Shawn Ryan Show - #171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Palmer Luckey is an entrepreneur and innovator best known for founding Oculus VR and Anduril Industries. In 2012, he launched Oculus VR and developed the Oculus Rift, a groundbreaking virtual reality headset that redefined a wide array of industries. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, where Luckey subsequently worked until 2017. Following his departure, he founded Anduril Industries - a defense technology company specializing in autonomous systems including drones, surveillance towers, and aircraft. Anduril has secured major contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and international allies. The company has raised significant funding, including $1.5 billion in 2022, valuing it at $8.5 billion. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: http://armra.com/srs http://helixsleep.com/srs http://patriotmobile.com/srs http://hexclad.com/srs http://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://ROKA.com | Use Code SRS Palmer Luckey Links: Anduril Industries - https://www.anduril.com/ ModRetro - http://modretro.com/ X - https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/ Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs. Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. Paul Merlucky, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so incredibly stoked to be here. I'm pumped to have you here.

It's so different when it's not on a screen. Yeah, do you watch it? Do you watch the show? So I don't watch podcasts regularly in general, but I've seen years from time to time. Of course I had to tune in for Trump. Yeah. And it's just, it's, you know, I'm a virtual reality guy. And so, you know, I understand the difference Yeah.

I'll set it up. You're a tech titan, and we had Joe Lonsdale on a couple of months ago. Amazing human. Amazing human. People should just know my bias. Joe was one of the first investors in my first company, Oculus. So back when I was a teenager, he put millions of dollars into my company at a time where very few people did. and I was like, dude, we've got to get this guy. He's like the Tony Stark, but real. So. Tony Stark, except Tony Stark got out of building weapons and I moved into it.

So, you know, we're a little bit in reverse, but I like the comparison. Yeah, yeah. Well, everybody starts off with an introduction here. So here we go. Palmer Lucky, from garage inventor to Silicon Valley Titan, a true innovator and disruptor in technology and defense. Founded Anduril Industries in 2017

to radically transform defense capabilities that the United States and its allies by fusing AI with the latest hardware advancements across many domains. Designer of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display and founder of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion. Attended Golden West College in Long Beach City College at the age of 14 and studied at California State University, Long Beach,

before dropping out to build Oculus VR. That seems to be the thing with all of you tech innovators, is you drop out of school and- The only difference between me and all the other tech guys is they were mostly going to school for tech degrees. I was, if you can believe it, a journalism major. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er, which was the Cal State Long Beach. You gotta be shitting me. You were gonna do journalism?

I was going to do journalism. I was, even as a teenager, frustrated with the state of journalism in America, particularly technology journalism. I think the thing that radicalized me was this CNN piece about a, I think this was back when you had the iCloud hacks, and they were reporting on how 4chan was affiliated with it and

They had this technology analyst who's paid six figures which was a lot of money at the time, you know When I was going to school he paid six figures to live in New York City and analyze technology and the anchor says so who is this? 4chan and I'm like, oh my god, this is Chan. And I'm like, oh my God, this is nuts. And then what does he say? He says, well, we don't know the details yet, but he's some part of the solution. I'm glad I decided to build technology rather than report on it.

I think being the man in the arena is a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding. It's interesting to imagine a world where I'd be in your chair. Maybe one day when I'm old and used up, I can get my own studio and I'll help you on. Cool. Known for your unconventional approach, love for gadgets and belief in using technology to push boundaries,

whether for entertainment or national security. So, man, I don't even, I mean, we're going to do a life story on you, fascinating human being. I can already tell with what the 30 minutes that you've been here, just when we were down shooting the thumbnails and, and shooting the shit back and forth.

I've been very blessed to have an interesting life. So a couple of, a couple of off the wall things that came up there down there. So you are, look, we had a little conspiracy theory talk down there. We did. We were talking about Trudeau and Castro We had a little conspiracy theory talk down there. We were talking about Trudeau and Castro, and let's go into that before we get into the weeds here.

We'll jump right into the crazy shit. So, I mean, look, I'll put my biases right out there. I think Justin Trudeau is Castro's son. But you can almost set that aside because that's not the issue I really care about. Like, is it really Castro's fault? Or sorry, is it really true to his fault if he's Castro's son?

Like, I don't believe in the sins of the father, right? I mean, I don't think he really should necessarily have to live his life burdened by that if it was true. Like, I can understand why someone would wanna hide that. And like, that's one issue, I'll set that aside. The real question has always been for me, why is this conspiracy theory reported on it the way that it was?

And we were talking about this. Let's say that it's, let's say it's not true. Okay, fine. But if you go and you look at any of the press coverage of this conspiracy theory, they make you believe through their reporting that anyone who believes it must be truly nuts. They're like digging deep on this conspiracy theory.

And then what follows is the most surface level thing that takes every official communication at state value and doesn't even look at the evidence that conspiracy theorists are actually analyzing. You know, they'll say, well, you know, it's very clear. The records are clear. Trudeau's mother didn't even visit Cuba until four years after he was born. It's like, but that's not the conspiracy.

The conspiracy theory is that in the flight logs, that one trip that was logged as Caribbean Island and doesn't have a country name, unlike every single other thing in the log, that that was Cuba. The conspiracy theory is that maybe it was when she went to his house in France. Like, that's the conspiracy.

And they literally don't mention it. And it makes me wonder, why are they going to such great lengths to make this seem not just that like, because you can analyze those and say, well, actually here's why. And you know, it was probably filled out by the FBO and they just didn't know where it had been.

And like, there are reasonable ways to go after it, but the way they've gone after it is to pretend that you're insane if you believe this conspiracy theory. And I think that really gets back to- Isn't that just about every conspiracy theory? I mean, it's certainly the, I mean, you know where the phrase comes from, right? Conspiracy theory.

Well, I mean, the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation. And again, it gets to this thing. Okay, set aside whether or not there was a second shooter, whether there was anyone on the grassy and all. Let's say that the official story really is accurate.

It's pretty extraordinary that conspiracy theory, conspiracy theorists are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy. It makes you wonder. People say, well, sure, the CIA had 30 media assets back then, including national news anchors. But, I mean, that's not Is it? Right. But yeah, that's why I like the Trudeau theory. There's other ones, like we talked about the Kamala Harris DNC pipe bomb. Yeah, I haven't followed that much.

You've got to look into this one because, and I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have people coming to the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this. But the official story, according to the government, which is that there was a live, active, and dangerous pipe bomb planted by extremists outside of DNC headquarters on January 6th, that Kamala Harris passed within just several feet of that bomb, and that they managed to save her, defuse it, and then destroy it. But there's so many problems with this story.

For example, you'll remember that originally, Kamala Harris, through her counsel, testified that she wasn't even at DNC headquarters on January 6th. You'll also see in the video footage that's captured of the pipe bomb, that after it was called in and after Secret Service was on site,

you have secret service and Capitol police just standing around the bomb with their thumbs in their pockets, talking to each other. At one point, the Capitol police walked to their car and eat their lunch. A group of children walks by, they don't block off the street. They don't be like,

hey, don't walk by that pipe bomb right there. The whole thing is it reeks. It couldn't possibly be what they say happened. And then this gets to kind of the second layer. Okay, again, ignore whether it was planted by the feds or planted by somebody else or planted by extremists, or maybe they found out it was planted by some foreign government agent that's a government.

Like it's hard to pick exactly which conspiracy you want to believe in. But there's a simple question. Why has Kamala Harris never talked about it even one time? She has so much to say about January 6th, so much to say about people who were just protesting at the Capitol, nothing to say about the feds who were planted in,

you know, in that whole op. But like why focus on things like the people who were protesting in front of the Capitol building when you could just say, oh yeah, they literally tried to kill me. Like right wing extremists planted bombs outside of my party headquarters and got within five feet of killing me.

Like, wouldn't you say that? Imagine if that happened to Trump. Trump would be milking it for all it's worth. And I love the guy, but I mean, he'd say, and they almost got me. Maybe it wasn't five feet. People say it's five feet. I think it was two feet.

Maybe I looked at it. Maybe I looked at it and said, I think that's a bomb. And maybe I'm the one who caught it. He would be talking about this. And the fact that it's not talking about it, someone has realized that it's not a good idea to talk about whatever happened because it's probably not what they told the public.

And so to me, this is like one of the most interesting conspiracy theories because it's very rare for them to touch people at Kamala's level, right? It's like, there's lots of conspiracies about like what an ATF unit does, or what some group of state department goons did. It's very, very rare that the vice president

of the United States has their proximity and seal of approval on the actions of the day. Yeah, that's a damn good point. Yeah, you've got to look into this and watch the video. I think your watchers would probably love to see it. You could just ask yourself, like, wait a second, if they know it's a live pipe bomb, Your watchers would probably love to see. You could just ask yourself, wait a second, if they know it's a live pipe bomb,

why are they doing what I'm watching them doing? This only makes sense if it's a bizarre conspiracy. I can't wait until everything comes out on all this stuff. I'm so concerned that it's going to be like the JFK files, there's going to be two missing boxes, and they're going to say, oh, well, it's all. I like the JFK files, you make money, people come after you. They come out of the woodwork and they see you for, you know, oh, you copied my idea. Oh, you're infringing on my patent in Germany. And I've won all of the cases that mattered in the end or got them thrown out by the judge. But one of the things that I had to

learn over the years, and by the way, I've been to a verdict in federal court twice. So, you know, I've unfortunately, I've become pretty well acquainted with the rules. If you destroy evidence, the way that the court interprets it is in the least favorable light. They basically assume that whatever was destroyed is as bad as it could possibly be. Otherwise, there's an incentive to destroy. Like, if you assume, oh, it's not the worst possible thing, what was destroyed, maybe it was only halfway there, and that's how we're going to weight this. Yeah, unless it's the the worst possible thing. What was destroyed, maybe it was only halfway there. And that's how we're going to weight this. Yeah, unless it's the government destroying the evidence.

And that's what it was like. I wish that they would look at it that way and say, no, no, when a box of evidence is missing on something and it's the government and they were committing these actions. And it just so happens to be the JFK. You like you should assume the worst. I'm not even saying that we should assume the worst as people. I'm saying the criminal justice system should assume the worst. I'm not even saying that we should assume the worst as people, I'm saying the criminal justice system

should assume the worst because otherwise they're going to keep doing this. Like you need to say, no, the box of missing papers does not get you out of hot shit. The box of missing papers is the indictment. It is the thing that you go to prison for life for. When you lose the files on the JFK investigation, like that is way more important to the national fabric

and unity of America and people's trust in government than any simple crime ever could be. You know, like that coverup is so much worse than anything that people go to prison for life for every day. You think they're going to do it? Or I guess it would be already gone. Are they going to hide it? Yeah Or I guess it would be already going. Are they going to hide it?

Yeah. I think it's what you said. I think the shredders are working overtime and I think they're looking at what's happening with USAID and they're probably saying, oh shit, the Doge boys are coming here next. We got to do something. Well, I mean, they already, I mean, are you familiar with Blackwater at all? Oh, very familiar. And yeah, I've had the pleasure familiar with Blackwater at all? Oh, very familiar.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Eric Prince a few times. What did he say? Should I say? I think I can say it. We talked about a few different things, but one of the things that he thought would be a good technological innovation would be artillery that is actively cooled in such a way that you don't have any cool down because it has a very high cyclic rate artillery be a huge game changer on the battlefield. I was looking at how I could apply mostly artificial intelligence and autonomy to AI.

The name of my company, Androl Industries, you'll note the acronym is AI, but we had to hide it because back then AI was kind of a dirty word in tech. I ended up not building it, but I look back now and say, shit, you know, that probably would have been a really useful thing to have in Ukraine, especially in the early days of the war. Yeah. But yeah, then of course, read his book, Civilian Warriors. While we may have won this election, the fight to restore a great nation has just begun. Now is the time to take a stand and Patriot Mobile is leading the charge. As America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, Patriot Mobile offers a way to vote with your wallet without compromising on quality or convenience. Patriot Mobile isn't just about providing exceptional cell phone service.

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Visit bubsnaturals.com today and use promo code Sean for 20% off your order. Remember, that's not just savings. That's also helping heroes with every purchase you make. BubbsNaturals.com slash Sean. Yeah, so the reason I bring it up, we were talking about the government deleting evidence. And so, you know, kind of the downfall of Blackwater was that in the sewer square incident. I think it was back in 2007 when they tried those guys. That was when they were taking fire

and then they responded and there ended up being civilian casualties. Yeah, they made it out to be like a big, like a bunch of blackwater cowboys. Well, they made it sound like they just rolled into an intersection and just like, did like a drive-by shooting or something. So they deleted the drone footage.

Really? Yeah, there was actually a... Somehow that hadn't even made it into my long-term memory. Yeah, a lot of people don't know. And so there was a Green Beret unit that was actually taking contact, just, I can't remember if it was like a couple kilometers or a couple thousand meters away,

but basically when they had that drone on station, so they brought it over and they deleted, there's like a five minute, 10 minute segment of drone footage where you actually see the vehicle. So short enough that this clearly wasn't just like lost data. It's that they didn't want that data to get out. And then the very specific like portion of the drone footage that showed the actual gunfight was deleted.

You can see where the vehicle rolled up and then it cuts out and then it goes away and you can even see where, you know, where the radiator fluid and stuff had been, had been leaking out from the vehicle, getting shut up. And in court they're like, well, where is this drone footage? And they said, oh, we routinely, we routinely delete drone footage just to save memory. And they're like, so you just happened to just delete the- Just that. Just the 10 minute segment that shows the actual gunfight

and everything before and everything after still there. And those guys wound up getting pardoned by Trump, but they sent one to prison for life, three for 35 years. The actual guys in the square, not the people that deleted the drone footage. Yeah, the guys in the square. Who deleted the drone footage?

I don't think they did. I mean, those guys ran out of money. One of the attorneys that was on the case was kind of doing a pro bono by the end of it. See, these are the things that undermine confidence of just America, for Americans. People the things that undermine confidence. Yeah. Of just America for Americans. People wonder why we lose confidence in our institutions. Like it is shit like that.

That's almost worse than those guys going to prison is the fact that everyone watched people in the state do that, get away with it and probably do it again. Yeah. I mean, it's not even at the highest level. Then we brought in this guy Captain Brad Geary. He was the he was the commanding officer Naval Special Warfare Training Center Which is Bud's and a couple years ago They had that they had that Bud's candidate who died in training and they so it turns out he Likely died from performance enhancing drugs that he was sourcing from out of the country

in fact, you know a cooler in his car with all this shit. And they made it sound like the training was too hard and it was all this, all Captain Gary's fault. And they reinvestigated it three different, they basically just, they reinvestigated, I believe three times. And they just kept doing it until they got the performance enhancing drugs out of the investigation. And once just kept doing it until they got the performance enhancing drugs out of

the investigation. And once those were gone. Then they pinned his ass to the wall and we wound up exposing it on the show. Now the case has been totally dismissed and it looks like he's going to get his retirement. I don't know where you fall on this. I need to look more into that one. We've treated that whole category, the whole category of making your body better is just like, it's just not allowed. I'm not against it, but it's gotta be done right. And if that played a part in it.

Well, the key is it has to, we should be doing it and we should be doing it right. We shouldn't be driving it into the shadows so that people are hiding it from their doctor, hiding it from their unit, hiding it from everybody. And now nobody has, I mean, I don't want to be like, I don't want to be too mean here, but like, do you think Marines are the right guys to be, you know,

measuring out dosages of this stuff? I'm being unfair, but like, you know, you can play the stereotype really easily here. Is that the guy you trust to get it right every single time, to get the math just so? You should have a doctor who's responsible for that. They should say, hey, your job is not to have this stuff hidden from you. It's to make sure that it's being done in a safe way. increasing their probability of living to see their families. Yeah, yeah.

All right, so I got a Patreon account. They're basically our, it's a subscription account. They're our top supporters, have been with us since the beginning and we built quite the community over there, the behind the scenes segment that you did. Hi Patreon. Yeah, so one of the things I do is I offer them

the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Mel. My 15 year old son thinks you're amazing and inspiring. My son is really into electronics and building things, but not as much into coding. What advice would you give him that might help him and other kids like him when he's thinking about, when he's thinking about building skills early

to do epic things like you with his life? Well, good news for him. other kids like him when he's thinking about building skills early to do epic things like you with his life? Well, good news for him. I'm not much of a coder either. I'm more of a hardware guy, more of an electro-optical, mechanical guy. And so I think he's in a fine place to especially with how things are going with AI. The Arduino wasn't big when I was his age. It's the thing that all the kids are using these days. It's a quasi open source microcontroller kit that allows you to interface different types of sensors with computers.

If you wanted to build out and been like, and then they would write a little bit of code that says, if the resistance level coming off of this sensor, if the resistance drops to this, that means something's blocking it, that means that it's probably a bird, then trigger this motor, fire this relay, give it the voltage for this long, this many seconds. of way you would do it these days. is to work on projects that you care about. Don't look to school, whether it's college or the state-mandated, you know, younger educational system.

Don't look to them to tell you, here's what electronics projects you should be working on. Here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things. Because one, they're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing. So you're going to be learning how to do things that are ancient. Two, when you're working on something

that you're only doing for yourself, you're going to make way better decisions, I generally find, in what you teach yourself, in how you do things. Like when I hire people at Andrel, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do.

Because that means that the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time, because they want to bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And to me, those are the projects that people, like that's what drives you to learn the most. It's what drives you to have the right attitude

around all this stuff. So I would say like, don't do what I did, which was like, I did some, you know, attitude around all this stuff. to self-guided, self-directed efforts. And that's especially true in the modern day of the internet. All these things that, like in my era, were not as widely available, and you kind of had to go talk to a professor about it. There's a YouTuber who can teach you even better. There's an Instructables guide.

