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

Palmer Luckey, 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.

Do you watch it?

Do you watch the show?

I don't watch podcasts regularly in general, but I've seen yours from time to time. Of course, I had to tune in for Trump.
I'm a virtual reality guy, and so I understand the difference between things that's on a flat screen versus 3D, but it's just so cool to be here in person. Oh, thank you.
We'll do the next one in VR. Teach me how to do it.
I'd love to be the first one to do that. I'll set it up.
You're a tech titan and we had Joe Lonsdale on a couple months ago. Amazing human.
People should just know my bias. Joe was one of the first investors in my first company, Oculus.
Back when I was a teenager, he put millions of dollars into my company at a time where very few people did. This was his last VC firm, Formation 8, which has now evolved into 8VC.
I love Joe, and I like to think Joe loves me. We've had a really productive and profitable relationship over the years.
Very cool. Well, he was a fascinating interview, and then you came up, and I was like, dude, we've got to get this guy.
He's like the Tony Stark, but real. Tony Stark, except Tony Stark got out of building weapons, and I moved into it.
So we're a little bit in reverse, but I like the comparison. Well, everybody starts off with an introduction here.
Here we go. Palmer Luckey, 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 of the United States and its allies by fusing AI with the latest hardware advancements across many domains. Designer of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and founder of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion.
Attended Golden West College in Long Beach City College at the age of 14 and studied at California State University, Long Beach, before dropping out to build Oculus VR. That seems to be the thing with all of you tech innovators as you drop out of school.
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 Law Foundation. You've got to be shitting me.
You were going to 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, 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, 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 nuts.
And then what does he say? He says, well, we don't know the details yet, but he's some kind of system administrator, someone who knows his way around computers and how to hack things. I was like, oh my God, technology journalism is going down the shitter.
And I wanted to be part of the solution. So 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. But yeah, it's interesting to imagine a world where I'd be in your chair.
Yeah, yeah. Well, who knows? Maybe one day.
Maybe one day when I'm all old and used up, I can get my own studio and I'll have you on. Cool.
Known for your unconventional approach, love for gadgets, and belief in using technology to push boundaries, whether for entertainment or national security. So, man, I don't even, I mean, we're going to do a life story on you, fascinating human being.
I can already tell with what, the 30 minutes that you've been here just when we were down shooting the thumbnails and shooting the shit back and forth. I've been very blessed to have an interesting life.
So, 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. You 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. All right.
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. Is it really Castro's fault? Sorry, is it really Trudeau's fault if he's Castro's son? I don't believe in the sins of the father, right? I don't think he really should necessarily have to live his life burdened by that if it was true.
I can understand why someone would want to hide that. 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 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. They'll say, well, it's very clear.
The records are clear. Trudeau's mother didn't even visit Cuba until four years after he was born.
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, 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 knoll. Let's say that the official story really is accurate.
It's pretty extraordinary that 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 that's not how it is today.
Yeah, right. Is it? Is it? Right.
That's why I like the Trudeau theory. There's other ones.
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 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 walk 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.
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. 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 are just protesting at the Capitol.
Nothing to say about the feds who were planted in that whole op. But 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.
Right-wing extremists planted bombs outside of my party headquarters and got within five feet of killing me. Like, wouldn't you say that? Like, 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, you know, maybe it wasn't five feet.
People say it's five feet. I think it was two feet.
You know, maybe I looked at it. Maybe I'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 one of the most interesting conspiracy theories because it's very rare for them to touch people at Kamala's level.
There's lots of conspiracies about 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.
That's a damn good point. 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, wait a sec, if they know it's a live pipe bomb, you're watching it, 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 think a lot of people are worried that the shredders worked overtime before they got in and the digital shredders.
You ever been involved in litigation? No. So, one of the things that's interesting, particularly with criminal, so I've been through, whenever you make money, people come after you.
They come out of the woodwork and they sue you for, 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 I'm unfortunately I'm 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

if you assume

I don't know. 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.
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 government destroying the evidence. And that's one of those, 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.
It just so happens to be the JFK. 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, because otherwise they're going to keep doing this.
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, 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.
That cover-up is so much worse than anything that people go to prison for life for every day. Do you think they're going to do it? I guess it would be already gone.
Are they going to hide it? I think it's what you said. I think the shredders are working overtime.
I think they're looking at what's happening with USAID and they're probably saying,, shit, the Doge boys are coming here next. We've got to do something.
Well, I mean, are you familiar with Blackwater at all? Oh, very familiar. And I've had the pleasure of meeting Eric Prince a few times.
Actually, even before I started Andrel, I asked him, what should Andrel build? 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 intervals.
What if you could have an artillery piece that works at maximum mechanical interval? It has a very high cyclic rate artillery that never needs to cool down and never goes down for maintenance, something that could auto-swap a lot of the consumables. And his point was that artillery is limited a lot in that respect, and that you can only get off so many rounds at a time from a single piece, and that it would be a huge game changer on the battlefield.
At the time, I was looking at how I could apply mostly artificial intelligence and autonomy to AI. The name of my company, Andrel 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.
Everyone thought it was never coming, never going to work, so we couldn't talk about it. I ended up not building it, but I look back now and say, shit, that probably would have been a really useful thing to have in Ukraine, especially in the early days of the war.
But yeah, and I, of course, read his book, Civilian Warriors. You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating, but only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested, qualified candidates all at once.
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Not legal in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. This we're talking about the government deleting evidence.
And so, you know, kind of the downfall of Blackwater was that Nassour 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 bunch of black water cowboys.
They made it sound like they just rolled into an intersection and just did 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. I can't remember if it was like a couple kilometers or a couple thousand meters away.
But basically, they had that drone on station, so they brought it over. And they deleted, there's like a five-minute, ten-minute segment of drone footage where you actually see the vehicle.
So short enough that this clearly wasn't just lost data. They didn't want that data to get out.
And then the very specific 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 the radiator fluid

and stuff had been

leaking out from the vehicle getting shot up.

And in court they're like

well where is this drone footage?

And they said oh we routinely

delete drone

footage just to save

memory. And they're like

so you just happened to just delete the

just the 10 minuteminute segment that shows the actual gunfight and everything before and everything after is 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. Did they ever figure out 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 it pro bono by the end of it.
See, these are the things that undermine confidence of just America, for Americans. People wonder why we lose confidence in our institutions.
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 commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Training Center, which is BUDS.
And a couple years ago, they had that BUDS 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, he had a cooler in his car with all this shit. And they made it sound like the training was too hard and it was all Captain Geary's fault.
And they reinvestigated it three different... They basically just...
They reinvestigated it, I believe, three times. Yep.
And they just kept doing it until they got the performance-enhancing drugs out of the investigation. And once those were gone.
Through some procedural error or we weren't allowed

to have that. Then they pinned his ass to

the wall and we wound up

exposing it on the show. Now the case has been

totally dismissed and it looks like he's going to get his

retirement and his ranking. I don't know where you

fall on this. I need to look more into that one.
I don't know

where you fall on this, but generally we should

be allowing these guys to use performance enhancing

drugs and it should be on the level

where we know about it and it's monitored. Because the reality is people are going to be using these things and there's ways to use them that are pretty safe and probably increase their probability of living in general.
But we've treated that whole category, the whole category of making your body better is just not a lie.

I'm not against it, but it's got to be done right. And if that played a part in him.
Well, the key is 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, like, I mean, I don't want to be, like, too mean here. but do you think Marines are the right guys to be measuring out dosages of this stuff? I'm being unfair, but you can play to the stereotype really easily here.
Is that the guy you trust to get it right every single time to get the math just so with people's lives on the line.

No, 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

that's increasing their combat effectiveness,

increasing their probability of living to see their families.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so I got a Patreon account. There basically 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 are 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 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.
I think he's in a fine place to not necessarily be a great coder, especially with how things are going with AI. The actual act of coding is going to become less and less important to being able to build things.
Really? I'm not saying that you're not going to still have programmers. I'm not saying that you're going to have everything done by AI.
But when you're talking about the types of coding that I had to learn to do, like gluing together bits of firmware, making my Arduino, well, the Arduino wasn't big when I was his age. Wait, what did you just say? Arduino, 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 compute. If you wanted to build an automated bird feeder, in my day, you would have gone out and been like, I'm going to build a 555 microcontroller circuit with a timer and an interrupt, and I'm going to build a thing where the bird flies in and put dispenses feed, or it dispenses feed every 12 hours if no birds come by.
We would have done that all by scratch. These days, a kid would go and buy an Arduino, and they would probably plug in the motor, and they'd plug in the sensor, 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.
That's the kind of way you would do it these days. And so I'm saying that type of coating, you don't need to be very good.
You need to know enough to get by. Think about, you might not know enough to design a car engine, but you know enough to clean a carburetor.
That's the type of coder I was. I think his son is in a perfectly fine place.
The most important advice that I can give people is to work on projects that you care about. Don't look to school, whether it's college or the state- 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. When I hire people at Anderil, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do.
Because that means they're the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time because they want to bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And to me, those are the projects that people, 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 don't do what I did, which was like, I started going to college, I was 14 or 15.
And I took some robotics courses, which in hindsight, like, I don't regret taking them. But I think the time that I spent taking those robotics courses would have been better put into self-guided, self-directed efforts.
And that's especially true in the modern day of the internet. All these things that like in my era were 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 would tell your son, encourage him to work on the things that he's interested in, and don't rely on other people telling him what he should be working on, and don't sweat the fact that he's not doing much or any coding.
There is lots of stuff you can create in the technology world when you're a bad coder. It just means he's going to have to go find a really good programmer as his co-founder, that's all.
Right on, right on. Well, I'm sure he's going to get a lot out of that.
So, got a little gift for you. Oh boy.
Yeah, yeah. Those are Vigilance League gummy bears.
A little something for the flight home. Now, there's no 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? 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 made right here in the United States.
And you're not using a... I can tell you don't have 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.
I asked because I'm interested in food science. Before starting Anderil, 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.
A lot of these gummy bears, they put anti-stick, anti-cake agents in them. And if you have too many of them, they give you diarrhea.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I can tell you, I can tell, I don't see it on the ingredients list and I 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. Something to think about.
You got a gift, right? I do.

So this is something that I put a lot of time into.

Not for yours specifically, just generally.

This is a mod retro chromatic.

For about the last 15 years,

as a side project that I put a little bit of time into here and there,

I've been building a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color.

So this is a hardware clone that is basically what Nintendo would have made if money was no object. It's got a custom one-to-one LCD that's the exact same resolution as the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
It's a modern, totally custom LCD. Sapphire screen lens, so not glass or plastic.
It's the same stuff you'd see on a high-end Rolex. The shell is made of an aluminum magnesium alloy.
Compatible with any Game Boy game. I gave you a couple games too that are sitting over in the studio.
So it's a pretty fun bit of hardware. And this one's signed by me.
Dude, I was a Game Boy fiend., it comes bundled with Tetris.

It's a new edition of Tetris.

This was actually played at the Tetris Classic World Championships

last year.

We had a tournament for it, and in my

opinion, it is the best version of Tetris that's ever

been made. Oh, well, if you want the batteries,

it runs on, not rechargeables,

runs on double A's.

Nice. So you'll have to twist those out of the

packaging. I'll do that later.

I'm going to frame this one and put it in the studio.

And you have another one in the studio so that you can actually

play. So I'm not going to let

it be trapped. You've got to get back into Tetris.

I will. I will.
Thank you.

This is awesome. You're very welcome.
I love this stuff, man.

I love putting stuff from guests

in the studio. You have so many cool

things. Most of this stuff in here is all from

prior guests and all that's like

Thank you. This is awesome.
You're very welcome. I love this stuff, man.
I love putting stuff from guests in the studio. You have so many cool things.

Most of this stuff in here is all from prior guests.

And all that's like a deep meaning, at least to me.

