Transcript for:
Insights from Palmer Luckey Interview

[Music] Palmer lucky welcome to the show thank you for having me I'm so incredibly stoked to be here I'm ped to have you here it's so different when it's not on a screen yeah know do you watch it do you watch the show so I don't watch podcast regularly in general but I I i' I've seen yours from time to time of course I had to tune in for Trump um and uh it's just it's it's it's a you know I'm a virtual reality guy and so you know I understand the difference between thing that's on a flat screen versus 3D but it's it's just so cool to to be here in person oh thank you thank you we'll do the next one in VR well teach me how to do it well i' would love to be the first one to do that I I I'll set it up I'll set it up right on yeah so we you're a tech Titan and uh we had Joe Lonsdale on a couple months ago amazing human amazing and people should just know my bias Joe is one of the First Investors in my first company Oculus so back when I was a teenager he put millions of dollars into my company at a time where very few people did this was his last VC firm formation 8 which has now kind of evolved into 8 VC so uh I I I love I love Joe and uh I like to think Joe loves me and we've had a really we've had a really productive and profitable relationship over the years very cool well he was a fascinating interview and then and then you came up up and I was like dude we got we've got to get this guy he's like the Tony Stark but real so Tony Stark except Tony Stark got out of building weapons and I moved into it so you know we're a little bit in Reverse but uh but I I I I I like I like the comparison yeah yeah well everybody starts off with an introduction here so here we go Palmer Lucky from a from garage inv venor to Silicone Valley Titan at true innovator and disruptor in technology and defense founded andural Industries in 2017 to radically transform defense capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing AI with the latest Hardware advancements across many domains designer of oculus rift a virtual reality head-mounted display and founder of oculus VR which was acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion attended Golden West College in Long Beach City College at the age of 14 and studied at California State University Long Beach before dropping out to build Oculus VR that seems to be like a that seems to be the thing with all of you Tech innovators as you drop out of school and the only difference between me and all the other Tech guys as they were mostly going to school for Tech degrees I was if you can believe it a journalism major I was the online editor the daily 49er which was the Cal State LA be sh me you going to do journalism not I was going to do journalism I was even as a teenager are frustrated with the state of Journalism in America particularly technology journalism I think the thing that radicalized me was this CNN piece about a uh about this I think this was back when you had the the iCloud hacks and they were reporting on how forchan was affiliated with it and uh they had this technology analyst who's paid six figures which was a lot of money at the time you know when I was going to school he paid six figures to live in New York City and analyze technology and the anchor says so who is this for Chan and I'm like oh my God what this is this nuts and then what does he say he says well we don't know the details yet but he's some kind of system administrator someone who knows his way around computers and how to hack things I was like oh my God like technology journalism is going down the and I wanted to be part I wanted to be part of the solution so it's it's a I'm glad that I I'm glad I decided to build technology rather than uh report on it I think being the man in the arena is a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding but yeah it's interesting to imagine a world where where I'd be I'd be in your chair yeah yeah well who knows maybe one day maybe one day when I'm all when I'm all when I'm all old and used up I can I can I can uh I can uh I I can get my own studio and I I'll have you on cool known for your unconventional approach love for gadgets and belief in using technology to push boundaries whether for entertainment or national security so man I don't even I mean we're going to do a life story on you fascinating human being I can already tell with what the 30 minutes that you've been here just when we're down shooting the thumbnails and and uh blessed to have an interesting life so couple of couple of off-the-wall things that came up there down there so you are look we had a little conspiracy theory talk down there we talking about Trudeau and Castro and let's go into that before we get we'll jump right into the crazy all right so I mean I look I'll I'll put my I'll put my biases right out there I think Justin Trudeau is Castro's son but you can almost set that aside because that's not the issue I really care about like is it really Castro's fault uh sorry is it really Trudeau's fault if he's Castro's son like I don't believe in the sins of the father right I mean I I like I don't think he really should necessarily have to live his life burdened by that if it was true like I can understand why someone would want to hide that and like that's one issue I'll set that aside the real question has always been for me why is this conspiracy theory reported on it the way that it was and we were talking about this like let let's say that it's let's say it's not true okay fine but if you go and you look at any of the press coverage of this conspiracy theory they make you believe through their reporting that anyone who believes it must be truly nuts they're like digging deep on this conspiracy theory and then what follows is the most surface level thing that takes every official communication at State value and doesn't even look at the evidence that conspiracy theorists are actually analyzing you know they'll say well you know it's very clear the records are clear TR you know uh Trudeau's mother didn't even visit Cuba until four years after he was born it's like but that's not the conspiracy the conspiracy theory is that in the flight logs that one trip that was logged as Caribbean island and doesn't have a country name unlike every single other thing in the log that that was Cuba the conspiracy theory is that maybe was when she went to his house in France like like that's the conspiracy and they they literally don't mention it and it makes me wonder why are they going to Such Great Lengths to make this seem not just that like because you can analyze those and say well actually here's why and you know it was probably filled out by the by the by the by the FBO and they just didn't know where it had been and like there are reasonable ways to go after it but the way they've gone after it is to pretend that you're insane if you believe this conspiracy theory and I think that really gets back isn't that just about every conspiracy theory I mean it's certainly the I mean you know where the phrase comes from conspiracy theory well I mean the the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation and again it gets to this thing I okay I set aside whether or not there was a second shooter whether there was anyone on the grassy all let's say that the official story really is accurate it's pretty extraordinary that conspiracy theory conspiracy theorists are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy uh it's it's it it makes it makes you wonder people say well sure the CIA had 30 media assets back then including you know national news anchors but I mean that's not how it is today yeah right is it is it right yeah that that's why I like the tro Theory and you know there's other ones like we talked about the Kamala Paris DNC pipe bomb and like that yeah what I didn't I haven't followed that much you've got to look into this one because and I'm I'm very I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have uh we have people coming in the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this but you the official story according to the government which is that there was a live active and dangerous pipe bomb planted by extremists outside of DNC headquarters on January 6th that Cala Harris passed within just several feet of that bomb and that they managed to save her diffuse it and then destroy it but there's so many problems with this story for example you'll remember that originally Camala Harris through her Council testified that she wasn't even at DNC headquarters on January 6 you'll also see in the video footage that's captured of the pipe bomb that after it was called in and after Secret Service was on site you have Secret Service and Capitol Police just standing around the bomb with their thumbs in their pockets talking to each other at one point the capital police walk to their car and eat their lunch a group of children walks by they don't block off the street they don't they don't be like hey don't walk by that pipe bomb right there it it it the whole thing is it reeks it it couldn't possibly be what they say happened and then this gets to kind of the second layer okay again ignore whether it was planted by the feds or planted by somebody else or planted by extremists or maybe they found out it was planted by some foreign government agent that's a government they like it's hard to pick exactly which conspiracy you want to believe in there's a simple question why has Cala Harris never talked about it even one time she has so much to say about January 6 so much to say about people who are just protesting at the capital nothing to say about the feds who were planted in you know in that whole op but but like why focus on things like the people who were protesting in front of the capital building when you could just say oh yeah they literally tried to kill me like right right-wing extremist planted bombs outside of my party headquarters and got within 5T of killing me like wouldn't is it wouldn't you say that like imagine if that happened to Trump trump would be meling it for all it's worth and I love the guy but I mean he'd say and they almost got me you know maybe it wasn't 5 feet people say it's 5 feet I think it was 2 feet you know maybe I looked at it maybe I looked at it and said I think that's a bomb and maybe I'm the one who caught you he would be he would be he would be talking about this and the fact it's not talking about like someone has realized that it's not a good idea to talk about whatever happened because it's probably not what they told the public and so to me this is like one of the most interesting conspiracy theories because it's very rare for them to touch people at kamala's level right it's there's lots of conspiracies about like what what an ATF unit does or what some group of State Department goons did it's very very rare that the vice president the United States has their proximity and seal of approval on the actions of the day yeah that's a damn good point yeah you've got to look into this and and and watch the video I think like you you're your your uh your Watchers would probably love to see like you could just ask yourself like wait a sec if if they if they know it's a live pipe bomb like you're watching like how why are they doing what I'm watching them doing how like this only makes sense if it's a bizarre conspiracy I can't wait till everything comes out on all this stuff you know so concerned that it's going to be like the JFK files there's going to be two missing boxes and they're going to say oh well it's I think a lot of people are worried that the the shredders worked overtime before they got in and the digital shredders and all have you ever been involved in litigation no so one of the things that's interesting particular with criminal criminal I I've so I've been through I whenever you make money people come after you they come out of the woodwork and they sue you for you know oh you copied my idea oh you're infringing on my patent in Germany um and uh I've won all of the cases that mattered in the end or got them thrown out by the judge but one of the things that I had to learn over the years and by the way I've been to a verdict in federal court twice so uh you know I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I've unfortunately I've I'm pretty well well acquainted with the rules if you destroy evidence the way that the court interprets it is in the least favorable light they basically assume that whatever was destroyed is as bad as it could possibly be otherwise there's an incentive to destroy like if you assume oh it's not the worst possible thing what was destroyed maybe it was only halfway there and that's how we're going to wait this yeah unless it's the government destroying the evidence and and and that's one those like I wish that they would look at it that way and say no no when a box of evidence is missing on something and it's the government and they were committing these actions happens to be the JFK Force you like you should you should the I'm not even saying that we should assume the worst as people I'm saying the criminal justice system should assume the worst because otherwise they're going to keep doing this like you need to say no the box of missing papers does not get you out of hot the box of missing papers is the indictment it is the thing that you go to prison for life for when you lose the files on the JFK investigation like that is that is way more important to the National Fabric and unity of America and and people's trust in government than any simple crime ever could be you know like that cover up is so much worse than anything that people go to prison for life for every day you think they're going to do it or I guess it would be already gone now that now they you mean they are they going to hide it yeah I I I think it's what you said I think the shredders are working overtime and I think I think they're looking what's happening with us Aid and they're probably saying oh you know the Doge boys are coming they're coming here next uh we we we got to do something well I mean they they already I mean do are you familiar with Blackwater at all oh very familiar and yeah and I've I've had the pleasure of meeting Eric Prince a few times even before I started androl I asked him what should androll build um what did he say yeah should I say I think I think I I I think I can say it um we talked about a few different things but one of the things that he thought would be a good technological innovation would be artillery that is actively cooled in such a way that you don't have any cool down intervals like what if you could have an artillery piece that works at maximum mechanical uh you know interval like it has a very high cyclic rate artillery that never needs to cool down and never goes down for uh you know never goes down for maintenance like something that could like auto swap a lot of the consumables and his point was uh that artillery is limited a lot in that in that respect and that you can only get off so many rounds at a time from a single piece and that it would be a huge game Cher on the battlefield and at the time it was that was not the type you know I was looking at how I could apply mostly artificial intelligence and autonomy to AI like the name of my company and Industries you'll note the acronym is AI but we had to hide it because back then AI was a kind of a dirty word in Tech everyone thought it was never coming never going to work so we couldn't talk about it um I ended up not building it but I look back now and say you know that probably would have been a really useful thing to have in Ukraine especially in the early days of the war yeah um but yeah and then of course read his read his book uh civilian Warriors I'm always on the lookout for ways to 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evidence and so you know kind of the downfall Blackwater was that Aur Square incident I think it was back in 2007 when they they tried those guys that was when they were taking fire and then they responded and they were there ended up being civilian casualties yeah they made it out to be like a big like a bunch of Blackwater cow they made it look like they made it sound like they just rolled into an intersection just like did like a drive by shooting or something it was in that so they deleted the Drone footage really yeah there was actually a somehow that hadn't even made it into my long-term memory yeah a lot of people don't know and so the the there was a green green beret unit that was actually taking contact just just uh I can't remember if it was like a couple kilometers or a couple thousand meters away but um but basically when that they had that drone on station so they brought it over and they've they deleted there's like a 5 minute 10 minute segment of Drone footage where you actually see the vehicle so short enough that this clearly wasn't just like lost data it's they didn't want that the very specific like portion of the Drone footage that showed the actual gunfight was deleted you can see where the vehicle rolled up and then it cuts out and then it goes away and you can even see where you know where the radio fluid and stuff had been had been leaking out from the vehicle getting shot up and in court they're like well where is this Drone footage and they said oh we routinely we we routinely delete Drone footage uh just to save memory and they're like so you just happened to just delete the just that just the 10-minute segment that shows the actual gunfight and everything before and everything after still there and those guys wound up getting pardoned by Trump but they sent one one to prison for Life three for 35 years the actual guys in the Square not the people that deleted the Drone footage to be yeah the guys in the Square who deleted the Drone footage I don't think they I don't think they did I mean those guys ran out of money that one of the attorneys that was on the case was kind of doing a pro bono by the end of it and see these are the things that undermine confidence in of just America for Americans people wonder why we lose confidence in our institutions like it it is like that like that's almost worse than those guys going into prison is the fact that everyone watched people in the state do that get away with it and probably do it again yeah I mean it's not even at the highest level then we then we brought in this guy uh Captain Brad G he was the he was the commanding officer Naval special Warfare Training Center which is Buds and couple years ago they had that um they had that buds candidate uh who died in training and they so it turns out he likely died from performance-enhancing drugs that he was sourcing from out of the country in fact he had like cooler in his car with all this and they made it sound like the training was too hard and it was all this all Captain gir's fault and they reinvestigated it three different they basically just they reinvestigated I believe three times Y and they just kept doing it until they got the performance-enhancing drugs out of the investigation and once through some procedural error or we weren't allowed to have that then they pinned his ass to the wall and we wound up exposing it on the show now the case has been totally dismissed and looks like he's going to get his retirement and his ranking I I don't know where you fall on this I need to look more into that one I don't know where you fall on this but generally like we should be allowing these guys to use performance-enhancing drugs and it should be on the level where we know about it and it's monitored and like yeah like that that because like the real people are going to be using these things and there's ways to use them that are pretty safe and probably increased their probability of living in general but we've just we've treated that whole category like the whole C or of making your body you know better is just like it's it's just it's just not I'm not against it but it's got to be done right and if that played a part in him well the key is it has to like we should be doing it and we should be doing it right we should we shouldn't be driving it into the Shadows so that people are hiding it from their doctor hiding it from their unit hiding it from everybody and now nobody has like I mean I don't want to be like I don't want to be I don't want to be like too mean here but like do you think Marines are the right guys to be you know measuring out dosages of this stuff you know I'm I'm I'm I'm being unfair but like you know you you you can play to The Stereotype really easily here it's like like are is is that the guy you trust to get it right every single time to get the math just so and you know with with with with