Heck, there's probably a lot of people on Patreon. I'll bet there's a ton. There's a lot of creators on Patreon who are putting out really interesting guides, really interesting education. I bet there's a ton. or any coding, there is lots of stuff you can create in the technology world when you're a bad coder. Gummy bears, little something for the flight home. Now there's no like caffeine in these or anything, right? No, no funny business. All right. I mean, there's a bunch of shit that's unhealthy for you,

like sugar. So what's good about these? Let's taste them. All right, I'm going to taste them. Open them up. I've been a big fan of European gummy bears in the past because they don't use all the stuff that they use in the United States. These are good. Those are that they use in the United States.

These are good. Those are made right here in the United States. Now you, and you're not using, I can tell you don't have like a bunch of mineral oil on these as an anti-caking or anti-sticking agent, do you? Dude, don't ask me about the ingredients. All I know is they taste fucking amazing. They do, they taste, I asked because

I'm interested in food science. Before starting Enderal, one of the things I was considering doing was starting a company They taste fucking amazing. Before starting Androl, one of the things I was considering doing was starting a company to make synthetic food out of petroleum. They would have zero calories and therefore allow you to eat as much as you want without getting fat. I had to learn a lot about food science, but in particular the science of foods that you're not really supposed to eat like mineral oil. food science, but in particular, the science of foods that you're not really supposed to eat like mineral oil. And a lot of these gummy bears, they put anti-stick, anti-cake agents in them. And if you have too many of them, they give you diarrhea.

Yeah. And I can tell you, I can tell, I don't see it on the ingredients list and I can feel it. Like they don't have like that slimy sheen. So you can eat as many of these as you want, I bet without having a bad day at the toilet. No. Something to think about.

This is something that I put a lot of time into. This is Mod Retrochromatic. For about the last 15 years as a side project that I put a little bit of time into here and there. It's a modern, totally custom LCD. Sapphire screen lens. So not glass or plastic. It's a pretty fun bit of hardware. And this one's signed by me. for it and in my opinion it is the best version of Tetris that's ever been made. Oh, well if you want the batteries, it runs on not rechargeables, runs on double A's.

So you'll have to twist those out of the packaging. And you have another one in the studio so you can actually play. I'm not going to let it be trapped. You've got to get back into Tetris. The name for it, the ModRetro Chromatic. But all right, so like I said, for a few years before they fired me. So I don't have that one anymore. And ModRetro I've had since I was 14 years old and I'm very lucky where I found a few other people who are putting their full time into it

because I just couldn't put time into it anymore. But I'd say, and Anderil's my baby. That's the thing that I'm putting all my time into. And that company is awesome. Thank you. It's awesome. For people who don't know, we're not a defense contractor. into. that nobody's been ever able to do That's awesome. but I spent my whole childhood in Long Beach. Why were you homeschooled?

How old are you right now? I'm 32 years old. I was homeschooled probably because I was not the type of kid who fit into the public education system. Probably these days they'd say that I have ADHD, but back then it was just called being a boy. Me in particular out of my sisters was probably going to do better in a homeschooling environment than in public school. My sisters, they were homeschooled for various periods of their childhood, but all of them

at some point actually ended up going back to traditional schooling. Really? But you didn't. Yeah. Different things work differently for different kids. Some people really like the formal structure and the formal education process and being told exactly what you're going to do and how you're process and being told exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it.

And I was not one of those people. And I think it turned out pretty well for me. You don't mind if I eat these the whole time, right? If you need more than two bags, we got more. My wife's going to love them. She loves jelly beans. Do you have kids? I do. I have one kid. He's six months old. Congratulations. I'm a big pronatalist. Do you have kids?

I just want one kid, like you fucking elitist. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you and direction that I just can't get behind. Of course, that ignores people who have a real reason, like a medical reason or a health reason or some unique economic circumstance. But if you have the means to do it, it's crazy to me to not have at least 2.1 kids. You could say, I did my part. I met replacement rate. bare minimum. to the hard work right now. I'm still working a lot. So I get to see him in the morning and I get to see him at night.

And we've oriented his napping and sleeping schedules where I get to spend some time with him every day. But for the most part, she's the one doing most of the work and that works out well for us. How long you been married? Oh man, since summer of 2019. So I mean, how many years is that now? I guess almost six years, or is that almost?

Almost six years. Yeah, yeah. But we've been together for a really long time. So my wife and I met when we were 15 years old. No shit. And we met at a debate camp in Maryland, at a law school that ran a policy debate camp that ended with a debate tournament.

And the first time that we met, she was crying within minutes of meeting me because it was my debate team versus her debate team. And we were arguing about whether or not, not arguing, formally debating, whether or not DDT, the pesticide agent, should be legal in the United States. And her team was completely unprepared

for our argument in particular, which I can get into if you want, but it was a novel argument that none of the other teams had ever seen. We ended up beating all of the other beginner teams, all but one of the other intermediate teams and several of the advanced teams. So we went way further than we should have

because of this novel argument. Anyway, they were so unprepared and they literally started crying in the middle of the debate. And somehow we went from that to her getting married to me. So it's a really strange world, isn't it? Very cool, very cool. She realized I wasn't a mean person.

I was just really good at debate. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I could see that already. So you said you had three sisters? Yep, yep. No brothers? No brothers. And that's why I'm so glad to have a boy.

I know you're supposed to love them all equally and not care which it was, but I was clear from the very beginning. I said, I'm praying it's a boy. Please be a boy. Because growing up in a household that was, but I was clear from the very beginning. I said, I'm praying it's a boy. Please be a boy. Because growing up in a household that was, my day-to-day was my mother and three sisters. Look, I always say,

you're supposed to go to hell after you die. All right? It can be intense. And so I was so, so worried that I might be on a track where I'm only going to have daughters and then all of a sudden I'm stuck in my childhood again. And so now that I've had a boy, I'm happy to have either. When's the next one coming?

As fast as biologically reasonable. Nice, nice, nice. So what were you into as a kid? Oh man, I started out as a outdoor kid when I was a kid. So running, surfing, swimming. I started out as an outdoor kid when I was a kid. Running, surfing, swimming. I was into all the outdoor stuff. It wasn't until I was 12, 13 that I really seriously got into electronics and engineering.

Then I quickly became an indoor kid. Like I just, I ceased to be useful in a physical capacity. Were you building forts and all that kind of stuff? Were you building weapons? So I was. As a kid? I actually just dug up a bunch of the first weapons that I built. I built a multi-stage electromagnetic accelerator,

basically a coil gun. So not a rail gun. Rail guns put past the current through the projectile directly, which is making a magnetic field that accelerated So not a rail gun. Rail guns put past the current through the projectile directly, which is making a magnetic field that accelerated nails and shot them out of a tube. The first thing that I ever built was a stun glove. So it was a Home Depot leather glove that I mounted a capacitor charging circuit. Like if you punched a plate of metal, it would leave a blast of sparks, a loud explosion,

shower sparks, it would leave big pits in the metal. And I did use it on myself a couple of times. And it doesn't blow holes in you, it just really, really, really works your muscles. And I was too young to recognize that high-amperage electrical weapons are extraordinarily dangerous. I had absolutely no idea how dangerous

what I was building was. I knew enough to be dangerous and not enough to be safe. Even though I'm excited for the new administration, there's a lot of tension in the world. Russia, Ukraine, the border, inflation, who knows what could happen next? Me, I'm not waiting around to find out and I don't think you should either. Look, it's simple. I want you to go to

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dot com slash s-r-s. This year, get talking with Babbel. Rules and restrictions may apply. Visit babbel.com for terms and details. I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter.

Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show. And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part, the newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows.

The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up. Links in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter. in the description or the highlighter inside. It was still a working highlighter. And then on the end it had two tiny little metal prongs. And I could touch it to an external charger, charge it up, and now I had a pen I could carry in my pocket. And if you touched that to somebody, it was just awful. it would leave real serious burns on your skin.

I'm very lucky that I didn't wipe myself out then and there. I was into building weapons. I was doing a lot of game console modification. I started modretro because I was really into this hobby called portable-izing, into self-contained handheld portables like portable Nintendo 64 handhelds, portables Super Nintendo handhelds, combining the best of modern technology with these retro systems. And that was kind of the foundation that led to me getting into virtual reality. So I got into VR when I was about 14 years old.

Not VR, just the regular weapons. See, for me, I was never really even interested in the wielding of the weapon. It was in the building of the weapon. When I watch a James Bond movie, the cool part that most appealed to me, I'm not imagining that I'm James Bond, I'm imagining that I'm Q. That was the cool thing to me. It was building these things that did things that nobody expected, that nobody had ever seen before, allowing James Bond to do things that would allow him to outmaneuver, outsmart, or outgun his opponent.

And so that was kind of, I was interested in all these weird exotic weapons, like high-powered lasers and high-voltage stuff and electromagnetic accelerators, That was kind of, I was interested in all these weird exotic weapons like high powered lasers and high voltage stuff and electromagnetic accelerators, not because they're effective weapons, but because they are a potential path to weapons that allow you to do things at conventional weapons hand. If I had just been interested in weapons, I would have just buy a Glock when you're 12 years old. But if you actually just want to shoot somebody, existing weapons are pretty good.

Anytime outdoors or anything? Yeah, so I grew up sailing small boats. So dinghies, the boat that we sail in Long Beach, it was called a Naples Sabbath, which was basically designed as a tiny, very short little boat that you would put on the back of a sailboat or a powerboat and just used to get back and forth between land and the boat. And then someone decided, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we made kids race these in a racing league. I didn't like it because when you're on a team boat, it's possible to succeed or fail on the basis of other people's work.

You can fail and the boat still wins, or somebody else can fail, or you think they fail, then you blame your loss on them. I found it was healthier for me to be a solo sailor, because then if I win, it's all me, and if I lose, it's all me. And if I lose, that's all me too. You can't make excuses for yourself and say,

Well, only reason I lost is because of Alex on the other side of the boat. That's why we really lost because that guy wasn't practice hard enough. I really like sailing. I have not sailed in years. I've thought often about getting back into it, but I'm just so busy with Anderol. It is an intense competitive sport. And I am so out of practice and so physically inept compared to what I was that I know I would be totally non-competitive. And so it's hard for me to go and do it.

I think I'm going to get back into sailing once I'm all old and used up. Once I've made my contribution to society, the candle has burned down and I bought it, it was like as is, no warranty, just like getting rid of it. And there was no use certificate, because they were basically selling it as scrap metal. And the nice thing about that is I was able to get it and then put a ton of money into reactivating everything, getting it going again.

As far as I know, I'm the only civilian owner and operator of a working Mark V. There's a guy who has one with no engines in it that's sitting on the side of the freeway in a boat yard in San Diego. But I think I'm the only guy who has one with no engines in it that's sitting on the side of the freeway in a boatyard in San Diego. I think I'm the only guy who's actually spent all the money to make one go again outside of the government. And I'll tell you, that boat was made for people with government wallets, not civilian wallets.

But it's such a cool boat, right? It's the fastest boat that the Navy ever built. It was built explicitly for Navy Seal insertion and extraction. So really, really fast, tons of storage, really, really durable, really incredibly bulletproof drivetrain and engines. and it'll do it. the people who made the original mounting brackets. I want you to make us four of that part. And so we got brand new weapons mounts made. I have replica M2s that were made by a company that makes Hollywood props that I keep on it when it's just parked in front of my house. But I keep the real M2s nearby so that if we go out into, out of California state waters, we could put the real M2s on.

Dan, that's awesome. It is really awesome. It's one it's one of those things where it's just When you're out there on that thing and you're blasting along at 50 knots and you're just eating up waves like it's nothing We've got on a few really cool trips on it There was one trip where when the hurricane was passing by California recently there were these huge You know waves and swell offshore. We said you know what we're just gonna take it out like Supposedly this thing could do 40 knots and see state 4 we're gonna go do it. That was the craziest shit you know, waves and swell offshore. We also went to go see the USS Kitty Hawk, the last of the United States conventionally powered supercarriers. So not nuclear powered. They were towing it from Bremerton, Washington,

down around the bottom of South America, and they didn't have any transponders on the boat or the tow because they didn't want looky-loos to come do it. And they were doing it offshore. They didn't want people coming out to get in the way. And we got a hot tip from a buddy of mine as to when it was leaving and how fast they were going. And so we charted out where it was gonna be and we guessed pretty well. So we just went out when it was passing by

Southern California and we eventually found it way offshore. when it was passing by Southern California and we eventually found it way offshore. And it was so funny because we were approaching the towboat and before they could make visual contact with us, they must have seen us on radar and they radioed us and said and talking to my buddies that it had already been cleared I think they were like, we shouldn't have puffed ourselves up like that. It was really cool. We got to rip right by the boat, we got some really good pictures,

and then we launched a fixed wing drone off the back of the Kitty Hawk. They've let people take off RC planes from the deck, and get the plane and keep it I had a whole hold it above my head to keep the memory card out of the water so that it wouldn't Said it wouldn't get destroyed, but we got the video. We got the video very cool. Very cool So when you were did you when you were homeschooled, I mean How how do they keep up with you? How did your mom keep up with you? I was really lucky in that there were certain things that I was, I had to have a beat into my head. There's other things where I was just interested

for my own reasons and very, very good self-directed learning. Like, I mean, I've read thousands of books before I was 13. Wow. Literally thousands of books. What kind of books? Everything, right? You know, the classics, science fiction, the art of the deal. Literally thousands of books.

or like to read and so people would sometimes buy me new books, but more oftenly you'd have especially like adult friends, just like dumping massive quantities of books. My mom also, she managed to get on whatever registry Barnes and Noble uses for teachers. And so she had the educator's discount for buying stuff in Barnes and Noble. And so I forget what the discount was, but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes and Noble.

I forget what the discount was, but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes and Noble did a lot for teachers, especially back then. I just read and read and read and read. chemistry, math, like real math, never really a fan. There was handwriting, which at the time, that was actually still a thing that they were insisting that kids needed to learn in school, and doing cursive, and they're like,

oh, you're definitely going to use cursive. Now they don't even teach it anymore. Well, man, what a waste of time that was. But yeah, I would say my mom didn't keep up with me on the things that I was interested in, but she didn't need to try. anymore. Master's degree. She's a sharp one on her own. Did you grow up in a middle-class family? My dad was a car salesman, sometimes new, sometimes used. The 2008 financial crisis was really tough for the car industry.

import vehicles because that was the only thing that was actually moving volume. It wasn't really what he wanted to do, but it was the only way to make it work. My parents decided my mom would stay at home and he would work. Like when you got one person working and that gets you a little more cash. and you fix them up, drive them around for a few months, and machines with your own two hands. You started college at what age? I honestly am not sure. It was when I was 14 or 15. It was around that summer, but I don't remember exactly.

It would have been right around when I was either turning 15 or almost 15. you actually go? state college courses by law. The law says you have to allow them to take those courses. But there's two requirements. One, it has to have sign-off from the principal of your school. This is why most kids don't do it. And by the way, taking college courses when you're a high school kid, it's amazing because you get college credit and high school credit at the same time. It's like AP courses, except a lot of these college courses are actually easier than AP courses, in my estimation. It's just true. Look, AP kids are all motivated. Community college, you get everybody. So the good news is my mom had, you know, she like, we were registered with a homeschool group that basically just signed off on all the paperwork. They're like, so I just got everything

signed off on and normally like schools don't want to sign off on this principles won't sign off because They lose out on revenue proportional to the classes You're not taking at school what from like what principal is gonna basically gonna sign off on a bunch of kids going to all the local Community colleges when his school is gonna lose the money So it's a totally fucked up system that incentivizes keeping kids trapped in the high schools rather than allowing them to specialize and take community college courses. The second thing you have to do is you have to, you basically have last priority for enrolling in classes.

So like, you know, when you were enrolling in classes, you know, there's popular class where you had to be like, you had to be on your game and actually like enroll in it quickly, right? You couldn't like wait two weeks and then get around to it because the class would be full. The problem is that when you are a high schooler taking college classes, you don't even,

the enrollment window doesn't open until it's been open for like four weeks for all of the proper students. And what that means is that every course you want to go into generally is already full. And so the only way to make it into the course is you have to go and petition into the course. You have to show up on the first day of class

with your petition form, and then then usually like you're there with maybe some other people petitioning, sometimes not. And then at the end of the class, you talk to the professor and try to convince him to let him into your class. And so I had to get really good at that. Every single course I did, I had to as like a 15 year old kid,

talk to the professor and I would make sure to do research on them. I would make sure to do research on what work I would make sure to do research on what work they might've done in academia. And I'd have to play the game like, oh, Professor Kraz, I'm such a huge fan of your work on the local geologics of the estuaries in Long Beach. I've been reading your papers lately

and I really think you make the argument better than your colleagues at UCLA. They say, oh, well, thank you. I say, Mr. Kraz, I would really love to take your geology course. I've read your papers lately and I really think you make the argument better than your colleagues at UCLA." They say, oh, well, thank you. I say, Mr. Kraz, I would really love to take your geology course. In fact, I have to take it for my general education requirements. I know your class is full. But is there any way that I could, you know, that I could, we could add an extra seat? Is there any way that I could stay for a week or two while we wait for students to inevitably drop out and I can take their seats. And actually nine times out of ten I was able to make it work. And there were times where I was, you know, just sitting in the back of the classroom, standing in the back of the classroom

for the first week or two. And then someone would drop, bam, I got my seat and I wouldn't have to stand anymore, which is good because I was fat at the time. This was a, I became an indoor kid, I stopped exercising. And so, yeah, that's how I know that was a long ramble, but when you're a kid going to college, it is as weird as you'd think. It is like a situational comedy every single day, because you're like a 15 year old kid. And like, it's obvious too.