Well, I've got a lot of my heart and soul in that.

And the name for it, the Mod Retro Chromatic.

Mod Retro is actually the first business I ever started.

So when I was a teenager, like 13 or 14,

I started an internet forum called Mod Retro for game console modification enthusiasts. Very good.
And it's pretty fun to come back to it today. Thank you.
Thank you. But all right, so like I said, we're going to do a life story and then get into all your business ventures.
Let's do it. At least some of them.
I don't know how many businesses do you have right now. You know, right now, I'm 99% focused on just Anderil.
I mean, I sold Oculus to Facebook for a few billion dollars, and I was up in Silicon Valley for a few years before they fired me. So I don't have that one anymore.
And Mod Retro 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. Andruil's my baby.
That's the thing that I'm putting all my time into. That company is awesome.
Thank you. For people who don't know, we're not a defense contractor.
We're a defense product company. We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before.
So our business model is that we build these things using our own money, not taxpayer money, and then we show up to the government, not with a PowerPoint saying, hey, here's this thing I want you to give me money to build from scratch. But I have this working tech, this working product.
Buy it from me. That's awesome.
All right, so where'd you grow up? I grew up in Long Beach, California. My dad was a car salesman.
My mom was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me and my three younger sisters. I ended up moving down to Orange County to start my first company, Oculus.
But I spent my total childhood in Long Beach. You were homeschooled? Yes.
Tell me about that. Why were you homeschooled? There's lots of reasons.
How old are you right now? How old? I'm 32 years old. You're only 32? I'm only 32.
Holy shit. Yeah, I've had a pretty intense run.
But I was homeschooled probably because I was not the type of kid who fit into the public education system. I was, you know, probably these days they'd say that I have ADHD, but back then it was just called being a boy.
And I think my parents identified that of me in particular, out of my sisters, was probably going to do better in a homeschooling environment than in public school. And my sisters, they were homeschooled for various periods of their childhood, but all of them at some point actually ended up going back to traditional schooling.
Really? But you didn't? Yeah. And 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 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. I think so.
It sounds... You don't mind if I eat these the whole time, right? All right.
If you need more than two bags, we got more. All right.
My wife's going to love them. She loves jelly beans.
Do you have kids? I do. I have one kid.
He's six months old. Congratulations.
Yeah, that's really great. I'm a big pro natalist.
I definitely believe you need to have kids. If you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation and our ideals because you're basically outsourcing responsibility for the continued existence of our nation to other peoples, which seems like a super elitist attitude.
You're like, oh, I think I just want one kid. I'm like, you fucking elitist.
It's like a mentality almost thinking like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll let the cattle reproduce. You know, they can keep up the population.
But my time, you know, I don't want to raise more than one. It just, it seems like an abdication of responsibility for our nation's future and direction that I just can't get behind.
Of course, that, like, ignores people who have, like, 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. Meeting replacement rate should be the bare minimum.
If you plan on dying, you should at least replace yourself. Six months old, huh? Yeah, six months old.
He's sitting up and looking around and loving life. That's cool.
How do you like being a dad? I'm really lucky because my wife is really trad. She's doing most of the hard work right now.
I'm still working a lot. I get to see him in the morning and I get to see him at night.
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 have you been married? Oh, man, since summer of 2019. So 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 that 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, 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. You know, I started out as a outdoor kid when I was a kid.
You know, so running, surfing, swimming. Like I was into all the outdoor stuff.
and it wasn't until I was a kid. So running, surfing, swimming.
I was into all the outdoor stuff. And it wasn't until I was 12, 13 that I really seriously got into electronics and engineering.
And then I quickly became an indoor kid. 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 pass the current through the projectile directly, just 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. I built it for like 11 or 12.
Capacitor charging circuit, and then a bunch of photo flash capacitors in a gauntlet. 330 volts, you could dump the whole thing through this big, thick gauge wire to two spring-loaded pegs on the front of the fist.
And if you punched a plate of metal, it would leave a blast of sparks, a loud explosion, shower sparks, and it would leave big pits in the metal.

And I did use it on myself a couple 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.
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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.

In the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad.
She's made two different appearances here on the 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.
Link's in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.
Did you hit anything with it? Oh, just myself. Just myself.
Just myself. I ended up building a covert version that was a highlighter pen that I put three photo flash capacitors into the body of, kept the front of the highlighter inside.
So it was still a working highlighter. And then on the end, it had two tiny little metal prongs.
And I could touch it to an external charger, charge it up, and now I had a pen I could carry in my pocket. And if you touch that to somebody, it was just awful.
And it would leave real serious burns on your skin. And I'm very lucky that I didn't wipe myself out then and there.
But yeah, so I was into building weapons. I was doing a lot of game console modification.
I started Mod Retro because I was really into this hobby called Portableizing, which is turning vintage game consoles into self-contained handheld portables, like portable Nintendo 64 handhelds, portable 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.
How did you get into that? What age are you? So I got into VR when I was about 14 years old. Not VR, just the regular weapons.
Not regular weapons. I thought you were going to say bow and arrow and spears.
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, not because they're effective weapons, but because they are a potential path to weapons that allow you to do things that conventional weapons hand.
If I had just been interested in weapons, I would have just bought a Glock, right? You know, that's, well, it's hard to buy a Glock when you're 12 years old. But, you know, that's, if you actually just want to, if you just want to shoot somebody, you know, existing weapons are pretty good.
They're pretty good. Any time outdoors or anything? Yeah, so I grew up sailing small boats, so like dinghies.
The boat that we sail in Long Beach, it was called a Naples Sabot, which originally 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? And that's more or less how it all started.
So I was racing Naples Sabbaths when I was a kid. Later, I got into a type of boat called lasers, which they're an Olympic sailing class boat.
And I liked sailing those. I then later tried team sailing, where you're one of multiple people on a boat.
I didn't like it because when you're on a team boat, it's possible to succeed or fail on the basis of other people's work. 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, that's all me too. You can't make excuses for yourself and say, well, the 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 pulling his weight. When it's just you in the boat, you're like, I lost.
I didn't try hard enough. I didn't practice hard enough.
And so that was a, I really like sailing. It's a physical and mental sport.
You still sail? I have not sailed in years. I've thought often about getting back into it, but I'm just so busy with andrel.
Sailing to me is not a fun, relaxing activity. It is an intense, competitive sport.
I am so out of practice and so physically inept compared to what I was that I know I would be totally non-competitive. And so I, I, that's why it's hard for me to, it's hard for me to go and go and do it.
I'm kind of, I think I'm going to get back into sailing once I'm, once I'm all old and used up. Once I've, once I've, I've made my contribution to society, the candle has burned down to just the puddle of wax.
I'll get back into sailing. Nice.
Nice. I like powerboats too.
That's the other problem is. Yeah.
I heard you got a Mark five. I do.
I've used to, if you've probably been on Mark Mark 5s before I've been on a lot of Mark 5s I bought a Mark 5 special operations craft from the Naval Special Warfare guys and I bought it it was as is no warranty, just 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.
Damn. There's a 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. I'll tell you, that boat was made for people with government wallets, not civilian wallets.
It's such a cool boat. 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.
Did you put any weapons on it? So that was part of my saga, is they cut off all the weapons mounts even. They took off the weapons and then cut off all the weapons mounts and hardpoints because that would have been ITAR restricted, arms type stuff.
But we were able to find the contract number for the people who made the original mounting brackets. And so we just contacted that machine shop and said, hey, we need part number 462571.
Do you still have the CAD for that? They said, it's not even in CAD. This is all paper drawings, but yeah, we got the drawings.
We want you to make us four of that part. 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 of California state waters, we can put the real M2s on.
Yeah, that's awesome. It is really awesome.
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 went 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 waves and swell offshore. We said, you know what? We're just going to take it out.
Supposedly this thing could do 40 knots and see state four. We're going to go do it.
That was the craziest shit I've ever done on a boat. It was insane.
I mean, think like coming off of waves, diving bound into the next wave, and the whole thing goes over the entire boat, and you shoot out the other side, and you're still going 30 knots. 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, then back up to Galveston, Texas for scrapping. 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 going to 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. And it was so funny because we were approaching the towboat.
And before they could make visual contact with us, us they must have seen us on radar and they radioed us and said that this was a military tow operation and to stay clear but I knew for a fact from talking to my buddies that it had already been cleared from DoD possession and this was just the tow company talking shit and they were arguably illegal what they were saying and so we just didn't respond and about one minute later, we make visual contact with them and they see a big gray Navy boat blasting towards them at 50 knots and they shut up and they didn't say another word. I think they were like, oh shit.
Damn. They were like, we shouldn't have puffed ourselves up like that.
So it was really cool. We got to got to we ripped right by the boat we got some really good pictures and then we launched a fixed wing drone off the back of the Mark V and we did a touch and go on the runway at the Kitty Hawk oh my god I bet those people are shitting their pants well the thing is you'll never get another like the military is not really in the business of letting you fly your you know remote control airplanes off of aircraft carriers it was so cool because we're out in the middle of the ocean, too, so it's not like we're doing it off a docked ship or something, which they have done that with the USS Midway in San Diego.
They've let people take off little RC planes from the deck, but it's just sitting at the pier. It's so cool to be flying an RC plane, FPV, and going down, approaching the carrier, touch and go.
And unfortunately, we tried to land the plane back on the Mark V, but we messed up and the plane went into the water. So I had to come back around and I had to jump into the water and get the plane and keep it, I had to hold it above my head to keep the memory card out of the water so that it wouldn't get destroyed.
But we got the video. We got the video.
Very cool. Very cool.
When you were homeschooled, I mean, how did 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 had to have beat into my head. There's other things where I was just interested for my own reasons and very, very good self-directed learning.
I read thousands of books before I was 13. Literally thousands of books.
What kind of books? Everything. The classics, science fiction, the art of the deal.
The entire gamut of everything that you'd want. So I was checking out lots of books from the library.
Also, lots of people giving me books. Everyone knew that Palmer liked to read.
And so people would sometimes buy me new books. But more often, you'd have, especially adult friends, just dumping massive quantities of books.
My mom also, she managed to get on whatever registry Barnes & Noble uses for teachers. And so she had the educator's discount for buying stuff in Barnes & Noble.
And so I forget what the discount was, but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes & Noble did a lot for teachers, especially back then.
And so, yeah, I just read and read and read and read. So certain topics I was pretty, I was okay with.
I loved science. I love engineering.
I loved 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. 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. She knew that I was going to be fine on those.
And on the other stuff, my mom was able to beat me into submission. Right on.
My mom's no dummy. She has a master's degree.
She's a sharp one on her own. Yeah.
So did you grow up in a middle-class family? Yeah. So my dad was a car salesman.
Sometimes new, sometimes used. It depended on the time.
The 2008 financial crisis was really, really tough for the car industry. So there were some times where it was really tough because dealers were laying people.
You can't keep all your salespeople employed when people aren't buying cars. It's just the way that it is.
But he sold mostly domestic cars, a Buick, Pontiac, GMC, Hummer. And then later, he kind of had to shift into selling import vehicles because that was the only thing that was actually moving volume.
So he had to get into selling Korean and Japanese cars. And 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. We were a single-income household.
I don't want to say we were poor or anything, but when you got one person working and their one job they're working is a car salesman, you got to sharpen your pencil sometimes. One of the things my dad would do is in his spare time, he'd buy used cars.
I know it's funny, you sell used cars all day, then you go home, you buy used cars, and you fix them up, drive them around for a few months, and then you sell them for more than you bought them for, and that gets you a little more cash. That was one of the ways that I ended up becoming mechanically inclined, was helping my dad work on motorhomes and vans and old crusty BMWs.
You learn a lot when you actually interact with the world and machines with your own two hands. And you started college at what age? Honestly, I'm not sure it was when I was 14 or 15.
It was around, it was that summer. But I don't remember exactly.
It would have been right around when I was either turning 15 or almost 15. So was that remote or did you actually go? No, no, I went.
Because I was a commuter student. I wasn't like, I wasn't on campus.
I was still living at home. But no, I was actually going to school.
And it was is, when you're... So here's the way it works in California.
High school students are allowed to attend community college courses and state college courses by law. The law says you have to allow them to take those courses.
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. Principals won't sign off because they lose out on revenue proportional to the classes you're not taking at school.
What principal is basically going to sign off on a bunch of kids going to all the local community colleges when his school's going to lose the money? 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.

