possible to take frontier models drop them into a robotic embodiment and and get pretty stunning results. So I'd love to ask you a question, maybe about the scaling hypothesis as it applies to autonomous weapons systems,

or autonomous systems in general. If you have to extrapolate out, is there a Moore's law, is there an experience curve for what, as obviously the capabilities of underlying frontier models, whether they're from frontier labs proper or from AI, as those progress, do we see any equivalent of a Moore's law

for the autonomous system? themselves and maybe the second half of the question would be do you think ultimately we achieve some sort of convergence andrel it makes a variety of embodiments in a variety of different form factors do you see ultimately some general purpose category killer robot that is equivalently the generalist robotic embodiment just like we now have generalist models that are capable of doing substantially any task no I don't think so on the defense side I think fit for manufacturing and for hospitality and medicine, you might see this because you get economies

of scale that are really material for those types of businesses. And a humanoid robot may not be the optimal form for a burger griller. And it may not be the optimal form for a firefighter. It may not be the optimal form for a nurse or an assembly technician. Salima's smiling. But even if it's not optimal, the fact that it is shared with humanity in its form makes it a really, really good form factor. Now I can make one robot that does all of these things,

and I would probably rather have a, let's say, robot that's 5% slower or less reliable than the optimal burger-flipping robot if I can share commonality with that nurse. In defense, that's not really the case because you are in this constant race to not just barely beat your adversary, but to massively overpower them.

to try and make it where the goal is not to just barely win a conflict on the margins. It is to fight unfair, to have overwhelming threat of violence, underpinning whatever diplomatic overtures or negotiations you have. And everyone's always pushing the limit. So if I have a jet that has a reliable 5% every time edge over the enemy, that's worth paying a lot of money for, right? And I think the loss in performance you would see through lack of specialization probably makes it non-viable. Like to go to the extreme, like, you know, I build robot submarines, and those have a specialized form that needs to dive to 6,000 meter depth and sit on the bottom of the ocean for months at a time.

And then I have other stuff that's on the surface and, you know, their robotic systems that, you know, roll up a hill and then they loiter. and then I have other things that are aerial vehicles that are doing very specialized tasks. And I just can't imagine a convergence that would make sense. Unless you're telling me that we're going to get something cool, like humanoids that have like, you know, onboard fusion reactors and they can dive to 6,000 feet depth. So, Palmer, why are you building those?

I mean, if anybody, you should... Look, you could potentially build such a thing, but then very quickly you realize that specialization would allow you to build something even better. You say, okay, I've built something that can dive to the bottom of the ocean and fly to the moon, man, it could get to the moon a lot faster if it didn't have to also die to the bottom of the ocean. So I think defense is going to be this one where kind of like, you know, you look at, for example, the difference between cars, where everything has shared platforms within a manufacturer, you know, manufacture, and they also share a lot of the same standards and interfaces.

I think that you compare it with like motorsport where it's all completely different and it's continuously pushing forward. I think the defense side is probably always going to be this weird branch of exotic, highly specialized robotic systems. You know, Palmer, I expected if anybody was going to be building humanoid robots would be you. No, no, the opposite. You said absolutely not. I've opted out because I believe in them. If I didn't believe that humanoid robotics had such a powerful future, then I would probably build them. But I want Anderil to build things that wouldn't exist otherwise.

That's what I generally want to do. You want to maximize your marginal impact. Correct. All the other people are already doing a great job. I want to use their robots and do things with them. I think humanoid are going to be an incredible general artificial intelligence interface between AI and remote systems and a lot of legacy platforms that were designed for a person to pull the lever, push the button, read the screen. We're going to be able to take all those and automate them without replacing them entirely. So you have a lot of things like radar systems that cost millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nobody wants to man them during a hot conflict because they're the first thing that's going to go. But if I can put humanoid robots in them, I've now been able to automate them without that. So, yeah, I'm not going to build humanoids. This is also why Anderl is not building, like, small quadcopter attack drones. Too many other companies doing a great job. There's a lot of areas. And we're not going to do space launch. Like, we do space products.

We operate a lot of our own satellites. and a lot of our own sensors in space. But I don't want to be a launch provider. That's for all the other billionaires to... Yeah, yeah. Let them handle that. That's fantastic. Phileem.