I wasn't like a, I wasn't one of those kids where I'm like, you know, a towering brute, and who knows if he's 30. 15 year old kid. And you basically have a whole bunch of people who are like, you know, older guys mostly getting You know post post post graduate master's degree type work And you have a 15 year old kid and the way the class works is you're all on teams building robots And so you have to pull your weight like and like nobody really wants you on your team when you're a 15 year old kid When you're kind of going in blind you're like, why do I want to be gimped by this teenager? and blind. Did they have a problem keeping up with you? I did a good job of making it clear that I could keep up pretty quickly. And as soon as that was clear, then I was the most hilarious novelty ever.

Everyone thought it was just the funniest thing ever. As I got older and then I'm like 15, then 16, then 17, then 18, now I'm just the age of all the freshmen, when you're 14 years old, start taking community college courses. And what you should do is take all the general education courses first, because they're generally easier. You have to do them no matter what you're going to do as an adult, right? Like if I become a journalist or a mechanical engineer

or a pilot, I'm still going to have to take history. So just start with all that crap and just do a few years of the crappy, all general ed courses. And then you can decide at the end what you're actually going to do. And you can then transfer all those units the crappy, all general ed courses, Like you're surrounded by anybody your age. Like nobody in their 20s is like, I think all my best friends were internet friends. And it actually worked out pretty well for me. It's like when I started Oculus,

and I started Oculus when I was 19 years old, almost everyone who worked there, and this Oculus, my virtual reality heads that company, almost everyone I hired was friends and moderators and administrator staff from ModRetro. We were all teenagers. Like we're all a bunch of teenage dudes who have known each other for like five or six years

on the internet. And we basically decided to start a VR company together. I'll never forget when I called up my friend, Chris, who was one of the early administrators and moderators on ModRetro and a good online friend. I literally never met him in person. And I called him up and said, Chris, what are you doing this fall?

He said, oh, I'm probably gonna work all summer at the local pizza place. And then I'm starting school this fall. I'm going off to college. I said, no, you're not. You're gonna come with me and we're gonna start this VR company that I've been working on, Oculus.

And that was on a Friday. And that Monday I rolled up in my crappy minivan to his house, which was two and a half hours away from mine. He piled all of his stuff into it and we drove away. And his mom couldn't believe it. She, she, she, she, she. Oh my God. He told her, mom, I'm, I'm dropping,

I'm not going to school. I'm going to start a company with Palmer from the internet instead. And she's just like, okay, like sure. I'm not going to school. Seaport Marina Inn, and we lived there for the first few months of Oculus. 19 years old. Yep. And did you complete college? No, I dropped out. I went through, you know, I had basically one semester and summer school left to get my degree. And I had a series of technological breakthroughs in my virtual reality hobby, which I'd been

working on. Like I said, I started building VR headsets when I was 14 or 15 as a hobby. And I would become obsessed with virtual reality technology and trying to make it better. which I'd been working on. there weren't very many people working on VR tech. much cheaper, much lighter, much smaller than anything that anyone had ever made. And for the first time when I showed it to my friends, instead of them seeing my prototypes and saying that I was wasting my time, they said, oh shit, I actually get it now. This is cool. And so I had a choice. I could either stay in school

and get my journalism degree, or I could drop out of school and start this company. And then there was actually, it was kind of two options. I drop out of school and start this company. And then there was actually, it was kind of two options. I can either drop out and start this company, or I could stay in school, get this degree, probably have to make use of that degree. And I was terrified that in the process of delaying me working on my real passion, that somebody else was going to figure out what I had

and they were going to do it before I did. I said, I don't have the time. I need to get this out of the world right now, because anyone, there were literally thousands of people in the technology industry who could have had the insights I had. The insights I had were not like Einstein level insights. They were the natural conclusion that any smart person who was looking at the VR industry in 2011 and 2012

would have made. Computer power was increasing in a certain way where I could compensate for optical distortion in real time on a graphics card shader and not have it take up happened to glance in my direction, And it was more or less built on exactly the same principles I was open sourcing all of my work, I got into VR like I just wanted to work on VR and make it good. I guess there's two ways to look at this. One is that if I put stuff out there, other people put stuff out there. And then we all move faster together as a collective than me hoarding all my information myself.

But to be honest, it was just purely cultural and I never thought it through. Remember, I started the ModRetro forums because I was interested in modifying game consoles, vintage computers. The social currency of an internet forum is knowledge. How do you show off on an internet forum that is built around engineering and product, like building projects? You show your projects and you don't just show them, you say, and here's why my project is better than anyone else's. Let me tell you in detail how I built my power management system. Notice how I modified this LCD to not use a compact fluorescent illuminator, but instead uses the latest white LEDs from Nichia to achieve much lower power consumption.

And then all the other nerds say, oh my God, this guy is a God. Like that is the social currency of nerd forums in the 2000s was prowess. And so if you didn't prove your prowess, you're nobody. And so I honestly, that was the culture I grew up in on the internet. That's how the internet was back then. And it's very different than today. Today it's about flash and style.

You make a cool video and like, it's not really necessarily about going deep It's very different than today. You would post updates in a forum thread every week. You'd say, here's my project update thread, guys, here's how's it going, here's what I'm doing. People would say, you're a fucking idiot, why are you doing it that way? And sometimes you'd say, you're wrong, when I started working on VR, I'm like, well, that's what you do. You share your work and people are impressed by it. And so how did Sony get on? How did you get on Sony? I got really lucky in a series of chains. So I don't want to say that it was all luck because I think people make a lot of their own luck.

You might not be able to make a coin more likely to land on heads or tails, but you could increase the number of coins you get to flip in life, right? Like, you could do things that increase the number of interactions you're likely to have with people. I think publishing in the open, for example, did that. It means that I didn't have to personally meet every person who would be helpful to me.

They could just see my work out in the open and be helpful to me, more or less the creator of first-person shooters, the modern 3D game engine. If you've played Call of Duty, if you've played Battlefield, if you've played anything, it all goes back to Doom. He is a wizard and he was so far ahead of his time. Not just building 3D games, but also one of the first people to conceive of networking those games over the internet to allow people around the world to be in a single virtual space and play games together. John was bringing that out. People had online games, but they typically were not real time. They were things like online chess. but they typically were not real time.

knows who he is. Actually, he would also publish all his personal notes and technical notes. He wasn't worried about people running faster than him because he was already running twice as fast as anybody in the world could ever run. John Carmack had been looking at virtual reality for years, but he had always concluded it was too expensive, too low field of view, too much latency, it made people sick. And every few years he would do another new look at VR and see where it was. And I got lucky where he came onto this internet forum and he was researching VR and he saw my project threads. and see where it was.

or you'll throw up. And so I laid all that out. He looked into all my other posts. He said, hey, you seem to really know your stuff. I see you have this Oculus Rift prototype. I said, I'll do better than that, John. for prototypes for free. the world had ever seen. put me in touch with Sony. is that I was already in a race against the clock. When I turned them down, I didn't understand. I thought turning them down was like,

I need to do this on my own before Sony gets into VR. I didn't know that they were literally already in a race with me. So, all the VR work back then was being done by a group called Sony Liverpool. So over in the UK, they had an office that was doing most of their 3D work, like they were doing all their 3D ports of various PlayStation games. Those were kind of the guys leading the charge on VR as well. And I found out that they were working on VR right before, right after I turned them down. But then Sony Liverpool was shut down just a few months later. And so all of a sudden the people who had been working on it

weren't working on it anymore. But what I didn't know is, and so I basically found out they were working on VR, then thought they weren't working on VR, then I found out maybe a year later that there was an entirely separate VR project going on inside of Sony out of Japan. Then I found out maybe a year later their PlayStation VR headset. Literally the same day. Which gets back to it was clearly an idea whose time had come. I was very lucky that I had the insight that I did as just a random guy in his garage.

How wild is it that there's me, a 15-year-old sitting in his garage has more or less the exact same insights on this dead technology that a huge team of advanced display researchers in Tokyo have at exactly the same time. Like man, that's how you know that it's the right time to do something. That is crazy. And who's your friend that you? And by the way, John Carmack,

just to tell you a little more and more about him, he also at the same time he did in software ran a rocket company that competed in the X Prize. just to tell you a little more about him. He also, at the same time he did in software, ran a rocket company that competed in the X Prize. And they built one of the first vertical takeoff and landing rockets. Years before SpaceX did. He also built twin turboed Ferraris as his hobby. And then I hired him as the CTO of Oculus.

So I convinced him to leave his own game studio to come and be the CTO of Oculus. And then eventually, after I was fired, he left. And now he's working on trying to build super intelligent general artificial intelligence. Thank you. Was he a co-founder? I don't even count myself as employee number one, because you can't employ yourself. Anyway, we've always said that he's employee number one, because he was. And the crazy thing is, Chris was also employee long story on its own, but when I was fired by Facebook,

Chris was the guy who took a stand and said publicly, hey, you firing Palmer is totally wrong. It is absolutely insane. He has done nothing wrong. And I can't be at a company that is like this. And so he quit his extremely highly paid job at Facebook to come and join my next company, I can't be at a company that is like this. which is what people should do. We were up to about 75 people. And that was when we were acquired by Facebook.

And then during my years in Silicon Valley working on VR at Facebook, we were run as kind of an independent operation owned by Facebook. We grew it to a couple thousand people. How did it pop up? When Sony announced PlacesVR, we knew it was coming. We knew there were other companies that were going to be entering the space with way more resources than we had as a startup. Look, we're a group of like 75 guys who managed to raise a little bit of venture capital.

How do you compete with multi-billion dollar companies like Sony or Microsoft or Google or Apple? It's really, really hard. And so that was one thing we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally. or Microsoft, or Google, or Apple. It's really, really hard. So that was one thing we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally. How do we survive in the long run? when it then comes in and outspends us.

They're strictly business. you need to be able to make sure that developers can justify financially being on your platform. So that was all going on. The interesting thing was when Facebook came in, and a few things happened. I think Mark was truly convinced that VR was the future. He saw what we were doing and he said, oh my God, this is the future of computing. This is the future of gaming. I truly believe in your vision.

I want you to be a part of Facebook. So, well, you know, we're not really that interested at this point, but like maybe we could team up in some way. And the thing that really convinced us in the end was two things. One, Mark promised not just to buy our company, but to invest a minimum of a billion dollars a year The thing that really convinced us in the end was two things. One, Mark promised not just to buy our company, but to invest a minimum of a billion dollars a year into research and development for the next decade. That was really the thing.

Like when you're someone like me who's used to working with garage budgets and scraping money here and there and trying to keep your thing going, imagine what that sounds like. Someone comes to you and says, I'm going to give you a billion dollars a year for the next 10 years of your life to try and push virtual reality forward. It's a really compelling pitch. In fact, I remember exactly what I wrote in the email to the team after we met with Mark. I said,

we might be getting played, but if so, Zuck is Van Halen. Like, he's saying he's hitting all the right notes. He's saying exactly what you want to hear, and he's doing it in a way that really makes sense. The second reason that we were persuaded is because they made a pitch to us and said,

look, Microsoft, if they buy you, is just going to cut you up into pieces and use you to sell more Xboxes. They don't actually want VR or AR to be the next major computing platform. Like, Microsoft's pretty happy with how things are. Same thing with Google. Same thing with Apple.

They're already at the top of the food chain, right? They're making iOS, they're making Android, they're selling phones, or they're selling, you know, Microsoft Office, they're selling computer operating system licenses. The people at the top don't want to shake everything up. They don't want to shake the snow globe and see who comes out on top. They kind of want to maintain things the way they are. So his point was, if you get bought by Google or Microsoft or Apple, they are not going to try and shake up the whole world and make VR a thing

as fast as they can. You're going to be a tiny part of their 10-year plan. But Facebook, on the other hand, we don't have an operating system. We don't have a hardware platform. We don't control these gigantic stores. We don't control the iOS store. We don't control the Google Play store. But they want to have a platform. And so Mark's point, pitch to us was, look, you go to those other guys, they're not going to be motivated to make your thing change the world.

You come to Facebook, we are deeply motivated, because we want to shake the snow globe. We want to make the whole universe move to VR and AR. And even if we don't end up on top, we'll probably at least be in second or third place, which is a heck of a lot better than today, where we're way down here. And I think that it was just obviously true, right? Like you could look at it logically and say,

yeah, that's actually right. They do need to figure out a way to shake things up. This clearly is that way. And they're committing to spending a billion dollars a year on the thing that I am passionate about. So you'll notice that nowhere in there is I did it to get rich. I will address that really fast

because I know what people are thinking. I know they're thinking, well, Palmer, what about the $2.3 billion that Mark gave you for the company? On the one hand, like that was some tiny factor, but remember that I had other companies that were making offers too. My investors were telling me not to sell.

They were saying, Palmer, no, we'll fund you, we'll give you as much money as you want. I could have done that instead. And also, I believed that Oculus was going to make tons of money all on its own. We were the hottest things in the games industry. So in my mind, I was already going to make as much money as I would ever need. So people, they often say, well, Palmer, you really just did it for the 2.3 billion I say no like if this is about 2 billion dollars, I could have just made that myself

But Mark was offering 10 billion dollars in research and development and me getting 2 billion dollars from somebody doesn't do that Yeah, doesn't do that. Wow, interesting interesting So it was like if I could flip it on you like I'd not not not to play the interview doesn't do that. Like, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. And I know you probably want to remain independent, but if someone told you, I'm going to let you remain independent, you're going to make all the shots, and I'm going to give you $10 billion over the next 10 years, you'd say yes to that. Absolutely, I would.

In fact, that's a discussion we're having right now. I'm so stoked to hear that. And I'd say to anyone listening, It's not $10 billion. Well, I'll tell you, if you can find somebody who will give you $10 billion to do what you're passionate about, take the deal. It is, it is like, it is, it is. And like, did it turn out well for me?

I mean, in the end, I ended up getting fired for absolutely bullshit political reasons. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. Guess what? VR is a multi-billion dollar industry. I'm having the last laugh. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So, you moved over. We basically got bonuses paid out I got great performance reviews. Everyone loved me. And I got along pretty well with everybody, despite moving to the Bay Area, which was a very,

very politically left place at the time. I'll say like, I've long been a libertarian minded person. Politics were always something I had thought about, but really didn't do anything about. Like I had given $40 to Gary Johnson, right? Like it just, I don't want to say politics weren't important to me, but they just weren't that important to me.

I cared about VR. I was the VR guy, right? And so here I am. I've sold my company for billions of dollars, few years pass. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump's running for president. Now, Donald Trump is somebody who I had long had respect for. I actually wrote a letter to him when I was in college

and 15 years old telling him that he should run for president. You might not remember this, but he had been on TV and they were asking if he was gonna run against Barack Obama. And he said, he said, well, I might have no choice. I might have to run. I don't want to run.

No, nobody wants me to run. It feels like, but if I have to do it, then I have to do it. You know, if people tell me that I have to run, then maybe I have to do it. And so I wrote him a letter. I said, you have to run. We need someone who's signed both sides of a check. We need someone who is not a part

of this giant government bureaucracy. We need someone who understands what it's like to build a business, not to be a community organizer. And I wrote that letter. I don't even want to say like I thought too much of it, right? I did it on an impulse because I saw him say, if enough people tell me I have to run,

then maybe I'll do it. Years pass, Trump's running for president. And I said, this is fantastic. I'm so stoked that Donald Trump is finally running for president. Hold on, was there any, did you get a response? No, I never got a response. Okay.

Which is fine. I don't want to act like I was put off by it. I also, I'm so glad I did this. I posted on Facebook about it too. Which is fine. This would be like a ridiculous story. everyone in Silicon Valley was losing their mind, right? I mean, it's like, I know you probably remember, but there's probably people listening who don't remember or they're too young to remember. 2015 and 2016 was insane. The media hated Trump.

Everything was being twisted in these absurd ways. You remember when he said, they're sending us their drugs, their criminals, their rapists, and they said, Trump says that Mexicans are rapists. And their quote is, they are rapists. It's like, you can literally just watch what he says. And like, it doesn't even make grammatical sense

for that construct. Also, he's literally talking about the criminals and the drugs and the murderers and the rapists. And I mean, it was was like, it was insane. There was no ethics being used. It was a pure attack blitzkrieg by the media against Trump. And a lot of people fell for it. And so I ended up giving $9,000

to a pro-Trump anti-Clinton group. And it's so funny because this started a media shit storm that I'll get into in a moment, but I have to tell you what they actually did. I gave them $9,000. They ran one single billboard in Ohio, I think in Columbus, Ohio, that was a picture of Hillary Clinton,

and it said, too big to jail. And this was after she got away with mishandling classified information. You might remember at exactly the same time you had US Submariners being put in prison for decades for much less expansive mishandling of classified information. It was an obvious double standard. You have the deep state State Department apparatus

protecting Hillary. And on the other state, state department apparatus protecting Hillary. And on the other side, you have a serviceman going to prison for something that was not nearly as bad as anything. So too big to jail. So would you agree like that's pretty reasonable political discourse, right? That's not crazy. I'm not saying Hillary's a bitch.

Like, you know, it's very reasonable. So two things happened. First, the media found out about my contribution and a few media outlets reported on it somewhat accurately. Like Palmer Lucky, the guy who started Oculus, this Facebook executive has given $9,000 to this pro-Trump anti-Clinton group that's running a billboard.

Then a handful of people on Twitter, literally it was a completely made up story said, Palmer is funding white supremacist internet trolls to attack Clinton supporters on the internet. It expanded from there. Palmer is funding anti-Semitic memes. Palmer is funding misogynist troll squads. Palmer is funding a, I believe Ars Technica called it,

a tidal wave of racist memes on Reddit, Facebook and beyond. It was literally fabricated. None of it ever happened. It was a completely false story. And it was reported by dozens of outlets, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Ars Technica, Wired Magazine, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, The Washington Post,

Taylor Lorenz reported on it. I mean, it was everywhere. And they all just had this lockstep narrative. Palmer Luckey is a racist, misogynist, anti-Syrian, which is so funny, I'm actually a radical Zionist. And like, it was even in the moment, it was- What about radical Zionists? I strongly believe in the right of Israel

to exist as a Jewish state. Like, people are like, that's so problematic though. It's so ethnostate adjacent. I say, I don't care. After what happened to them in World War II, they deserve a place where they can do their own thing and protect their own people without getting wrecked by everybody else who hates them.