people's lives on the line no you should like you should have a Doctor Who's responsible for that and they should say hey your job is not to is not to you know have the stuff hidden from you it's to make sure that it's being done in a safe way that's increasing their combat Effectiveness increasing their probability of living to see their families yeah y all right so uh so I got a a patreon account they're basically are it's a subscription account there are top there are top supporters have been with us since the beginning and uh we built we built quite the community over there behind the scenes segment that you did up yeah so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question this is from Mel my 15-year-old son thinks you're amazing and inspiring my son is really into electronics and Building Things but not as much into coding what advice would you give him that might help him and other kids like him when he's thinking about when he's thinking about building skills early to do epic things like you with his life well good news for him I'm not much of a coder either I'm more of a hardware guy more of an electro Optical mechanical guy um and so my I think he's in a Fine Place to not necessarily be a great coder especially with how things are going with AI like the actual Act of coding is going to become less and less important to being able to build things really I'm I'm not saying that you're not going to still have programmers I'm not saying that you're uh going to have everything done by AI but when you're talking about you know the types of coding that I had to learn to do like gluing together bits of firmware making my Arduino well the Arduino wasn't big when I was when I was his age but you know what what did you just say Arduino it's it's the thing that all the kids are using these days it's it's a it's a it's an it's a quasi open source microcontroller kit that allows you to interface uh different types of sensors with comput like like if you wanted to build an automated bird feeder in my day you would have gone out and be like okay I'm going to build a 555 microcontroller circuit with a timer and an interrupt and I'm going to build a thing where the bird flies in and put dispenses feed or it dispenses feed you know every 12 hours if no birds come by we would have done that all by scratch these days a kid would go and buy an Arduino and they would probably plug in like the motor and they plug in the sensor and then they would write a little bit of code that says if if the you know if the uh resistance level coming off of this sensor you know if the resistance drops to this that means something's blocking it that means that it's probably a bird then trigger this motor you know fire this relay give it the voltage for this long this many seconds uh like the that that's the kind of way you would do it these days and so I'm saying that type of coating you don't need to be very good like you you you you need to know enough to get by think about like you know you might not know enough to design a car engine but you know enough to clean a car Ator that's the typee of coder I was and so uh I think his son is in a perfectly fine place the most important advice that I can give people is to work on projects that you care about don't look to school whether it's college or the state mandated you know younger educational system don't look to them to tell you here's what your electronics projects you should be working on here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things cuz one they're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing so you're going to be learning how to do things that are ancient two when you're working on something that you're only doing for yourself you're going to make way better decisions I generally find in what you teach yourself in how you do things like when I when I hire people at andal I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do because that means they're the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time because they want to bring something into this world wouldn't have existed otherwise and to me those are the projects that people like that's what drives you to learn the most it's what drives you to have the right attitude around all this stuff so I would say like don't don't do what I did which was like I I did some I you know I started going to college I was 14 or 15 and I took some robotics courses which in hindsight like I I don't regret taking them but I think the time that I spent taking those robotics courses would have been better put into self-guided self-directed uh uh efforts and that's especially true in the modern day of the internet all these things that like in my era were not as widely available and you kind of had to go you know talk to a professor about it there's a YouTuber who can teach you even better there's a there's an instructables guy heck there's probably a lot of people on patreon you know there's there there's bet there's a I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of creators on on patreon who are who are putting out really interesting guid really inter education so yeah I I would tell your son like encourage him to work on the things that he's interested in and don't rely on other people telling him what he should be working on and don't sweat the fact that he's not doing much or any coding there is lots of stuff you can create in the technology world when you're a bad coder it just means he's going to have to go find a really good programmer as his co-founder that's all right on right on well I'm sure he's going to get a lot out of that so got a little gift for you oh boy yeah yeah those are uh vigilance gumy Bears little something for the flight home now there's no like caffeine in these or anything right no no funny business I mean there's a bunch of that's unhealthy for you like sugar so what's good what's good about these what's taste them all right I'm going to taste them open them up I've uh I've been a big fan of European gummy bears in the past because they don't use uh they don't use um all the stuff that they use in the United States these are good those are made right here in the United States uh and you're not using a I can tell you don't have like a bunch of mineral oil on these as an anti-caking or anti-sticking agent do you dude don't ask me about the ingredients all I know is they taste amazing they do they taste I asked was I'm interested in food science before before starting andal one of the things I was considering doing was starting a company to make synthetic food out of petroleum uh they would have zero calories and therefore allow you to eat as much as you want without getting fat interesting and so U I had to learn a lot about you know food science but in particular the science of foods that you're not really supposed to eat like mineral oil and a lot of these gummy bears they put anti-stick anti-c cake agents in them and if you have too many of them they give you diarrhea yeah yeah and I can tell you I can tell I don't see it on the ingredients list and I I can feel it like they don't have like that slimy Sheen so you can you can eat as many of these as you want I bet without having a bad day at the toilet something to think about you got a gift right I do so this is something that I put a lot of time into not for your specifically just generally um this is a mod retr chromatic for about the last 15 years as a side project that I put a little bit of time into here and there I've been building a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color so this is a hardware clone that is basically what Nintendo would have made If Money Was No Object so it's got a custom one:1 LCD that's the exact same resolution as the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color uh it's a modern modern totally custom LCD Sapphire screen lens so not glass or plastic it's the same stuff you'd see on like a high-end Rolex and the shell is made of an aluminum magnesium alloy compatible with any Game Boy game I I gave you a couple games too that are sitting over in the studio so uh it's a it's a pretty it's a pretty fun it's a pretty fun bit of hardware and this one's this one's signed by me dude I was a Game Boy fiend so so it comes bundled with uh it comes bundled with Tetris it's a new edition of Tetris it this was actually played at the tetris classic World Championships last year um we had a tournament for it and in my opinion it is the best version of Tetris that's ever been made oh well if you want the batteries it runs on not rechargeables runs on double a nice so you'll have to twist those out of the packaging I'll do that later but uh I'm going to frame this one and put it in the studio and you have another one in the studios that you can actually play so I'm I'm not going to let I'm not going to let it be trapped you got to got to get back into Tetris I will I will thank you this is awesome I love this stuff man I love putting stuff from guests in the studio that's all this you have so many cool things most of stuff in here is all from prior guests and all has like a deep meeting at least to me and um well I've got a lot of my heart and soul in that and the the the name for the mod retro chromatic mod retro is actually the first business I ever started so when I was a teenager like 13 or 14 I started an internet Forum called mod retro for a game modification enthusiasts very and uh you know it's it's it's it's pretty fun to come back to it today thank you thank you but um all right so like I said we're going to do a life story and then get into all your business ventures let's do it at least some of them I don't know how many how many businesses do you have right now you know right now I'm 99% focused on just andal um I mean I sold Oculus to Facebook for a few billion dollars and I was up in Silicon Valley for a few years before they fired me uh so I don't have that one anymore yeah and mod retro I've had you know since I was 14 years old and I'm uh I'm very lucky where I found a few other people who are putting their fulltime into it because I just couldn't put time into it anymore but uh I'd say and and and rolls and rolls my my baby that's the thing that I'm putting all my time into like that company is awesome thank you it's awesome well like for people don't know it's we're we're not a defense contractor we're a defense Product Company so we use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever a ever able to do with weapon systems before so our business model is that we build these things using our own money not taxpayer money and then we show up to the government not with a PowerPoint saying hey here's this thing I want you to give me money to build from scratch I have this working Tech this working product buy it from me that's awesome all right so where'd you grow up I grew up in L Beach California um my my dad was a car salesman my mom was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me and my three younger sisters um I ended up moving down to Orange County to start my first company Oculus but I spent yeah I spent my to Childhood in Long Beach you were homeschooled yes tell me about that why were you homeschooled you know there's lots of reasons um wait how do you how old are you right now how old I'm 32 years old you're only 32 I'm only 32 holy yeah I'm I've had a had a pretty intense run um but I was homeschooled probably because I was uh not the type of kid who fit into the public education system uh I was you know probably these days they'd say that I have ADHD uh but back then it was just called being a boy yeah and uh and uh I think I think my parents identified that uh of me in particular out of my sisters was proba going to do better in a homeschooling environment than in public school and my my my sisters they were homeschooled for various periods of their childhood but all of them at some point actually ended up going back to traditional schooling really but you didn't yeah and I look I different things work differently for different kids um some people really like the formal structure and and the formal formal education process and being told exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it and I was not one of those people and I I think it turned out pretty well for me I think so it you don't mind if I eat these the whole time right you got if you need more than two bags we got more all right but um my wife's going to love them she loves jelly beans do you have kids I do I have one kid he's six months old congratulations yeah it's really great I'm I'm a I'm a big pronatalist I definitely believe you need to have kids like if you don't have 2.1 kids minimum you're a Trader to the nation and our ideals CU you're you're basically Outsourcing responsibility for the continued existence of our nation to other people's which seems like a super elitist attitude we like oh I think I just want one kid like you elitist you you you it's like a mentality almost thinking like oh like like yeah I'll let the you know I'll let the C I'll let the cattle reproduce you know they can keep up the population but my time you know I I don't want to raise more than one it just it it seems like an abdication of responsibility for our nation's future and direction that I I just can't get behind of course that that like ignores people who have like a real reason like a medical reason or a health reason or some unique economic circumstance but like if you have the means to do it it's crazy to me to not have at least 2.1 kids so you could say I did my part I I met replacement rate that meeting replacement rate should be the bare minimum you know if you're going to die you should at least if you plan on dying you should at least replace yourself six months old huh yeah six months old so he's uh so he's uh he's sitting up and looking around and and and and uh and loving life that's cool how do you like being a dad well I'm really lucky because my wife is really tra and so she's doing most of the hard work right now I'm still I'm still lot so I I I get to see him in the morning and I get to see him at night and uh We've oriented his napping and sleeping schedules where where where I get to spend some time with him every day but uh for the most part she's the one she's the one doing most of the work and that's uh that that works out well for us how long you been married oh man since uh summer of 2019 so uh so I mean how how many years is that now I guess almost six years or is that almost almost six years yeah yeah so but but but we've been we've been together for a really long time so my wife and I met when we were 15 years old no and uh we met at a uh at a debate camp in in Maryland at a at a law school that ran a policy debate camp that ended with a debate tournament and the first time that we met she was crying within minutes of meeting me because it was my debate team versus her debate team and we were arguing about whether or not uh not formally debating whether or not DDT the pesticide agent should be legal in the United States and her team was completely unprepared for our argument in particular which I can get into if you want but it was it was a novel argument that none of the other teams had ever seen we ended up beating all of the other beginner teams all but uh all but one of the other intermediate teams and several of the advanced team so we went way further than we should have because of this novel argument anyway they they were so unprepared and that they they literally started crying in the middle of the debate and uh somehow that we went from that to her uh getting married to me uh so it's it's it's it's it's a really strange world isn't it very cool very cool she realized I wasn't a mean person I was just really good at debate yeah yeah I could see that I could see that already so you you said you had three sisters yep yep no brothers no brothers and that's why I'm so glad to have a boy I know you're supposed to love them all equally and not care which it was but I was clear from the very beginning I said it I'm I'm praying it's a boy please be a boy because growing up in a household that was you know my day-to-day was my mother and three sisters look I always say you're supposed to go to hell after you die all right it it's it can be intense and so I was so so worried that I might be on a track where like I'm only going to have daughters and then all of a sudden I'm stuck in my childhood again and so now that I've had a boy I'm I'm happy to have either but when's the next one coming um as as as fast as biologically reasonable nice nice nice so what were you into as a kid oh man you know I I started out as a outdoor kid when I was a kid you know so running surfing swimming like I I was into all the outdoor stuff and it wasn't until I was like 12 13 that I really seriously got into electronics and engineering and then I quickly became an indoor kid like I just I I ceased to I ceased to be useful on a physical capacity were you were you building Forts and all that kind of were you building were you building weapons so I was I mean I I I actually I just dug up a bunch of the first weapons that I built um I built a multi-stage electromagnetic accelerator uh basically a coil gun so not not a not a not a rail gun rail guns you know put past the current through the projectile directly which making a magnetic field that accelerated uh accelerated nails and shot them out of a tube um the first thing that I ever built was a uh it was a a stun glove so it was a Home Depot leather glove that I mounted a capacitor charging circuit I I like 11 or 12 capacitor charging circuit and then a bunch of photo flash capacitors in a gauntlet 330 volts you could dump the whole thing through this big thick gauge wire to two spring-loaded pegs uh on on on the front of the Fist and like if you punched like like if you punched a plate metal it would leave hu a blast of Sparks a loud you know loud explosion shower Sparks it would leave big pits in the metal and uh I did use it on myself a couple times and you know it doesn't blow holes in you it just really really really works your muscles and I was too young to recognize that high amperage electrical weapons are extraordinarily dangerous I had absolutely no idea how dangerous what I was building was I I knew I knew enough to be dangerous and not enough to be safe not sleeping well can negatively impact your quality of life and it's really no secret that getting a good night's sleep makes a huge difference ever since Helix sent me a mattress to try I've been getting the best sleep of my life I used to sleep too hot on my old mattress 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month of service with promo code SRS switch to patriotmobile today and defend your freedom with every call and text you make visit patriotmobile docomo call 972 Patriot did you hit anything with it oh just myself just myself that's myself um I ended up building a covert version that was a uh it was a was a highlighter pen that I put three photo flash capacitors into the body of kept the front of the of the of the highlighter insides it was still a working highlighter and then on the end it had two tiny little metal prongs and I could touch it to an external charger charge it up and now I had a pen I could carry in my pocket and if you touch that to somebody it it was it was it was just awful um and uh it would it would like it would leave like real serious burns on your skin and uh I'm I'm I'm very lucky that I didn't wipe my myself out then and there but yeah so I was I was into building weapons I was into building building uh I was doing a lot of game console modification I started mod retro because I was really into this hobby called portalize which is turning vintage game consoles into self-contained handheld Portables like portable Nintendo 64 handhelds uh portable Super Nintendo handhelds combining the best of modern technology with these retro systems and uh that was that was kind of the the foundation that led to me getting into vir reality which how how did you I mean how do you get into that what age are you so I got into VR when I was about 14 years old not VR just the regular weapons oh regular not regular weapons I thought you were going to say bow and arrow and Spears and see for me I was I was never really even interested in like the wielding of the weapon it was in the building of the weapon like when I watch a James Bond movie The cool part that most appealed to me like I'm not imagining that I'm James Bond I'm imagining that I'm Q like that that's the that was cool thing to me it was it was building these things that did things that nobody expected that nobody had ever seen before allowing James Bond to do things that you know