When you were enrolling in classes,

there's popular class where you had to be on your game and actually enroll in it quickly.

You couldn't 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,

the enrollment window doesn't open

until it's been open for four weeks for all of the proper students. And what that means is that every course you want to go into generally is already full.
And so the only way to make it into a course is you have to go and petition into the course. You have to show up on the first day of class with your petition form.
And then usually 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 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 they might have 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. In fact, I have to take it for my general education requirements.
I know your class is full, but is there any way that 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 just sitting in the back of the classroom, or 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 was good because I was fat at the time.
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 it's obvious too. I wasn't one of those kids where I'm like a towering brute and who knows if he's 30.
It's like, what's that 15-year-old kid doing here? This guy's still going through puberty over here.

That was exactly the situation.

And it was especially funny in things like

when I was going to Long Beach City College

and taking robotics courses.

And you basically have a whole bunch of people

who are older guys, mostly getting

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.
And nobody really wants you on your team when you're a 15-year-old kid, when you're kind of going in blind. You're like, why do I want to be gimped by this teenager when we're all professional-level people often already working jobs and taking this night class.
I really had to work hard to stand out

and prove that I could keep up with the adults.

Did you have a problem keeping up?

No, I had no problem.

Did they have a problem keeping up with you?

I did a good job of making it clear

that I could keep up pretty quickly.

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 and 16 and 17 and 18, now I'm just the age of all the freshmen and it's not interesting anymore. But at the beginning, it was definitely pretty interesting.
But you're not in freshman classes at that age. Not at that point.
Well, it depends. So the way that I did this, and the way I would actually recommend basically everybody do it, if you can scam your principal into signing your paperwork, is the moment you are eligible, when you're 14 years old, start taking community college courses.
And what you should do is take all the general education courses first, because they're generally easier. You have to do them no matter what you're going to do as an adult.
If I become a journalist or a mechanical engineer or a pilot, I'm still going to have to take history. So just start with all that crap and just do a few years of the crappy all general ed courses.
And then you can decide at the end what you're actually going to do. And you can then transfer all those units to whatever school you're actually going to.
And that's what I did. I transferred all those units from community college to Cal State Long Beach and went into the journalism program.
How did you make friends? I mean, it doesn't sound like you're surrounded by anybody your age. Everybody's older.
So a few things. One, I was lucky.
You're doing things that you can't do. I was lucky.
I had a lot of local friends. So I'll admit it I wasn't making my friends at college.
People are fine with the weird 15-year-old kid on their robotics team, but they're not going to go hang out with them after school. Nobody in their 20s is like, I just love hanging out with 15-year-old kids.
If they are, something's wrong. I was lucky.
I wasn't running into any of those guys. I had a lot of friends had a lot of friends I grew up with, had a lot of friends from doing homeschool stuff.
But honestly, most of my friends were internet friends. I was running an internet forum called Mod Retro.
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 is Oculus, my virtual reality headset company, almost everyone I hired was friends and moderators and administrator staff from Mod Retro. We were all teenagers.
We're all a bunch of teenage dudes who have known each other for 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 Mod Retro, 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 going to work all summer at the local pizza place, and then I'm starting school this fall.
I'm going off to college. I said, no, you're not.
You're going to come with me, and we're going to start this VR company that I've been working on, Oculus. And that was on a Friday.
And that Monday, I rolled up in my crappy minivan to his house, which 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. Oh my God.
He told her, Mom, 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. And she didn't understand that he was like imminently doing it that Monday.
And so we moved into a motel that is now condemned and has been torn down. It was later condemned and torn down.
But we moved into the Seaport Marina Inn, and we lived there for the first few months of Oculus. Literally, me and my internet buddies living in a crappy motel room starting this company.
And so I believe I didn't have a problem with making friends. We just had problems seeing each other in real life.
How old were you? I was 19. 19 years old.
And did you complete college? No, I dropped out. I had basically one semester and summer school left to get my degree.

And... 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. I believed that the existing systems, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were very heavy, I believed they had missed something.
I knew this had to be a crackable nut. There weren't very many people working on VR tech.
It was kind of a laughingstock at the time. Everyone thought, oh, that's this dead technology that'll never happen.
It was just a ridiculous fad of the 90s. I still believed in it.
Over the course of years, I got better and better and better. Then I had a series of technological breakthroughs that made my headsets much cheaper, much lighter, much smaller than anything that anyone had ever made.
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 could either drop out and start this company, or I could stay in school, get this degree, probably have to make use of that degree.
And I was terrified that in the process of delaying me working on my real passion, that somebody else was going to figure out what I had and they were going to do it before I did. I said, I don't have the time.
I need to get this into the world right now because there were literally thousands of people in the technology industry who could have had the insights I had. The insights I had were not Einstein-level insights.
They were the natural conclusion that any smart person who was looking at the VR industry in 2011 and 2012 would have made. Basically, there were certain components becoming available.
Computer power was increasing in a certain way where I could compensate for optical distortion in real time on a graphics card shader and not have it take up very much of my graphics rendering load. And I realized that if anyone smart happened to glance in my direction, that they were going to have all the same conclusions I did.
And I knew I needed to take advantage of that. Good thing I did.
Actually, even better, I was right. Sony ended up launching PlayStation VR a couple years later, and it was more or less built on exactly the same principles that I had.
Now, I think they copied a little bit from what I made public, but they also had internally been working on VR for years. It turns out there were people in major companies who literally had come to the same conclusion I had.
In fact, Sony made me a job offer before I launched Oculus. I was open sourcing all of my work, publishing it on the internet.
Why were you doing that? Why were you putting open source information on the internet if you were worried people were going to steal the idea? So a few things. First, remember, VR was just kind of like a joke at the time.
And I was working on it not as a job. I was working on it as a hobby.
I got into VR like I just wanted to work on VR and make it good. And it's not about...
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 to myself. But to be honest, it was just purely cultural and I never thought it through.
Remember, I started the Mod Retro 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? You're 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 Nichea to achieve much lower power consumption.
And then all the other nerds say, oh my God, this guy is a god. 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 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 it's not really necessarily about going deep into the technology that you did or the design decisions.

Also, you know what was common in the 2000s?

You wouldn't do it today where you go on and you post your final completed thing and hope it goes viral on TikTok.

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 and I'm going to prove it. Other times you'd say, he's right.
I was doing it a stupid way. You would adapt.
It was just a totally different culture. That was the approach that when I started working on VR, I'm like, that's what you do.
You share your work, and people are impressed by it. 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.
You could do things that increase the number of interactions

you're likely to have with people.

I think publishing in the open, for example, did that.

It means that I didn't have to personally meet

every person who would be helpful to me.

They could just see my work out in the open

and then come to me.

In this case, it was a guy named John Carmack,

who you should have on the show, honestly.

Probably the smartest engineer in the world that I know. Can you connect me with him? Absolutely.
John is 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 was the original creator and lead programmer for Doom. Oh, dude, I love Doom.
He is a wizard. And he was so far ahead of his time.
I mean, not just building 3D games, but also one of the first people to conceive of networking those games over the internet to allow people around the world to be in a single virtual space and play games together. John was bringing that out.
People had online games, but they typically were not real-time. They were things like online chess.
He figured out how to build netcode that would allow you to have people in a fast-paced action game where milliseconds matter and allow that to function over the internet. John was an extraordinarily brilliant guy.
Everyone in the games industry, the tech industry writ large, knows who he is. He would give these...
Actually, he would also publish all his personal notes and technical notes. He would literally publish them online and just let anybody see them because he also believed in sharing information, everybody goes together.
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 he contacted me and to Hey Palmer.
Actually, no. Our first interaction was he posted asking, hey, I want to modify this Sony head-mounted display that I have to be lower latency because you can't play games with it or you'll throw up.
Does anyone have any tips on modifying this thing? And I gave him a detailed response where I said, John, I've already tried to do exactly what you're talking about. Here's all the technical challenges.
The way Sony has implemented the display pipeline makes it impossible to get rid of the latency unless you drive the displays directly with your own brand new controller. Here's why you're not going to be able to do that.
And so I laid all that out. He looked into all my other posts.
He saw my Oculus Rift work logs and he contacted me and said, hey, you seem to really know your stuff. I see you have this Oculus Rift prototype.
Can I buy one from you? I said, I'll do better than that, John. I'm a huge fan of yours.
I'll just send you one for free. So I sent him one of my Oculus Rift prototypes for free.
He adapted that into Doom 3 BFG Edition. He basically made his game run on my headset and he showed that at E3, which is a major gaming trade show in Los Angeles.
It takes place every year. That was where Sony saw it.
Sony saw that prototype and there was so much attention being given to this at this point because it was the best VR demo the world had ever seen. John even explicitly said, this is the best VR demo the world has ever been created.
Sony saw that and they said, oh my God, John, who the hell made this? What company did you buy this from? He said, I bought it from a teenager on the internet who I've never met. He just gave it to me for free.
He put me in touch with Sony. I met with them, showed them my technology, and they offered me a job running a VR research lab in their Santa Monica PlayStation studio.
I ended up turning them down to start my own company. What I didn't know at the time is that they were already running a VR project.
What I didn't know is that I was already in a race against the clock. When I turned them down, I didn't understand that...
I thought turning them down is like, oh, 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.
It was a really wild time. When did you find out? I kind of knew that there were...
All the VR work back then was being done by a group called Sony Liverpool. Over in the UK, they had an office that was doing most of their 3D.
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. And I found out about a year later, and then you won't believe this, the day that we announced the acquisition by Facebook of Oculus, literally the same day was the day that Sony announced their PlayStation VR headset.
Literally the same day. Wow.
Yep. It's really, which gets back to, it was clearly an idea whose time had come, right? 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. 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 about him, he also, at the same time he did software, ran a rocket company that competed in the XPRIZE. And they built one of the first vertical takeoff and landing rockets

years before SpaceX did.

They were more or less the inventors of modern control theory

around doing vertical takeoff and landing rockets.

He did that as his hobby.

He also built twin-turboed Ferraris as his hobby.

Then I hired him as the CTO of Oculus.

I convinced him to leave his own game studio

to come and be the CTO of Oculus. So I convinced him to leave his own game studio to come and be the CTO of Oculus.
And then eventually, after I was fired, he left, and now he's working on trying to build super intelligent general artificial intelligence. And he did this before the AI boom.
So I know that seems like, oh, well, of course he's doing AI, like all these other hot people just following the trends. John was doing it when everyone thought he was crazy.
He's way ahead of the curve. Damn, I would love to talk to him.
I'll connect to you guys. John is brilliant.
Thank you. Who's your friend that you had coaxed out of going to school? That's my friend Christopher Dykus.
I said earlier that I had never met him in person. That's actually not true.
I just remembered I had met him

one time in person at San Diego

Comic-Con.

We both met up while we were at

Comic-Con.

So was he a co-founder?

Yeah.

He was literally the first

person that I called before I called anybody

else.