And you know what? Maybe someday everyone who hates Jews are gonna be gone. We are not living in that world today. And people, it's a slippery slope though. If they can have it, why can't the KKK have their own state? I say, that's not gonna happen. Like it's absurd for us to even have discussion. It is very reasonable for the Jews

to have a place that is theirs. And they say, oh, but what about the Palestinians? You know what? That's a separate political issue. Like the existence of a Jewish state, which is what Zionism is, like the belief that they have the right to a Jewish state, the existence of a Jewish state,

is separate from the issue of what do you do with refugees from some political, from some physical area. So it was so funny to me with like Palmer's this anti-Semitic guy, because it was literally made up. Like it's not even like there was like screenshots or made up screenshots. Journalists just said it was true with zero evidence and they just repeated what each other said.

And I know people are gonna hear this and say, I must be, Palmer's ignoring, like he's glossing over something. He must have like said something about Jews on Twitter. And they were like- Are you Jewish? No, I'm not Jewish. I just believe in the existence of a Jewish state.

And I bet even some of your listeners probably won't agree with me on that. And that's fine. We don't have to all agree on everything. But I will say it was pretty ridiculous in the moment where like Palmer's an anti-Semite. I'm like, no, I love the Jews more than like anybody. Like you Democrats would probably hate me

for how much I like the Jews. You know, like that you... Anyway, it was... But what happened was, as a result of this reporting, like looking back, I should have pushed back. What happened is I wrote a statement saying, hey, this is all false. None of this is true.

Here's what actually happened. I gave $9,000 to this pro-Trump group. They ran a single billboard. Everyone is lying. This is literally fake news. And that was when fake news was like a new phrase. Facebook told me I couldn't publish it. They said, we won't let you make this statement.

You cannot make this statement because it frames the media as the bad guy. And in a world where Donald Trump is attacking the fourth estate, we can't appear to be aligned with him. I said, well, you guys don't have to appear to be aligned, but I will be. Like I'm fine if people think that I'm being unfair because this is literally

character assassination like they are they are they are trying to destroy their they kept reporting as of Thursday at 358 p.m When reach for comment Palmer Lucky is still employed by Facebook like that's how they ended the article It was it was explicitly a scalp taking operation from the very beginning. All the articles were ending with Palmer's still employed. Palmer's still employed. According to Facebook, Palmer is currently still employed and they just couldn't wait for the follow-up

where they could take my scalp. So Facebook tried to get me to resign and I refused. They tried to get me to not say anything. Eventually they wrote their own statement for me that basically just said, I'm sorry for the negative impact this is having on Facebook's reputation. And I want to, I'm going to be taking

a voluntary leave of absence. In reality, they told me, I couldn't come into the office until after the election. It was that explicit. You can't come in until after the election. Their thinking was, okay, Palmer is like the leader of our virtual reality organization. They knew they actually needed me.

It was, getting rid of me is not a thing that they could easily do. And their thought was, okay, we know that Palmer didn't post these racist memes. Like Facebook did not know, Facebook knew none of this was true, right? So they knew that this was just a media invention, but they didn't want to push back.

They didn't want to say anything. Kind of like where, you know, you'll see Mark now coming out and finally saying, okay, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, maybe, you know, that wasn't good. But this was 2016. It was a different universe. So they were hoping that I would take this leave of absence, disappear until after the election.

They believed Hillary would win. And then if Hillary won, they thought all their employees and the press would kind of forget about this whole thing. Because it would just be this crazy time that Palmer supported that fringe candidate who lost in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Remember, she had a 95% chance of winning.

So now I told them this was a bad strategy. I said, guys, what you don't understand is Donald Trump is going to win. And they thought that I was just like insane. They like literally, when I said that, they said, wow, I thought you were a smart person. I'm like, no, guys, I am a smart person. Donald Trump is going to win.

Like I will accept that there's a possibility he won't, but all of the signs are that he is going to win. Like the problem is that the media is reporting on Donald Trump the same way that they're reporting on me, an absurd, totally baseless way that is out of touch with reality. Don't fall for that. And they said, no, no, you have to stay out of the office

till after the election. So the day after the election, Trump had won. They said, actually, you can't come back to the office. Are you serious? I'm serious., actually, you can't come back to the office. Are you serious? I'm serious. They said, you can't come back to the office. And that was when the machinery went into motion to get rid of me. They realized that with Trump in office,

that, and like there were Facebook executives publicly saying, I will not work with Trump supporters. I will not have them on my team, which is all the way, by the way, illegal in California, but you know, you have to bring a case about it. And especially back then Republicans weren't really, I think we weren't punching square. I think that most of them were like,

I just want to get shit done. I just want to get paid. I'm not trying to be a professional victim, right? Like what red blooded Republican man wants to basically go into a courtroom and be like, they're so mean to me. They said, they said that they don't like me because I voted for Trump.

Like, doesn't that just sound like this is like the dumbest little bitch fest ever? Like, wouldn't everyone laugh at you even if you won? And I think, and so people didn't, people wanted to, they wanted to get work done. They didn't want to, they didn't want to be a professional victim and put themselves out there as the whiny, you know, whiny little boy

who's sad his coworkers don't like him in a hostile workplace environment. Did you have any conversations with Zuckerberg in person? No, because the lawyers were very, like they very quickly isolate things like this. Like, the moment they realized that this was turning into a problem, they, like, they're like, you cannot come to the office, you cannot send any messages, you cannot send any emails,

you may only communicate through attorneys. Like there is a lockdown protocol to minimize accountability on these things. And so it wasn't until, and so they told me though, even after the election, they said, you can come back. We really need you. Like we all recognize that you're the guy and that you're a critical part of the team.

We just need you to stay out of the office for a little longer and we're gonna figure this all out. And then January rolled around and their attorneys called my attorneys and said, you're being fired, you're being terminated without cause. Oh, that was the other thing I forgot. They launched an internal investigation into me. They wanted to try and dig up some kind of policy violation.

They wanted to try and find a reason to fire me that they could say had nothing to do with politics. And so that went for months and they dug through all my emails and all my communications and they interviewed dozens of Facebook employees, being like just like full Gestapo style. You know, what have you ever heard about Palmer Lucky doing something bad?

Like, what do you know? What have you ever heard? And I was like, I literally have never heard Palmer even mention politics. He's just like a VR guy. He gave $9 heard? And I was like, I literally have never heard Palmer even mention politics. He's just like a VR guy. He gave $9,000 to this Trump group, I think on a whim because he has billions of dollars.

Like, this doesn't see, he's, and so they tried to find something on me and they found literally nothing. So their investigation concluded. And I remember being in the room with, because it's a formal process and they let you know when you're being investigated. And in the end they said,

we found no violations of Facebook policy at any point in your tenure. So that was when they realized they were gonna have to fire me without cause. They just said, well, we were paying you tens of millions of dollars a year and we've just decided for no reason we don't need you employed anymore.

And it was, look, it was totally ridiculous. It was totally trumped up. They didn't ever ask me about people who were discriminating against me for my politics, right? They were saying, oh, we did this investigation and Palmer was not fired for his politics. It's like, well, you never asked me about it. If you would have told me,

Palmer, are you aware of any instances of people being discriminated against for politics? I'd be like, yeah, I can give you like two dozen. If they asked me, Palmer, were you fired for politics? I'd be like, yeah, I can literally give you the emails and messages where people explicitly state that they will not work with me because of how I've... And so, like, it was insanity. And the worst part is they were even telling the media this. They were saying, oh no, it was Palmer's decision to leave.

Literally untrue. I was terminated. They said, they told one journalist off the record, but you know, off the record doesn't mean anything. They told one journalist off the record that it was something like, they said, look, Palmer leaving was his decisions. It's not like this is Soviet Russia

where you say something, you say something, the wrong thing about the wrong politician and then get disappeared. It was literally just like that. Anyway, I'm sorry I seem worked up about this, but just like, I hate getting back into this head space because it was just- It was just as if I was you too.

I mean, you got to remember this was, this was, sorry, I mean, you got to remember this was, sorry, I need to do some water. Oculus was everything to me. All my friends worked at Oculus. Remember I told you, it was started by me and all my friends worked there. All the friends that I made working over the course of,

you know, half a decade on that particular product were there. My reputation was there, my work was there. All of the technology that I had been developing since I was 13 years old for VR was owned by that company. Everything. Like I was Oculus. And then they said, no, we're taking it all away from you. And you can't even talk to anybody or we're gonna come after you. And if you say a word of this to anyone, we're gonna come after you.

And so for me, it was just, it was a catastrophically destructive event. And I wish that I would have acted differently in the moment, but the mistake I made was trusting that people could have different politics for me, but still treat me fairly. And I didn't realize that when they told me, oh, you're still a part of the team,

I didn't realize that was a pure manipulation tactic to prevent me from leverage. Like I had leverage. There were things that they needed from me. There were things I was doing. They basically were just manipulating me to try and squeeze the last little bit of juice for me for a few months before just getting rid of me. Wow.

Yep. Anyway, that was how that all went down. What would you have done different? So first of all, I would have put out my own statement, which I had already written. I should have just put it out. And the thing is I realized later, I didn't know at the time,

that political activity outside of your employer, like outside of your job is protected, at least in California. They cannot do anything about politics. Like they cannot tell you to not endorse a candidate, for example. They can tell you, you can't do it wearing a Facebook shirt.

You can't do it while you're on the clock at Facebook. Of course, lots of Facebook employees do that. You know, Hillary Clinton was everywhere. They were literally using the campus print shop to print, I'm with her posters that they were plastering all over San Francisco. Like if you were for Hillary, it was absolutely no problem. But I should have said, you know what, that aside,

I should have just gone out and said, hey, the media is lying. They are lying to all of you. This is completely false. This is a, this is fake news to the ultimate degree. The press is lying about me to try and take my scalp. And I think that would have probably caused a lot of, it would have pissed them off

because I wouldn't have been allowing them to run the PR strategy. But the way that it's supposed to work, just if you've never worked at a big company, the trade you're making when you allow the company to run your PR strategy is implicitly that they're not going to fire you, right? Basically, it's okay.

The trade is do things our way and you get to stay safe. Because otherwise there's no incentive to do things their way. Otherwise you do just go off on your own. You say, fuck you, I'm gonna do whatever I want. I shouldn't have made that trade. I should have gone out, gotten the truth out there. And I think people would have been pissed that I didn't let Facebook, you know,

do their preferred option, which was to say nothing bad about them. They literally told me I couldn't, I said I'm against Hillary Clinton because I think she's gonna drag us into World War III. She said that she's going to enforce the no-fly zone in Syria, which is, that is saying I'm gonna shoot down,

people think I will enforce a no-fly zone means you just like say words and it's like mean to pretend you have the authority. No, enforcing a no-fly zone means that a Russian aircraft is gonna enter Syrian airspace and the United States is going to shoot it down. And I was looking, I was like, holy shit. Like, I'm one of the people who want us to get out of the Middle East, especially at the tail end of things. I'm like, that will drag us back. Can you imagine doing this shit all over again with the

Russians in the Middle East? And they said, you can't say any of this. You cannot say anything negative about Hillary Clinton. You cannot say anything positive about Donald Trump. And I should have just realized, wait a sec, this is literally illegal. I should just put it out there. They would have been upset with me temporarily that I didn't follow their strategy, but it would have been much harder

for them to fire me in the end. The master stroke of their strategy was that in refusing to deny the allegations against me, they became true. Right? Perception is reality. My refusal to address them and Facebook's refusal to point out that it was all made up in the minds of everybody, they said, well, it must be true.

He is funding white supremacist troll campaigns. He is funding people to attack other people on the internet. He is funding a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes all over the internet, because why wouldn't they believe it? I never even said that it wasn't true. And I think if I had made clear that it wasn't true, I probably would have gotten through it.

Wow. What a crazy place to work. And wow. It's a- What a crazy place to work. It really, well, and you know what was even crazier was that they maintained for years and years and years that I was not fired from my politics. Zuck got asked about it when he was in front of Congress. Yeah, it was Ted Cruz who asked him, Senator Cruz,

why did you fire Palmer Lucky? And he said, oh, I don't think that's an appropriate, this is an appropriate forum. He said, you have to answer the question. And Zach said something like, I can only commit that it was not a political matter or something like that. Which was, to be fair to Mark, I don't think he was lying. I think that his team had correctly,

properly insulated him from it. Like when you're illegally firing employees for their politics, you don't bring that to the most important people in the company and basically poison them. Like that's poisoning the King. Like to show him, if you're like, hey King, here's this thing,

we're performing illegal activity. Like you've just screwed them over now because now they do know. And now am I to say that there was no suspicion or a kind of understanding as to what would happen? I wouldn't go that far, but it was crazy how they maintained for years and years and years

that they literally, literally, it was their CTO, Andrew Bosworth, publicly, on multiple occasions said Palmer's termination had nothing to do with politics. It was not a factor in any way whatsoever. And they were telling people, they started telling me that I was fired for cause. They're like, oh, we can't tell you why he was fired,

but believe me, we had no choice. He did something that was just beyond the pale. We had to fire him. We had no choice. I did, by the way, sort of get victory on this. So I will give credit to him. Andrew Bosworth, about a month ago, did post on Twitter. He said something like, you can pull up the exact one

if you want and put it up on the screen. He said something like, you can pull up the exact one if you want and put it up on the screen. He said something like, I want to apologize to Palmer Lucky. I've been saying things about him in the past that weren't true. I just want people to know that I was misled by others and that we are sorry

and it shouldn't have gone down that way. And I was wrong. So they are actually finally acknowledging that the story they were putting out there, that politics was not a factor and that I was fired for any reason at all is nonsense. But, you know, it's sparse comfort a decade on. Yeah, wow.

So you leave, are you involved with any VR now a Little bit we've got some big news coming soon big news on the anderle side I know you know we're gonna break that here in a little bit. All right, let's take a quick break Let's do it when we come back. We'll get into anderle sounds good I'm always on the lookout for ways to get healthier, especially now. That's why I'm so glad I discovered Armora Colostrum. Armora Colostrum has thousands of people reporting absolutely life-changing benefits, tens of thousands of five-star reviews, and transformational stories. Armora Colostrum is a proprietary, concentrated bovine colostrum that harnesses over 400 living

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That's 866-781-8900 or americanfinancing.net slash SRS. 8900 or americanfinancing.net slash srs. I have one more thing actually that's fun along those lines. I recently got the Meta Ray-Bans. Have you seen those? The little camera glasses? And once it's all set up, it says, ask Meta about anything. Just say, okay Meta, and Metta about anything.

Just say, okay Metta, and then ask your question. It's like, okay Metta, when was Palmer Lucky fired? And it goes, boom, boom. Palmer Lucky was fired on March 29th, 2017, after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property in a trade secret lawsuit. And then it links to a story on ZDNet where the guy says I was found guilty of this crime, but he's literally wrong. It literally didn't happen.

Because first of all, being found guilty is for criminal cases, not civil cases. Two, I literally won on all of the charges around trade secrets. Like we literally won on, and the judge threw out all the damages against me and said, yeah, he's not guilty of any of this. all of the charges around trade secrets. And if you ask these AI systems, after them now to remove these stories. that just lasts forever. Maybe the majority of it.

He says, you't matter what Elon says, they are not the press, we are the press. I'm like, oh my God, this guy's so, he's so out of touch with just the American moment. Like, who's gonna hear that and be like, yeah, he's right. How dare citizen journalists without credentials report on things? Yeah, wow. So you get, so you're done at Facebook,

you get fired from Facebook. Yep. And then you move into Andoril. So how long is the, how long is the gap here? Same day. I literally. Same day. I literally picked up the phone and I had been talking with people,

well, I got to backtrack a little bit. Before I started Oculus, when I was a teenager, Well, I got to backtrack a little bit. was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. The idea was that you could put them into virtual reality simulations of things that would trigger their PTSD, and you could teach them coping exercises, thinking exercises to mitigate their physiological responses

under the guidance of a licensed therapist. You could also expose them to things that they might be exposed to in the battlefield ahead of time to help them learn how to cope with that ahead of time. We've also exposed them to things that they might be exposed to to kind of support the program. But that was my first exposure to how the government uses technology, the good that it can do in our military, but also how broken a lot of the procurement systems are

in terms of how they buy things, how they procure things, the incentives that happen when you have cost plus contracts involved, cost plus contractors involved, who make more money when the contract runs long, more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster, more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster,

more efficient decisions. And that experience, small as it was, stuck with me through my whole career. And I had a lot of conversations with friends who did work in defense, whether working literally, you know, in the military or building tools for the military, who gave me these stories that you would just never believe about how broken things

were, how much money was being wasted and grafted and misspent. And so when I made all my Oculus money, one of the first things I did was try to find small defense startups that I could invest in that had a shot at changing this. My thinking was, okay, I've made all this money. I don't have the time to work on this problem at all,

but I want to find companies that have a shot at changing this structure, proving that you can apply technology from the tech industry and bring it into, you know, bring it into these defense spaces in a really meaningful way. And I ended up not really making any investments. There was a couple tiny things, but nothing material,

because I couldn't find anybody who was doing things the way that I wanted. I couldn't find anyone who was trying to build, basically, the next Lockheed Martin or the next Northrop Grumman. I mostly found companies that were building some little gizmo or gadget, but like a part of the bigger machine,

but they weren't going to change anything. And they weren't out there trying to change things at a big scale. And so I made some friends who were doing a similar thing. So one of those was Trey Stevens, who's one of the co-founders at Anderil. He was at the time working full-time as a venture capitalist at Founders Fund,

which is Peter Thiel's venture firm. Or one of his venture firms, rather. And he was full-time trying to find exactly the same thing I was. He was meeting with hundreds of small defense companies trying to find exactly the same thing I was. the Oculus employee, former paratrooper, really interested in trying to figure out how to use technology to make DoD better. And so what happened was after these years

of meeting all the time and just complaining, oh my God, isn't this all screwed up? Aren't we wasting so much money on nonsense? Isn't it a shame there's no company that could come in and really go toe-to-toe with these big guys and give them a threat? And the day that I was fired, I picked up the phone, I called Joe and I called Brian and I called a threat. during a Palantir or being a venture capitalist or in your case running Oculus.