would allow him to outmaneuver or outsmart or outgun his opponent and so that that was that was that was kind of that was I was interested in all these weird exotic weapons like high powerered lasers and high voltage stuff and electromagnetic accelerators not because they're effective weapons but because they are a potential path to weapons that allow you to do things at Conventional Weapons hand if I had just been interested in weapons I 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 if you actually just want to if you just want to shoot somebody you know you existing weapons are pretty good they're pretty good anytime Outdoors or anything yeah so you know I I grew up uh sailing small boats so like dingies uh the boat that we sail in in Long Beach it was it was called a Naples sabbot which originally was like basically designed as like a tiny very short little boat that you would put on the back of like a you know like a sailboat or a power boat and just used to get back and forth between land in the boat and then someone decided hey wouldn't it be funny if we uh we made kids race these in a Racing League and uh that's that's more or less how it all started um so I I was racing Naples sabbaths when I was a kid then I ler got got later I got into a type of boook called lasers which are they're an Olympic sailing class boat um and I I liked sailing those I then later tried team sailing where you know you're one of multiple people on a boat I didn't like it because when you're on a team boat it's possible to succeed or fail on the basis of other people's work like you can fail and the boat still wins uh or somebody else can fail or you think they fail then you blame your loss on them and I I found it was healthier for me to be a solo sailor because then if I win it's all me and if I lose that's all me too like you can't you can't can't make excuses for yourself and say Well only reason I lost is because of you know you know Alex on the other side of the boat you know that's why we really lost cuz that guy wasn't pulling his weight when it's just you in the boat you're like I lost I I didn't try hard enough I didn't practice hard enough and so uh that was that was a I I really like sailing it's a phys it's a physical and mental sport which is I have not sailed in years I I I I've thought often about getting back into it but I'm just so busy with andal and like sailing to me is not a fun relaxing activity it's it's it is an intense competitive Sport and I am so out of practice and so physically inept compared to what I was that I I know I would be totally non-competitive and so I I it's hard for me to it's hard for me to go and go and do it I'm I'm kind I think I'm going to get back into sailing once I'm once I'm all old and used up once I've once I've I've I've made my contribution to society the candle has burned down to just the puddle of wax I'll get back into sailing nice nice I like power boats too that's the other problem is yeah I heard you got a mark five I do you've probably been on Mark FS before I've been on a lot of Mark fivs so I I bought a I bought a mark 5 Special Operations craft from the Dil special Warfare guys and uh I bought it it was it was like as is no warranty just like getting rid of it and there was no use certificate because they were basically selling it as scrap metal and the nice thing about that is I was able to get it and then put a ton of money into reactivating everything getting it going again as as far as I know I'm the only civilian owner and operator of a working Mark 5 there's there's a guy who has one with no engines in it that's sitting on the side of the freeway uh in in a in a boat yard in San Diego but I I I think I'm the only guy who's actually spent all the money to to to make one go again outside of the government and I'll tell you that boat was that was that boat was made for people with government wallets not not a not not not civilian wallets but I mean it's such a cool boat right I mean it's it's ridic it's the fastest boat that the Navy ever built so so uh you know it was built explicitly for Navy SEAL insertion and extraction uh so really really fast tons of storage really really durable really you know incredibly bulletproof drivetrain and and engines and it'll do you put any weapons on it so that was one of that was part of my Saga is they cut off all the weapons mounts even not they they took off the weapons and then cut off all the weapons mounts uh and hard points because that would have been like you know itar restricted arm type stuff but we were able to find the contract number for the people who made the original mounting brackets and so we just contacted that machine shop and said hey we need part number 46 2571 do you still have the cad for that they said it's not even incad this is you know this is like this is all draw paper drawings but yeah we got the drawings and we said we we want you to make us four of that part and so we got uh brand new weapons mounts made and I've and I have a I have replica m2s that were made by a company that makes Hollywood props that I keep on it when it's just parked in front of my house but I keep the real m2s nearby so that if we go out into uh you know out of California state waters we can put the real m2s on yeah that's awesome it is really awesome it's one it's one of those things where it's just when you're out there on that thing and you're blasted along at 50 knots and you're just eating up waves like it's nothing we've got on a few really cool trips on it uh there was one trip where when when the hurricane was passing by California recently there were these huge you know waves and swell offshore we said you know what we're just going to take it out like supposedly this thing could do 40 knots in C State 4 we're going to go do it that was the craziest I've ever done on a boat it was insane I mean think like coming off of waves diving bound into the next wave and the whole thing goes over the entire boat and you shoot out the other side and you're still going 30 knots um we also went to go see the USS Kittyhawk the last of the US very cool us last of the United States conventionally powered super carriers so not nuclear powered they were Towing it from bton Washington down around the bottom of South America then back up to galvaston Texas for for for scrapping and uh they didn't have any transponders on the boat or the toe because they didn't want luil L to come do it and they were doing it offshore you they didn't want people coming out to get in the way and uh we we got a hot tip from a buddy of mine as to when it was leaving and how fast they were going and so we charted out where it was going to be and we guessed pretty well so we just went out uh when it was passing by Southern California and we eventually found it way offshore and it was so funny because we were approaching the towboat and before they could make visual contact with us they must have seen us on radar and they radioed us and said that this was a military tow operation and to stay clear but I knew for a fact from talking to my buddies that it had already been cleared from DOD possession and this was just the toe company talking and like they they were like arguably illegal what they were saying and so we just didn't respond and then about you know one minute later we make visual contact with them and they see you know big you know gray Navy boat blasting towards them at 50 knots and they shut up and they didn't say another word I think they were like oh like damn they were like we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't have uh shouldn't have you know puffed ourselves up that like like that and uh so we it was really cool we got to we we we ripped right by the boat we got some really good pictures and then we launched a fixed Wing drone off the back of the mark 5 and we did a touch and go on the runway of the kitty oh my God bet those people are their pants the thing is you'll never get another like the military is not really in the business of letting you fly your you know remote control airplanes off of aircraft carriers it was so cool and because we're on the middle of the ocean too so it's not like we're doing it like off like you know a dock ship or something which they have done that with like the USS Midway and 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 RC plane fpv and you know going down approaching the carrier touch and go and uh unfortunately we we tried to land the plane back on the mark 5 but we we we uh we we messed up and the plane went into the water so I the drink we had to come back around and I had to jump into the water and get the plane and keep it I had hold it above my head to keep the memory card out of the water so that it wouldn't uh so it wouldn't get destroyed but we got the video we got the video very cool very cool so when you were did you when you were homeschooled I mean how how do they keep up with you how did your mom keep up with you I was really lucky in that there were certain things that I was I had I had to have beat into my head there's other things where I was just interested for my own reasons and very very good at self-directed learning like I mean I've I've read I read thousands of books before I was 13 literally thousands of books what kind of books everything right the classics science fiction the art of the deal you know I just like the entire gamut of everything that you'd want so like we were we were uh you know check I was checking out lots of books from the library also lots of people giving me books everyone knew that Palmer liked to read and so people would sometimes buy me new books but more oftenly you'd have uh especially like adult friends just like dumping massive quantities of books my mom also uh you she she managed to get uh on whatever registry bar Barnes & Noble uses for uh for teachers and so she had the Educators discount for buying stuff in Barnes & Noble and so you're I I forget what the discount was but it was some extraordinary discount Barnes & Noble did a lot for a lot for teachers especially back then and so uh yeah I just read and read and read and read and so C certain topics I was pretty I was I was I was okay with like I loved science I love engineering I loved chemistry math like like like real math never really a fan um you know they were like uh uh uh handwriting which you know at the time that was actually still still a thing that they were you insisting that kids needed to learn in school um and you know doing cursive and they're like oh you're definitely going to use cursive now they don't even teach it anymore what what what a waste of time that was but uh yeah I was I was I would say my mom didn't keep keep up with me on the things that I was interested in but she didn't need to try she knew that I was going to be fine on those and uh on the other stuff you know my mom was able to was able to beat me be beat me into submission right on right on you my mom's no dummy she has a master's degree yeah she's she's a she she's she's a she she's she's a sharp she's a sharp one on her own yeah yeah so did you grow up in I mean did you grow up in a middle class family yeah so my dad was a car salesman sometimes new sometimes used it depend depended on the time uh you know like like the 2008 financial crisis was really really tough for the car industry so there were there were there were some times where it was really tough cuz dealers were laying you you can't keep all your sales people employed when people aren't buying cars like it's it's just the way that it is but he sold mostly domestic cars so Buick Pontiac GMC Hummer and then later uh he kind of had to shift into selling uh import Vehicles because that was the only thing that was actually moving volume so like had to had to get into selling Korean and Japanese cars and it wasn't really what he wanted to do but it was it was the only it was the only way to make it work and uh my parents decided you know my mom would stay at home and he would work so we were a single- inome household I I don't want to say like we were poor or anything but like when you when you got one person working yeah and their one job they're working as a car salesman uh you know you got to you got to you you got to sharpen your pencil sometimes and sometime like one of things my dad would do is in his spare time he'd buy used cars I know it's funny you sell used cars all day then you go home you buy used cars and you fix them up drive them around for a few months and then you sell them for more than you bought them for and that gets you a little little more cash that was that was one of the ways that I ended up becoming mechanically inclined was helping my dad work on you know motor homes and vans and uh you know old old crusty BMWs you you you you learn a lot when you actually interact with the world and machines with your own two hands and you went to you started college at what age you know I I I honestly I'm not sure it was when I was 14 or 15 it was it was it was around it was that summer um but I don't I don't remember exactly it would it would have been right around when I was either turning 15 or almost 15 so was that remote or did you actually go no no I went I because yeah I was a I was I was a commuter student I wasn't like I wasn't on campus you know I was still living at home um but no I was I was I was actually going to school and it was the funny thing is when you're so here's the way it works in California high school students are allowed to attend Community College courses and State College courses by law the law says you have to allow them to take those courses um but there's two requirements one it has to have sign off from the principal of your school this is why most kids don't do it and by the way taking college courses when you're a high school kid it's amazing because you get college credit and high school credit at the same time it's like AP courses except a lot of these college courses are actually easier than AP courses in my estimation um it's just true look like like AP kids are all motivated Community College you get everybody um so the good news is my mom had you she like we were registered with a Homeschool Group that basically just signed off on all the paperwork they're like so I I just got everything signed off on and normally like schools don't want to sign off on this principles won't sign off because they lose out on Revenue proportional to the classes you're not taking at school what like what principal is basically going to sign off on a bunch of kids going to all the local community colleges when his school's going to lose the money so it's a totally up system that incentivizes keeping kids trapped in the high schools rather than allowing them to specialize and take Community col college courses the second thing you have to do is you have to you basically have last priority for enrolling in classes like you you know when you were enrolling in classes you know there's popular class where you had to be like on you had to be on your on your game and actually like enrolling it quickly right you couldn't like wait two weeks and then get around to it because the class would be full the problem is that when you are a high schooler taking college classes you don't even the the enrollment window doesn't open until it's been open for like four weeks for all of the proper students and what that means is that every course you want to go into generally is already full and so the only way to make it into a course is you have to go and petition into the course you have to show up on the first day of class with your petition form and then usually like you you're there with maybe some other people petitioning sometimes not and then at the end of the class you talk to the professor and try to convince him to let him into your class and uh so I had to get really good at that every single course I did I had to as like a 15-year-old kid talk to the professor and I would make sure to do research on them I would make sure to do research on work they might have done in Academia and I would I'd have I'd have to play the game like oh Prof Professor K I'm such a huge fan of your work on the local geologics of the estuaries in Long Beach I've been reading your papers lately and I really think you make the argument better than your colleagues at UCLA they say oh well thank you I say Mr KZ I would really love to take your geology course in fact I have to take it for my general education requirements I know your class is full but is there any way that I could you know that I that I could we could add an extra seat is there any way that I could stay for a week or two while we wait for students to inevitably drop out and I can take their seats and actually nine times out of 10 I I was able to make it work and there there were times where I was you know just sitting in the back of the class or standing in the back of the classroom for the first week or two Dam and then someone would drop bam I got my seat and I wouldn't have to stand anymore which is good because I was fat at the time this was remember I became an indoor kid I stopped exercising and so uh yeah that's how I I know that was a long a long ramble but when you're a kid going to college it is is it is as weird as you'd think it it it is it is like it is like a situational comedy every single day cuz you're like a 15-year-old kid and like it's obvious too I wasn't like a I wasn't one of those kids where I'm like you know a towering brute and who knows if he's 30 like it's it's like what's that 15y old kid doing this guy still going through puberty over here it's a that was exactly the situation and uh it was especially funny in things like when I was going to Long Beach City College and taking robotics courses and you basically have a whole bunch of people who are like you know older guys mostly getting uh you know post post postgraduate master's degree type work and you have a 15-year-old kid and the way the class works is you're all on teams building robots and so you have to pull your weight like and like nobody really wants you on your team when you're a 15-year-old kid when you're kind of going in blind you're like why do I want to be gimped by this teenager when we're all like you know professional level people often already working jobs and taking this taking this night class and so I really had to work hard to stand out and and prove and prove that I could keep up with with the adults did you have a problem keeping up no I had no problem did they have a problem keeping up with you I think that as soon as it was I did a good job of making it clear that I could keep up pretty quickly and as soon as that was clear then I was like the most hilarious novelty ever like ever every everyone thought it was just the fun thing ever you know uh as I as I got older and then I'm like 15 then 16 then 17 18 now I'm just the age of all the freshmen and it's not interesting anymore but at the beginning it was definitely pretty interesting but you're not in freshman classes at that age um not at that point well it depends so what I the way that I did this and the way I would actually recommend basically everybody do it if you can scam your principal into signing your paperwork is the moment you are eligible when you're 14 years old start taking Community College courses and what you should do is take all the general education courses first because they're generally easier you have to do them no matter what you're going to do as an adult right like if if I become a journalist or a mechanical engineer or a pilot I'm still going to have to take history so just start with all that crap and just do a few years of the crappy all General Ed courses and then you can decide at the end what you're actually going to do and you can then transfer all those units to where where whatever school you're actually going to and that's what I did I transferred all those units from Community College to Cal State Long Beach and went into the journalism program how did you make friends I mean you know it doesn't sound like you're surrounded by anybody your age everybody's older so a few things one I was things that you can't do I was lucky I you know I had a lot of local friends so like I I'll admit it I wasn't making my friends at college right like people are fine with the weird 15-year-old kid on their robotics team but they're not going to go hang out with them after school like nobody in their 20s like oh I just love hanging out with 15-year-old kids and if they are somethings wrong right uh I was I was lucky I wasn't running I wasn't running into any in any of those guys um but I was lucky I had a lot of friends I grew up with had a lot of friends from doing homeschool stuff but honestly