You know, when you're operating industrial industries, you're decentralizing defense, right? The Pentagon and Ministries of Defense globally have been the most centralized entity in the history of humanity. You're sitting on the edge dealing with that. You must have a massive immune system problem, where people inside the entity are going,

now we've done that before, we can do it better. They either try and suck you in or they try and spit you out. How are you navigating that interface because you're doing it in a way that I've never seen anybody succeed, do it? I think that this is a problem that's very, very hard at the beginning. Oh, I said the wrong thing. Wow.

Well, until someone gets on the intercom and tells us to go. The AI is $1 million. Congratulations. What were we talking? What was it? Seriously? I knew the intercom was going to come on. What were we talking about again?

Centralization of Pentagon That's right. I'm going to keep talking to somebody tells me that I can't. So we've gotten through this event. I think early on there was that concern that Anderall was not going to be able to get through that. Our hardest problem raising money.

Skippy, would you please shut this down? I've been through enough of these to know how it's. going to work. There we go. I imagine. One of our early problems was that our investors said Palmer, potential investors. They said, look, we believe that you'll be able to build things that work. We believe you'll be able to build products that are great, but we don't believe the government is capable of actually purchasing them at scale. Because, I mean, you talk about centralization. You know about the issues for people who don't. Until just a few years ago, you had about

80% of MDAPs, major defense acquisition programs. So basically anything that matters, 80% of MDAPs went to five companies, and that's it. And I mean, you've seen incredible consolidation centralization. Anderall has been successful because we use, we're less of a contractor and more of a product company. We use our own money to build products, then we sell them. And we've gotten to the point now where people in government have done very, very well, betting on Anderle, and then miraculously, we finish on schedule, we finish on time, and then the next program manager says, I know how I can make my job easy. I just give the contract to Anderle. Got it. So it's got to take guts to enter the defense industry, right?

The most incestuous, you know, self-licking glycine cone on the planet. Yeah. And what insanity, you know, gave you the balls to do that? The insanity was the reason that I got into it. The first page of our pitch deck said, Anderall will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year. The idea being we're not just making products that we're selling, but we are displacing the systems that cost needlessly 10 times what they should.

And yeah, thank you. And so it does seem crazy, but, you know, I can't put myself on the same pedestal as him, but one of my mentors and idols growing up and then also early in my career was John Carmack, the founder of his software. John is great. John is incredible. And for people who don't know, he's basically the inventor of the modern 3D game engine, first-person shooters, also started a rocket company that competed in the...

He was competing in the XPRIES. And I remember... And he was one of the, if not the only one to be doing reusable vertical takeoff and landing. Which nobody else was even trying to do. And I remember there's this... name on the side of his vehicles, NVIDIA. How do you pronounce that thing? If I would only know.

That's right. He was using, so, yeah, he was using, he was building his own sensor fusion algorithms. He was processing them on modern, or on, you know, commercial style graphics card, hardware, using his game programming experience. Anyway, the point is, it was called Armadillo. Armadillo aerospace. Yeah. That's right.

And the thing, and, yeah, they were doing vertical takeoff and landing long before SpaceX was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, I mean, doing anything. Yeah, no, before it existed. For sure. That's right. And so, but anyway, the point is he, he, I, he ended up becoming the CTO of Oculus VR. I managed to poach him away from Id. But after he left, he went to work on AI, actually, even before I did.

And so he started, he started his own company to work on, on, on, on, on AI. And, and I said, why are you, why are you doing this? You know, the odds of you succeeding. And to be clear, I started. still believed AI was going somewhere, but he said, I'm going to start a company that's just going all in on the end state. Like, I'm not trying to incrementally get there. It's just all in on AGI. And the point that he made was, Palmer, even if I've got a 1% chance of succeeding, which maybe is an overestimation, but suppose I have a 1% chance of succeeding and suppose

that I could pull it off, the risk-adjusted outcome kind of demands that I do it, and that was how I felt about defense. If there was a 1% chance that I could help solve this problem, then it was one that would be massively impactful to work on versus, let's say, starting another gaming company, getting into space launch, you know, building a car company, which all of the billionaires, they end up doing the same thing. You don't have enough people getting into defense or putting on a bat suit. It's just cars and rockets and they just go in circles like that for, for, for, so, you know, When I interviewed you on the Moonshots podcast last time, you mentioned that you're part of a billionaires' boys club chat. Yeah, yeah.