I said, you know, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And so that was really, that was- So they had no idea? I let them know, but you know, it was- That's a sacrifice I'm willing to take. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And so I'd say like the early, the early Andral crew is like that group of people

that had been thinking about these problems. Some people from Oculus who resigned when they fired me. There was a pretty large contingent of people who said, what you did to Palmer is fucked up and wrong. And I refused to be part of it. I'm out of here. And the funniest part is that of that contingent, kind of the people I'm out of here. They were huge fans of me.

They believed I was treated unfairly. And then when they found out that the thing I thought was most important for me to work on, which is to build better tools for our national security, save taxpayers hundreds of billions by making tens of billions, they literally concluded that I had become an evil person and never wanted to talk to me again. Some of them have then come back around as world events have shifted.

Like, you know, this is 2017. So as it became more clear that China is an aggressor and not a benevolent fountain of money, as it became clear that Russia is still an expansionist dictatorship and not a reformed quasi-Western gas station. People have come back and said, okay, I was wrong.

What you're doing is not evil. But at the time, it was very controversial. A lot of people believed that anything you did with the military was either useless or evil or warmongering. The fact that you were saving them money was actually to the detriment. Like I was like, guys, we're spending way too much money

on these weapons systems. They said, oh, so you're gonna make it so they can buy 10 times as many weapons? Wow, as if that's better. Like, well, guys, if you hate the military, like if you hate NATO, for example, should they be armed with water balloons? Should they be armed with slingshots?

Like, what level of force are you okay with them having? Like if you believe that NATO has any reason to exist at a level beyond like kids with water balloons, then you should probably want them to be armed with things that can actually beat our adversaries. And the problem is that at that point, people just, they stop talking to you and say, fuck you fascist.

And they move like, you can't reason someone out of an opinion that they didn't reason themselves into. And when people, when you start to try to pull them out of the matrix, they are often unable to make the job. It's a great quote. So Andrel started. So Andrel started. We wanted to build not a defense contractor but a defense product company. So Andrel started.

So Andrel started. We wanted to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company. Use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, decide when it's done, and then sell products based on those technologies to the United States government. I was a strong believer, and I get to look like a visionary today, but back then I looked like a crazy person. I was a strong believer that the entire future of warfare would be defined by artificial intelligence and autonomy. This fundamental decoupling of the one-to-one ratio from shooter to weapon, from pilot to plane to allow smaller numbers of people to wield many swords

was kind of the thinking there. I knew that would change everything. smaller numbers of people to wield many swords was kind of the thinking there. I knew that would change everything. Not just with small cheap drones, but even with large scale systems. Like if you can get people out of harm's way, and if you can allow them to leverage their own intellect beyond what they can hold and steer with their own two hands, if you can basically become a person

who manages weapons at a higher level while they micromanage the second to second execution of your commands, you can fundamentally change warfare in a way that I think is very accretive to US interests and very, very against the world that let's say China or Russia wants to exist. Largely because I think these advantages accrue mostly to the defender.

If you're trying to build a military that is designed to turn your allies into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, like you have in NATO or most US operations, that's really useful. If you're trying to build a military where you need to, let's say, go into Taiwan with landing craft

and get millions of soldiers there and invade and then occupy their territory, all of the stuff I just talked about is a nightmare for you. Like it doesn't actually help you. The ability to wield many swords per arm is not that useful for occupying a resistant hostile land. It's a lot better for slug it out,

large scale great power fights. And that's what the United States needs to focus on winning for the most part, at least right now. slug it out, large scale, great power fights. And that's what the United States needs to focus on winning, for the most part, at least right now. So were you aware of how it works then with the military industrial complex? How did you know that with all the VR stuff you were doing? and the beautiful mind chart up on the wall with all the strings and all the pins connecting where I thought the bad shit was

and where we could be going after. And I was right enough. Like I was right about enough of the problems that we were able to actually get some traction. Basically our bet was simple. We decided we were going to put all of our money into building this AI called Lattice, which is a military focused AI that is built to the standards you need for military, the reliability you need for military, into building this AI called Lattice,

as a sort of core software product. And then you can build on top of it, autonomous fighter jets, autonomous tanks, cruise missiles, small arms, surveillance systems, security systems, drone defense systems, Some of them for the military, Wow. Wow. Basically you're talking about Skynet from The Terminator. Yes. I mentioned earlier that I read a lot of books and I read a lot of science fiction. One of the things that I've realized in my career is that nothing I ever come up with will be new. I've literally never come up with an idea

that a science fiction author has not come up with before at some point, which makes sense. There's a lot of them. They've been around for a long time and they don't have to make things and they don't have to wait to the right moment. You remember, I started Oculus at just the right moment for it to succeed.

A science fiction author doesn't have to wait for something to be possible to think about it and to write about it and for people to be excited about the idea. And so every time I've come up with something, I've been able to find usually many, sometimes one, science fiction pieces addressing literally exactly that idea by some guy who just thought about it, like 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 70 years ago.

Some of the stuff that I'm building today, for example, in the AR VR space around augmenting the vision of soldiers. These are ideas that are from 1959's, like, Starship Troopers novels, right? Like these are old ideas that have only very recently become technologically feasible. The idea of autonomous fighter jets, that's been around for about a hundred years. The idea of making a computer that is so good you can program it with a general intent at the beginning and then it executes on a mission all on its own.

People have been thinking of this since computers were programmed with punch cards. They were imagining a punch card computer that could do the whole management of a bombing mission during World War II. The tech wasn't ready, but the idea was. And so you're bringing up Skynet, and I think that like, Skynet makes a ton of sense, except for one critical mistake. They gave it control of the United States nuclear arsenal. Like, I always like to think how Terminator might have gone. If one, you know, Skynet wouldn't have achieved sentience,

but even more to the point, what if they just would have used it for the weapons systems that actually make sense for AI to control, right? If one, SkyNet wouldn't have achieved sentience. But even more to the point, what if they just would have used it for the weapons systems that actually make sense for AI to control? There's actually not a lot of gains in having an advanced artificial intelligence have control of your nuclear weapons. It's all risk and no upside. There is a lot of upside in allowing people to get out of, let's say, tip-of-the-spear fighter jets so far is a recent contract we won called CCA. proposed by these people who have been around for a century. and all the expertise we needed to build a fighter jet that is capable of going toe to toe

with all of these other companies. Like, we're like, oh shit. We've built in eight years from like, you know, Chris Dykes was employee number one at Oculus then employee number one at Anderil. He was the first guy to, you know, he got right out of Facebook, said, you guys are fucked up. I'm going to do whatever Palmer does.

We've gone from me hiring Chris Dykes as employee number one to being selected against Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, companies that have a stellar reputation for building really sick aircraft for the better part of a century. We've done that, we've gone from me and Chris Dykes to that in less than eight years. And it's because we are taking the best

of modern technology development practices, including many that I learned while I was at Facebook in Silicon Valley and bringing them to defense manufacturing, defense production. Like what we're doing is like, we're not supermen here, right? I'm not saying we're like these brilliant Einstein level geniuses, what we're like these brilliant Einstein-level geniuses.

What we're doing is taking techniques, approaches, and people who used to be making AR mustache emojis in Silicon Valley and putting them to work on problems that actually matter. Ones that actually get them stoked in the morning to come to work. And if you take the best technologists in the country and you put them to work on a problem AI management systems that are able to manage a little bit. Star Wars Episode 1. are all controlled by one central AI The Trade Federation really screwed up and optimize it for different things, and train it how to do things that normally they would have been done by not just a person, but an expert person.

For example, we use Lattice to pilot our fighter jets. We are training them how to do things based on data from the world's best fighter pilots. And we are using Lattice to power our underwater submarines. We make a lot of underwater submarines for the United States, but also really mostly for Australia right now. And that submarine is able to listen to things, differentiate things.

It can basically be an expert sonar operator and an expert submarine pilot and an expert energy management specialist. And you could basically take all of this expertise from hundreds of different roles and jam it into one brain. You can build one system like Lattice that is the world's best fighter pilot, submarine pilot, sensor reader, and small arms operator that the world's ever seen. You can build one system like Lattice

In some cases. So, one of the most common misconceptions about Andoril is that LADIS is only a brain for the things that we make. We do make a lot of hardware. Like, we make surveillance towers, we make fighter jets, we make submarines, we make loitering munitions that are being used in Taiwan and Ukraine. But... What are loitering munitions? So, basically, think like weapons that can go somewhere, observe a target,

and then choose when and how to strike it. So not like, artillery's not loitering a thing, like a missile that flies to an area, then pops out wings and orbits overhead for 10 minutes watching what they're doing and figuring out what it's going to do. That would be a loitering munition. Okay. And we've actually had a lot of success in Russia, between Russia and Ukraine. We're on the Ukrainian side, obviously. That would be a loitering munition.

can't get in to destroy these targets, What I wanted to finish and say is, that are already used by DoD. So, like, vehicles they already have, weapons they already have, sensors that they already have, we're basically taking everything, not just our weapons, but everything that they have, and we're trying to glue it all together into one common hive mind so that all the people, all the vehicles, all the robots have a common shared view of the world. Basically, in real time, seeing everything that's going on in the battlefield

so you know where the good guys are, you know where the bad guys are. You're able to predict what's going to happen in the near future so that you can have everything kind of skating to the puck, as it were, rather than reacting to what happened 10 minutes ago. And it's a really powerful thing to do, to take these systems that used to be siloed and just be their own little stovepipe worlds, and instead bring them into one gigantic brain. and just be their own little stovepipe worlds,

to the job building humanoid robots. And I've known for a few years now that they're on the edge of being real. And I've been waiting for that to happen because humanoid robots are not good enough to, let's say, replace a Navy SEAL. But they are good enough to replace, let's say, an elderly man. Like, they can hobble around

and pull levers and push buttons with about the same ability as a guy in his 90s, as I'd say where most humanoid robots are today. It turns out that if you can put a brain like Lattice into one of those robots, you can basically use that as a way to convert legacy weapons systems into AI-powered weapons systems. So imagine that I have an old Soviet-era surface-to-air weapon systems. robot doing all of that. for what they can do at the high end, powered cars for the military, We have a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, AI to new weapons.

of making those trillions of dollars of hardware, for everything. paint version of this optic that's going on this rifle, it's going to be $4,500. Meanwhile, as a civilian, you can go buy something for $500 that is just as good. We have to stop doing that as a country. Eisenhower was right when he said education, a library never built, a hospital never constructed. Like I feel like a lot of people forget that those two things are tied together. It doesn't mean we need to be hippies about it

and pretend that war's never gonna happen, but we need to be spending the right amount on these things. We cannot treat it as right now, it's almost like you can't question it because you can't question. If you question defense spending, you're questioning the existence of the military. That's just crazy to me. There's no other part of our society

where you can get away with that. Where you're like, oh, you can't, no, that's not true, education. You can't question education either. You can't say, aren't we spending too much on education for how bad it is? And be like, how dare you attack our brave teachers who are educating all of our children?

It's like, no, no, I'm not attacking the teachers. It's just, you know, it seems like we spend a lot of money for kids to get grades this bad. Like the kids can't read good or do other stuff good too. So could the Navy SEAL be replaced? Oh man, this is an interesting one. I don't think so on a quite long timeline for a few reasons.

First of all, it's the nature of the job. Like I'll tell you, here's someone who will be replaced. That hilltop surface to air missile operator, right? That is a crazy dangerous job. You're the first thing that everyone wants to take out before they can get through to everything else. Like you're gonna die. We have to get rid of that guy.

But then you look at what like a lot of Navy SEALs do and what else, or like look at what Green Berets do. It's so much about interacting extremely closely with people, around people, among people, in infrastructure that was designed for people, I think it's going to be really, really hard to make robots that do that set of things. It's, remember I said robots can do the jobs

that a 90-year-old man can do? Okay, they're going to eventually do the job that a 70-year-old man can do. And then eventually they'll be able to do what like a average in-shape 50-year-old man can do. To build humanoid robots that can do what a Navy seal in the prime of his life, you know, probably secretly secretly roided out like that's, that's a really high bar for a robot to hit, especially when it comes to his ability to break the rules or make

a decision that wasn't programmed or decided that he's going to do something that a robot is never going to do. It's it's my intuition here is like, that's going to do something that a robot's just never going to do. It's a little bit like, it's not a perfect example, but it's like, is AI going to replace the jobs of our politicians? That's probably the last thing to go. in a very real sense, there's certain parts of our society that are almost like envoys of America. They represent what we're doing. And I think that we're not going to

outsource that to robots any time soon. So we're a long ways out from replacing a tier one assaulter. I think we're a long way out. And that's, and- What is a long way out? 30, 40, 50 years minimum. There's some things that move fast and others that don't, but I mean, because here's the other thing

you have to remember. And I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but you're also able to augment people. So the right comparison is not Navy SEAL of today versus robot 10 years from now. It's what could a Navy SEAL look like in 10 years in terms of their biological modifications or conditioning, in terms of their mental modifications or conditioning,

things like exoskeletons, things like more advanced mobility, things like more advanced small arms. All of those are going to make the Navy SEAL a moving target as well. So the robots would have to get not just as good as a seal of today, they're gonna have to be as good of a seal of that era. And I think we're gonna keep investing in, I think we're gonna keep investing in the guys around, hopefully a lot more than we have been.

Like you're involved with exoskeletons, correct? Well, I don't know how I, I just ran a sub eight minute mile for the first time in my life. And I'm usually the guy who's wheezing to do a sub 10 minute mile. And last night I ran a sub eight mile in an exoskeleton that ran,

basically it ran out of thermal capacity two thirds of the way through the run. So the last third of the run I was actually going slower than I normally would run. But the first two thirds were so fast. Actually when I go home tonight, I'm going to be I normally would run. I think I'm going to run a sub-seven mile. Anyway, I'm like an out-of-shape fatty, and if I'm able to just put on an exoskeleton and run a seven-minute mile,

imagine what that could do on a Navy SEAL. The same thing for three night vision. Sure, it's white phosphor instead of green and it's a little higher res and a little higher game, but it's generationally, it's the same. Imagine what happens when you can take that Navy SEAL and you can put on a visor that gives him full peripheral vision at night in the thermal spectrum, the visible spectrum,

the ultraviolet spectrum, the hyper spectral spectrum. He's able to identify individual materials, components, vehicles, see all of his buddies, see all of the bad guys, and have information seamlessly shared between him and every other weapon and robot and vehicle on the battlefield. Like that is where the Navy SEAL is going to be

in just a few years. I think it's going to be hard for robots to compete with that guy. on the battlefield. on your actual motion, and then it tries to predict. It actually has an onboard AI algorithm that is trying to predict what you're doing, and then it applies force that matches. You use power steering, right? You make a motion, it feels that torque, and then it adds more power to it to zero it out. It's actually not that different than that. Imagine if you had power steering, but instead of just for turning a wheel and grinding your tires, imagine it was every joint on your body. So you say, okay, I'm lifting, I'm doing this, and it says, oh, he's trying to do that. I'm going to add more power in. There's more advanced techniques that start to actually read your muscles before they even move.

Because when you tell your muscles to move, it takes time for them to respond. That's going to be the future of exoskeleton. It's going to be measuring your body so that instead of there being a delay where I move, it feels it, and then it helps me, it's going to be seamlessly integrated with you. Maybe even starting to move your arm before your natural muscles are doing it. Wow. That's what, like, I'm, I'm, and like, the crazy thing is eventually, someday, and I think this is way out just for a variety

of basically invasive surgical reasons, eventually you'll be able to read those signals right from the brain directly. So Matt, like right now, you have a lot of latency in your motion. You don't perceive it. You think there's no latency in your body. There's actually a couple hundred milliseconds

of latency in your movements that your brain just ignores and tells you is fine. Imagine a world where you're wearing an exoskeleton where the moment your brain is telling your arm to move, the exoskeleton starts moving your arm. You could potentially make someone who's literally 10 times faster at moving or reacting. And again, do you see where I'm getting like,

that's gonna be the Navy seal of the future. And that guy is going to be a beast. And again, do you see where I'm getting? That's going to be the Navy SEAL of the future. And that guy is going to be a beast. Holy shit. I've actually got a very small scale version of stuff. And I hooked that up to another electrical actuator. You ever use like a tens unit for like therapy? So I hooked up something that's a lot like a tens unit, but it's just rigged a little differently.

So then instead of making your muscles vibrate, it is made to just trigger individual muscle groups. You know, like you can just basically make you, you know, pull this finger or pull that finger. And I made it so that whenever I even barely start to flex a muscle up here in my face, it sends a signal wirelessly to a patch I have on my arm that fully fires this tendon and makes me pull my trigger finger.