most of my friends were internet friends like I was running an internet form called mod retro I think all my best friends were internet friends and uh that actually worked out pretty well for me it's like when I started Oculus and I started Oculus when I was 19 years old almost everyone who worked there this Oculus my virtual reality headset company almost everyone I hired was friends and moderators and administrator staff from Mod retro we were all teenagers like we're all a bunch of teenage dudes who have known each other for like five or six years on the internet and we basically decided to start a VR company together I I'll never forget when I called up my friend Chris H who was one of the early administrators and moderators on 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 I'm I'm probably going to uh I'm probably going to work all summer at the local pizza place and then I'm starting school this fall I'm going off to college I said no you're not you're going to come with me and we're going to start this VR company that I've been working on Oculus and that was on a Friday and that Monday I rolled up in my crappy minivan to his house which is 2 and 1 half hours away from mine He piled all of his stuff into it and we drove away and his mom couldn't believe it she she my God he he told her mom I'm uh 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 it was later condemned and torn down but we we moved into the SeaPort Marina Inn and we lived there for the first few months of Oculus like literally me and my internet buddies living in a crappy motel room starting this company and so I I I believe I didn't have a problem with with uh making friends we just had problems uh seeing each other in real life how old were you that was I was 19 19 years old yep and did you complete college no I dropped out um I I went through you know I I I I had basically one semester and summer school left to get my degree and and I had a series of technological breakthroughs in my virtual reality hobby which I've been working on like I said I started building VR headsets when I was 14 or 15 is a hobby and I would become obsessed with virtual reality technology and trying to make it better I I I believed that the existing systems which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were very heavy I believe they were they had missed something I I knew this had to be a crackable nut and there weren't very many people working on vrtech it was kind of a laughing stock at the time everyone thought oh this dead you know technology that'll never happen uh it was just a ridiculous fat of the 9s and I still believed in it and over the course of years I got better and better and better and then I had a series of technological breakthroughs that made my headsets much cheaper much lighter much smaller than anything that anyone had ever made and for the first time when I showed it to my friends it instead of them seeing my prototypes and saying that I was wasting my time they said oh I actually get it now this is cool and so I I had a choice I could either stay in school and get my journalism degree or I could drop out of school and start this company and there was there was actually it was kind of two options I could either drop out and start this company or I could stay in school get this degree probably have to make use of that degree and I was terrified that in the process of delaying me working on my real passion that somebody else was going to figure out what I had and they were going to do it before I did I I I don't have the time I I need to get this into the world right now because anyone there there were literally thousands of people in the technology industry who could have had the insights I had the insights I had were not like Einstein level insights they were the natural conclusion that any smart person who was looking at the VR industry in 2011 and 2012 would have made basically there were certain components becoming available computer power was increasing in a certain way where I could compensate for optical Distortion in real time on a graph 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 I knew I I needed to I needed to take advantage of that good thing I did it was a wow and actually even better it I I was right so Sony ended up launching PlayStation VR a couple years later and it was more or less built on exactly the same principles that I had now I think they copied a little bit from what I made public but they also had internally been working on VR for years and so it turns out there were people in major companies who literally had come to the same conclusion I had in fact Sony made me a job offer before I launched Oculus um I I was open sourcing all of my work publishing on the internet and when uh when Sony why were you doing that why were you putting open source information on the Internet or if you were worried people were going to steal the idea so a few things first remember VR was just kind of like a joke at the time and I was working on it not as a job I was working on it as a hobby right I got into VR like I just wanted to work on VR and make it good and it's about it's it's not about it's guess there's two ways to look at this one is that if I put stuff out there other people put stuff out there right and then we all move faster together as a collective than me hoarding all my information to myself but to be honest it was just purely cultural and I never thought it through remember I started the retro forums CU I was interested in modifying game consoles vintage computers the social currency of an Internet forum is knowledge right how do you show off on an internet Forum that is built around engineering and product you like building projects you show your projects and you don't just show them you say and here's why my project is better than anyone else's let me tell you in detail how I built my power management system notice how I modified this LCD to not use a compact fluorescent illuminator but instead uses the latest white LEDs from nichia to achieve much lower power consumption and then all the other nerds say oh my God this guy is a God Like That is the the social currency of nerd forums in the 2000s was prowess and so if you didn't prove your prowess You're Nobody and so I I honestly that that was the culture I grew up in on the internet that's that's how the internet was back then and it's very different than today today it's about Flash and style you make a cool video and like it's it's it's not really necessarily about going deep into the technology that you did or the design decisions also you know what was common in the 2000s you wouldn't do it today where you go on and you post you know your final completed thing and hope it goes viral on Tik Tok you would post updates in a forum thread like every week you 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 idiot why are you doing it that way and and sometimes you'd say you're wrong and I'm going to prove it times you say he's right I I was doing it a stupid way and you would adapt and so it was just a totally different culture and that was the approach that I when I started working on VR I'm like well that's that's what you do that's you you share your work and people are impressed by it um and so how did Sony get on how did you get on son so what that that was that I I got really lucky in a series of chain so I I I don't I don't want to say that it was all luck because I think people make a lot of their own luck like you might not be able to make a coin more likely to land on heads or tails but you could increase the number of coins you get to flip in life right like you could you could do things that increase the number of interactions you're likely to have with people I think publishing in the open for example did that it means that I didn't have to personally meet every person who would be helpful to me they could just see my work out in the open and then come to me and in this case it was a guy named John carac um who you should have on the show honestly probably the smartest engineer in the world that I I know can you connect me with him absolutely um John is more or less the creator of firstperson Shooters the modern 3D game engine like if you've played any if you've played Call of Duty if you've played Battlefield if you play anything it all goes back to Doom he was the original Creator and lead programmer for Doom and uh he oh dude I love do he he is a wizard and he was so far ahead of his time I mean not just building 3D games but also one of the first people to conceive of networking those games over the internet to allow people around the world to be in a single virtual space and play games together like John was bringing that out like people had online games but they typically were not real time you know they were things like online chess he figured out how to build net code that would allow you to have people in a fast-paced action game where milliseconds matter and allow that to function over the internet I mean like and so John was an extraordinarily brilliant guy everyone in the games industry the tech industry RIT large knows who he is and uh he would give these he would he would give these uh actually he would also publish all his personal notes and Technical notes in in in a lot like he would literally publish them online and just let anybody see them because he also believed in sharing information everybody goes together and he wasn't worried about people running faster than him because he was already running twice as fast as anybody in the world could ever run John carmac had been looking at virtual reality for years but he had always concluded it was too expensive too uh low field of view too much latency it made people sick uh and he had every few years he would do another new look at VR and see if where it was and I got lucky where he came on to this internet forum and he was researching VR and he saw my project threads and he contacted me and said hey Palmer um actually no our first interaction was he posted asking hey I want to modify this Sony head mounted display that I have to be lower latency because you can't play games with it or you'll throw up um does anyone have any tips on modifying this thing and I gave him a detailed response where I said John I've already tried to do exactly what you're talking about here's all the technical challenges the way Sony has Implement implemented the display pipeline makes it impossible to get rid of latency unless you drive the displays directly with your own brand new controller here's why you're not going to be able to do that and so I laid all that out he looked into all my other posts he saw my Oculus Rift worklogs and he contacted me and said hey you seem to really know your stuff I see you have this Oculus Rift prototype can I can I buy one from you I said I'll do better than you better than that John I'm I'm I'm a huge fan of yours I'll just send you one for free so I sent him one of my Oculus prototypes for free he adapted that into Doom 3 BFG Edition he basically made his game Run on my headset and he showed that at E3 which is a major gaming trade show in Los Angeles it takes place every year that was where Sony saw it Sony saw that prototype and there was so much attention being given to this at this point cuz it was the best VR demo of the world that ever seen like John even explicitly said this is the best VR demo the world has that has ever been created Sony saw that and they said oh my God John like who the hell made this what company did you buy this from he said I bought it from a teenager on the internet who I've never met and and he and he just gave it to me for free and so he put me in touch with Sony I met with them showed them my technology and they offered me job running a VR research lab in their Santa Monica PlayStation studio and uh I ended up turning them down to start my own company but uh but and what I didn't know at the time is that they were already running a VR project and what I didn't know is that I was already in a race against the clock I didn't even un when I turned them down I didn't understand that like I thought turning them down it's like oh I need to do this on my own before Sony you know gets into VR I didn't know that they were literally all already in a race with me it was a it was a really wild time when did you find out you know I I kind of knew that there were PE so all the VR work back then was being done by a group called Sony Liverpool uh so over in the UK they had an office that was doing most of their 3D work like they were doing all their 3D ports of various PlayStation games those were kind of the guys leading the charge on VR as well and I found out that they were working on VR right before right after I turned them down but then Sony Liverpool was shut down just a few months later and so all of a sudden the people who had been working on it weren't working on it anymore but what I didn't know is like and so I I I basically found out they were working on VR then thought they weren't working on VR then I found out maybe a year later that there was an entirely separate VR project going on inside of Sony out of Japan and I found out about a year later and then you won't believe this the day that we announced the acquisition by Facebook of oculus literally the same day was the day that Sony announced their PlayStation VR literally the same day wow yep it's really like which gets back to like it was clearly an idea whose time had come right like I was very lucky that I had the Insight that I did as just a random guy in his garage like how Wild is it that there's like me a 15-year-old sitting in his garage has more or less the exact same insights on this dead technology that a huge team of advanced display researchers in Tokyo have at exactly the same time like man that's how you know that it's the right time to do something that is crazy and who who was your friend that you by way John carac just to tell you a little more more about him he also at the same time he did it software ran a rocket company that competed in the X prize and they built the one of the first vertical takeoff and Landing Rockets way years before SpaceX did they were were more or less the inventors of modern control theory around doing vertical takeoff at L Rock so he did that as his hobby he also built like twin turboed Ferraris as his Hobby and then I hired him as the CTO of oculus so I convinced him to leave his own game Studio to come and be the CTO of oculus and then eventually after I was fired he left and now he's working on trying to build super intelligent General artificial intelligence and he did this before the AI boom so like I know that seems like oh well of course he's doing AI like all these other you know hot people just following the trends John was doing it when everyone thought he was crazy so I mean he's he's he's way ahead of the curve damn I would love to talk to him I I'll connect to you guys I John is John is John is brilliant thank you thank you so who was your who was your friend that you had COA out of going to school so that's my friend Christopher dkas who was uh I said earlier that I had never met him in person that's actually not true I just remembered I had met him one time in person at San Comic Con um we were we we we we we both met up while we were at Comic Con nice nice so was he a co-founder yeah so he was he was I mean he was the literally the first person that I called before I called anybody else and he was you know guy a lot of the like same Hobbies as me same uh same same interests as me and I mean he so he was employee number one at Oculus literally employee number one I I don't count my S as employee number one cuz he can't employe yourself um or maybe you can anyway we've always said that he's emplo we've always said that he's he's employee number one uh cuz he was and the crazy thing is Chris was also employee number one at andril my new weapons company no so when this is a whole long story on its own but when I was fired by Facebook Chris was the guy who took a stand and said publicly hey you firing mer is totally wrong it is it is absolutely insane he has done nothing wrong and I can't be at a company that is like this and so he quit his extremely highly paid job at Facebook to come and join my next company even though that company didn't exist yet had nothing to its name and uh you he's he's he's one of those he's one of those one of those friends who is probably more loyal than he should be which is what people should do wow so you developed Oculus how many people were on the team well started with just me in my garage when we were shipping our first product the Oculus Rift dk1 we were up to about 25 people when we shipped our second product the DK Oculus Rift DK2 we were up to about 75 people and that was when we were acquired by Facebook and then during my years in Silicon Valley working on VR at Facebook you know they basically we were run as a kind of an independent operation own by Facebook um we grew it to a couple thousand people holy yep and so how did it how did it pop up were you trying to sell the company how do it pop up on Facebook's radar so there were a few things um we were not trying to sell the company we were planning on staying independent but then a few things happened first it became apparent to us that we weren't running a race on our own we started to hear what was going on at Sony like when Sony announced PlayStation VR we knew it was coming we knew there were other companies that were that were going to be entering the space with way more resources than we had as a startup and look we're we're a group of like 75 guys who managed to raise a little bit of enture capital how do you compete with multi-billion dollar companies like Sony or Microsoft or Google or Apple it's really really hard and uh that was so that was one thing we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally how do we survive in the long run we we we have the jump on these guys but how do we turn that lead into something that persists rather than just being the people who are first and blazing a trail for everyone who then comes in and outspends us and it's pretty easy to outspend people in the games industry like here's a very real concern what if they came in and all the video game developers who are making games for our platform what if they just came in and gave them piles of money to not support our headset and be exclusive to their headset Sony did just that and I by the way I have no ill will towards them they it's all business right they're strictly business they were trying to compete with us there were titles that had announced for the Oculus Rift as our launch titles Sony came in gave them money and they said we're not going to be on your platform we're going to be on Sony's now so we we were very very vulnerable because nobody wants to buy a game console that has no games right you you you you really need to you need to be able to make sure that developers can justify financially being on your platform so that was all going on and then incomes you like i' say there was lots of interest from obvious people like Microsoft coming in and Google coming in the interesting thing was when Facebook came in and a few things happened first I think Mark was truly convinced that VR was the future he saw what we were doing and he said oh my God this is the future of computing this is the future of gaming I truly believe in your vision I want you to be a part of Facebook so well you know we're not not really that interested at this point but like maybe we could team up in some way um and the thing that really convinced Us in the end was two things one Mark promised not just to buy our company but to invest a minimum of a billion dollars a year into research and development for the next decade that was really the thing like when you're someone like me who's used to working with garage budgets and scraping money here and there and trying to keep your thing going imagine what that sounds like someone comes to you and says I'm going to give you a billion dollars a year for the next 10 years of your life to try and push virtual reality forward it's a really compelling pitch in fact I remember exactly what I wrote in the email to the team after we met with Mark I said we we might be getting played but if so Zuck is Van Halen like you like he he's saying he's hitting all the right notes he's saying exactly what you want to hear and he's doing it in a way that really makes sense uh the second reason that we were persuaded is because they made a pitch to us and said look Microsoft if they buy you is just going to cut you up into pieces and use you to sell more Xboxes they don't actually want VR or ar to be