He was a guy same hobbies as me, same interests as me. And I mean, he was employee number one at Oculus, literally employee number one.
I don't even count myself as employee number one because you can't employ yourself. Or maybe you can.
Anyway, we've always said that he's employee number one, because he was. And the crazy thing is, Chris was also employee number one at Andrel, my new weapons company.
Oh, shit. So when, this is a whole long story all 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, even though that company didn't exist yet, had nothing to its name.
He's one of those friends who is probably more loyal than he should be, which is what people should do. Wow.
So you developed Oculus. How many people were on the team? Well, it started with just me and my garage.
When we were shipping our first product, the Oculus Rift DK1, we were up to about 25 people. When we shipped our second product, the Oculus Rift DK2, we were up to about 75 people.
And that was when we were acquired by Facebook. And then during my years in Silicon Valley working on VR at Facebook, we were run as kind of an independent operation owned by Facebook.
We grew it to a couple thousand people. Holy shit.
Yep. And so how did it pop up? Were you trying to sell the company? How did it pop up on Facebook's radar? So there were a few things.
We were not trying to sell the company. We were planning on staying independent.

But then a few things happened.

First, it became apparent to us

that we weren't running a race on our own.

We started to hear what was going on at Sony.

When Sony announced PlayStation VR,

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. We're a group of 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. That was one thing we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally.
How do we survive in the long run? We have the jump on these guys, but how do we turn that lead into something that persists rather than just being the people who are first and blazing a trail for everyone who then comes in and outspends us? It's pretty easy to outspend people in the games industry. Here's a very real concern.
What if they came in and all the video game developers who are making games for our platform, what if they just came in and gave them piles of money to not support our headset and be exclusive to their headset Sony did just that and by the way I have no ill will towards them, it's all business it's strictly business, they were trying to compete with us there were titles that had announced for the Oculus Rift as our launch titles Sony came in, gave them and they said, we're not going to be on your platform,

we're going to be on Sony's now.

So we were very, very vulnerable

because nobody wants to buy a game console

that has no games, right?

You really need to be able

to make sure that developers

can justify financially

being on your platform.

So that was all going on.

And then in comes,

I think there was lots of interest from obvious people, like Microsoft coming in and Google coming in. The interesting thing was when Facebook came in and a few things happened.
First, I think Mark was truly convinced that VR was the future. He saw what we were doing and he said, oh my God, this is the future of computing.
This is the future of gaming. I truly believe in your vision.
I want you to be a part of Facebook. So we're not really that interested at this point, but 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 into research and development for the next decade.
That was really the thing. 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.
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. 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 Microsoft Office, and they're selling computer operating system licenses. The people at the top don't want to shake everything up.
They don't want to shake the snow globe and see who comes out on top. They kind of want to maintain things the way they are.
So his point was, if you get bought by Google or Microsoft or Apple, they are not going to try and shake up the whole world and make VR a thing as fast as they can. You're going to be a tiny part of their 10-year plan.
But Facebook, on the other hand, we don't have an operating system. We don't have a hardware platform.
We don't control these gigantic store. 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 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, 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.

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.

In my mind, I was already going to make

as much money as I would ever need.

People often say, Palmer, you really

just did it for the $2.3 billion. I say,

no, if this is about $2 billion,

I could have just made that myself.

But Mark was offering

$10 billion in researching

Thank you. did it for the $2.3 billion.
I say, no, if this is about $2 billion, I could have just made that myself. But Mark was offering $10 billion in research and development, and me getting $2 billion from somebody doesn't do that.
Doesn't do that. Wow, interesting.
If I could flip it on you, not to play the interview, but what are you most passionate about in life? Because for me, it was VR at that point. This.
This right here. What if someone told you that they were going to give you $10 billion to do this for 10 years? Yeah.
Wouldn't you just think, oh my God, 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...

Did it turn out well for me? In the end, I ended up getting fired

for absolutely bullshit political

reasons. Yeah, I wanted to ask you

about that. But guess what? VR is a multi-billion

dollar industry. I'm having the last laugh.

I wanted to... Mark changed

the name of the company to Meta and literally

made AR and VR the core of the company. In the end, Mark didn't acquire me.
I acquired them. That's a damn good point.
So Facebook bought it. You moved over.
How was it working at Facebook? Things were going great. We had a bunch of metrics that we needed to hit in terms of sales, user retention.
We needed to get 10 million users on the Oculus platform. We needed to hit, I forget, it was some number of millions of hours of monthly users.
And we had these different levels where we basically got bonuses paid out on the basis of our performance tied to those metrics. We had something like five years to hit the top benchmark of 10 million users.
we did it in less than two years. We were kicking ass.
And so everything was going great. I earned all my bonuses.
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 I've long been a libertarian-minded person.
Politics were always something I had thought about, but really didn't do anything about. I had given $40 to Gary Johnson.
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. And so here I am.
I've sold my company for billions of dollars. A few years pass.
And all of a sudden, Donald Trump's running for president. Now, Donald Trump is somebody who I had long had respect for.
I actually wrote a letter to him when I was in college and 15 years old telling him that he should run for president. You might not remember this, but he had been on TV and they were asking if he was going to run against Barack Obama.
And he said, well, I might have no choice. I might have to run.
I don't want to run. Nobody wants me to run, it feels like.
But if I have to do it, then I have to do it. 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 I thought too much of it. 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'm so glad I did this. I posted on Facebook about it too.
And I said, it looks like Donald Trump might run for president. We convinced him this would be awesome.
I'm so glad I did that because now I have proof that I supported him when I was 15 years old all those years ago. Because otherwise, this would just be a ridiculous story.
You'd never be able to prove it. When I had Trump at my house years later for a fundraiser, which by the way was the biggest presidential fundraiser for a Republican that had ever been held.

I put that little Facebook post up on the screen before he came up.

Anyway, so look, Trump's running for president.

Everyone in Silicon Valley was losing their mind, right?

I mean, 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

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

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 shitstorm 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 U.S. 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 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? That's pretty reasonable political discourse, right? That's not crazy. I'm not saying Hillary's a bitch.
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 Luckey, 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, which is so funny. I'm actually a radical Zionist.
It was even in the moment, it was funny. What is a radical Zionist? I strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
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 going to 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 going to happen.
It's absurd for us to even have this discussion. It is very reasonable for the Jews to have a place that is theirs.
And they say, oh, but what about the Palestinians? You know what? That's a separate political issue. Like the existence of a Jewish state, which is what Zionism is, like the belief that they have the right to a Jewish state, the existence of a Jewish state is separate from the issue of what do you do with refugees from some political, from some statistical 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 going to hear this and say, this, I must be missing.
Palmer's ignored, like he's glossing over something. He must have like said something about Jews on Twitter, and they just repeated what each other said.
And I know people are going to hear this and say, I must be missing. Palmer's ignored.
He's glossing over something. He must have said something about Jews on Twitter.
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 Palmer is an anti-Semite.
I'm like, no, I love the Jews more than anybody. You Democrats would probably hate me for how much I like the Jews.
Anyway, but what happened was as a result of this reporting, 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.
I'm fine if people think that I'm being unfair because this is literally character assassination. They are trying to destroy, they kept reporting as as of Thursday at 3.58pm when reached for comment, Palmer Luckey is still employed by Facebook.
That's how they ended the articles. 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'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 the leader of our virtual reality organization. They knew they actually needed 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 that 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 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 is a bad strategy.
I said, guys, what you don't understand is Donald Trump is going to win. And they thought that I was just like insane.
They like literally, when I said that, they said, wow, I thought you were a smart person. I'm like, no, guys, I am a smart person.
Donald Trump is going to win. I will accept that there's a possibility he won't, but all of the signs are that he is going to win.
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

until 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.

They said, you can't come back into the office.

And that was when the machinery

went into motion to get rid of me. They realized that with Trump in office, and there were Facebook executives publicly saying, I will not work with Trump supporters.
I will not have them on my team, which is, by the way, illegal in California, but 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 just sound like the dumbest little bitch fest ever?

Wouldn't everyone laugh at you even if you won?

And I think

people wanted to get

work done. They didn't want to be a professional

victim and put themselves out there as the

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, they very quickly isolate things like this. The moment they realized that this was turning into a problem, 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. 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.

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 going to 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 want to try to find a reason to fire me that they could say had nothing to do with politics.
And so that went for months and they dug through all my emails and all my communications and They interviewed dozens of Facebook employees, just full Gestapo style. What have you ever heard about Palmer Luckey doing something bad? What do you know? What have you ever heard? I literally have never heard Palmer even mention politics.
He's just a VR guy. He gave $9,000 to this Trump group, I think on a whim because he has billions of dollars.
This doesn't see... 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. And like, so that was when they realized they were going to have to fire me without cause.
They just said, well, we were paying you tens of millions of dollars a year and we've just decided for no reason we don't need you employed anymore. And 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.
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 their politics? I'm like, yeah, I can give you two dozen.

If they asked me, Palmer, were you fired from politics?

I'm 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...

It was insanity.

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 told one journalist off the record, but 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 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 I hate getting back into this headspace because it was just- It was a good test if I was you too. 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, it was started by me and all my friends worked there. All the friends that I made working over the course of half a decade on that particular product were there.
My reputation was there. My work was there.
All of the technology that I've been developing since I was 13 years old for VR was owned by that company. Everything.
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 going to come after you. And if you say a word of this to anyone, we're going to 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 an important part of the team, I didn't realize that was a pure manipulation tactic to prevent me from leverage. 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 political.
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.

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.

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 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 going to do whatever I want.
I shouldn't have made that trade. I should have gone out, gotten the truth out there.
And I think people would have been pissed that I didn't let Facebook do their preferred option, which was to say nothing bad about the media. They literally told me I couldn't.
I said, I'm against Hillary Clinton because I think she's going to drag us into World War III. She said that she's going to enforce the no-fly zone in Syria, which is correct.
That is saying I'm going to shoot down. People think I will enforce a no-fly zone means you just like say words and it's like mean to pretend you have the authority.
No, enforcing a no-fly zone means that a Russian aircraft is going to enter Syrian airspace and the United States is going to shoot it down. And I was looking at it, I was like, holy shit.
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 masterstroke of their strategy was that in refusing to deny the allegations against me, they became true. 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.
It's a... What a crazy place to work.
And you know what was even crazier was that they maintained for years and years and years that I was not fired for my politics. 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 Luckey? And he said, oh, I don't think this is an appropriate forum. He said, you have to answer the question.
And Zuck 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. 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.
That's poisoning the king. To show him, if you're like, hey, king, here's this thing.
We're performing illegal activity. You've just screwed them over now because now they do know.
Am I am I to say that there was no suspicion or, you know, a kind of understanding as to what would happen? You know, I wouldn't go that far, but it was crazy how they maintained for years and years and years that 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, I want to apologize to Palmer Luckey.
I've been saying things about him in the past that weren't true. I just want people to know that I was misled by others and that we are sorry and it shouldn't have gone down that way and I was wrong.
so they are actually finally acknowledging that the story they were putting out there

that politics was not a factor and that I was

fired for any reason at all

is 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 Andruil side.
I know we're going to break that here in a little bit. All right, let's take a quick break.
Let's do it. We've got some big news coming soon.
Big news on the Anduril side. We're going to break

that here in a little bit. All right, let's take a quick break.
Let's do it. When we come back,