Now the thing is, if I do this normally, like if I normally am telling my trigger finger to go, that signal has to go from my brain down my spinal cord out through all these nervous cords out Into my arm that actually takes a really really long time. It's it's your it's your there's something called nervous transit velocity You're a nervous conduction velocity. It's how fast you can send signals down your peripheral nervous system by building a bypass for it I can make it where I can actually if I want to pull the trigger on my gun I can flex that muscle on my head, if I want to pull the trigger on my gun, I can flex that muscle on my head,

which is much closer to my brain, therefore a much, much shorter pathway. And I can actually shave a ton of latency off the delay between when I see something when I pull my trigger. All of a sudden, I've now reduced effectively, because you're from with like lock time in a firearm. It's like lock time is the time between when you pull a trigger and when the round is actually going.

And different, if you have like a really heavy hammer, you can have a higher lock time. It's if you're looking at a target, you're pulling that trigger, you have some inaccuracy that is caused purely by the lock time, when you told it to fire and when it actually fires. And you can learn it out to some degree

by kind of predicting all this together. I can not only be faster, I can even be more accurate by just removing that latency. Lock time, we pretend it's actually just the gun. Your real lock time is signal from your brain to when you pull the trigger to when the trigger reacts. And there's a lot of things we can do. So when I talked about biological modifications

and mechanical modifications, there's things that we're going to be able to do that are going to eventually have your brain, you know, telling you to fire some weapon. And the weapon will be fired and out the barrel and hitting the target before you would have, a traditional guy would have been able to even pull the trigger. So it's an exciting future. Wow. I'm totally mind blown, right? That's, holy shit. How long do you think it'll be before we see exoskeletons on the battlefield?

So I do have to admit that I have said in the past that exoskeletons, the time has probably come and gone. This is a public prediction that I've made. My belief was that exoskeletons were probably something that made sense in the 80s and the 90s if we would have invested in them. But that at this point we probably should just move to humanoid robotics and just have them remotely controlled by people. Like, I will say by the way, like less than a year, would be my estimation. A controlled robot. Now, they're going to be a little less cool than people expect.

It's not going to be like an Iron Man suit. It's more like a suit that maybe helps one or two of your joints, like that helps you run better, maybe to run faster, or maybe just to use less, so that you can run longer. I mean, I'm sure you were in situations where when you've liked it to have been able to go take a jog, carrying a whole bunch of stuff to a place a kilometer away and then get there and not be tired, that'd be a huge deal. and I'm carrying 300 pounds of vibranium armor and the bullets are blasting off me. I think it's going to be more like, hey, you can run up a whole flight of stairs

to the top of a 10 story building because all the power's cut and there's no elevators and you're going to step out on that last landing. You're like, oh yeah, that was a little tough as opposed to feeling like you want to collapse. And that's a huge deal. Eventually, I do think we will see the thing that everybody wants, which is you put on the suit to feeling like you want to collapse. that can do that can also kill you. Just think about it this way,

like a suit that basically helps out your legs, it's only as powerful as your legs are on average, you know, climbing up some stairs. So like, if it malfunctions, like you might hurt yourself, but you'll be okay. If you are building a suit that is capable of, you know, doing Ironman style, like I'm going to punch through this building

and walk through the brick wall opening, that's a suit where if it malfunctions, it could rip your arms out of their joints. And you really need to be, you really need to be careful when you're building something like that. It's not the type of thing that you build over a weekend. I mentioned earlier, like I'm modifying this exoskeleton tonight so that I can run faster. That's not the type of thing you do with an exoskeleton that is able to rip your limbs off. You know, it's a very different development process. so that I can run faster. or robots. robot bodies that are piloted by people. and you'll be, it's probably going to handle the leg logo motion because that's something you can't really remotely do very well.

It's going to have to use local sensors to scan the terrain and do a better job than you'd be able to see anyway. So imagine like downward shooting lidars, building a 3D model of all the terrain on what you need to avoid. And then everything on the top, you've got a guy who's just tele-operating the whole thing. So they'll be controlling these from a totally separate location. So casualties would be essentially zero. I will admit, there are problems with this. The reason you want to move to an AI brain eventually is largely because of communications links problems.

If I have a command center that has to talk to a robot, that means that all they have to do to make this robot stop working is jam that link. If they jam the link, the robot is like all of those battle droids in Star Wars Episode I. It's the humanoid robot demo with Optimus. I'm not trying to piss off Elon. All those demos with the robots pouring drinks for people and being robot attenders, those are all actually tele-operated. There's a guy who's doing what I just described, wearing a VR headset, wearing a motion capture suit, and he's pouring drinks for people, walking around,

doing all kinds of stuff. And yeah, that is definitely going to be a thing that our military is doing a lot of in just the next few years. Holy shit. you know, like that's going to be happening soon. Wow. Let's talk about. I don't publish it just for my own note keeping and entertainment, but I did write a bit years and years ago about a tier one operator who basically uses robotics

to continue operating even into his 70s and 80s. They'd be like, he's got a broken body, but he's still the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to his instincts and his knowledge and his knowledge and his ability to get stuff done. It's really interesting to imagine how that might actually work in the future, because if you've got a guy who's really good at remote-controlling robots,

it doesn't really matter if he's getting older and older and breaking down, at least not as much. So as long as your brain's there, I think people will still be useful. It's going to be a wild future. Wow. Let's talk about the missiles. How do those work? So the way I understand it, you're basically taking away missiles that don't need to expend come back and land. So there's a few things that we're doing. You're probably thinking of Roadrunner,

which is a reusable missile of sorts. Vertical takeoff and landing. It can go out, attack targets, and come back. And we have some versions that are suicide attack aircraft. We have other, like where they're carrying a bomb. We have others where they have payloads, where they can go out, do a mission, and come back. We're also building long-range cruise missiles. a coded laser target designator. Like in the past you would need somebody to say, get out there, shine a laser at the thing you want it to go after, and then it goes after that laser dot. Well what if instead you get a missile show up somewhere

and say, oh, that's a Li Yang destroyer. I know that the engine room is right there. And I know that the thinnest part of the deck is right there. If I approach it this angle and this speed from this direction, I can punch through the engine room and destroy engine one. And if that's successful, another one's going to come in behind me from the other side and destroy engine one.

And if that's successful, another one's going to come in behind me from the other side and destroy engine two. If I miss or I don't make it through, I'm going to have it instead go for engine one. And then the next one's going to go. That's the type of intelligent targeting that has been the stuff of science fiction until now. And now we just do it. Like we're doing this type of stuff in Russia right now, where we're hitting targets,

where they have jammed communications link that would make it impossible to remote control systems. And where it's at ranges where you can't get a person into these areas, like you can't get a JTAC forward to alas these Russian targets. They would, they'd mow you down with machine guns or land mines before you get even close. The other side of what we're doing with missiles,

and it's less interesting than the AI stuff, I know, but it's just manufacturing. or you get even close. a car. Like we're basically using, we're using processes, robots, assembly lines that you could use to build a Tesla. You could use it to build our submarine. Versus more traditional techniques that require huge teams of specialized human welders and huge pieces of infrastructure that allow you to really, really slowly build pressure vessels. Same thing with our missiles. Our missiles have 90% fewer parts than our competition. We've very aggressively designed them to have very few parts, to have those parts consolidated as much as possible into individual pressings or panels that look like, we might have one part that is 10 times as big as the parts that you would have in a competing system,

and it does all of these different things. And the reason that's important is because right now, in U.S. war games, we're predicting that we'll run out like a US war games against a hypothetical Chinese Chinese invasion scenario in Taiwan. We run out of missiles in less than eight days. Like we have eight days and then we are we're completely out. So eight days of pain for China doesn't mean very much to a country that thinks in a hundred year timelines. They're like, that's it? Like there'll be eight days of pain and then it will take the United States literally years to rebuild that arsenal. Oh shit, well, we could just go win.

Let's just go do it. Like, just put the cannon fodder out there, soak up the missiles and then we win because we have years to operate with impunity until they get their shit together. We have to fix this as a country. We have to get back to where things are actually manufacturable. As a country, we've slipped into this problem

where we build so few arms that we build really expensive, really exquisite things that take years to complete. We need to get back into more of a World War II mentality where we can build weapons faster than we can use them. Because now China has to think about day eight, day 80, day 800, day 8,000. That's how you're gonna deter them. They need to look and see that you are a continuously

present adversary, that there is a credible threat of violence that extends beyond the weekend. That's the only way we're gonna keep them from running rough shot over everybody. And this may be more political, but I'll say it anyway. Taiwan is not the end state for China. And all the people who think that this fight over Taiwan is the real fight are missing the point.

They believe that the Philippines is their territory. They believe that Korea is their territory. They also believe that North Korea is their territory, but they like them as a buffer state with South Korea. But that would change the moment they could actually capture South Korea. And they even think that most of Japan belongs to them. They think that it's theirs.

They've tried over and over for thousands of years. And even today, like even publicly, they won't say they own all of Japan, but they do maintain they own part of Japan. Like, no, no, maybe we say they own all of Japan, but they do maintain they own part of Japan. Like, no, no, maybe we don't own all of it, but like that part, that's definitely ours. It is really dangerous to let people with millennia long ambitions of ruling those areas

go unchecked because like, even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, which you should because our whole modern economy runs on chips from them. And until we figure out how to make them better or as good ourselves, Because even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, People like talking about the AI part of the missiles, but honestly, if our missiles had no AI and were just able to make them 10 times faster, that's pretty good all on its own, even if we were doing nothing else. Geez, do any of our adversaries have this type of technology that you're developing? China definitely has the technology in terms of manufacturing prowess. They know how to make stuff fast. They know how to make it cheap. They have automated cruise missile production facilities

that are capable of turning out more cruise missiles in a week than the entire United States turns out in a year. I mean, like it is, do you know the multiple for Chinese shipbuilding capacity? So China has more shipbuilding capacity than us. They could build ships a lot faster than us. If we start blowing up boats in the Pacific, they're going to be able to build more.

How much more shipbuilding capacity do you think they have? How much more? Five times, you think it's five times more, you think it's a hundred times more, what do you think it is? I honestly have no idea. Make a crazy guess. 20 times.

It's 350 times. 300 and 50 times. They have 350 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States. An equivalent ship? So, no, so it's worse. People will try to argue with me that, and sometimes they'll say,

but Palmer, all of that is commercial shipbuilding capacity. So it's unfair to compare, you know, all of China with all of the United States because you're counting all of China's commercial shipping. But you know why it's fair? Because in China, the law says that all commercial vessels have to meet military standards. If you are building a roll on, roll off passenger ferry

for transporting people and cars, you have to have deck plate supports that are strong enough to transport tanks and armored vehicles on. They are requiring even their civilian vessels to all be military standards compliant because they foresee a world where they're going to nationalize their entire domestic fleet

and use it in a whole of China fight against the West. And it's funny because people are like, oh, they're just doing that just in case, just in case. It's not just in case. China understands how much more it costs for every single ferry to support military operations. They are taking that cost on because they expect to do it. They're not gonna basically spend billions of dollars

for absolutely no reason in an economy that knows how to cut corners like no other. Like they are doing this because they believe it's a core part of their strategy. So yes, they're not quite equivalent. Like I would say US ship, like ship for ship, our ships are better. But quantity has a quality all on its own.

And when you're talking about a 350X difference, people will say, oh, well, the Chinese Navy is only twice the size of our Navy. Well, yeah, today, but on day 10, they're going to be probably a lot bigger. And then every day we're going to crank, like we're going to crank out a ship a month and they're going to put out 350 ships a month.

You can see where this just becomes an impossible problem for the United States. And so what really happens is we become an ally that is unreliable, that says we're there for our allies but only in the way that people say they stand for things. It's very easy for us to say, oh, of course we stand with Japan. Okay, well, what's that gonna mean

when every single one of our ships is at the bottom of the ocean and we have one new ship coming off the line a month? It's a meaningless promise. And so our adversaries see that and a lot of them are going to our allies and China is saying, hey, you know the math, you can do the math,

you need to end up in the Sinosphere. And like, and the US can say they love you all they want. Reality is they can't back up. They can't cash those checks. And so my belief is that the United States should stop being the world police. We need to stop sending our people all over the world to fight everyone's wars for them.

And we need to become the world's gun store. We need to just sell them the guns that they need to defend themselves. And we need to make sure that we actually keep those shelves stocked. Because if like, look at what's happening in Ukraine. We're not sending them more stuff partly for, you know, various partisan political reasons and strategic reasons, but we're also out of stuff to send to them.

Like we were out of artillery shells that we can spare to Ukraine. We're out of a lot of, like, we don't have any javelins to send to Ukraine. We're out of a lot of, like we don't have any javelins to send to Ukraine. We're all out. And so how can our allies stay allied with us if they think that they're gonna get into a conflict

and we're just say, oh, sorry. Actually we forgot how to bake things. We forgot like a hundred years ago, sorry. Geez, do they have any of the technology? So manufacturing wise, which I just talked about, they have any of the technology? So manufacturing-wise, which I just talked about, they're ahead of us. You're talking about like AI, the sensors, do they have that?

Luckily we're ahead on that. Like the United States is ahead of China on a lot of advanced sensing technology and a lot of advanced AI. Now China, like don't underestimate them. You know, we've seen like with DeepSeek and stuff, they're doing very interesting things in the AI realm. I don't think that we're like a decade ahead of them in technology. We have, what I'm doing at Andoril is ahead of what China's doing in most ways by a few years.

But that's it. I'm a few years ahead of them. I hate to admit this, but I was part of the problem for a long time. I made millions of virtual reality headsets in China. That's where we made Oculus Rift. That's where we made Gear VR. That's where we made Oculus Quest. Millions and millions of those things. And I know how good they are, not just at manufacturing,

but at the actual technology development side. They understood exactly what we were doing. They knew how we were doing it. They were able to we were doing. Now, I think they don't have a culture that's particularly good at leaping beyond what we're doing, but you don't have to leap beyond what we're doing to be a threat to us. If they're really good at manufacturing

and they have way more people and they have tech that is about as good as ours, that's all you need to win. Yeah, I mean, it's my understanding, isn't it Chinese law that anything that gets developed in that country that could help their military has to be. That's right. Has to be shared.

So you're talking about a particular provision of a policy, a legal policy that they call civil military fusion. Anything that is civilian is inherently military as well. And if the military wants to use it, they have all rights to it. You cannot deny it to them. You cannot tell them no. You. You cannot deny it to them. You cannot tell them no. You cannot refuse to sell it to them.

They are basically saying the military apparatus and the civilian apparatus are one and the same. And you may, you cannot operate within the Chinese social contract unless you equally support both. I'm actually glad that the United States has given companies the freedom. Like, you know, I'm a libertarian leaning guy.

I think it is good when you have the right to self-determination. If I decide that I want to be a pacifist and never sell a single thing to the United States military, I should absolutely have that right. I think that people should berate me for it. I think that's the wrong opinion. But isn't it good that you're allowed to make that decision

that the state can't come and say, you have to work for me if I want you to. I'm glad about that. But we have to recognize that there are disadvantages to that. One disadvantage has been the way that the United States technology industry has treated the United States of America

for the last 20 years. I mean, I know it sounds crazy today when you have Mark Zuckerberg begging Congress to ban TikTok and you have all these tech companies saying that China is a huge threat to them, but let's get in the time machine for a second. Let's travel back 10 years to 2015. What was going on in 2015? Google was trying to get into China. Facebook was trying to get into China. Microsoft was trying to get into China. China had convinced all of these companies and more, Apple too, that they were ascending to be the world's dominant economic superpower,

that they were going to surpass the US in short order, and that these companies could make trillions of dollars by working with China the way China wanted them to work. So making, for example, have you heard about Project Dragonfly? That was Google's project to make a censored version of Google search engine for the Chinese market. That would appease the Chinese authorities. It was used to censor search results and also collect and report on information on any dissidents to pipeline that to the Chinese government. So anyone who would be using it to try and search for things they shouldn't,

it was going to alert the Chinese authorities and tell them how to find them. You basically had, for a period of about a decade, a total abdication of responsibility on the part of our tech companies to do anything for the United States. They were all refusing to work with our military, protesting our military. Google famously pulled out of the Project Maven contract

because their employees were angry about it. That was a project to use Google's AI to do better targeting that would better avoid civilian casualties. And their employees protested and they gave in. The executive says, okay, we won't do it. We're going to pull out of working with the military. Actually, YouTube banned the Anderil YouTube account.

About two years into our company, they banned it. They said that our company promoted harm of people. And we said, guys, like that's what war is. Like it's either threatening you're gonna harm somebody or actually doing it. Like that's the whole game. And they said, sorry, this is not allowed under our threat of harm policy.

And they didn't actually unban us until years later when they, in the midst of this new re-banned war, under our threat of harm policy. And they didn't actually unban us until years later when they, in the midst of this new realignment of tech with our military and our government, when they launched the new Google Federal team doing government work and they realized they needed to integrate with something that we made. And I told them, guys, I'm not integrating

with Google Federal until you unban our YouTube account. Like, I'm not that cucked, right? Could you imagine what a cuck I'd be to let them integrate with our weapons systems, even though they literally banned me from the largest video platform and deplatformed me from the largest video platform in the world because some shitty pencil pushing blue haired person

in San Francisco doesn't like my politics or my company. To their credit, they did unban us. We've been unbanned for years. So like good for Google. The point I'm trying to make is, people are coming back around and they're starting to say they're gonna work with the military.

Google is saying that, Meta is saying that, Microsoft is saying that. Apple is not saying that. Pay attention to that. But there was this period of time where we ran a very dangerous experiment, which was decoupling our most innovative,

most valuable companies from the military entirely. And that's an experiment we've never run as a country. Has there ever been a time where our most innovative companies didn't work with the US military? Could you imagine how World War II would have gone? Could you imagine if General Motors and IBM and General Electric had said, World War II would have gone. Imagine if Zenith and RCA and Westinghouse had said, you know, we love America in an abstract hypothetical way, but actually we're going to team up with the Soviet Union

and we're going to manufacture all of our chips there. Like, could you imagine what would have happened to America? And so I was, when I was in Silicon Valley, this was one of the things that it was rolling through my head was, oh my God, I'm sitting amongst the best technologists in the world and none of them care about our military. None of them care about America

and they're thrilled to work with China. I'm so glad that China, I think China has actually made a misstep and I'll end this rant with this. China has made a misstep that we should take advantage of. They tricked all of our tech companies and our media companies into believing that China was this revenue opportunity.