the next major Computing platform they like Microsoft's pretty happy with how things are same thing with Google same thing with apple they're already at the top of the food chain right they're making iOS they're making Android they're selling phones or they're selling you know Microsoft Office and they're selling computer operating system licenses the people at the top don't want to shake everything up they don't want to shake the snow globe and see who comes out on top they kind to want to maintain things the way they are so his point was if you get bought by Google or Microsoft or apple they are not going to try and shake up the whole world and make VR a thing as fast as they can you're going to be a tiny part of their 10-year plan but Facebook on the other hand we don't have an operating system we don't have a hardware platform we don't control these gigantic you know store like we don't control the iOS store we don't control the Google Play Store but they want to have a platform and so Mark's point Point pitch to us was look you go to those other guys they're not going to be motivated to make your thing change the world you come to Facebook we are deeply motivated because we want to shake the snow globe we want to make the whole universe move to VR and AR and even if we don't end up on top we'll probably at least be in second or third place which is a heck of a lot better than today where we're way down here and I think that it was it was he was it was just obviously true right like you could look at it logically and say yeah that that's actually right they they do to figure out a way to shake things up this clearly is that way and they're committing to spending a billion dollars a year on the thing that I am passionate about so uh you'll notice that not nowhere in there is I did it to get rich uh I I I will address that really fast because I know people are thinking I know they're thinking well Palmer what about the $2.3 billion doar that Martin gave you for the company on the one hand uh like that was some tiny Factor but remember that I had other companies that were making offers too my investors were telling me not to sell they were saying Palmer no we'll we'll fund you we'll give you as much money as you want like I could have done that instead and also I believed that Oculus was going to make tons of money all on its own right like we we were the hottest things in the games industry so in my mind I was already going to make as much money as I would ever need like like like so people they often say well Palmer you really just did it for the 2.3 billion I say no like if if this is about $2 billion I could have just made that myself uh but Mark was was offering $10 billion in research and development and me getting $2 billion from somebody doesn't do that yeah doesn't do that wow interesting interesting so was like if if I could flip it on you like not not not to play the interview but like what are you most passionate about in life CU for me it was VR at that point this this this right here what if someone told you that they were going to give you10 billion to do this for 10 years yeah like would you just pick oh my God like this is the opportunity of a lifetime and I know like you probably want to remain independent but if someone told you I'm going to let you remain independent you're going to make all the shots and I'm going to give you 10 billion over the next 10 years you'd say yes to that absolutely I would in fact that's a that's a discussion we're having right now so F I'm I'm so stoked to hear that and I I'd say to anyone listening it's not10 billion well I'll tell you if if you can find somebody who will give you $10 billion do to do what you're passionate about take the deal yeah it is it is like that is it is and like did it turn out well for me I mean in the end I ended up getting fired for absolutely political reasons yeah I wanted to ask you guess what VR is a multi-billion dollar industry I'm having the last laugh I I I wanted Mark changed the name of the company to meta and literally made AR and VR the core of the company like in the end mark didn't acquire me I acquired them it's a damn good point so how long so Facebook bought it y you moved over how was it working at Facebook Facebook things were going great I mean we so we we had a bunch of metrics that we needed to hit in terms of sales user retention like we needed to get 10 million users on the Oculus platform we needed to hit I forget it was some number of millions of hours of monthly users and we had these different levels where we basically got bonuses paid out on the basis of our performance tied to those metrics we had something like five years to hit the top Benchmark of 10 million users we did it in less than 2 years like we were were kicking ass wow and so everything was going great I earned all my bonuses I got great performance reviews everyone loved me and I I got along pretty well with everybody despite moving to the Bay Area which was a very very politically left place at the time I'll say like I I've long been a Libertarian minded person politics were always something I had thought about but really didn't do anything about like I had given $40 to Gary Johnson right like it just it I I don't want to say politics weren't important to me but they just weren't that important to me I cared about VR I was the VR guy right and so here I am I've sold my company for billions of dollars few years pass and all of a sudden Donald Trump's running for president now Donald Trump is somebody who I had long had respect for I actually wrote a letter to him when I was in college and 15 years old telling him that he should run for president you might not remember this but he had been on TV and they were asking if he was going to run against Barack Obama um and he said he said well I might have no choice I might have to run I don't want to run no nobody wants me to run it feels like but if I have to do it then I have to do it you know if people tell me that I have to run then maybe I have to do it and so I wrote him a letter I said you have to run we need someone who's signed both sides of a check we need someone who is not a part of this giant government bureaucracy we need someone who understands what it's like to build a business not to be a community organizer and uh I wrote that letter I I I don't even want to say like I thought too much of it right I I you know like I I did it on an Impulse because I saw him say if if enough people tell me I have to run then maybe I'll do it years pass Trump's running for president and I said this is this is f fantastic I'm I'm so stoked that Donald Trump is finally running for president was there hold on was there any did you get a response no I I never got a response okay which is which is which is fine like I I I don't want to act like I was like put off by it I also I'm I'm so glad I did this I posted on Facebook about it too and I said I said I said looks like Donald Trump might run for President we convince him this would be awesome I'm so glad I did that because now I have proof that I supported him when I was 15 years old all those years ago uh because otherwise this just this would just be like a ridiculous story you'd never be able to prove it um when I had Trump at my house years later for a fundraiser which by the way was the biggest presidential fundraiser for a republican that had ever been held um I I put that I put that little Facebook post up on the screen uh before he came up um anyway so look Trump's running for president everyone in Silicon Valley was losing their mind right I mean it's it like I know you probably remember but there's probably people listening who don't remember or they're too young to remember 2015 and 2016 was insane the media hated Trump everything was being Twisted in these absurd ways you remember when he said they're sending us they're drugs they're criminals they're rapists and they said Trump says that Mexicans are rapists and their quote is they are rapists it's like you can literally just L watch what he says and it like it it doesn't even make grammatical sense for that construct also he's literally talking about the criminals and the drugs and the murderers and the rapists and I mean it was like it was insane there was no ethics being used it was it was it was it was a pure attack Blitz C by the media against Trump and a lot of people fell for it and so uh I ended up giving $9,000 to a prot trump anti-clinton group and it's so funny because this started a media storm that I'll get into in a moment but I have to tell you what they actually did I gave them $9,000 they ran one single billboard in Ohio I think in Columbus Ohio that was a picture of Hillary Clinton and it said too big to jail and this was after she got away with mishandling classified information you might remember at exactly the same time you had us submariners being put in prison for decades for much less expansive mishandling of classified information you was like it was it was an obvious double standard you have the Deep state State Department apparatus protecting Hillary and on the other side you have a serviceman going to prison for something that was not nearly as bad as anything she so too big to jail so would you agree like that's pretty reasonable political discourse right that's not that's not crazy I'm not I'm not saying Hillary's a like you know it's it it it's very reasonable so two things happened first the media found out about my contribution and a few media Outlets reported on it some what accurately like Paul mer lucky the guy who started Oculus this Facebook executive has given $9,000 to this prot Trump anti-clinton group that's running a billboard then a handful of people on Twitter literally it was a completely madeup story said Palmer is funding white supremacist internet trolls to attack Clinton supporters on the internet it expanded from there Palmer is funding anti- uh anti-semitic memes Palmer is funding misogynist troll squads Palmer is funding a a I believe RS Technica called it a Title Wave of racist memes on Reddit Facebook and Beyond it was literally fabricated none of it ever happened it was a completely false story and it was reported by dozens of outlets CNN Bloomberg CNBC RS Technica Wired Magazine Gizmodo boing Bo The Washington Post Taylor Loren reported on it I mean it was everywhere and they all they all just had this this lock step narrative Palmer lucky is a racist misogynist anti- which is so funny I'm actually a radical sist and I'm and like it it was it was even in the moment it was what is a radical Zionist I strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish State like i i i i people are like that's so problematic though it's so it's so ethnos State adjacent I say I don't care after what happened to them in World War II they deserve a place where they can do their own thing and protect their own people without getting wrecked by everybody else who hates them and you know what maybe someday everyone who hates Jews are going to be gone we are not living in that world today and I and people they they it's a slippery slope though if they can have it why can't the KKK have their own State I say that's not going to happen like like it's it's absurd for us to even have discussion it is very reasonable for the Jews to have a place that is there 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 the belief that they have the right to a Jewish State the existence of a Jewish state is separate from the issue of what do you do with refugees from some political you know from for some from some physical area so it was so funny to me with like Palmer is this anti-semitic guy because it was literally made up like it's not even like there 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 Miss Palmer's ignor like he's he's glossing over something he must he must have like said something about Jews on Twitter and they were like are you Jewish no I'm not Jewish I just believe in the existence of a Jewish State um and and I bet even some of your listeners probably won't agree with me on that and that's fine we don't have to all agree on everything but I will say it was pretty ridiculous in the moment where like Palmer is an anti-s semi I'm like no I love the Jews more than like anybody like you Democrats hate me for how much i' like to choose you know like that you anyway it was but what happened was as a result of this reporting like looking back I should have pushed back what happened is I wrote a statement saying hey this is all false none of this is true here's what actually happened I gave $9,000 to this prot Trump group they ran a single billboard everyone is lying this is literally fake news and that was when fake news was like a new a new a new phrase Facebook told me I couldn't publish it they said we won't let you make this statement you cannot make this statement because it frames the media as the bad guy and in a world where Donald Trump is attacking the fourth estate we can't appear to be aligned with him I said well you guys don't have to appear to be aligned but I will be like I I'm I'm fine if people think that I'm being unfair because this is literally character assassination like they they are they they are trying to destroy and they they kept reporting as of Thursday at 3:58 p.m. when reach for comat Palmer lucky is still employed by Facebook like that's how they ended the Articles it was it was explicitly a scalp taking operation from the very beginning all the Articles were ending with Palmer's still emplo employed Palmer is still employed according to Facebook Palmer is currently still employed and they just couldn't wait for the followup where they could take my scalp so Facebook tried to get me to resign and I refused they tried to get me to not say anything eventually they wrote their own statement for me that basically just said I'm sorry for the negative impact this is having on Facebook's uh reputation and I want to uh I'm going to be taking a voluntary leave of absence in reality they told me I couldn't come into the office until after the election it was it was That explicit you can't come in until after the election their thinking was okay Palmer is like the leader of our virtual reality organization they knew they actually needed me it was getting rid of me is not a thing that they could easily do and their thought was okay we know that Palmer didn't post these racist memes like Facebook did not know Facebook knew none of this was true right so they knew that this was just a media invention but they didn't want to push back they didn't want to say anything kind of like where you know you you see Mark now coming out and finally saying okay the hunter Biden laptop thing maybe you know that wasn't good but this was 2016 it was it was a different universe so they they were hoping that I would take this leave of absence disappear until after the election they believed Hillary would win and then if Hillary won they thought all their employees and the Press would kind of forget about this whole thing because it would just be this crazy time that Palmer supported that Fringe candidate who lost in a landslide to Hillary Clinton whever she had a 95% chance of winning so now I told them this is a bad strategy I said guys what you don't understand is Donald Trump is going to win and they thought that I was just like insane they like literally when I said that they said wow I thought you were a smart person I'm a no guys I am a smart person Donald Trump is going to win like I will accept that there's a possibility he won't but all of the signs are that he is going to win like the problem is that the media is reporting on Donald Trump the same way that they're reporting on me an absurd totally baseless way that is out of touch with reality don't fall for that and uh they said no no you have to stay out of the office till after the election so the day after the election Trump Trump had won they said actually you can't come back to the office are you serious I'm serious they said you can't come back into the office and that was when the Machinery went into motion to get rid of me they realized that with Trump in office that and like there were Facebook Executives publicly saying I will not work with Trump supporters I will not have them on my team which is Al by the way illegal in California but you know you you have to bring a case about it and especially back then Republicans weren't really I think we weren't punching Square I think that most of them were like I just want get done I just want to get paid I'm not I'm not trying to be a professional victim right like what what what red blooded Republican man wants to basically go into a courtroom be like they're so mean to me they said they said that they don't like me cuz I voted for Trump like doesn't that just sound like this like the the dumbest little Fest ever like wouldn't everyone laugh at you even if you won and I think and so people didn't people people wanted to they wanted to get work done they didn't want to they didn't want to be a professional victim and put themselves out there as the whiny you know whiny little boy who who Who's sad his co-workers don't like him in a hostile workplace environment did you have any conversations with Zuckerberg and in person no because the lawyers were very like they they they very quickly isolate things like this like the moment they realize that this was turning into a problem they like they're like you cannot come to the office you cannot send any messages you cannot send any emails you may only communicate through attorneys like there there is a lockdown protocol to minimize to minimize accountability on these things and so it wasn't until uh and so they they told me that even even after the election they said you can come back we really need you like we all recognize that you're the guy and that you're you're a critical part of the team we just need you to stay out of the office for a little longer and we're going to figure this all out and then January rolled around and uh their attorneys called my attorneys and said you're being fired you're being terminated without cause oh that was the other thing I forgot they launched an internal investigation into me they wanted to try and dig up some kind of policy violation they wanted to try find a reason to fire me that they could say had nothing to do with politics and so that went for months and they dug through all my emails and all my communications and they interviewed dozens of Facebook employees being like just like full gestapo style you know what have you ever heard about Palmer lucky doing something bad like what what do you know what have you ever heard and I was like I literally have never heard pal mention politics he's just like a VR guy he gave $9,000 to this Trump grew I think on a whim because he has billions of dollars like like this doesn't seem he he's NE and so they they tried to find something on me and they found literally nothing so their investigation concluded and I I remember being in the room with because it's a formal process and they they let you know when you're being investigated and in the end they said we just want we uh we found no violations of Facebook policy at any point in your tenure and I and and like so that was when they realized they were going to have to fire me without cause they just said well we were paying you tens of millions of a year and we' just decided for no reason we don't need you employed anymore and uh it was it look it was it was totally ridiculous it was totally trumped up they didn't ever ask me about people who were discriminating against me for my politics right and they they were they were saying oh we did this investigation and Palmer was not fired for his politics like well you never asked me about it if you would have told me Palmer are you aware any instances of people being discriminated against their politics like yeah I can give you like two dozen if they ask me Palmer where you fire for politics like yeah I can literally give you the emails and messages where people explicitly state that they will not work with me because of how I and so like it was it it was it was Insanity like they and they were the worst part is they were even telling the media this they were saying oh no it was it was Palmer's decision to leave literally untrue I was I was terminated they said they told one journalist uh off the Record but you know off the Record doesn't mean anything um they told one journalist off the Record that uh it was something like they said look leaving was his decisions it's not like this is Soviet Russia where you say something you say some the wrong thing about the wrong politician and then get disappeared it was it was