we'll get into And public record. Your record.
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I recently got the meta Ray-Bansans. Have you seen those? The little camera glasses? Once it's all set up, it says, ask Meta about anything.
Just say, okay, Meta, and then ask your question. It's like, okay, Meta, when was Palmer Luckey fired? It goes goes, boop, boop, boop.
Palmer Luckey was fired on March 29th, 2017, after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property in a trade secret lawsuit. And then it links to a story on ZDNet where the guy says I was found guilty of this crime, but he's literally wrong.
It literally didn't happen. Because first of all, being found guilty is for criminal cases, not civil cases.
Two, I literally won on all of the charges around trade secrets. Like we literally won.
And the judge threw out all the damages against me and said, yeah, he's not guilty of any of this. So like, but what's crazy is of course, like the average person, like you ask these questions and these things that journalists write are being brought up years in the future as the basis for AI knowledge.
If you ask these AI systems, as far as they know, it's all true. It's all true.
According to these AIs, I was fired after I funded a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes. And how do you undo that? It's this persistent harm that just lasts forever.
Let's say that I could get them by sending my lawyers after them now to remove these stories. Well, there's still these huge AI models that have been trained on a decade now of reporting and re-reporting.
How do you undo that? It's a big problem when you've got so much bullshit that's been put out there. A tidal wave of it.
I'd say maybe the majority of it. Well, I think the good news is I think the majority of people now know that legacy media is complete bullshit.
Well, that's why the media is so freaked out. They're now trying to replicate podcasts.
Yep. You saw the bit where Elon was saying, he says, you are the media now.
In the modern world, you have the tools to get your message out and people can amplify others based on who has the closest proximity to the real information, who actually has the actual media. We can be primary sources.
We don't need intermediaries. Then you have the National Press Club.
You see this speech where they have this guy up on stage. He says, doesn't matter what Elon says, they are not the press.
We are the press. I'm like, oh my God.
This guy's so out of touch with just the American moment. Who's going to hear that and be like, yeah, he's right.
How dare citizen journalists without credentials report on things? Yeah, wow. So you're done at Facebook, you get fired from Facebook.
Yep. And then you move into Andurl.
So how long is the gap here? Same day. I literally picked up the phone and I had been talking with people.
I got to backtrack a little bit. Before I started Oculus, when I was a teenager, I had worked for almost a year on an army project called Brave Mind.
Have you ever heard of this? No. It was at the ICT Mixed Reality Lab.
There was a project that was being worked on called BraveMind that was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. The idea was that you could put them into virtual reality simulations of things that would trigger their PTSD, and you could teach them coping exercises, thinking exercises to mitigate their physiological responses under the guidance of a licensed therapist.
You could also expose them to things that they might be exposed to in the battlefield ahead of time to help them learn how to cope with that ahead of time. And I was not doing any important work on the program.
I don't want to make it sound like I was one of the key researchers. I was the cable monkey.
I was the lab technician. I was making

stuff go, making head-mounted displays work, designing stuff to

support the program. But that was my first exposure to how the government

uses technology, the good that it can do in our military, but also

how broken a lot of the procurement systems are in terms of how they buy things,

how they procure things, the incentives that happen when you have

cost-plus contracts involved, cost-plus contractors involved who make more money when the contract runs long, more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster, more efficient decisions. And that experience, small as it was, stuck with me through my whole career.
And I had a lot of conversations with friends who did work in defense, whether working literally 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 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 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 Anderle. 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. He was full-time trying to find exactly the same thing I was.
He was meeting with hundreds of small defense companies, trying to find ones that had a shot of really becoming something big and meaningful. We ended up becoming friends.
I met Brian Schimpf, who was director of engineering at Palantir at the time, and a few other people, my friend Joe Chen, who was an early Oculus employee, former paratrooper, really interested in trying to figure out how to use technology to make 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? The day that I was fired, I picked up the phone.
I called Joe, and I called Brian, and I called Trey. I said, hey, guys, we've been trying to find a company that we could invest in that does this.
I think we should start it ourselves. I think now's the moment.
They said, Palmer, we're all so busy running engineering at Palantir or being a venture capitalist, or in your case, running Oculus. I said, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
So they had no idea? I let them know. but you know it was that's a sacrifice I'm willing to.
That's a sacrifice I'm willing to take. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I'd say the early Andrel crew is 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 refuse to be part of it. I'm out of here.
And the funniest part is that of that contingent, the people who left because of the way Facebook treated me then, many of them came to work at Andrel, and they said, Palmer, what are you doing next? I want to be a part of whatever it is. and then some of them came to work at Anderil and they said, I want to be a part of whatever it is.

And then some of them,

when they found out I was starting a weapons company,

never talked to me again.

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

to me for to work on,

which is to build better tools

for our national security, save taxpayers hundreds of billions by making tens of billions. They 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. 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.
I was like, guys, we're spending way too much money on these weapons systems. They said, oh, so you're going to make it so they can buy 10 times as many weapons? Wow, as if that's better.
Well, guys, if you hate the military, if you hate NATO, for example, should they be armed with water balloons? Should they be armed with slingshots? What level of force are you okay with them having? If you believe that NATO has any reason to exist at a level beyond 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

stop talking to you and say, fuck you,

fascist.

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 jump.

It's a great quote.

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

I'm sorry. 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, not just with small cheap drones, but even with large-scale systems.
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.
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.
So were you aware of how it works then with the military-industrial complex? Oh, yeah. How did you know that with all the VR stuff you were doing? Like I said, I had exposure from the Brave Mind stuff and I'd become interested in the problem, but I'd done a lot of research and I'd kind of been building a theory of how someone might be able to fix this.
There were a lot of assumptions I made that were wrong. Some were right.
I don't want to make it sound like I came in day one and I understood the whole landscape. But I had my 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. 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, that could act as a tool that would be the brains of dozens of products.
So basically, a Lattice being something you can build other things on top of, they always build this Lattice AI as a sort of core software product. And then you can build on top of it autonomous fighter jets, autonomous tanks, cruise missiles, small arms, surveillance systems, security systems, drone defense systems.
And they all kind of share this common brain. by building Lattice and we started building products on top of it, some of them for the military, some of them for customs and border protection.
Actually, our first major program of record was with CBP. Against all odds, we've actually managed to make it work.
Today, Andrel is still making Lattice, and we have over two dozen different hardware products that are all using that same AI brand. Wow, wow.
One of our big wins recently. So 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 Starship Troopers novels, right? These are old ideas that have only very recently become technologically feasible.
The idea of autonomous fighter jets, that's been around for about 100 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.
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 Skynet makes a ton of sense

except for one critical mistake.

They gave it control of the United States nuclear arsenal. I always like to think how Terminator might have gone 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 where they are going to need to fly into areas that are very well defended by surface-fare missiles and you know you're going to lose a large fraction of your fleet. That is a job for robots, not for people.
And so one of the things we said we were going to build at the start of the company, and probably our biggest win that we've had as a company so far, is a recent contract we won called CCA. We won a spot on increment one for CCA, competing against Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.
It's us, toe-to-toe with the big guys, saying we are going to build a fighter jet powered by RAI that is better than all of the systems being proposed by these people who have been around for a century. And guess what? We beat all of them.
Damn, congratulations. Thank you.
It was a huge moment for our company. You should have seen the office.
People were screaming and cheering and throwing chairs. And we did it because we managed to build this very powerful AI system and all the expertise we needed to build a fighter jet that is capable of going toe-to-toe with all of these other companies.
We've built in eight years. Chris Dykus was employee number one at Oculus and 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 Dykus as employee number one

to being selected against Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop,

companies that have a stellar, you know, stellar reputation for building really sick aircraft for the better part of a century. We've done that.
We've gone from me and Chris Dykus 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.
What we're doing is, we're not supermen here, right? I'm not saying we're like these brilliant Einstein level geniuses. What we're doing is taking techniques, approaches, and people who used to be making AR mustache emojis in Silicon Valley and putting them to work on problems that actually matter.
Ones that actually get them stoked in the morning to come to work. And if you take the best technologists in the country and you put them to work on a problem that they actually care about and they really believe in, you're going to get extraordinary things coming out of it.
So did this idea develop from Skynet? I'd say Skynet was maybe part of it. No shit.
Here's what it really is. Skynet itself is not actually a unique idea.
The idea of AI management systems that are able to manage large numbers of autonomous weapons, they've literally been around for 100 years. Skynet was just the one that happened to capture the public imagination.
But there are lots and lots of examples. Not to say that this is the best example, but look at Star Wars Episode I.
Do you remember Star Wars Episode I? A little bit. Well, the crux of people who haven't watched it, which they're not super missing out.
Episode III was great. Episode I, you can skip it if you're not a Star Wars person.
But the Trade Federation imposes a blockade on Naboo, and they send down all of these robots, and they're all controlled by one central AI that's up in the ship that's orbiting above. And they have to destroy that ship so that they can shut down all of the robots.
Now, by the way, there's something to be learned from that, which is put the AI brain in each of the robots. Don't require a data link that can be jammed or hacked or broken or a central command post that can be destroyed.
Anyway, they didn't know that on Naboo. The Trade Federation really screwed up and they had it all going on in the cloud.
But for some reason, nobody remembers the Trade Federation. They all just talk about SkyNet.
Wow. So you develop the AI mind, but you also develop...
And what's cool is we develop that AI mind, but we can basically optimize it for different things and train it how to do things that normally 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. And to be able to cram that all into one brain, it's a powerful thing.
Wow. So you're developing the mind.
You're also developing the aircraft, the autonomous aircraft, the autonomous submarines. In some cases.
So one of the most common misconceptions about Anderil is that Lattice is only a brain for the things that we make. We do make a lot of hardware.
We make surveillance towers. We make fighter jets.
We make submarines. We make loitering munitions that are being used in Taiwan and Ukraine.
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 artillery is 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.
And we've actually had a lot of success between Russia and Ukraine. We're on the Ukrainian side, obviously.
They've been using our munitions to strike at things that other weapons don't have enough range or can't get through jamming bubbles to attack. So the Russians, for example, will be jamming communications so other drones can't get in to destroy these targets.
Our drones, because they're piloted by AI, can fly in, orbit above, let's say, a jamming truck or a surface air missile launcher, and then figure out the right time to go in and strike it and destroy it. And the mind is in the aircraft.
And the mind is in the aircraft. Holy shit.
What I wanted to finish and say is, the common misconception is that because we build these hardware products on top of Lattice, that Lattice is only for Android hardware products. That is not the case.
We have integrated Lattice with over 100 existing DoD platforms. So we're taking these brains and we're hooking them up to systems that are already used by DoD.
So 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.. 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.
Holy shit. That's incredible.
It's some good shit. One of the things that I've started working on lately is a project.
I've never wanted to build humanoid robots, not myself, because there's so many other companies that are doing a good job building humanoid robots. And I've 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 weapon systems into AI-powered weapon systems.
Imagine that I have an old Soviet-era surface-to-air missile launcher. Normally, you need a bunch of guys to stand around it, watching a screen, picking out targets.
They have to turn on the generator. You have to pull the lever, you have to prime the pumps, you got to put the choke and start the whole thing up.
But what if you could have a humanoid robot doing all of that? All of a sudden, this thing that used to have a bunch of humans that made it a really, really juicy target, now you can put it up on a hill and say, oh yeah, it's just a bunch of robots. And I've networked it into the greater hive mind.
Now the data that it's collecting is being shared out to hundreds of other weapons in real time. I'm pretty excited about humanoid robots, not for what they can do at the high end, but more for just taking a lot of these legacy systems.
Imagine you have an old Humvee. How cool would it be if instead of having to build a brand new AI-powered vehicle with AI actual...
You have all these new cars that Tesla's making that are capable of steering themselves. What if instead of buying all new AI powered cars for the military, I can take a humanoid robot, I can tell it to walk over to that Humvee, get in and drive it around as an autonomous vehicle.
It doesn't make sense for consumers. For consumers, you should just buy an autonomous car.
But where the military already has literally trillions of dollars in inventory. Remember, we have a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but the military has trillions and trillions of dollars of hardware that they've already bought.
I am not out to make them rebuy all of that. Some of it they'll need to rebuy.
But I want to make sure we're leveraging all these tools we already have as well. We need to bring AI to everything, not just AI to new weapons.
Wow. You have completely revolutionized warfare as we know it.
And by the way, you can see where with their current business model, like warfare, but also think about like the amount of money or the first page of our first pitch deck said, Anderil will save taxpayers hundreds of billions a year by making tens of billions a year. If you're in the business of making those trillions of dollars of hardware, you're probably pretty spooked by a company like Anderil coming in and saying, well, maybe you actually don't have to rebuy a bunch of stuff.
Maybe you can actually keep using a lot of the systems you already have. Or worse, maybe you can buy stuff from Anderil that's a tenth of the price of the stuff that you've been buying from the other guys.
We are, as taxpayers, paying way too much for everything. I mean, when you were in, you probably had to pay government prices for various things.
You're familiar with companies will literally charge the government a different price than they charge civilians. And I know technically they're not allowed to charge government more, but they have the government version, right? It's like a special government paint.
Like, oh yeah, the special government 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.
I mean, we have to stop doing that as a country. Very familiar with that.
Eisenhower was right when he said that in a very real sense, every rifle made, every bomb dropped, represents a child deprived of an education, a library never built, a hospital never constructed. I feel like a lot of people forget that those two things are tied together.
It doesn't mean we need to be hippies about it and pretend that war is never going to happen. But we need to be spending the right amount on these things.
We cannot treat it as, right now it's almost like you can't question it because you can't question it. 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 seems like we spend a lot of money for kids to get grades this bad.
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.
I'll tell you, here's someone who will be replaced. That hilltop surface-to-air missile operator.
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.
You're going to die. We have to get rid of that guy.
But then you look at what a lot of Navy SEALs do, or 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.
Remember I said robots can do the jobs that a 90-year-old man can do? They're going to eventually do the job that a 70-year-old man can do. Then, 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 an average in-shape 50-year-old man can do. To build humanoid robots that can do what a Navy SEAL in the prime of his life probably secretly roided out, that's a really high bar for a robot to hit, especially when it comes to

his ability to break the rules or make a decision that wasn't programmed or decide that he's

going to do something that a robot's just never going to do.