Are they working on anything worthwhile at this point? I mean, I gave them shit for saying, like, God, you've got all this capital, solved the world's biggest problems. I think the B-boys are doing a lot better now than we were a few years ago. Okay. They're stepping up. And the thing we're talking about is I was giving a lot of people a hard time, especially some retired B-boys. And I was telling him, what are you doing? You have, because money is one of the resources they have.

But one of the resources people don't talk about, especially for the retired B-boys, is that they have credibility, which would allow them to gather people around them, teams around them, and capital. Like, they could, and it's just sitting there, unutilized if they're doing nothing. They have the credibility in that people trust them as a leader to be able to lead an organization like that. They could have the same ideas and the same words. is somebody who's equally smart or smarter,

and they'll still do better for that. So my point of them is you have a responsibility, not only as someone who's got a lot of capital yourself, but who's got this underutilized resource of the ability to do more. If you're not doing that, then are you really, like, what are you even doing? Anyone can sit on a boat.

Few people can start another multi-billion-dollar company that does something that matters. And the good news is those of them, I think, I think a lot of people have gotten the itch to solve some of these problems that are out there. So we've got... Nialism is on the downs. Maybe the solution is we need more T-boys and if you were B-boys. Yeah, that's an interesting point.

Although, like I said, I think most of the T-boys, I think they seem like they keep pretty busy. That's the point. I don't have a problem with B-boys who don't do enough. Like, some people, they mistake what I say. Like, oh, Palmer wants other billionaires to work on defense or energy or or biology. My point is not that people need to distract themselves by doing more things. A lot of people can only do one thing.

And that was what I did for a long time. What I hate is the people who are not doing anything. That is like a repulsive to me. So maybe a message to the audience, you get to join the B-Boy's Slack group or whatever this is, Telegram, if you're doing something new and differentiated. The group actually got shut down. and we've been talking about now, we need to do a B-Boys 2.0.

But I think people post... Maybe some B-girls as well? I think people posted the wrong memes a few too many times. Boom. There was a time where there were no B-girls, and then there was this Business Insider article whining about it. And the reality is like, it's just like me and some guys. Like, you know, it's not like this isn't like the Illuminati Conference.

You know, it's like, they're like, oh, there's a group. And, you know, but no women have been invited. I'm like, it's not that no women have been invited. It's just like me and some, some of my boys. But actually, there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a girl in it by the end. So, yeah, we need to restart that. We need to restart that group. So you're in Facebook commercials now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so if you met a VR is out, how does it compare against your vision of what you wanted to achieve? Is it, yeah. Look, it does a lot of the things that, uh, I'm not. It's not exactly what I would make, were I the guy who's waving the magic wand and... You've got lots of magic wand spinning the cad, but look, the new meta-v-r glasses are a lot closer in a lot of ways. So I've long been a believer that you need to decouple the compute and the battery from the head. It should not even saying the head totally.

It's more the front. So before Oculus Quest. So Oculus Quest was the last thing that I worked on before they fired me. And the prototypes at the time were a prototype series code named Santa Cruz. And we were actually showing that publicly before they fired me. And Santa Cruz had the battery and compute on the back of the head. And then the part of the soft tissue on the front of your head was kept as light as possible. And then at some point after they got rid of me, they jammed it all into one big giant lump in the front.

And they ruined the ergonomics. They forgot why you need a top strap. But, you know, it bothers- Serve them right. It bothers me most, look, it bothers me mostly at this point because the Oculus Rift CV-1, which was the first modern consumer VR headset, it got the ergonomics more or less perfect in 2016,

and, you know, we were showing it off in 2015, and literally nobody has done as good as it, and it's been over a decade. Every single person screws it up, even Apple. And I just, I don't, I can't comprehend it. How, how could it be that the ergonomic design led by a 19-year-old kid with no experience is better than anything that anyone has come up with since? Anyway, the new men of your glasses are the closest thing. And they're very lightweight.

They've off-borded the compute. They've off-boarded the batteries. They have really high-quality pass-through. It has a feature that I invented for CV-1 called Transformo Fabric, which they do not call it. Basically using fabric, a soft, flexible, black, black, light-absorbing matte fabric to, one, minimize reflections, but to basically seal the cavity between and around the lenses. That means that you can move them, and the fabric just stretches to meet where the lenses are for different interpupillary distances, rather than having, like, sliding mechanical interfaces and plastic. And they brought Transformo fabric back for the first time since my era. So I'm a huge fan, and it's a third of the price of Apple's product and somewhat higher pixel density.