literally just like that any I'm sorry I seem worked up about this but just like I I I hate getting back into this heads space because it was just it would be pissed if I was you too I mean it you got to remember this was this was sorry I need to do some water Oculus was everything to me all my friends worked at Oculus remember I told it was started by me and all my all my friends worked there all the friends that I made working over the course of you know half a decade on that particular product were were there my reputation was there my work was there all of the technology that I've been developing since I was 13 years old for VR was owned by that company yeah everything like I was oculus and then they said said no we're taking it all away from you and you can't even talk to anybody or we're going to come after you and if you say a word of this to anyone we're we're going to come after you and so for me it was just it was a a catastrophically destructive event and I I wish that I would have acted differently in the moment but the the mistake I made was trusting that people could have different politics from me but still treat me fairly and I didn't realize that when they told me oh you're still a important part of the team I didn't realize that was a pure manipulation tactic to prevent me from Leverage like I had leverage there were things that they needed from me there were things I was doing they basically were just manipulating me to try and squeeze the last little bit of juice for me for a few months before just getting rid of me wow yep anyway that was that was how that all went down what would you have done different so first of all I would have put out my own statement which which I had already written I I I I should have just put it out and the thing is I realized later I didn't know at the time that political activity outside of your employer like outside of your job is protected at least in California they cannot do anything about politic like they cannot tell you to not endorse a candidate for example you they can tell you you can't do it wearing a Facebook shirt you can't do it while you're on the clock at Facebook of course lots of faceb employees do that you know they Hillary Clinton was was everywhere they were literally using the campus print shop to print I'm with her posters that they were Plastering all over San Francisco like if you were for Hillary it was absolutely no problem but I should have said you know what that that aside I should have just gone out and said hey the media is lying they are lying to all of you this is completely false this is a like this is fake news to the ultimate degree the Press is lying about me to try and take my scalp and I think that would have probably caus a lot of it would have pissed them off because I wouldn't have been allowing them to run the pr strategy but the way that it's supposed to work just if you've never worked at a big company the trade you're making when you allow the company to run your PR strategy is implicitly that they're not going to fire you right basically it's it's okay the trade is do things our way and you get to stay safe because otherwise there's no incentive to do things their way otherwise you do just go off on your own you say 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 you know do their preferred option which was to saying nothing bad about the me they literally told me I couldn't I said I'm I'm against Hillary Clinton because I think she's going to drag us into World War III she said that she's going to enforce the no fly zone in Syria which is like that is saying I'm going to shoot down people think I will enforce a no-fly zone means you just like say words and it's like mean to pretend you have the authority no enforcing fly zone means that a Russian aircraft is going to enter Syrian airspace and the United States is going to shoot it down and I I was I was looking at I was like holy I like I'm one of the people who want us to get out of the Middle East especially at the tail end of things I'm like that will drag us back can you imagine doing doing this all over again with the Russians in the Middle East and they said you can't say any of this you cannot say anything negative about Hillary Clinton you cannot say anything positive about Donald Trump and I should have just realized wait a sec I this is literally a I should just put it out there they would have been upset with me temporarily that I didn't follow their strategy but it would have been much harder for them to fire me in the end the master stroke of their strategy was that in refusing to deny the allegations against me they became true right perception is reality my refusal to address them and Facebook's refusal to point out that it was all made up in the minds of everybody they said well it's it must be true he is funding white supremacist troll campaigns he is funding people to attack other people on the internet he is funding a tital wave of anti-Semitic memes all over the Internet because why wouldn't they believe it I never even said that it wasn't true and I I think if if I had made clear that it wasn't true they I probably would have gotten through it wow it's a it's a it's it's a what a crazy place to work it really well and you know what was even crazier was that they made ained for years and years and years that I was not fired for my politics got asked about it when he was in front of Congress um yeah it was Ted Cruz who asked him uh Senator Cruz uh you know why why did you fire Palmer lucky and he said oh I I don't think that's an appropriate this is an appropriate form he said you have to answer the question and Z said something like I I I can only commit that it was not uh it was not a political matter or something like that which was to be fair to markk I don't think he was lying I think that his team had correctly properly insulated him from from it like when when when you're illegally firing employees for their politics you don't bring that to the most important people in the company and basically poison them like that's poisoning the king like to show if you're like hey King here's this thing uh we're performing illegal activity like you you've just screwed them over now because now they do know and uh now am I to say that there's no there was no suspicion or you know a kind of understanding as to what would happen of you know I I wouldn't go that far but it was crazy how they maintained for years and years and years that Pol they literally lit 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 tell me that I was fired for cause they're like oh we can't tell you why he was fired but believe me we had no choice he did something that was just beyond the pale we had to fire him we had no choice um I did by the way sort of get Victory on this so uh I will give credit to him Andrew Bosworth about a month ago did po post on Twitter he said something like you can pull up the exact one if you want and put it up on the screen he said something like I want to apologize to Palmer lucky I've been saying things about him in the past that weren't true I just want people to know that I was misled by others and that we are sorry and it shouldn't have gone down that way and I was wrong so they are actually finally acknowledging that the story they were putting out there that politics was not a factor and that I was fired for any reason at all is is nonsense but uh you know it's a it's it's a it's sparse Comfort a decade on yeah wow so you leave Ian are you involved with any VR now a little bit we've got some big news coming soon big news on the andal side I know you we're going to break that here in a little bit all right let's take a quick break let's do it when we come back we'll get into andal sounds good I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us and I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source it's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world and so one thing we've done here at sha Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter and the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman former CIA targeter some of you may know her as Sarah Adams call sign super bad she's made two different appearances here on the Shawn Ryan Show and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mindblowing and so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief so it's going to be all things terrorists how terrorists are coming up through the southern border how they're entering the country how they're traveling what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up up to and here's the best part the newsletter is actually free we're not going to spam you it's about one newsletter a week maybe two if we release two shows the only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that but like I said it's a free CIA intelligence brief sign up links in the description or in the comments we'll see you in the newsletter this episode is sponsored by Roa Roa is a performance eyewear brand for people who want to invest in themselves Roa manufactures premium sunglasses prescription eyeglasses and readers and cuts all of their lenses here in the US at their Headquarters in Austin Texas Roa recently partnered with one of my favorite guests Dr Andrew huberman to launch a new line of glasses called The windown Collection guys I've tried the you know I have problems sleeping I absolutely 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food the best way to start the new year is with a home-cooked meal in hexclad makes that easier than ever hexclad are hands down the best pans I've ever used hexclad makes cooking so much more convenient it get the performance of stainless steel in the convenience and nonstick in a single pan they're easy to clean dishwasher safe and simp to wipe off after use they're even oven safe up to 500° F the patented hexagon design is durable and protects against scratches even from metal utensils plus hexclad products come with a lifetime warranty they can literally last a lifetime for a limited time only our listeners get 10% off your order with our exclusive link just head to hexclad dcom SRS support our show and check them out at hx.com for / SRS and tell them we sent you bonati let's eat with hex clads revolutionary cookware I have one more thing actually that's fun along those lines I recently got the The Meta rayb bands have you seen those the little camera glasses and uh it it once it's all set up it says ask meta about anything just say Okay meta and then ask your question it's like okay meta when was Palmer lucky fired it goes Palmer lucky was fired on March 29th 2017 after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property in a trade secret lawsuit and then it links to a story on ZDNet where the guy says I was found guilty of this crime but he's literally wrong it literally didn't happen because first of all being found guilty is for criminal cases not civil cases two I literally won on all of the charges around Trade Secrets like we literally want and the judge threw out all the damages against me and said yeah he's not guilty of any of this so like but what's crazy is of course like the average person like you ask these questions and these things that journalists write are being brought up years in the future as the basis for AI knowledge and like you if you ask these AI systems as far as they know it's all true it's all true so you know according to these AIS I was fired after I funded a tital wave of anti-Semitic memes geez and it's just and like and how do you undo that right it's like it's it's this persistent harm that just lasts forever like let's say that I could get them by sending my lawyers after them now to remove these stories well there's still these huge AI models that have been trained on a decade now of reporting and re-reporting how do you how do you undo that it's a it's a it's a big problem when you've got so much that's been put out there a tital wave of it I'd say maybe the majority of it well I think the the good news is I think the majority of people now know that Legacy Media is complete well that's why the media is so freaked out yeah yeah it's they're trying they're now trying to replicate podcasts yep you I mean you you you saw the bit where Elon was saying to people he says you are the media now in the modern world you have the tools to get your message out and people can amplify others based on who has the closest proximity to the real information who actually has the activity like we can be primary sources we don't need intermediaries and then you have like the national Press Club you see this speech where they have this guy up on stage he says he doesn't matter what Elon says they are not the Press we are the Press I'm like oh my God this guy's so he's so out of touch with just the American moment like like who's going to hear that and be like yeah he's right how dare citizen journalists without credentials report on things yeah wow so you get so you're done at Facebook you get fired from Facebook yep and then you move into andural so how long is the how long's the Gap here same day I literally I literally picked up the phone and I had been talking with people well I got to backtrack a little bit before I started Oculus when I was a teenager I had worked for almost a year on an army project called Brave mind have you ever heard of this no it was at the ICT mixed reality lab uh there was a project that was being worked on called Brave mind that was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD the idea was that you could put them into virtual reality simulations of things that would trigger their PTSD uh and you could teach them coping exercises thinking exercises to mitigate their physiological responses under the guidance of a licensed therapist you could also expose them to things that they might be exposed to in the battlefield ahead of time to help them learn how to cope with that ahead of time and uh I was not doing any important work on the program I don't want to make it sound like I was like one of the key researchers I was the cable monkey I was the lab technician I was making making stuff go making head mounted displays work designing stuff to kind of support the program but that was my first exposure to how the government uses technology the good that it can do in our military but also how broken a lot of the procurement systems are in terms of how they buy things how they procure things the incentives that happen when you have Cost Plus contracts involved Cost Plus contractors involved who make more money when the contract runs long more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster more efficient decisions and that experience small as it was stuck with me through my whole career and I had a lot of conversations with friends who did work in defense whether working literally you know uh in the military or building tools for the military who gave me these stories that you would just never believe about how broken things were how much money was being wasted and grafted and misspent and so when I made all my Oculus money one of the first things I did was try to find small defense startups that I could invest in that had a shot at changing this my thinking was okay I've made all this money I don't have the time to work on this problem at all but I want to find companies that have a shot at changing the proving that you can apply technology from the tech industry and bring it into you know bring it into uh into these defense spaces in a really meaningful way and I ended up not really making any Investments there was a couple tiny things but nothing material because I couldn't find anybody who was doing things the way that I wanted I couldn't find anyone who was trying to build basically the next Lockheed Martin or the next north of gemman 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 a Trey Stevens who's one of the co-founders at andal he was at the time working full-time as a venture capitalist at Founders fund which is Peter Teal's Venture firm or one of his Venture firms rather and uh he was full-time trying to find exactly the same thing I was he was meeting with hundreds of small defense companies trying to find ones that were had a shot of really becoming something big and meaningful and uh we ended up becoming friends I met Brian schimp who was director of engineering at paler at the time uh and a few other people my friend Joe Chen who was an early Oculus employee former paratrooper really interested in trying to figure out how to use technology to make D better and so what happened was uh after these years of meeting all the time and just complaining oh my God isn't this all screwed up aren't we wasting so much money on nonsense isn't it a shame there's no company that could come in and really go toe to- Toe with these big guys and you know give them a threat and uh the day that I was fired I picked up the phone I called Joe and I called Brian and I called Trey I said hey you know guys we've been trying to find a company that we could invest in that does this I think we should started ourselves I think now's the moment they said Palmer we're all so busy like you know running engineering at paler or being a venture capitalist or in your case running Oculus I said you know it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make and so that was really that was so they had no idea I I I I I let I let him know but you know it was it was um that's a sacrifice I'm willing to take it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make and uh and so I I I'd say like the early the Early andal crew is like that group of people that had been thinking about these problems uh some people from Oculus who resigned when they fired me there was there was a there was a pretty large contingent of people who said what you did to Palmer is up and wrong and I refuse to be part of it I'm out of here and uh the funniest part is that of that contingent kind of the the people who left because of the way Facebook treated me then many of them came to work at andell and they said Palmer what are you doing next like I I want to be a part of whatever it is and then some of them when they found out I was starting a weapons company never talk to me again they were they were huge fans of me they believed I was treated unfairly and then when they found out that the thing I thought was most important me for to work on which is to build better tools for our national security save taxpayers hundreds of billions by making tens of billions they they literally concluded that I had become an evil person and never wanted to talk to me again some of them have then come back around as world events have shifted like you know this is 2017 so as it became more clear that China is an aggressor and not a benevolent Fountain of money as it became clear that Russia is still an expansionist dictatorship and not a reformed quasi Western gas station uh people have come back and said okay I was wrong what you're doing is not evil but at the time it was very controversial a lot of people believed that anything you did with the military was either useless or evil or warmongering the fact that you were saving them money was actually to the detriment like I said guys we we're spending way too much money on these weapon systems they said oh so you're going to make it so they can buy 10 times as many weapons wow as if that's better like well guys if you hate the military like if you hate NATO for example like should they be armed with water balloons should they be armed with slingshots like like what what level of force are you okay with them having like if you if you believe that NATO has any reason to exist at a level Beyond like kids with water balloons then you should probably want them to be armed with things that can actually beat our adversaries and the problem is at that point people just they stop talking to you and say you fascist and they move like you can't reason someone out of an opinion that they didn't reason themselves into and and when people when you start to try to pull them out of the Matrix they are often unable to unable to make the jump it's a great quote so andl started so Andel started we wanted to build not a defense contractor but a defense Product Company use our own money to decide what to build how to build it decide when it's done and then sell products based on those Technologies to the United States government I was a strong believer and I I I get to look like a Visionary today but back then I looked like a crazy person I was a strong believer that the entire future of warfare would be defined by artificial intelligence and autonomy this fundamental decoupling of the one toone ratio from shooter to weapon