And so they basically caused our technology innovation economy to decouple from our government and our country and our national responsibilities. What they should have done is actually given them a slice of the Chinese pie. They should have let Google in. They should have let Facebook in. They should have given them some money

and then a little more and a little more and a little more to keep them on the line. You know, like basically just to string them along, keep them in the communist bucket. But what they did instead was they eventually said, ha ha, we tricked you. We're not gonna allow you in. And we're gonna subsidize ByteDance.

And also ByteDance is gonna sell TikTok to you guys. And it's gonna take over your entire social media industry. And that was when all the tech companies flipped. When they realized that China was not their friend. And so Xi is making a tactical error. He basically should have kept controlling them by allowing them to get a few dollars here and there. We should take advantage to the fullest

of this mistake that he's made. And when people have asked me, Palmer, why are you forgiving Meta or Google or Microsoft or Apple? Why are you letting them get away with changing their allegiance from China to the US? My point is we need to let them get away with changing their allegiance from China to the US? My point is we need to let them get away with it. Like the whole point should be to persuade them

to do the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons. And what we need to do is take advantage of this moment in time and say, hell yeah, you're on our side, let's go. And get them so integrated that they don't really have a chance to change their mind in the future. Cause if we push them away and refuse to allow them to engage,

they're going to eventually divorce themselves from the US interests again. Wow, that's smart. That's really smart. It is interesting to think about the Apple one in particular. Yeah. But Tim Cook, I have nothing against the guy personally, but if I were him, I would feel a little humiliated

that I can't say anything about China, despite supposedly on paper being one of the most powerful men in the world. Like he speaks out against climate change and he speaks out in favor of diversity. And he puts all this money into like ads for mother earth and he tweets about how we all need to respect the rights of black people in America.

And we need to solve these blog forms perhaps. So he's politically engaged. Imagine what would happen if he said something like, I believe concentration camps are bad. Like China on account of the Uyghur Muslim issue would immediately lock them out of the country. Like he can't say that. Isn't that crazy?

Like the most powerful executive in the country running our most valuable company on account of the whims of a foreign ruler can't say things like human rights are good, concentration camps are bad. I think you probably shouldn't lock people up for their religion. Like he can only comment on our domestic issues

because here our government says you're allowed to say whatever you want about anything. And if I were him, I'd feel a little humiliated about that. I'd be like, I'm not the big boss man. I'm not actually powerful. I'm actually just the stooge of the country that makes the thing that I sell. Cause they can't do it.

If he did this, like imagine what would happen if Xi locked Apple out of China. Two trillion dollars in market cap, gone just like that. Almost everything they make is made in China, made with Chinese parts. Like that would be the end of Apple. The most valuable company in American history exists day to day at the whims

of the dictator that runs China. Isn't that just like an insane situation? Could you imagine if that had happened during the Cold War? Imagine if the Kremlin could have just like put out a single legal document that would have destroyed, what was the biggest company during the Cold War in America? What would it have been?

Man, I have no idea. Would it have been an oil company? Would it have been a manufacturing company? I don't know, like, pick any of them. Whether it's General Motors or Exxon Mobil or, I don't know, who else was really big back then? What was the smoking company? Marlboro?

Marlboro is owned by somebody, isn't it? Like, imagine if that could have just been shut down because a dictator in Russia is like, oh, I don't like you anymore. I'm going to destroy you. Anyway, and during the Cold War, we understood this at a political level too. Not to bring it back to Trump, but like Trump instinctively understands this

in a way that the globalist elites do not. They thought that outsourcing everything was just a great thing. It's amazing. They're against tariffs. It's like, why would you make it in the less efficient economy? Why wouldn't you make it wherever it wants to be made according to the global interdynamics? And the problem is they forgot that once you can't make anything and once your companies

don't make anything You have no leverage and you've just handed it away to everyone else like Trump understands that if we don't make things in America We're actually just everyone else's bitch And like what like what what's the price on that? It's easy to complain about tariffs making cars more expensive because the parts can't come from China about tariffs making cars more expensive because the parts can't come from China. But like what value do you put on the fact that a dictator in China could destroy our economy overnight

by signing a few pieces of paper? Like, isn't that a situation that we should just be like humiliated by every day as a nation? Like shouldn't we be wake up saying, holy shit, like everything I'm enjoying is because Xi hasn't decided to screw us yet. And Xi is gonna do it. Like when he, people think that the first missile to fly

is going to be a Chinese ship firing at a US ship in the straight of Taiwan. That's not the first missile. The first missile is gonna be Xi calling up of his buddies in the United States and saying, the United States and saying, I'm going to destroy your economy. I will do it tomorrow.

I will kick all of you out. I will give away all your special waivers. what he has in his quiver. It's heavy stuff, right? And the worst part is that, not to be a caricature, nobody's talking about this. When was the last time you heard this discussed in an open Does anyone dispute that Xi can just destroy Apple? I don't think anyone disputes that. Does anyone dispute that Xi could literally destroy millions of US jobs and trillions, if not tens of trillions

in market cap literally overnight with the stroke of his pen? Like, I don't know. I feel like maybe how people felt a little bit during the Cold War, you know, just being under the pressure of, oh man, the nukes could launch at any moment. It feels like, it feels a little bit like some lesser version of that. So yeah, I'm a libertarian who's pro-tariffs now

is the real conclusion. I'm pro-tariffs until we have our own house in order. Like, I like, I'm not a fan of tariffs. I mean, how long would it even take to get our house in order? Not even that long. I mean, you've probably seen what people say, oh, well, maybe tariffs work in theory,

but I mean, it'll take years or decades to set up factories. That's bogus. Look at what we did when we transformed this country during World War II. We went from basically being a mercantilist, quasi agrarian society, to being the world's most powerful manufacturing hub in like a year and a half, two years.

Are you really telling me we couldn't do it again if it wasn't a priority? I just don't believe it. It's easier than ever to set up a factory. I've done it in China. It is easier than ever to set up a factory. I've done it in China. Like it's, it is easier than ever to set up advanced manufacturing. It's just a matter of will.

And you also need to staff it. Like, you know what we've done? We've built a country where through globalism, no smart kid wants to be a manufacturing process engineer. For example, is there any world where Palmer Lucky, let's say I was 18 years old, I'm deciding what my major is. Why in the world would I major in anything to do with manufacturing, knowing that there's hardly

any manufacturing going on in my country, right? If I'm a smart kid, I'm going to go work in finance or biotech or what else are kids doing these days? I guess maybe working in video games. If we don't manufacture here, then our smartest people aren't going to want to work in manufacturing. And so like, this is a problem that's like,

at least when we got out of manufacturing stuff and call it like the globalized decline starting in the 90s to now, at least back in the 90s, we still had all the leftover people from the Cold War. Now they're all retired. And now we don't actually have anybody. So like this is a problem where we can build

the factories quickly, but the hardest part is going to be training the kids. Like we're going to need to basically get serious about training people to run factories well efficiently using modern techniques. And we do have a lack of those. I am a big, have you heard of the idea of defector visas? No.

It's one of my pet political ideas. During the cold war, we gave a lot of visas to people to come to the United States, to immigrate here from hostile powers like the Soviet Union, if they were in a critical role in those countries. Everybody said, you're important over there. You are one of like the puzzle pieces that keeps everything held together

for their missile program. Come over to the United States, we'll give you a job at NASA and we'll give you a visa. You can come over, you can get an American life, an American wife, it'll be fantastic. You're gonna love it. I think we need to start doing that again.

I think that that's one of the ways that we can beat China because there's a lot of people in China, they're there, but they don't really want to be. There's a lot of people who hate what China has become. I would love it if we could say, you know what? We need a lot more people in America who know how to manufacture. I want American jobs, right?

To be clear, I'm not saying we need to import people because we can't survive without immigration. I'm not one of those people. But if we can steal their very best manufacturing engineers, deprive China of those people, and then put them to work here, helping us catch up with China on manufacturing, I mean, that's a great trade.

Let's haul over their best plant managers, and then let's have a thousand jobs created by each of those guys here in America. I think we need to bring back defector visas. We need to own it. And it seems like a type of immigration that even the really anti-immigration people can get behind.

Because the point is like, look, we're not trying to bring in millions of fruit pickers. We're trying to steal the very best people from our greatest foe. Surely we can agree that that's usually worth doing. It's better for us to have those people for them, for them to be running the missile factory that's going to blow up our name.

And there was a little bit of a debate on that not too long ago, correct? If you do like the skilled immigration versus not. So that's true. The difference there is that H1Bs are about whether or not they're,, it's on theory. Of course, there's so much H-1B abuse. You would not believe what I saw

when I was in Silicon Valley. It's crazy. It is insane. It's obviously a program to try and replace US workers with basically slave labor that can't ever escape. It's like, H-1B abuse is crazy. But in theory, H-1Bs are to create a job for an immigrant if there is not a person who could be hired to do that job in the United States.

A defector visa adds an additional requirement. It has to be something that they care about that you're ripping away. So like, it's not just that there's a need for them here. It's that it's going to hurt China by taking them. If China has a million people that do something, like let's say that we need more rice pickers here and China's got more rice pickers. If China has a million people that do something, let's say that we need more rice pickers here

and China's got more rice pickers, China's got plenty of rice pickers. Taking a rice picker's not going to hurt. Taking the head of an advanced silicon manufacturing facility that can make cutting edge computer graphics chips, that is going to really, really hurt them. So I say that was the part of the debate that I didn't see present,

is using immigration not just as a tool to help the United States, but to harm our adversaries. to really, really hurt them. who will cause catastrophic consequences for their home country if they leave. Like here's like a fun one. Think about the guys who are running the. I mean it would be like if China plucked you. Yes, like that's a great example. Imagine if I had no national allegiance and they made an offer over there

and I really wanted to live in China. And they just, yeah, they got rid of me. That would cause so much downstream damage. And the best, like I don't want to live in China. And they just, yeah, they got rid of me. That would cause so much downstream damage. And the best, like, I don't want to go to China. In fact, my company is sanctioned by China on account of our sales to Taiwan. And so if I go to China or Hong Kong, I'll be arrested. It's fantastic.

Also Russia or Belarus. If I go to Belarus, I'll be arrested. I would imagine. But- How do you know that? Oh, they put it out publicly. Russia has the so-called poison list, where they say, here are the individuals

that are under extreme sanctions, personally, individually, as individuals. And Belarus also recognizes the, I think Belarus and maybe one, maybe one other, one other, like, weirdo Baltic break-off. I can't remember what it was, but there's a handful of countries in the world where I literally can't go. one other like weirdo Baltic break-off. I can't remember what it was, but there's a handful of countries in the world where I literally can't go. But think about not even just China.

I actually have the notice framed in my office. I was just going to say, I want to get that, have you sign it, and I'm going to get that, have you sign it, I know that today that sounds like not that interesting, but this was nine years ago when everyone thought AI was crazy. Xi Jinping said that too. So, right. And like you have all these world leaders who are saying things.

Like, could you imagine, let's say like, could you imagine like Hillary Clinton having an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago? Absolutely not. Could you imagine Joe Biden, like an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago? Absolutely not. Could you imagine Joe Biden like putting a stake in the ground and it's like, of course not. It's like, anyway, even in going China,

like look at Venezuela. Let's take whoever's running their like oil and gas machinery over there. Imagine what would happen if we identified their top 10 most competent people who are running their oil and gas organizations. And we gave them all defector visas and said, come to America and you can work at ExxonMobil

on like industrial refinement systems. And we're going to pay you twice as much as you make in Venezuela. You would destroy the whole Venezuela economy overnight. And you just have to take like 10 people. So yeah, immigration is a sword. We need to be doing way more of this. Because an American passport is worth its weight in diamonds. Right?

It is so valuable to these people. They desperately want it. Culturally, we've dominated the world, right? Everyone loves America. Even the people who hate America love America. Even the people who hate America love our movies, love our music. They all want to date American women.

Like let's take advantage of that. Let's talk about Anderol in the IVAS program. The IVAS program. So, when is this coming out? I don't know yet. Alright, roughly. Roughly. Probably in a couple weeks. So, IVAS is a program that is the modern instantiation of a very old idea.

This idea that you are going to augment the vision of soldiers and give them superhuman perception abilities. The idea is you can see at night, you can see thermal signatures, you can see hyperspectral signatures, you have extraordinary superhuman hearing. You're able to mark targets in the environment without projecting anything in the environment. You can seamlessly see in your heads-up display where all of your friends are, where all of your foes are, where all of the innocents and non-combatants are,

and have that all just seamlessly presented to you as if you're Superman. You know, you can see through walls, you can see through walls, you can see through night, you can see through fog, you are Superman. This idea's been around for a very long time, of putting a heads-up display, a computer, and a radio on every soldier. You can even go back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, and that was really the concept behind the mobile infantry.

They're wearing these kind of mech suits with fighter jet style heads up displays that show them where all their targets are, that show them where all of the good guys are, that help them do ballistics calculations, showing where bullet impact is going to be in a much more intelligent way than just, you know, putting a red dot that's coaxially aligned. But actually saying like, here is the impact point

factoring in the wind, factoring in your your motion factoring in what the other guy is doing People have tried this over and over again through history and the text just never quite been ready And they've also not maybe worked on it in quite the right way But most importantly nobody's ever built a software back end that could make it work even if the helmets were okay They didn't have this kind of system whether it's AI or something else They could understand the whole battle space taking in sensors from everybody They didn't have this kind of system, has never really been properly accomplished. And so you have programs like Future Warrior and Net Warrior and Connected Soldier and Land Warrior.

You have all these different programs where the army has tried over and over. IVAS is sort of the latest attempt at this kind of individual infantry vision augmentation system. When the IVAS contract was first awarded years ago, it was a really big deal and I was really excited about it. an augmentation system. I was not going to be able to win this contract. But as an AR-VR guy, I was really excited that the Army was moving in that direction. And they were putting a lot of resources behind it.

IVAS is a $22 billion contract. It's enormous. The plan is not to put this on the heads of one person or, you know, one top tier unit. It's to put it on the heads of every single person in the Army who's bearing a rifle Anyone who's making contact with the enemy is going to have superhuman augmented vision that allows them to never miss Anything never miss their shot never hit the wrong thing

You you probably more than almost any anybody can probably understand what an incredible tool that would be yeah anybody can probably understand what an incredible tool that would be. The problem is that even IVAS has been plagued by many of the problems that have hit a lot of these other systems. You didn't have the backend that could provide all of that data to make it a useful thing rather than just a heads-up display. the hardware working as well as it could have. There were a lot of soldier reports that it was making people sick, that it was making people dizzy, that it was causing signature problems. There were quotes from soldiers in evaluations who said, this is going to get me killed.

It was just, it was running you a lot of issues. Anyway, the punch line is, over the last year, I've been working on an angle to integrate Lattice, our AI system, to build the IVAS product. We did a soldier touchpoint with it. tracking information into their existing IVAS heads of display. We did a soldier touch point with it. They said, oh my God, this is incredible. I can see drones that are coming to attack me.

I can see where I need to go to be safe in an amount of time that is reasonable before that drone actually gets to me. Really, really powerful stuff. As of just about now, Androil is taking over the Ivas program as the prime. Microsoft is transferring all of the employees, hardware, IP, facilities, everything to Androil. We are now going to be the prime on the Ivas program. to Andriol. our vision augmentation system that has ever been built in terms of resolution, in terms of field of view, in terms of graphical fidelity, in terms of sensor quality and what you can do with those sensors.

It is a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus. It is a jump that I think cannot be overstated. And I am very aligned with the Army's vision in terms of this being something that should be on everybody, but I think my vision goes maybe even a little further. I don't just want this on every person

who's carrying a rifle. I want it on every logistician, every load master, every rotary wing pilot, every fixed wing pilot. I want it deployed with everybody across every service, every branch so that every person is eyes for everyone else. If you can- What about police? I think that police is going to be a very interesting,

it's going to be an interesting but adjacent challenge. So for example, police, you're trying to make something that they can wear all day, every day, and they're also interacting face to face with people. Like, let me put it this way. You can't put a RoboCop helmet on most police officers. It's too heavy, it's too much protection, Let me put it this way. that is still running Lattice. and it's something I'm very excited about. Also, like you look at things like body cameras, like you could make body cameras that are way better that do with 360 degree capture.

And right now a body camera for a law enforcement officer is really just a tool that gets his ass in hot water, right? Like that's basically his job. Nobody, not enough people look at footage from these body cams and say, oh wow, this guy was totally in the right in what he did, right? If the footage exonerates their actions,

then everyone ignores it and the media says nothing. And if it shows that he made any mistake, then they're going to hoist him by his own petard. What I wanna see is body cameras that are a tool that law enforcement officers are excited to use. I want something that's watching my six. I want something that's watching for threats. I want something that's watching for threats that I'm not seeing.

I want basically a guardian angel on my shoulder that is able to do what backup would normally do for me. And at a superhuman level. Imagine if you could have not just eyes in the back of your head, but what if you could have a hundred eyes all throughout your head, all looking out into the world and at the slightest disturbance,

be like, holy shit, I think someone's opening that window and firing, like they're aiming a gun from that window. It should be telling me not like, hey, you know, be aware that someone might be shooting you. It should be giving you even more direct commands than that. Like it should like throw a red threat alert and show you a direction you need to throw yourself immediately to not get shot, to get behind cover.