I think that's pretty extraordinary. Oh, and one-eighth the weight. Amazing. Amazing. Pretty good. Let's close on this. We've got, you know, 1,500 entrepreneurs, moonshot visionaries and tens of thousands watching on the live stream. What's your advice?

what, you know, what did you learn in high school that made you succeed at the speed you did? We were talking about this on the plane right back. I mean, I was really lucky to, I guess maybe not lucky. I did it. Well, you are lucky. That's right. I am lucky. I started an online community called Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15.

It was an internet forum for people who were modifying vintage game consoles and computers, building handheld units, improving the performance in a variety of ways. We had a few thousand active members and a whole team of volunteer moderators and administrators with me, me at the top of it for some reason. And I learned a lot of valuable lessons about how you can build an organization, how you market an organization, how you get people to believe in what you're doing. I learned a lot about dealing with the types of problems you deal with when you're running a company. With humans.

Well, I mean, you have a tale as old as time. You've got two people. They're both brilliant. They're both very good at what they do, and they hate each other, and they disagree over something. You need to somehow mediate the conflict or separate them in a way that allows you to get the value that allows both them to contribute value to the greater project, but not have them hate you, not have them lose faith in the broader thing, but also you not kill each other. But sometimes that means you need to reconcile things between the two. Sometimes it means that you need to put one guy over here and one guy over here. And sometimes you need to make sure that they don't know that that's what you're doing as you do it.

I'm not saying that's the key to running a successful business is the management of the two assholes problem. But it's, you know, and once you make it a three-body problem now. But it's that and a hundred things like it that I learned running Mod Retro that I was able to take into starting. Oculus to carry forward into what I'm doing in my other companies. And that's why I'm a strong believer that kids should get a job. And I also had a job starting when I was 14, so I learned how the real world works too. But I'm a huge fan of people doing things at a scale that's larger than just themselves. In other words, don't just do a project. Do a project with someone else. Do a project with other people. Build in the open, learn the good parts of that, the bad parts

of that, it's been extremely useful to me. And has building changed in the age of AI? What advice do you have? Again, we've been saying on the pod for a while now, you know, forget about grad school, you know, even college is a maybe, you didn't go to college. You know, in high schoolers should, what, find a purpose they care about and use AI to go and code it? What's your closing advice here on that?

You know, one of the reasons I have not been as upset as some people about No, that's funny. There's something on the screen. It's telling us to not talk about something. I just wanted to make sure you saw that. I did. We're not going to talk about... Don't think about it.

All right, great, great. The... There's a lot of people who love their craft and they love what they do. And they are rightfully mourning the end of, for example, coding things by hand, top to bottom, start to finish,

as anything but like a craft endeavor. And I understand that. It's the same way that a lot of artists felt when the camera was invented. They wind and complained about how it ruined art, and it made it so that anybody could push a button. And these things are always painful for the people who are masters of their craft. I already got screwed in that way a long time ago. When you're a founder, you don't get to actually work in any of the tech anyway. All the other people get to have all the fun.

And so, you know, I like electrical engineering. I like optical engineering. I like mechanical engineering. I don't get to do any of it because the job of a founder, is to hire people to displace them and to do what they thought they could do or what they like they like doing better. The job, I've said many times to people, if you want to work on technology, work for somebody else. If you want to work on nonstop bullshit, start a company. And so what I would say to people is, AI doesn't actually change the bullshit part of the job very much.

You're still on the hook legally. You're still on the hook for all the interpersonal. personal stuff. And you can delegate some of it. But at the end of the day, it's your call, it's your decision. It's the same thing for fundraising. It's the same thing for general product architecture. And when people make the wrong decisions, it's your choice as to when you need to overrule them, override them, replace them. I don't see AI replacing that part of it anytime soon, not because it couldn't, but because the gains everywhere else are so much larger that I think we've got a good 10 years of speed running all of the other parts of of business before they cover that.

So look, AI changes a lot, but I'm telling you, there's a lot of people. You are in for a rude awakening. If you are like a hobbyist coder or a hobbyist engineer and you think you're going to start a company and you think you're going to be doing all that stuff, no. You're going to learn a hard lesson. Being a founder was always like AI took your job. It's just that other people took it. Ladies and gentlemen, it's giving up for common lucky.