from Pilot to plane to allow smaller numbers of people to wield many swords was kind of the was kind of the thinking there I knew that would that would change everything not just with small cheap drones but even with large scale systems like if you can get people out of Harm's Way and if you can allow them to leverage their own intellect beyond what they can hold and steer with their own two hands if you can basically become a person who manages weapons at a higher level while they micromanage the second second execution of your commands you can fundamentally change Warfare in a way that I think is very creative to us interests and very very against the world that let's say China or Russia wants to exist largely because I think these advantages acre mostly to the defender uh if you're trying to build a military that is designed to turn your allies into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on like you have in NATO or most us operations uh that's that's really useful if you're trying to build a military where you you need to let's say go into Taiwan with landing craft and get millions of soldiers there and invade and then occupy their territory all of the stuff I just talked about is a nightmare for you like it doesn't actually help you the ability to wield many swords per arm is not that useful for occupying a resistant hostile land it's it's it's a lot better for you know Slug It Out large scale great power fights and that's what the United States needs to need need needs to focus on winning for the most part at least right now so were you how were you aware of how it works then with the military industrial complex oh yeah I mean look like maybe how did you know that going with with all the VR stuff you were doing I I like I said you know I had exposure from the brave mind stuff and I become interested in the problem but i' done a lot of research and I'd kind of been building a theory of how someone might be able to fix this I'm not but there were a lot of assumptions I made were that were wrong somewhere right like I I don't want to make it sound like I came in day one and I understood the whole landscape but you I had my I had my beautiful mind chartred up on the on the wall with all the all with all the strings and all the pins connecting where I thought where I thought bad was and where we could be going after um and I I was right enough like I was right I was right about enough of the problems that we were able to actually get some traction basically our bet was simple we decided we were going to put all of our money into building this AI called latus which is a military focused AI that is built to the standards you need for military the reliability you need for military that could act as a tool that would be the brains of dozens of products so basically make lat a lattice you know being something you can build other things on top of they always build this lattice AI as a sort of core software product and then you can build on top of it autonomous fighter jets autonomous tanks cruise missiles Small Arms surveillance systems security systems drone defense systems and they all kind of share this common brain and so we started by building lattice and we started building products on top of it uh some of them for the military some of them for Customs and Border Protection actually our first major program of record which was with CBP uh and uh Against All Odds we've actually managed to make it work like like today andr is still making latus and we have over two dozen different Hardware products that are all using that same AI brain wow wow like one of our big wins recently so you basically you're talking about Skynet from The Terminator yes that like I mentioned earlier that I read a lot of books and I read a lot of Science Fiction one of the things that I've realized in my career is that nothing I ever come up with will be new I've I've literally never come up with an idea that a science fiction author has not come up with before at some point which makes sense there's a lot of them they've been around for a long time and they don't have to make things and they don't have to wait to the right moment you remember I started Oculus at just the right moment for it to succeed a science fiction author doesn't have to wait for something to be possible to think about it and to write about it and for people to be excited about the idea and so every time I've come up with something I've been able to find usually many sometimes one science fiction pieces addressing literally exactly that idea by some guy who just thought thought about it like 50 years ago 60 years ago 70 years ago some of the stuff that I'm building today for example in the arvr space around augmenting the vision of soldiers these are ideas that are from 1959 like Starship Troopers novels right like these are old ideas that have only very recently become technologically feasible the idea of autonomous fighter jets that's been around for about a hundred years the idea of making a computer that is so good you can program it with a general intent at the beginning and then it executes on a mission all on its own like people have been thinking of this since computers were programmed with Punch Cards they were imagining a punch card computer that could do the whole management of a bombing Mission during World War II the tech wasn't ready but the idea was and So you you're bringing up Skynet and I think that uh like skyb makes a ton of sense except for one critical mistake they gave it control of the United States nuclear Arsenal um like I I always like to think how Terminator might have gone if uh one you know Skynet wouldn't have achieved sence but even more to the point what if they just would have used it for the weapon systems that actually make sense for AI to control right there's there's actually not a lot of gains in having an advanced artificial intelligence have control of your nuclear weapons it's like it's all risk and no upside mhm there is a lot of upside in allowing people to get out of let's say tip of the spear fighter jets where they are going to need to fly into areas that are very well defended by surface air missiles and you know you're going to lose a large fraction of your of your of your Fleet like that that is a job for robots not for people and so like one of the things we said we were going to build to start of the company and probably our big win that we've had as a company so far is a recent contract we won called CCA uh so we won a spot on increment one for CCA competing against north of Grumman locked Martin and Boeing so it's us toe to- Toe with the big guys saying we are going to build a fighter jet powered by raai that is better than all of the systems being proposed by these people who have been around for a century and guess what we beat all of them damn congratulations thank you it was a huge moment for our company you just see in the office people were screaming and cheering and throwing chairs it was and we did it because we managed to build this very powerful AI system and all the expertise we needed to build a fighter jet that is capable of going toe-to-toe with all of these other companies like no we've built in eight years from like it you know Chris dikus was employee number one Oculus and employee number one at andal he was the first guy to you know he he he got right out of Facebook said you guys are up I'm going to do whatever Palmer does we've gone from me hiring Chris geas as employee number one to being selected against Lockheed Boeing Northrup companies that have a stellar you know Stellar reputation for building really sick aircraft for the better part of a century we've done that we we've gone from me and Chris dius to that in less than 8 years and it's because we are taking the best of modern tech technology development practices including many that I learned while I was at Facebook in Silicon Valley and bringing them to defense manufacturing defense production like what we're doing is like I I we're not Supermen here right I'm not saying we're like these brilliant Einstein level Geniuses what we're doing is taking techniques approaches and people who used to be making AR mustache emojis in Silicon Valley and putting them to work on problems that actually matter ones that actually get them stoked in the morning to to to come to work and if you take the best technologists in the country and you put them to work on a problem that they actually care about and they really believe in you're going to get extraordinary things come out of it so did this idea develop from Skynet I'd say Skynet was maybe part of it like no Well here here's what it really is Skynet itself is not actually a unique idea like the idea of uh of kind of AI Management systems that are able to manage large numbers of autonomous weapons they've literally been around for a hundred years like Skynet was skynight was just the one that happened to kind of capture the public imagination uh but there are lots and lots and lots lots of examples I mean like not not to say that this is the best example but look like Star Wars episode one you know I don't know if you remember do you remember Star Wars episode one a little bit well you the the the Crux people who haven't watched it which you know they're not super missing out uh episode three was great episode one you can you can you can skip it if you're not a Star Wars person but the Trade Federation imposes a blockade on nebu 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 nabo uh the Trade Federation really screwed up and they had it all going on in the cloud but like uh for some reason nobody remembers nobody remembers the Trade Federation they all talk about Skynet wow so you develop you develop the AI mind but you also develop and what we could what's cool is we like we develop that AI mind but we can basically optimize it for different things and train it how to do things that normally they would have been done by not just a person but an expert person for example we use lce 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 lce to power our underwater submarines we make a lot of under underwater submarines for the United States but Al 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 Lattis that is the world's best fighter pilot submarine pilot sensor reader and Small Arms operator that the world's ever seen and to to be able to cram that all into one brain it's a it's it's a powerful thing wow so you're developing the mind you're also developing the aircraft the autonomous aircraft the autonomous submarine in some cases so one of the most common misconceptions about andal is that lattice is only a brain for the things that we make we do make a lot of Hardware like we make surveillance Towers we make fighter jets we make submarines we make loitering Munitions that are being used in Taiwan and Ukraine but what are in Munitions so basically think uh think like uh weapons that can go somewhere observe a Target and then choose when and how to strike it so not like not like artillery is not loitering a thing that like a missile that flies to an area then pops out wings and orbits overhead for 10 minutes watching what they're doing and figuring out what it's going to do uh that that would be a loitering munition okay um and uh we we've actually had a lot of success in Russia like between Russia and Ukraine uh we on Ukrainian side obviously um they've been using our Munitions to strike at things that other weapons don't have enough range or can't get through jamming bubbles to attack so the Russians for example will be jamming Communications so other drones can't get in to destroy these targets our drones because they're piloted by AI can fly in orbit above let's say you know a jamming truck or a surface air missile launcher and then figure out the right time to go in and strike get destroyed and the mind is in the aircraft and the mind is in the aircraft that's but but um so you really sorry what I wanted to finish and say is the common misconception is that because we build these Hardware products on top of lce that lattice is only for andr horror products that is not the case we have we have integrated lattice with over 100 existing DOD platforms so we're taking these Brands and we're hooking them up to systems that are already used by DOD so like Vehicles they already have weapons they already have sensors that they already have we're basically taking everything not just our weapons but everything that they have and we're trying to glue it all together into one common hive mind so that all the people all the vehicles all the robots have a common shared view of the world basically in real time seeing everything that's going on on the battlefield so you know where the good guys are you know where the bad guys are you're able to predict what's going to happen in the near future so that you can have everything kind of you know skating to the puck as it were rather than reacting to what happened 10 minutes ago and uh it's it's a really powerful thing to do to take these systems that used to be siloed and you know just be their own little stove pipe worlds and instead bring them into one gigantic brain holy that's incredible it's some good one of the things that I've started working on lately is a project I I've never wanted to build humanoid robots not myself because there's so many other companies that are doing a good job building humanoid robots and I've just been I I I've known for a few years now that they're on the edge of being real and I've been waiting for that to happen because humanoid robots are not good enough to let's say replace a Navy SEAL but they are good enough to replace let's say an elderly man like they can hobble around and pull levers and push buttons with about the same ability as a guy in his 90s is I'd say where most humanoid robots are today it turns out that if you can put a brain like lattice into one of those robots you can basically use that as a way to convert Lego weapon systems into AI powered weapon systems so imagine that I have a an old Soviet era surface air missile launcher and normally you need a bunch of guys to stand around it watching a screen picking out targets they have to turn on the generator right you know you have to pull the lever you have to Prime The Palms you got to put the choke and you know start the whole thing up but what if you could have a humanoid Rob 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 M now the data that it's collecting is being shared out to hundreds of other weapons in real time and so I'm pretty excited about humanoid robots not for what they can do at the highend but more for just taking a lot of these Legacy systems like imagine if you have an old Humvee right how cool would it be if instead of having to build a brand new AI powered vehicle with like AI actual you rope you have all these new cars that Tesla's making that are capable of steering themselves what if in instead of buying all new AI powered cars for the military I can take a humanoid robot I can tell it to walk over to that Humvee get in and drive it around as an autonomous vehicle it doesn't make sense for consumers for consumers you should just you know uh just buy an autonomous car but where the military already has literally trillions of dollars in inventory like remember we we have a we have a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars a year but the military has trillions and trillions of dollars of Hardware that they've already bought I am not out to make them Reby all of that some of it they'll need to Reby but I want to make sure we're leveraging all these tools we already have as well we need to bring AI to everything not just AI to new weapons wow you have completely revolutionized Warfare As We Know It And by the way you can see where with their current business model like Warfare but also think about like the amount of money here the first page of our first pitch deck said andal 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 andrel coming in and saying well maybe you actually don't have to buy Reby a bunch stuff maybe you can actually keep using a lot of the systems you already have or Worse maybe you can buy stuff from andrel that's a tenth of the price of the stuff that you've been buying from the other guys it's we are as taxpayers paying way too much for everything I mean how like when you were in you probably had to pay government prices for for for for for for for for various things like you're familiar with like companies will literally charge the government a different price than they charge civilians or and I know technically they're not allowed to charge government more but they have like the government version right it's like a special government paint like oh yeah the special government paint version of this of this like optic that's gone on this rifle it's it's going to be $4,500 meanwhile as a civilian you can go buy something for $500 that is just as good I mean we we have to stop doing that as a country very familiar with that Eisenhower was right when he said that in a very real sense every rifle man every bomb dropped represents a child deprived of Education a library never built a hospital never constructed like I feel like a lot of people forget that those two things are tied together it doesn't mean we need to be hippies about it and pretend that war is never going to happen but we need to be spending the right amount on these things we cannot we cannot treat it as right now it's almost like you can't question it because you can't question like if you question defense spending you're questioning the existence of the military that that like that's that's just that's that's just crazy to me there's no other part of our society where you can get away with that where you like oh you can't no that's not true education you can't question education either you can't say aren't we spending too much on education for how bad it is and be like how dare you attack our brave teachers who are educating all of our children it's like no no I'm not attacking the teachers it's just you know it seems like we spend a lot of money for kids to get grades this bad like the kids can't read good or do other stuff good too so could the Navy SEAL be replaced oh man this is an interesting one I don't think so on a quite long timeline for a few reasons first of all it's a bit it's it's the nature of the job like I'll tell you here's someone who will be replaced that Hilltop surfac air missile operator right like he's that is a crazy dangerous job you're the first thing that everyone wants to take out before they can get through to everything else like you're going to die we have to get rid of that guy but then you look at what like a lot of Navy SEALs do and what like or or like look at what Green Berets do it's so much about interacting extremely closely with people around people among people in infrastructure that was designed for people I think it's going to be really really hard to make robots that do that set of things it's it's remember I said robots can do the jobs that a 90-year-old man can do okay they're going to eventually do the job that a 70-year-old man can do and then eventually they'll be able to do like a average in shaped 50-year-old man can do to build humanoid robots that can do what a Navy Seal in the prime of his life you know probably secretly uh secretly roed out like that's that's a really high Bar for a robot to hit especially when it comes to his ability to break the rules or make a decision that wasn't programmed or decide that he's going to do something that a robot's just never going to do it's it's my my intuition here is like that's going to be the last job to be figured out um it's it's a little bit like it's not a perfect example but it's like the the you know is AI going to replace like the jobs of our politicians it's like you know that's probably like the last thing to go like in in a in in a in a very real sense there's certain parts of our society that are almost like envoys of America they represent what we're doing and I I I think that we're not going to Outsource that to robots any so so we're a long ways out from replacing a a tier one assaulter I think we're a long way out and that's and what is a long way out 30 40 50 years minimum I there's some things that move fast and others that that don't but I because here's here's the other thing you have to remember I think we talked about this a little bit earlier but you're also able to augment people so the the the the right comparison is not Navy Seal of today versus robot 10 years from now it's what could a Navy SEAL look like in 10 years in terms of their uh you biological modification or conditioning in terms of their mental