Like, you're going to see very tight integration between man and machine on these things. Anyway, I-VAS is very much a war fighter oriented system, and it's oriented towards the things that people at the tip of the spear are doing. I think you're going to see similar ideas, but oriented around maybe a different form factor for law enforcement. What does it look like? What does it look like? You see similar ideas, but oriented around maybe a different form factor for law enforcement. What does it look like? One of my beliefs with the previous IVAS system, it was not very tightly integrated into the helmet.

So you wear your ballistic helmet and it basically straps on top of it. You clip it on the brim here, you run a strap to the back. and misbalanced, where it's really, really torquing your neck. The thing that I'm building is an all-up integrated ballistic shell that integrates hearing protection, hearing augmentation, vision protection, vision augmentation, all into one seamless ballistic shell that protects you from air bursts, direct fire rounds, blast and concussion, the whole thing in one integrated, seamless product. And I'm not quite ready to show the actual thing, but true to Andral product company fashion,

we've been investing a ton of resources in this for years at this point. So I knew that I wanted this to happen years ago. I wasn't sure if I would able to make it happen, but we started putting millions of dollars into this years ago so that if it I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it happen, sensors, all of the different compute and vision augmentation systems all integrated into one thing is going to be done at the end of March. So right now we're basically in systems tests where you have individual systems that we are you know doing development and testing of but the first fully integrated helmet with all of this stuff actually working, like actually working tied together with lattice, feeding tracks, like that's all going to be done in March. And like just to like actually working tied together,

tied together with Lattice, feeding tracks, that's all going to be done in March. And just to give you an example of how useful this might be, if you want to market target for somebody else, you'd have to use a laser, right? What if you could market digitally, and you don't emit any signature for anyone like you could just do this with this tech. Imagine that you're doing some kind of pincer

and you have some guys over here, some guys over here. And I can't see a guy behind that building, but you can. If you're seeing him, it's taking that track, it's taking that enemy mark and it's now putting it into my vision. I can now see through the building, through the wall, and I can see the guy coming around the corner before he's there.

Could you? They're all talking to each other. It's all continuously, and it's not just the helmets, you're also, anything that's seemed in the lattice is talking to you. So if there's a droid overhead that sees a guy five clicks out that way, coming up a hill, and he thinks he's gonna set up

on top of that hill and pop you, imagine if it sees him and notifies you, you look at him coming over a hill and he thinks he's going to set up on top of that hill and pop you. Imagine if it sees him, it notifies you, you look at him coming over that hill and you bring your rifle on target. Literally the moment he clears, you're taking out that threat. That's the type of kind of combined sensing and combined arms tactics that this enables. It's going to make robots and people work together so seamlessly, like they're just one cohesive, effective unit. And like, this is also the way that I think you're going to have, you know, robot dogs, robot soldiers integrated with human force. Imagine if you see

a guy who's, you know, running around a building, you lose sight of him, you can't deal with him because you've got something else. What if I can now task another robot and say, hey, just stay on that. Don't let that guy get into a position where he can fire at me. And if it looks like he's going to, let me know and we'll make him a priority. Now I don't have to spend my very limited vision processing

and engagement capability, just tracking that potential threat who might be running away or might be just repositioning. Like, isn't it great if I can just tell the drone overhead, hey, watch that guy. If he's really just running away in his sandals, like, I don't care about that right now. Maybe we're gonna go track him down later,

but I don't really care about it right now. Today, it's really hard to make that work. You end up with people getting basically pulled onto all these different tasks, and they have to make split-second decisions because they don't have unlimited bandwidth. When you have computers watching all these different tasks and they have to make split-second decisions because they don't have unlimited bandwidth. When you have computers watching all these sensors and you have an unlimited amount of attention that a computer can give, you can have that computer doing everything for you.

You can say, watch every single one of those windows and watch every single one of those doors and just let me know if I need to worry about it. I got a question. Fire away. That's fucking amazing, by the way. It's going to be so good. But would you be able to, would there be any way to do, let's say something like the Bitlodden rate. Yeah.

Would there be a way to integrate some type of facial recognition? So if it was a capture kill mission, or potentially a hostage rescue, would the system, would there be a way a capture kill mission or potentially a hostage rescue. Would the system, would there be a way to basically identify, hey, this is, that's the hostage. You know, that stuff can get tricky depending on how they're dressed,

what their ethnicity is. I think, so I'll be honest. I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition, mostly because the situations where it works, I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition, mostly because the situations where it works, I believe, are pretty limited. And if you're wrong, it's such a spooky thing. What if it tells you the wrong thing? How do you delegate responsibility for that? Yeah. wall-penetrating radar systems that are flooding that whole area with RF energy, so that I can actually see people moving around inside the buildings behind the walls.

If I can do that, then I can, like, if I'm a hostage, I can probably guess, like, a guy up against the wall, you know, who's staying there even when shit's going down, probably not someone I need to worry about, as much as the guys who all of a sudden start scrambling around like flies the moment that we land in the yard. So you're going to have a pretty good idea even just from shit like that. But if it were me, my understanding is during the Bin Laden raid, there was a live video the moment that we land in the yard. I would love to see a situation where you basically have the feed from everyone's cameras being fed back to a talk. And you've got a bunch of analysts in there who have seen this guy a hundred thousand times

on every bit of one, on all their intel. They've built a pattern of life on this guy. They know what he's wearing every day when he goes to take a piss in the yard. Like I would want a guy where instead of facial recognition trying to make a guess, I can look at somebody and there's like 10 angels over my shoulder in the form of human intel analysts who will say,

that's him, that's the guy that you want. I mean, there could be other things. Let's say, let me give you another example. Maybe there's a CIA asset that's on the ground or on the target at the time of the raid. That's gonna be for us. So, you know, or you have the bad guy's phone, you know, at the time of the raid. Or you have the bad guy's phone,

and it's just constantly tracking his phone. Or the CIA asset has some type of a beacon that appears into the imagery that you're looking at. It just helps with the. but it's presenting him with, hey, that's the Target, we're tracking him. What I'm, maybe I'm misspeaking here. So I'm talking about- I might just be misunderstanding. I'm talking about, okay, let's say it's, I don't know. It's the Target's doctor who is reporting to the agency and he's the one that has the go switch that's saying,

he's fucking here, now's the time to do the head I'm on target. Yep. I'm in the same room as him. Yep. Don't fucking shoot me. I look just like everybody Oh, I you're saying so kind of marker so that we know that it's yes, that's super easy I mean like you basically just so like we eagle eye you actually have that inherently all the helmets I can't talk about how they do it because you know, mm-hmm not great information to be out there With Eagle Eye, you actually have that inherently. If I look over into those bushes and my guys are over there, it's popping up their names above their heads. Well, I don't mean they couldn't be wearing the helmet because they're undercover.

Yeah, and what I'm saying is it would be trivially easy to make something where if you know what the guy looks like and you know what he's wearing, yeah, you could have it just scanning for that. And it's looking like I'm all, you know, it's like man in doctor in white lab coat. And it's like it's Dr. Farij in the white lab coat and he's going to be wearing. Farij in the white lab coat

and he's going to be wearing his tortoiseshell glasses. That is something you could definitely do. That is something you could definitely do. The situation you're talking about, that's even a little different than facial recognition specifically. I'm actually a huge fan of height recognition. When I say height, it's not even height, it's actually skeletal recognition. Face recognition is hard because you need a good capture, it needs to be relatively dead on, it needs to be lighting is good enough. between different people on their skeletal pose. So like if I have a drone that's way overhead and it sees some guy walking through a doorway,

especially if I know how big that doorway is, I can take that video, run it back, and I could basically build a model of how long his wrist to arm joint to shoulder distances are. And we're all different. Like we're all uneven too. Like my arms are slightly uneven. If I can basically say, oh look, it's a six foot one guy

with an arm that's two inches shorter on this side and he leans a little bit to this side. Like you can be pretty freaking sure that's the same guy that you saw get into the car. Stuff like that is paired with facial recognition a lot more powerful and what you're describing, it's like almost like clothing recognition. You know, it's like, yeah, he's got a white lab coat,

he's got the glasses, and he's got the face, and he's got the hair, and like, if you have all of that, but the guy is only like four feet tall, then it would say, oh, that's not Dr. Farage. It doesn't, I don't care what his face looks like. Yeah, basically I'm just looking at like an identifier, something to identify him and show his face. Now, are you imagining, and you're imagining

that this is like happening on the fly, like we can't give him a beacon or something ahead of time? Because if he has a beacon, it's really easy. If we can give him- Now, are you imagining, and you're imagining There's so many ways. That's cocaine. you know, dirt to a normal person. some of the right compound on their head, and you can have a system just see that and say, oh, it's that guy. We're going to outline anyone who has this shit on their forehead. We're going to outline their whole body in blue as a hostage. and thinking about it from a more big army versus special tactics. I mean, it'd be, I mean, well, that's the world I come from. We'll have to bring you out once we have the functioning system.

Bring me out. I'd love to help develop it. Well, the cool thing is, I talked earlier about Lattice. The goal is to take, maybe you can see where my grand scheme is all coming together. When I started Andoril, we said we're going to save taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. see where my grand scheme is all coming together here. But I remember I talked earlier about how Lattice, we're basically taking all this expertise of the world's best operators and boiling it down into an AI model that can help you. Imagine if you're an operator who's wearing something like Eagle Eye, Ivas.

And imagine if I not only have a system that is watching my six and telling me what's going on, imagine if it can look at an aircraft that's coming to engage us, and then it also like on board, the AI has the expertise of the world's best fighter pilots. Like, isn't that extraordinary or best rotary wing pilots? Like by building all this expertise in, you're potentially building a guardian angel that is like the superhuman, super intelligent thing.

Like imagine if you look at it and says, oh shit, that's a Russian pilot based on the tactics that it's observing or the way that it's working. Imagine he says, oh, he's gonna come back around to do a low attack run. Like this stuff is way beyond just, oh, there's a dot and there's the enemy. If you have the world's best expertise

of the world's best war fighters distilled into one super AI, it's like you're rolling around with a whole team of experts sitting on your shoulder telling you what might happen next. And that's just, I'm so excited to live in that world. Because I imagine that's not the world you live in, right? Like, or lived in, like, I bet there were plenty

of things you did where you said, man, I wish that we had the world's leading expert on X, Y, or Z here with me to tell me what was going on. And so, you've probably played with the AI stuff where you're like, hey, who won the 1960 World Series? That's fine. But what if you could say, hey, how do I defuse this bomb? Or imagine seeing a vehicle, How do I defuse this bomb?

Imagine seeing a vehicle and be like, how do I hotwire this car? And if it can just have all of that on tap for you and say, oh, well, either here's how to do it, or just say, you're shit out of luck, you can't hotwire this car in the five minutes that you have, you need to move on. Really excited about living in a world

where everyone's working with access to the best information. I need one of these helmets. We're going to, so it's interesting. This is a little bit of an off topic bit, but people have internally been discussing this. Are we going to sell this to civilians? And it's one of those really shitty situations.

Like I'm a gun owner. I own about 400 guns and I own a bunch of other gun related type systems as well. So like I'm really down the rabbit hole. And I'm a big fan of weapons companies, especially gun companies that sell the same things to the military that they sell to civilians.

That's great. Like I hate it when they say, oh, we're not going to sell this to you or only going to support the government. The problem, and when I was like, when I was not in the defense space, I was always pissed about this. I'm like, how dare they not sell me the cool shit? Like, how dare they not do that?

But then I'm realizing anything that I sell to civilians, I'm effectively also selling to Chinese special forces, to Russian commandos. Now, I'm not saying that they'll be able to get enough to outfit their whole force, but anything you sell to civilians is eventually gonna get sold to a traitorous American. It happens way too often.

I hate that it happens, but you've read these stories, right? You know, some guy sells on eBay night vision that is top of the line night vision to like literal Russian cutouts. And so I would hate to build this incredible capability and then all of a sudden it's in the hands of the top tier units that we're potentially

gonna be fighting against. And also I don't want them reverse engineering it. Like I don't want them using it and learning how it works, learning whatever my problems, like, cause there will be problems. I'm gonna do my very best to minimize the impact of those problems. Like I know something is gonna be wrong with our system.

I would prefer that I don't have a bunch of Russian cues walking around and trying it every day and realizing that there's a way to, for example, trick the Dr. Farij facial recognition so that it swaps the two things. Not that I'm going to let it do that anyway, but you get what I'm saying. So I've been struggling with this.

I want to sell to civilians, but I also know that the national security impact is actually material and real. but you get what I'm saying. to include the model that includes cartel's hands. I'm so proud of the work that we do with Border Patrol. And could you imagine if they start going up against cartels who have helmets telling them how to evade our systems, how best to bypass them, sharing tactics on when to send decoys across to distract them and saying, okay, based on the average transit speed of a Humvee in this terrain, we think you have 16 minutes

before they are able to get line of sight on you. Like, that's what I want to be doing. And I don't want to just tell soldiers what's happening now. I want to tell them what's probably going to happen. I want to do predictive analysis and use data processing to say, hey, like, based on what we've seen in the past, tactics we've seen from this enemy in the past, this is what they're going to be doing 10 minutes from now. I do not want the cartels having that shit. Could you imagine if you were to say to Facebook? What do you mean there? You mean this wouldn't be happening?

It's an interesting thing to ponder. But you know, Mark's come around. Mark's based now. It's pretty interesting to watch. I'm sure you've seen this going on for. Oh yeah, I've seen it. It's a, it's, I think it's a reflection of a lot of things. You know, like the world's changing. It's clear China's not our friend. You've seen this going on for. I think it's a reflection of a lot of things.

It's clear they're not the friend of our corporations. It's clear that there's crazy people running our media, crazy people running our politics. Zuck is smart, right? He's not an idiot. At some point, you come out of the matrix, right? And I think that's... What I meant was, Andral would... Oh, you mean if I wouldn't have started Oculus? 100%. I mean, I don't want to complain too much here,

but one of my biggest beefs with the US defensive system is I could not have started and role before oculus I've only been successful with and role because I'd already made billions of dollars and another company That's kind of an indictment of our system if you look at history, we have a long history as a country of finding the best technology wherever it is and then building those people and those technology up into incredible parts of our war fighting apparatus. Are you familiar with like the Samuel Colt story?

No. Or Smith and Wesson? So like, Sam Colt was about to go bankrupt for the second time when he was hand making revolvers out of the back of a covered wagon. And then he got a order from the Texas Rangers for like two dozen of his pistols that paid his bills for the year. And then after that the United States Army adopted his revolver as the

standard service weapon because it was so obviously superior to anything else that had come before. So like the six shooter of the time was an extraordinary sidearm. And he went in his life from almost being bankrupt, working out of a covered wagon, to arming the entire Western world with his weapons. Like the designs that he made went from out of the back of a wagon

to literally tens of millions of units spread across America and Europe, defending America against Nazis and the Japanese. Isn't that actually insane? Isn't that amazing that our country used to be able to have those stories of finding the right guy? And so my question to people is always, could the United States military effectively buy something

even if it was a game changer from Palmer Lucky of 2011? Back when I was a teenager, building Oculus. If I had gone to the military and said, I've changed everything, I've built a VR headset that is better, faster, cheaper by an order of magnitude, it's $300 and it's better than your best $300,000 headset and a 10th of the weight. Do you think they would have been able to buy it or use it?

Like, no, it's this muscle we used to have that we've lost as a country. We're only willing to bet on people who have already made it, companies that are already big, nobody wants to take any risk, and in doing so, they take more risk than they ever should. A bureaucrat doesn't want to risk his job. So instead he just risks our national security. It's, it's, it's, so the point I always make to people is

we need to fix our procurement system so that the Palmer Lucky of 2011 can successfully sell into the military. We should not pat ourselves in the back because, and people are, they're saying, oh, well, I'm so glad things are changing. The success of Andrel shows that we're really getting our shit together. I'm like, guys, well, I'm so glad things are changing. The success of Andrel shows that we're really getting our shit together.

I'm like, guys, like that's a good first step, but let's not pat ourselves in the back for a billionaire successfully starting a new company, right? That is not the problem America has, is that billionaires aren't good at starting companies. Like if you have a billion dollars, you can do whatever you want. You can start an ice cream company,

you can start a defense company, but we need to open it up to a lot more innovation that doesn't come from people like me. Man, I love that you just said that. And I gotta be honest, I had a lot more that I wanna talk with you, but I think this is the perfect place to end this. Well, it's an important one.

And I hope that people who are listening are considering working on national security problems because even if you think that you are not relevant or not helpful, you're probably wrong. Like if you are good with computers, there are places that desperately need you. If you are good at metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering,

there are places that desperately need you. If you're just good at talking and good at metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, there are places that desperately need you. If you're just good at talking and good at sales, there are places that desperately need you. There's a whole new wave of new defense companies that are nipping at the heels of the big guys. Now is a great time for someone who cares about the future of our country to shift out of building parking apps

and into building things that are going to keep people from getting their heads blown off. That is where we need our best and brightest. And it feels like, I hate to be mimetically aligned to this degree, but the vibe shift is real. And I think people should take advantage of that. It definitely is, it definitely is. Would you come back? 100%, this has been take advantage of that. Definitely is, definitely is. Would you come back?

100%. This has been a lot of fun. And I got to get you into an eagle eye though. I would love that. We'll let you know as soon as it's cleared by the army for us to start showing people. Perfect. Well, we won't release this until the announcement comes.

Perfect. And I think it will come in time. I'm telling you ahead of the announcement, but the announcement comes. Wow. Wow. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. No one knows music like Rolling Stone. Senior writer Brian Hyatt talks the biggest music news from the biggest stars.

Almost everyone is teaming up on Drake. It's like Drake versus the world. You first met Prince, you were driving for him before you were drumming for him. That's correct. Stevie Wonder! You kind of have to understand how Stevie began. White radio, that's where the money was.

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