My intuition here is that's going to be the last job to be figured out.

It's not a perfect example, but it's like, is AI going to replace the jobs of our politicians?

It's like, 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.

So we're a long ways out from replacing a tier one assaulter. I think we're a long way out.
What is a long way out? 30, 40, 50 years minimum. There's some things that move fast and others that don't.
Because here's the other thing you have to remember. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but you're also able to augment people.
So the 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.
The robots would have to get not just as good as a SEAL of today, they're going to have to be as good of a SEAL of that era, and I think we're going to keep investing in the guys around, hopefully, a lot more than we have been. You're involved with exoskeletons, correct? Well, I don't know how I involved.
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.
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 making some mods to the cooling system that the company I don't want to badmouth the company.
I think that they made a mistake on the cooling system. I'm going to be doing some mods tonight that I already have the parts sitting in the garage for and I'm going to run, I think I'm going to run a sub seven mile.
Anyway, I'm 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 augmenting vision.
Right now, the night vision capabilities that we give our warfighters are not that far removed from what we had in the 90s. It's still Gen 3 night vision.
Sure, it's white phosphor instead of green, and it's a little higher res and a little higher gain, but 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 hyperspectral spectrum.
He's able to identify individual materials, components, vehicles, see all of his buddies, see all of the bad guys, and have information seamlessly shared between him and every other weapon and robot and vehicle on the battlefield. 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. So how does the exoskeleton work? So different exoskeletons work in different ways.
This particular one basically is sensing your motion based on your actual motion, and then it tries to predict. It actually has an onboard AI algorithm that is trying to predict what you're doing, and then it applies force that matches.
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 exoskeletons.
It's going to be measuring your body so that instead of there being a delay where I move, it feels it, and then it helps me, it's going to be seamlessly integrated with you. Maybe even starting to move your arm before your natural muscles are doing it.
Wow. Then the crazy thing is eventually, someday, and I think this is way out just for a variety of basically invasive surgical reasons, eventually you'll be able to read those signals right from the brain directly.
So Matt, 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? 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 this. I built a system that measures when you are trying...
Are there security guys running around with this stuff?

We have a great security team,

but I probably shouldn't talk about methods and tactics on that.

I built a device many years ago,

and I've screwed around with it a lot of times.

It basically is a small sensor that you can mount that is able to tell when you are flexing muscles on your face. I hooked that up to another electrical actuator.
You ever use a TENS unit for therapy? I hooked up something that's a lot like a TENS unit, but it's just rigged a little differently. Instead of making your muscles vibrate, it is made to just trigger individual muscle groups.
You know, like it can just basically make you, you know, pull this finger or pull that finger. And I made it so that whenever I even barely start to flex a muscle up here in my face, it sends a signal wirelessly to a patch I have on my arm that fully fires this tendon and makes me 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.
There's something called nervous transit velocity or nervous conduction velocity. It's how fast you can send signals down your peripheral nervous system.
By building a bypass for it, I can make it where I can actually, if I want to pull the trigger on my gun, I can flex that muscle on my head, which is much closer to my brain, therefore a much, much shorter pathway. And I can actually shave a ton of latency off the delay between when I see something when I pull my trigger.
All of a sudden, I've now reduced effectively, because you're familiar with 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 if you have a really heavy hammer, you can have a higher lock time. And so if you're looking at a target, you're pulling that trigger, you have some inaccuracy that is caused purely by the lock time, when you told it to fire and when it actually fires.
You can learn it out to some degree by 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

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. 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? 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. I will say, by the way, we're going to have remotely controlled Navy SEAL robots long before you have the AI-controlled robot.
But I've recently seen some technology that has me questioning that. I think that we're going to start seeing this tech in kind of tier one groups like just about now, like less than a year would be my estimation.
When does it get out? A controlled robot. Sorry, no, exoskeletons.
Exoskeletons. Now, they're going to be a little less cool than people expect.
It's not going to be like an Iron Man suit. It's more like a suit that maybe helps one or two of your joints, that helps you run better, maybe to run faster, or maybe just to use less, so that you can run longer.
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.

I think those are going to be the types of exoskeletons

we see. It's not going to be like, I put on my

Iron Man suit 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

and you'll be like, oh yeah, that was

a little tough, as opposed

Thank you. the top of a 10-story building because all the power is cut and there's no elevators, and you're going to step out on that last landing.
You'll be like, oh yeah, that was a little tough, as opposed to feeling like you want to collapse. That's a huge deal.
Eventually, I do think we will see the thing that everybody wants, which is you put on the suit and you're Superman, and you punch through walls, and the bullets are coming at you, and nothing happens. It's going to be a decade plus before that happens.
One of the problems being any suit that can do that can also kill you. Just think about it this way.
A suit that basically helps out your legs, it's only as powerful as your legs are on average climbing up some stairs. If it malfunctions, 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,

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.

It's a very different development process.

It's more like a medical device

and less like a toy.

A little contradiction, maybe. You had mentioned, first we were saying, no, we're not going to see remote-controlled robots.
Yep. Now you're saying we might see that before the exoskeleton.
I guess before you had asked about AI Navy SEALs or robot Navy SEALs. I missed it in my mind.

There's going to be an intermediary step,

which is you'll have robot bodies that are piloted by people,

so they're still using human judgment.

That's going to happen a lot sooner than the AI robot Navy SEAL.

How do you see that working?

You're going to put on a VR headset.

You're going to strap on a suit that does full motion capture of your entire body. 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. Imagine downward shooting lidars, building a 3D model of all the terrain that's within 10 feet of you so you know what to step over, what you could trip on, what you need to avoid.
And then everything on the top, you've got a guy who's just teleoperating the whole thing. Oh, shit.
So they'll be controlling these from a totally separate location. Yeah.
So casualties would be essentially zero human casualties. 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. They just fall over and they're useless.
But for missions where that's okay, maybe we have links that can't be jammed by that enemy. Maybe it's short-range enough that we can just power through.
Yeah, that's going to be a thing soon. Actually, you've seen the Tesla humanoid robot demos with Optimus.
So most of those demos, I'm not trying to piss off Elon. Sorry, Elon, I'm going to let people know.
All those demos with the robots pouring drinks for people and being robot bartenders, those are all actually teleoperated. It's not an AI brain that's doing all of that.
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. That is definitely going to be a thing that our military is doing a lot of in just the next few years.
Holy shit. If not at the level of a Navy SEAL.

Wow. If not at the level of a Navy SEAL.

But if you need to serve drinks,

that's going to be happening soon.

Wow.

Damn, dude. Let's talk about...

I got to throw out one more thing, which

is I write

a little bit of speculative sci-fi from time to

time.

I don't publish it. It's 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. The idea being 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 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 breaking down, at least not as much. So, as long as your brain's there, I think people will still be useful.
Man, this is... It's going to be a wild future.
Yeah, no shit. Wow.
Let's talk about the missiles. Let's talk about it.
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 then come back and be reused again.
We're doing a lot of interesting stuff on that front, I think, because in the past, a lot of, like we're also building long-range cruise missiles. We have a line of missiles called Barracuda.
We have a Barracuda 100, 250, and 500 different ranges, different payloads. And one of the cool things you can do with AI powered missiles is send them into an area and then have them do precision targeting, collaborating with each other, even if you don't have a person there who's, let's say, steering a coded laser target designator.
In the past, you would have needed 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 can have 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 at this angle and this speed from this direction, I can punch through the engine room and destroy engine one.
And if that's successful, another one's going to come in behind me from the other side 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. We're doing this type of stuff in Russia right now, where we're hitting targets, where they have jammed communications length 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.
You can't get a JTAC forward to allaze these Russian targets. They'd mow you down with machine guns or landmines before you get even close.
The other side of what we're doing with missiles, and it's less interesting than the AI stuff, I know, but it's just manufacturing. We are making our missiles and our submarines and really everything we do in a much more reasonable way.

The way we make our submarines

looks a lot like you make a car.

We're basically using processes, robots,

assembly lines that you could use to build a Tesla.

You can use it to build our submarine

versus more traditional techniques

that require huge teams of specialized human welders

and huge pieces of infrastructure that 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.

U.S. war games against a hypothetical Chinese invasion scenario in Taiwan,

we run out of missiles in less than eight days.

We have eight days, and then we're completely out. So, eight days of pain for China doesn't mean very much to a country that thinks in 100-year timelines.
They're like, that's it? There will 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.
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 going to deter them. They need to look and see that you are a continuously present adversary, that there is a credible threat of violence that extends beyond the weekend.
That's the only way we're going to keep them from running roughshod over everybody. 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, even publicly, they won't say they own all of Japan, but they do maintain they own part of Japan. No, no, maybe we don't own all of it, but that part, that's definitely ours.
It is really dangerous to let people with millennia-long ambitions

of ruling those areas go unchecked. Because 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, we have to keep them around.
Even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, there's a lot of reasons to make sure we're spooking China on day 80, day 800. People like talking about the AI part of the missiles, but honestly, if our missiles had no AI and we're just able to make them 10 times faster, that's pretty good all on its own, even if we're doing nothing else.
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.
Do you know the multiple for Chinese shipbuilding capacity? China has more shipbuilding capacity than us. They can 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? You think it's five times more? You think it's 100 times more? What do you think it is? I honestly have no idea.
Make a crazy guess. 20 times.
It's 350 times. They have 350 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States.
An equivalent ship? No, so it's worse. People will try to argue with me, and sometimes they'll say, but Palmer, all of that is commercial shipbuilding capacity.
So it's unfair to compare 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 just in case it's not just in case China understands how much more it costs for every single ferry to support military operations they are taking that cost on because they expect to do it they're not going to basically spend billions of dollars for absolutely no reason in an economy that knows how to cut corners like no other they are are doing this because they believe it's a core part of their strategy. So yes, they're not quite equivalent.
I would say US ship, ship for ship, our ships are better. But quantity has a quality all its own.
And when you're talking about a 350x difference, people will say, oh, well, the Chinese Navy is only twice the size of our Navy. Well, yeah, today, but on day 10, they're going to be probably a lot bigger.
And then every day, we're going to crank 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 thanks. It's very easy for us to say, oh, of course we stand with Japan.
Okay, well, what's that going to mean when every single one of our ships is at the bottom of the ocean and we have one new ship coming off the line a month? It's a meaningless promise. And so our adversaries see that.
And a lot of them are going to our allies and China's saying, hey, you know the math. You can do the math.
You need to end up in the sinusphere. 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 various partisan political reasons and strategic reasons, but we're also out of stuff to send to them. We're out of artillery shells that we can spare to Ukraine.
We're out of a lot of... We don't have any javelins to send to Ukraine.
We're all out. And so how can our allies stay allied with us if they think that they're going to get into a conflict and we're just saying, oh, sorry.
Actually, we forgot how to bake things. We forgot like a hundred years ago.
Sorry. Jeez.
Do they have any of the technology? So manufacturing-wise, which I just talked about, they're ahead of us. You're talking about like AI, the sensors, do they have that? Luckily, we're ahead on that.
The United States is ahead of China on a lot of advanced

sensing technology and a lot of advanced AI. Now, China,

don't underestimate them. We've seen with DeepSeek and stuff,

they're doing very interesting things in the AI realm.

I don't think that we're a decade ahead of them in technology.

What I'm doing at Andrel 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 rip it off.

They were able to do it with their own domestic companies.

When we were developing cutting-edge technology,

we were never more than a few months ahead of China.

Anything that we figured out, they would be able to copy it and figure it out very quickly. 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 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 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 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.
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 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 Anduril YouTube account.
About two years into our company, they banned it. They said that our company promoted harm of people.
And we said, guys, that's what war is. It's either threatening you're going to harm somebody or actually doing it.
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 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, like I'm not that cocked, right? Could you imagine what a cuck I'd be to, to like, 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. And to their credit, they did unban us.
We've been unbanned for years. So like good for Google.
The point I'm trying to make is people are coming back around and they're starting to say they're going to work with the military. Google is saying that.
Meta is saying that. Microsoft is saying that.
Apple is not saying that. Pay attention to that.
But there was this period of time where we ran a very dangerous experiment, which was decoupling our most innovative, most valuable companies from the military entirely. And that's an experiment we've never run as a country.
Has there ever been a time where our most innovative companies didn't work with the US military? Could you imagine how World War II would have gone? Could you imagine if General Motors and IBM and General Electric had said, well, we're not going to work with you. We think that's wrong.
In fact, we're going to work with Imperial Japan because we think that's a huge revenue growth opportunity for us in the future, and we think manufacturing is going to be cheaper there.

That's what our big tech corporations were doing.

Imagine if during the Cold War, if all – imagine if Zenith and RCA and Westinghouse had said, you know, we love America in an abstract, hypothetical way, but actually we're going to team up with the Soviet Union and we're going to manufacture all of our chips there. Could you imagine what would have happened to America? And so when I was in Silicon Valley, this was one of the things that 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's 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 a little more and a little more and a little more to keep them on the line. 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 going to allow you in.
And we're going to subsidize ByteDance. And also ByteDance is going to sell TikTok to you guys.
And it's going to take over your entire social media industry. And that was when all the tech companies flipped, when they realized that China was not their friend.
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 it.
The whole point should be to persuade them to do the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons. And what we need to do is take advantage of this moment in time and say, hell yeah, you're on our side, let's go, and get them so integrated that they don't really have a chance to change their mind in the future.
Because if we push them away and refuse to allow them to engage, they're going to eventually divorce themselves from the U.S. interests again.
Wow, that's smart. That's really smart.
It is interesting to think about the Apple one in particular. 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.
He speaks out against climate change, and he speaks out in favor of diversity. And he puts all this money into 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 law-enforced problems.
So he's politically engaged. Imagine what would happen if he said something like, I believe concentration camps are bad.
China, on account of the Uyghur Muslim issue, would immediately lock them out of the country. He can't say that.
Isn't that crazy? 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.
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. Because they can't do it.
If he did this, imagine what would happen if Xi locked Apple out of China. $2 trillion in market cap, gone just like that.
Almost everything they make is made in China, made with Chinese parts. 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 an insane situation? Could you imagine if that had happened during the Cold War? Imagine if the Kremlin could have just 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, pick any of them.

Whether it's General Motors or ExxonMobil

or...

I don't know, who else was really big back then?

What was the smoking company? What was the smoke? Marble. Yeah, what was it? Marble was owned by somebody, isn't it? 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 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. Trump understands that if we don't make things in America, we're actually just everyone else's bitch.
And what's the price on that? It's easy to complain about tariffs making cars more expensive because the parts can't come from China. But 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? Isn't that a situation we should just be like humiliated by every day as a nation? Like, shouldn't we be waking up saying, holy shit, like everything I'm enjoying is because Xi hasn't decided to screw us yet.
And Xi is going to do it. Like when people think that the first missile to fly is going to be a Chinese ship firing at a US ship in the Strait of Taiwan.
That's not the first missile. The first missile is going to be Xi calling up of his buddies in the United States and saying, if the United States government tries to fight this, I'm going to destroy your economy.
I will do it. I will do it tomorrow.
I will kick all of you out. I will give away all your special waivers.
We're going to steal all your factories. We're going to nationalize all your workers.
And then we are going to sell iPhones to the entire world and you will become irrelevant. Like that is actually what he has in his quiver.
Jeez. That's fucking scary.
It's heavy stuff, right? Yeah. And the worst part is that not to be a caricature, but nobody's talking about this this.
When was the last time you heard this

discussed in an open eye? And it's all obviously true. 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, just being under the pressure of, oh man, the nukes could launch at any moment. 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.

I'm not a fan of tariffs.

How long would it even take to get our house in order?

Not even that long.

You've probably seen what people say,

oh, well, maybe tariffs work in theory, but 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 advanced manufacturing. It's just a matter of will.
And you also need to staff it. 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? 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 this is a problem that's at least when we got out of manufacturing stuff and call it 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 this is a problem where we can build the factories quickly, but the hardest part is going to be training the kids.
We're going to need to basically get serious about training people to run factories well, efficiently, using modern techniques. We do have a lack of those.
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 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 going to love it. I think we need to start doing that again.
I think that that's one of the ways that we can beat China 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, 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 to be running the missile factory that's going to blow up our name.
There was a little bit of a debate on that not too long ago, correct?

You know, like the skilled immigration versus not.

So that's true.

The difference there is that H-1Bs are about

whether or not they're, like, on theory,

of course, there's so much H-1B abuse.

You would not believe what I saw

when I was in Silicon Valley.

It is insane.

It's obviously a program to try and replace U.S. workers

with basically slave labor that can't ever escape. The H-1B abuse is insane.
It's obviously a program to try and replace U.S. workers with basically slave labor that can't ever escape.
H1B abuse is crazy. But in theory, H1Bs are to create a job for an immigrant if there is not a person who can be hired to do that job in the United States.
A defector visa adds an additional requirement. It has to be something that they care about that you're ripping away.
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, 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 is not going to hurt.
Taking the head of an advanced silicon manufacturing facility that can make cutting-edge computer graphics chips, that is going to really, really hurt them. That was the part of the debate that I didn't see present, is using immigration not just as a tool to help the United States, but to harm our adversaries.
I want to stop focusing on the plow and start turning it into a sword. It's a double win.
Exactly. Because there's a lot of people around the world who would rather be here who will cause catastrophic consequences for their home country if they leave.
Here's a fun one. Think about the guys who are running the- It would be like if China plucked you.
Yes. 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. They got rid of me.
That would cause so much downstream damage. The best...
I don't want to go to China. In fact, my company is sanctioned by China on account of our sales to Taiwan.
Congratulations. 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.
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 other 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. Is that public? I even tweeted about it.
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 frame it.
I will definitely send one to you. I have one in my office.
Perfect. My dream is to get it signed by Vladimir Putin somehow.
I just want to get it on his desk somehow or at a signing or something. By the way, he deserves a bit of credit on this AI stuff.
He was saying before I even started Anderall, the country that wins in the sphere of artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the entire world. I know that today that sounds not that interesting, but this was nine years ago when everyone thought AI was crazy.
Xi Jinping said that too. Right, and you have all these world leaders who are saying things.
Could you imagine Hillary Clinton having an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago? Absolutely not. Could you imagine Joe Biden putting a stake in the ground? Of course not.
Anyway, even ignoring China, look at Venezuela. Let 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. Let's take advantage of that.
Let's talk about Anderle and the IVAS program. The IVAS program.
So, when is this coming out? I don't know yet. 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 can see through walls, you can see through night, you can see through fog.
You are Superman. This idea has been around for a very long time of putting a heads-up display, a computer, and a radio on every soldier.
You can even go back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, Starship Troopers, and that was really the concept behind the mobile infantry. They're wearing these kind of mech suits with fighter jet style heads-up displays that show them where all their targets are, that show them where all 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 putting a red dot that's coaxial aligned, but actually saying like, here is the impact point, factoring in the wind, factoring in your motion, factoring in what the other guy is doing.
People have tried this over and over again through history, and the tech's just never quite been ready. And they've also not maybe worked on it in quite the right way.
But most importantly, nobody's ever built a software backend that could make it work. Even if the helmets were okay, they didn't have this kind of system, whether it's AI or something else, they could understand the whole battle space, taking in sensors from everybody.
So my helmet, his helmet, his helmet, and that airplane, and that airplane, and that satellite, and that ship.

You get what I'm saying.

Building one common fused view of the world in real time has never really been properly accomplished. And so you have programs like Future Warrior, and Net Warrior, and Connected Soldier, and Land Warrior.
You have all these different programs where the Army has tried over and over. IVAS is sort of the latest 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. I knew I couldn't compete with it because unfortunately it was being awarded right around the time that I was starting Andrel.
So when the IVAS program was kind of running through the wickets, Andrel was 12 people. Obviously I was not going to be able to win this contract.
But as an ARVR 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 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 probably more than almost 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.
You didn't have the hardware working as well as it could have. There were a lot of soldier reports that it was making people sick, that it was making people dizzy, that it was causing signature problems.
There were quotes from soldiers in evaluations who said, this is going to get me killed. It was running to a lot of issues.
Anyway, the punchline is, over the last year, I've been working on an angle to try and get the IVAS program into a better place, to try and make it everything that it should be. A few months ago, we teamed up with Microsoft, which was the company that had won the IVAS contract and that was using something based on their HoloLens system, which is now discontinued, to build the IVAS product.
We partnered with them to integrate Lattice, our AI system, with their heads-up display. We integrated that.
We did it very quickly. It was actually a less than three-week process.
In three weeks, we went from teaming up to having Lattice feeding all of our three-dimensional tracking information into their existing IVAS heads of display. We did a soldier touchpoint with it.
They used it in some exercises and some trials. They said, oh my God, this is incredible.
I can see drones that are coming to attack me. I can see what their attack vectors are.
I can see where the people controlling them are.

I can see where I need to go to be safe in an amount of time that is reasonable

before that drone actually gets to me.

Really, really powerful stuff.

But here's the really big deal.

As of just about now,

Anderil is taking over the IVAS program as the prime.

Microsoft is transferring all of the employees, hardware, IP, facilities, everything to Anduril. We are now going to be the prime on the IVAS program.
We are going to continue to integrate Lattice into it, and we are building a totally new system on the hardware side that is going to be better than anything that anyone has ever seen. It is going to be by far the best AR, VR, MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built in terms of resolution, in terms of field of view, in terms of graphical fidelity, in terms of sensor quality and what you can do with those sensors.
It is a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus. It is a jump that I think cannot be overstated.
I am very aligned with the Army's vision in terms of this being something that should be on everybody, but I think my vision goes maybe even a little further. I don't just want this on every person who's carrying a rifle.
I want it on every logistician, every loadmaster, every rotary wing pilot, every fixed wing pilot. I want it deployed with everybody across every service, every branch, so that every person is eyes for everyone else.
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.
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 for what they're doing day-to-day.
But the software back-end is certainly going to integrate. I'll give an example.
I think that probably what you're going to see on law enforcement officers is going to look more like a pair of Oakleys that is still running Lattice. It's still showing them where threats are, but it probably doesn't need the ability to pick up an attack helicopter 15 clicks out and then flag them where they need to go.
I probably don't need that type of expensive sensing on there. I probably need things that are much more of a local web, but that's definitely going to happen.
And it's something I'm very excited about. Also, you look at things like body cameras.
You could make body cameras that are way better, that do a 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.
That's basically his job. 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.
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 want to see is body cameras that are a tool that law enforcement officers are excited to use. I want something that's watching my six.
I want something that's watching for threats that I'm not seeing. I want basically a guardian angel on my shoulder that is able to do what backup would normally do for me and at a superhuman level.
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. It should throw a red threat alert and show you a direction you need to throw yourself immediately to not get shot, to get behind cover.
You're going to see very tight integration between man and machine on these things. Anyway, IVAS is very much a warfighter-oriented system, and it's oriented towards the things that people at the tip of the spear are doing.
I think you're going to see similar ideas, but oriented around maybe a different form factor for law enforcement. What does it look like? What does it look like? It looks like a...
So one of my beliefs, with the 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, there's a big battery packing compute module back here, there's a big sensor brim you clip onto the helmet. The problem when you're trying to clip onto an existing system is it ends up not very tightly integrated, lots of snag points, lots of snag hazard.
It ends up being very heavy 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 Andrel product company fashion,

we've been investing a ton of resources in this for years at this point. So I knew that I wanted this to happen years ago.
I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it happen, but we started putting millions of dollars into this years ago so that if it happened, we would be ready to go and not trying to catch up from the start. Damn.
Anyway, this shit is going to be crazy. I'm pretty, so the first fully integrated system, meaning it has all of the different sensors, all of the different compute and vision augmentation systems all integrated into one thing, is going to be done at the end of March.
So right now, we're basically in systems test where we have individual systems that we are doing development and testing of,

but the first fully integrated helmet

with all of this stuff actually working,

actually working tied together with lattice,

feeding tracks,

that's all going to be done in March.

Just to give you an example of how useful this might be,

if you want to mark a target for somebody else,

you'd have to use a laser, right?

What if you could mark it digitally and you don't emit any signature for anyone else with nods to see? And what if anyone else can see it? Here's an even crazier, and when I say crazy, I don't mean like a hypothetical. 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. Holy shit, so they're all talking to each other.
It's all continuously, and it's not just the helmets. You're also, anything that's seamed into Lattice is talking to you.
So if there's a drone overhead that sees a guy five clicks out that way, coming up a hill, and he thinks he's going to set up on top of that hill and pop you, imagine if it sees him, it notifies you, you look at him coming over that hill, and you bring your rifle on target, literally the moment he clears, you're taking out that threat.

That's the type of 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 this is also the way

that I think you're going to have robot dogs,

robot soldiers integrated with human force.

Imagine if you see a guy who's 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.
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, I don't care about that right now.
Maybe we're going to go track them down later, but I don't really care about them right now.

Today, it's really hard to make that work.

You end up with people getting basically pulled onto all these different tasks and they have to make split-second decisions

because they don't have unlimited bandwidth.

When you have computers watching all these sensors

and you have an unlimited amount of attention that a computer can give,

you 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 get a question.
Far 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 Bin Laden 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 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'll be honest. I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition mostly because the situations where it works, I believe, are pretty limited.
If you're wrong, it's such a spooky thing. What if it tells you the wrong thing? What if it is wrong? How do you delegate responsibility for that? But I will tell you this.
Here's how I would handle that problem. I probably wouldn't use facial recognition.
And I'm just making this up on the fly. I haven't thought this through very well, so you'll have to forgive me.
First of all, going into something like the Bin Laden raid, I probably would have set up drones around that whole site with things like wall-penetrating radar systems that are flooding that whole area with RF energy so that I can actually see people moving around inside the buildings behind the walls. If I can do that, if I'm a hostage, I can probably guess a guy up against the wall 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 feed from the team back all the way to the situation room.
Is that correct? That's what I hear. That's what I hear.
I would love to see a situation where you basically have the feed from everyone's cameras being fed back to a talk and you've got a bunch of analysts in there who have seen this guy a hundred thousand times on every bit of one, on all their Intel, they've built up 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,

that's the guy that you want.

I mean,

there could be other things.

Let's say,

let's,

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.
Or you have the bad guy's phone. 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.
So it just helps with the- That will definitely happen. And you think about, I think for that CIA asset, he's probably not going to be wearing the full, the system that we're building is called Eagle Eye.
He's not going to be wearing a full Eagle Eye integrated ballistic visor probably. He's probably going to be wearing something more like Oakley's that just look like he's just a normal dude, but it's presenting him with, hey, that's the target.
We're tracking him. Maybe I'm misspeaking here.
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. Yep.
Now's the time to do the hit. I'm on target.
Yep. I'm in the same room as him.
Yep. Don't fucking shoot me.
I look just like everybody else that's here. You're saying some kind of marker so that we know that it's...
Yes. That's super easy.
I mean, like, you basically just... So, like with Eagle Eye, you actually have that inherently.
All the helmets, and I can't talk about how they do it because, you know, not great information to be out there. There are multiple ways for the helmets to know who is who, even in really tough environments, without the bad being able to pick up on how that works.
But basically, if I'm wearing this helmet, if I look over into those bushes and my guys are over there, it's popping up their names above their heads. Well, I don't mean they couldn't be wearing the helmet because they're undercover.
Yeah, but 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 could have it just scanning for that. It's like doctor in white lab coat.
It's like it's Dr. Farage in the white lab coat and he's going to be wearing his tortoiseshell glasses.
That is something you could definitely do. Or you enter the room and it outlines him in blue and it says, Dr.
Farage, probably. Wow.
The thing is, the more- That just makes the decision-making process. Well, 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. So one of the things, and when I say height, it's not even height.
It's actually skeletal recognition. So face recognition is hard because you need pretty good, you need a good capture.
It needs to be relatively dead on. It needs to be lighting as it is good enough.
I'm a huge fan of being able to differentiate 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 can basically build a model of how long his wrist to arm joint to shoulder distances are.

And we're all different. We're all uneven too.
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.
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 almost like clothing recognition. 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 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. I don't care what his face looks like.
Yeah, basically I'm just looking at like an identifier, something to identify him. 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- It would be easy to get an asset, a beacon. If I can give him a- You could plant something inside of them.
You could give him a water bottle that has something in it. I don't know.
Honestly, there's so many ways. So I mentioned hyperspectral vision.
Using hyperspectral cameras, you can look at things and they can tell you what it is made out of based on its spectral response across multiple frequencies. So you can say, that is stone, that is glass, and they, you can, have you ever seen hyperspectral cameras that are used for detecting drugs? They can just look at something, and that's cocaine.
It's really wild. There have been attempts in the past to use hyperspectral cameras for doing covert marking of vehicles.
So you'll have an operative walk by a car, and they basically take a piece of invisible paint that you can't see with your human eye, they just like smear a line along the hood as they walk by and it looks just like a smear of dirt to a normal person but on a hyperspectral camera it shows up as a bright orange streak on it you could just say like hey I'm going to give you a pen made out of hyperspectral stuff I mean like out of a weirdo material like basically a chemical you would not normally see in a pen you could say I'm I'm going to give you these eyeglasses. Honestly, you could give them some makeup.
You could have them smear some of the right compound on their head. You could 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.
There's a lot of interesting things you can do there. I haven't thought that much about these applications, I got to admit.
I've mostly been thinking about it from a more big army versus special tactics. 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 here.

When I started Anderil,

we said we're going to save taxpayers

hundreds of billions of dollars.

We're going to make our war fighters

into unstoppable technomancers.

And we literally said we're going to build

augmented reality heads-up displays,

fighter jets, smart cruise missiles. The things we're building today are literally what we said we were going to build eight years ago.
But remember I talked earlier about how 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 onboard 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 the superhuman, super intelligent thing.
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 it says, oh, he's going to come back around to do a low attack run.
This stuff is way beyond just, oh, there's a dot and there's the enemy. If you have the world's best expertise of the world's best warfighters distilled into one super AI, it's like you're rolling around with a whole team of experts sitting on your shoulder telling you what might happen next.
I'm so excited to live in that world because I imagine that's not the world you live in. 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.
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 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.

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 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. I hate it when they say, oh, we're not going to sell this to you.
We're only going to support the government. The problem, 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? 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 going to get sold to a

traitorous American. It happens way

too often. I hate that it happens, but

you've read these stories, right? Some guy sells

on eBay night vision that is top

of the line night vision to 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 going to be fighting against.

And also, I don't want them reverse engineering it.

I don't want them using it and learning how it works,

learning whatever my problems, because there will

be problems. I am going to do my very best

Thank you. potentially going to be fighting against.
And also, I don't want them reverse engineering it. I don't want them using it and learning how it works, learning whatever my problems, because there will be problems.
I am going to do my very best to minimize the impact of those problems. I know something is going to 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. Fareesh 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. 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. I haven't figured out how to reconcile that yet.
One would be to sell a more limited version to civilians. Maybe it doesn't do everything.
You probably don't want the civilian version to include the model that includes the weapons, tactics, advice of the best master chiefs and the best pilots and the best admirals of history. That's probably a dangerous thing for our allies or for our adversaries to have.
You probably don't want it to be able to... It'd take about five seconds and it's in cartels' hands.
Yeah. I had not even run through my mind now, but that's another thing.
We do a lot of work with CBP. We actually have our AI power.
Our lattice sentry towers are along about 30% of the border now. We're covering hundreds of miles.
We are responsible for hundreds of thousands of apprehensions that would not have happened otherwise. I am so proud of the work that we do with Border Patrol.
And could you imagine if they start going up against cartels who have helmets telling them how to evade our systems, how best to bypass them, sharing tactics on when to send decoys across to distract 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. 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, 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? 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. You've seen this going on.
Oh yeah, I've seen it. I think it's a reflection of a lot of things.
The world's changing. It's clear China's not our friend.
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.
And eventually, people who are smart, and 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, Andrel would have... Oh, you mean if I wouldn't have started Oculus? A hundred percent.
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 Andruil before Oculus. I've only been successful with Andruil because I'd already made billions of dollars at another company.
And that's kind of an indictment of our system. If you look at history, we have a long history as a country of finding the best technology wherever it is and then building those people and those technology up into incredible parts of our warfighting apparatus.
Are you familiar with the Samuel Colt story? No. Or Smith & Wesson? So 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 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

Thank you. 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 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.
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 Luckey 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.
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.
The point I always make to people is we need to fix our procurement system so that the Palmer Lucky of 2011 can successfully sell into the military. We should not pat ourselves on the back because, and people are, they're saying, oh, well, I'm so glad things are changing.
The success of Andrel shows that we're really getting our shit together. I'm like, guys, that's a good first step, but let's not pat ourselves on the back for a billionaire successfully starting a new company.
That is not the problem America has, is that billionaires aren't good at starting companies. 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 got to be honest, I had a lot more that I want to 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 think that you are not relevant or not helpful, you're probably wrong.
If you are good with computers, there are places that desperately need you. If you are good at metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, there are places that desperately need you.
If you're just good at talking and good at sales, there are places that desperately need you. 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.
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. 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, I believe, is going to get cleared by the customer before this airs, so fingers crossed.
Perfect. All right.
Well, Palmer, I really appreciate you.

Damn, what a fascinating interview.

I'm just, wow.

Wow.

It was a lot of fun.

Thank you. but also how sport to be on your podcast, man.
It's an honor. Spike Lee, entrepreneur, filmmaker, Academy Award winner.

Nick Stens.

Now you see, I got you.

But also how sports brings life, passion, music,

all of this together.

The Jim Jackson Show,

part of the Rich Eisen Podcast Network.

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