modifications or conditioning things like exoskeletons things like more advanced Mobility things like more advanced Small Arms all of those are going to make the Navy SEAL a a moving Target as well so the robots would have to get not just as good as a seal of today they're going have to be as good of a seal of that era and I think we're going to keep investing in I think we're going to keep investing in the guys in the hopefully a lot more than we have been you're involved with exoskeletons correct well we I I don't how invol I I just ran a sub 8 minute mile for the first time in my life and I'm usually I'm usually the guy who's wheezing to do a sub 10-minute mile uh and last night I ran a sub Eight Mile in an exoskeleton that uh ran I basically it ran out of thermal capacity two-thirds of the way through the run so uh the last third of the run I was actually going slower than I normally would run but the first twoth thirds were so fast I still actually when I go home tonight I'm going to be making some mods to the cooling system uh that the company I don't want to badmouth the company I think that they made a mistake on the cooling system um and so I'm going to be doing some mods tonight that I already have the parts sitting in the garage for and I'm going to run I think I'm going to run a sub Seven Mile anyway I'm I'm I'm I'm like an out of shaped fatty and I'm if I'm able to just like put on a exoskeleton and run a 7-minute mile imagine what that could do on a Navy SEAL um the same thing for augmenting vision you know right now the night vision capabilities that we give our war War Fighters are not that far removed from what we had in the 9s right it's still gen 3 night vision sure it's white phosphor instead of green and it's a little higher res and a little higher game but it generationally it's the it's the same imagine what happens when you can take that Navy SEAL and you can put on a visor that gives him full peripheral vision at night in the thermal Spectrum the visible spectrum the ultraviolet Spectrum the hyperspectral Spectrum he's able to identify individual materials components Vehicles see all of his buddies see all of the bad guys and have information seamlessly shared between him and every other weapon and robot and vehicle on the battlefield like that is where the Navy SEAL is going to be in just a few years I think it's going to be hard for robots to compete with with that guy so how does how does the exoskeleton work so different exos skeletons work in different ways um this particular one basically is sensing your motion uh based on your actual motion and then it tries to predict it actually has an onboard AI algorithm that is trying to predict what you're doing and then it applies force that matches like you you you use power steering right M 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 CU When you tell your muscles to move it takes time for them to respond that's going to be the future of exoskeleton it's going to be measuring your body so that instead of there being a delay where I move it feels it and then it helps me it's going to be seamlessly integrated with you maybe even starting to move your arm before your natural muscles are doing it wow that's what like I'm and like then the crazy thing is eventually someday and I think this is way out just for a variety of basically invasive surgical reasons eventually you'll be able to read those signals right from the brain directly so I'm at like right now you have a lot of latency in your in your motion that you you don't perceive it you think there's no latency in your body there's actually a couple hundred milliseconds of latency in your movements that your brain just ignores and tells you is fine imagine a world where you're wearing an exoskeleton where the moment your brain is telling your arm to move the exoskeleton starts moving your arm you could potentially make someone who's literally 10 times faster at moving or reacting and you that again you see where I'm getting like this is that that's going to be the Navy Seal of the future and that guy is going to be a beast holy I've actually got a a very small scale version of this I built a system that uh measures when you are trying Security Guys running around with this stuff you are we we have a great security team but I probably shouldn't I probably shouldn't talk about methods and tactics on them um I I built a device many years ago and I've I've I've I've screwed around with it a lot of times it basically is a small sensor that you can mount that is able to tell when you are flexing muscles on your face and I hooked that up to another electrical actuator you ever Ed like a t unit for like therapy or so it's I hooked up something that's a lot like a unit but it's just rigged a little differently so that instead of making your muscles vibrate it is made to just trigger individual muscle groups you know like it can just basically make you you know pull this finger or pull that finger and I made it so that whenever I even barely start to flex a muscle up here in my face it sends a signal wirelessly to a patch I have on my arm that fully fires this tendon and makes me uh makes me pull my trigger finger now the thing is if I do this normally like if I normally am telling my my my trigger finger to go that signal has to go from my brain down my spinal cord out through all these nervous cords out into my arm that actually takes a really really long time it's it's your it's your there's something called nervous Transit velocity or nervous conduction velocity it's how fast you can send signals down your peripheral nervous system by building a bypass for it I can make it where I can actually if I want to pull the trigger on my gun I can Flex that muscle on my head which is much closer to my brain therefore a much much shorter pathway and I can actually shave a ton of latency off the delay between when I see something when I pull my trigger all of a sudden I've now reduced effectively because you you're fam with like lock time in a firearm it's like lock time is a time between when you pull a trigger and when the round is actually going and different you know if you if you have like a really heavy Hammer you can have a higher lock time and so if you're looking at a Target you're pulling that trigger you have some inaccuracy that is caused purely by the lock time you told it to Fire and when it actually fires and you can learn it out to some degree by kind of predicting all this together I can not only be faster I can even be more accurate by just removing that latency lock time we pretend it's actually just a gun your real lock time is signal from your brain to when you pull the trigger to when the trigger reacts and there's a lot of things we can do so when when I talked about biological modifications and mechanical modifications there's things that we're going to be able to do that are going to eventually have your brain you know telling you to fire some weapon and the weapon will be fired and out the barrel and hitting the target before you before before you would have a traditional guy would have been able to even pull the trigger so it's it's an exciting future wow um totally mind blown right that's that's holy it's it's it's it's how long do you think it'll be before we see exoskeletons on the battlefield so I I I do have to admit that I have said in the past that EXO skeletons the time has probably come and gone I like I I've I've this is a public prediction that I've made my my belief was that exoskeletons were probably something that made sense in the 80s and the '90s if we would have invested in them but that at this point we probably should just move to humanoid Robotics and just have them remotely controlled by people like by I will say by the way we're going to have remotely controlled Navy SEAL robots long before you have you know the AI controlled robot uh but I've recently seen some technology that has me questioning that uh I I I think that we're going to start seeing this Tech in kind of tier one groups like just about now like less than a year would be my would be my would be my estimation uh when when does it get controlled robot uh sorry no exoskeletons exoskeletons now they're going to be a little less cool Than People expect it's not going to be like an Iron Man suit it's more like a suit that maybe helps one or two of your joints like that helps you run better maybe to run faster or maybe just to use less uh so that you can run longer like I mean I'm sure you were in situations where would you've liked it to have been able to like go take a jog carrying a whole bunch of stuff to a place a kilometer away and then get there and not be tired like that'd be a huge deal I think those are going to be the types of exoskeletons we see it's not going to be like I put on my Iron Man's suit and I'm carrying 300 lb of vibranium armor and the bullets are blasting off me I think it's going to be more like hey you can like you can run up a whole flight of stairs to the top of a 10-story building because all the power's cut and there's no elevators and you're going to step out on the on that last Landing you'll be like oh yeah that was that was a little that was a little tough as opposed to feeling like you want to collapse and that's a huge deal eventually I do think we will see the thing that everybody wants which is you know you put you put on the suit and you're Superman and you punch through walls and the bullets are coming at you and and nothing happens I it's going to it's going to be a plus before that happens one of the problems being any suit that can do that can also kill you just think about it this way like a suit that basically helps out your legs it's only as powerful as your legs are on average you know climbing up some stairs so like if it malfunctions like you might hurt yourself but you'll be okay if you are building a suit that is capable of you know doing Iron Man style like I'm going to punch through this building and walk through the brick wall opening that's a suit where if it malfunctions it could rip your arms out of their joints and you really need to be you really need to be careful when you're building something like that it's not the type of thing that you build over a weekend I mentioned earlier like I'm modifying this exoskeleton tonight so that I can run faster uh that's not the type of thing you do with an exoskeleton that is able to rip your limbs off you know it's is a is a very different development process so it's not it's more like a medical device and less like little contradiction maybe you would mentioned first we were saying no we're not going to see remote controlled or robots yep now you're saying we might see before the exoskeleton I guess uh before you had asked uh like you had asked about um you had asked about like AI Navy SEALS or robot Navy Seals I have to ad I I missed in my mind there is going to be an intermediary step which is like you're not you'll have robot bodies that are piloted by people so they're still using you know human judgment and like that's going to happen a lot sooner than you know the the AI robot Navy SEAL that is how do you see that working um is it going to be you're going to put on a VR headset you're going to put on a VR headset you're going to strap on a suit that does full motion capture of your entire body and you'll be like it's probably going to handle the leg logo motion because that's something you can't really remotely do very well it's going to have to use local sensors to scan the terrain and do a better job than you'd be able to see anyway so imagine like downward shooting Lars building a 3D model of all the terrain that's within 10 ft of you so you know what to step over what you could trip on you know what you need to avoid um and then everything on the top you've got a guy who's just H operating the whole thing and you know oh so this will be so they'll be controlling these from a totally separate location yeah I mean like and so casualties be essentially zero human casualties if it's a if I will admit like there are there are problems with this like the reason you want to move to an AI brain eventually is largely because of communications links problems like if I if I have a command center that has to talk to a robot that means that all they have to do to make this robot stop working is Jam that link if they Jam the link the robot is like all of those battle droids in Star Wars episode one they just fall over and they're useless um so but for Missions where that's okay maybe like maybe we have links that can't be jammed by that enemy maybe it's short range enough that we can just power through uh yeah that's the that's going to be a thing soon actually have you seen the you've seen the Tesla humanoid robot demos right with Optimus yeah so most of those demos I I I hate to I'm not trying to I'm not trying to piss off Elon sorry Elon I'm gonna I'm G to let people know all those demos with the robots pouring drinks for people and being Enders those are all actually teleoperated it's not an AI brain that's doing all of that there's a there's a guy who's doing what I just described wearing a VR headset wearing a motion capture suit and he's pouring drinks for people walking around doing all kinds of stuff and uh yeah that that that is definitely going to be a thing that our military is doing a lot of in just the next few years holy if not at the level of a Navy SEAL wow if not the level Navy SEAL but like uh if you if you need to serve drinks you know like that's that that's that's going to be happening soon wow damn dude let's talk about I got to throw out one more thing which is uh I I write a little bit of speculative sci-fi from time to time um I don't publish just for my own my own notekee keeping and entertainment but I did write a bit a bit uh years and years ago about um a tier one operator who basically uses robotics to continue operating even into his 70s and 80s the being like he's got a broken body but you know he's still he's still the sharpest the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to his his instincts and his knowledge and his ability to get stuff done and it's really interesting to imagine how that might actually work in the future cuz if you've got a guy who's really good at remote controlling robots it doesn't really matter if he gets you know if he's getting older and older and uh older and breaking down at least not as much so as long as your brain's there I think you I think people will still be useful man this is this is it's going to be a wild future yeah oh um Wow Let's Talk about the missiles let's talk about it what how does how do those work so the so the way I understand it you can you're basically taking away missiles that don't need to expend come back and land so there's a few things that we're doing you're probably thinking of Road Runner which is a reusable missile of sorts vertical takeoff and Landing it can go out attack targets and come back and we have some versions that are suicide attack aircraft we have other like where they're carrying a bomb we have others where they have payload where they can go out do a mission and then come back and be reused again M um we're doing uh we're doing a lot of interesting stuff on that front I think because in the past a lot of like we're we're also building long-range cruise missiles we have a line of missiles called Barracuda we have a barracuda 100 250 and 500 different ranges different payloads and one of the cool things you can do with AI powered missiles is send them into an area and then have them do Precision targeting collaborating with each other even if you don't have a person there who's let's say steering a coated laser target designator like in the past you would have needed somebody to say like get get out there shine a laser at the thing you want it to go after and then it goes after that laser dot well what if instead you can have a missile show up somewhere and say oh that's a Lee Yang Destroyer I know that the engine room is right there and I know that the thinnest part of the deck is right there if I approach at this angle and this speed from this direction I can punch through the engine room and Destroy engine one and if that's successful another one's going to come in behind me from the other side to destroy engine two if I miss or I don't make it through I'm going to have it instead go for engine one and then the next one's going to go that's the type of intelligent targeting that has been the stuff of Science Fiction until now and now we just do it uh like we're doing this type of stuff in Russia right now where we're hitting targets where they have jammed Communications link that would make it impossible to remote control systems and where it's at ranges where you can't get a person into these areas like you can't get a jtac forward to L these r R targets they they would they' mow you down with machine guns or landmines before you get even close the other side of what we're doing with missiles and it's it's it's less interesting than the AI stuff I know but it's just manufacturing we are making our missiles and our submarines and really everything we do in a much more reasonable way so like the way we make our submarines looks a lot like you make uh a car like we're we're basically using we're using processes robots assembly lines that you could use to build a Tesla you can use it to build our submarine versus more traditional techniques that require huge teams of specialized human welders and huge pieces of infrastructure that that allow you to really really slowly build pressure vessels um same thing with our missiles our missiles have 90% fewer Parts than our competition we've very aggressively designed them to have very few parts to have those parts Consolidated as much as possible into individual pressings or panels that would like we might have one part that is 10 times as big as the parts that you would have in a competing system and it does all of these different things and the reason that's important is because right now in US War Games we're predicting that we'll run out like us war games against a hypothetical Chinese Chinese Invasion scenario in Taiwan we run out of missiles in less than eight days like we have eight days and then we are we're completely out so eight days of pain for China doesn't mean very much to a country that thinks in hundredy year timelines they're like that's it like there will be eight days of pain and then it will take the United States literally years to rebuild that Arsenal oh well we could just go win let's just go do it like like like just put the cannon fodder out there soak up the missiles and then we win because we have years to operate with impunity until they get their together we have to fix this as a country we have to get back to where things are actually manufacturable as a country we've slipped into this problem where we build so few arms that we build really expensive really Exquisite things that take years to complete we need to get back into more of a World War II mentality where we can build weapons faster than we can use them because now China has to think about day 8 day 80 day 800 day 8,000 that's how you're going to deter them they need to look and see that you are a continuously present adversary that there is a credible threat of violence that extends beyond the weekend uh that that's the only way we're going to keep them from running rough shot over everybody and I this is maybe more political but I'll say it anyway Taiwan is not the end state for China and all the people who think that this fight over Taiwan is the real fight are missing the point they believe that the Philippines is their territory they believe that Korea is their territory they also believe that North Korea is their territory but they like them as a buffer state with South Korea but that would change the moment they could actually capture South Korea and they even think that most of Japan belongs to them they think that it's theirs they they've tried red over and over for thousands of years and even today like even publicly they won't say they own all of Japan but they do maintain they own part of Japan like like no no maybe we don't own all of it but but like that part that's definitely ours it is really dangerous to let people with Millennia long Ambitions of ruling those areas go unchecked because like like even if you don't give a about Taiwan which you should because our whole modern economy runs on chips from them and until we figure out to make him better or as good ourselves like we have to keep him around like even if you don't give a about Taiwan there's a lot of reasons to make sure we're spooking China on day eight day 80 day 800 wow so i i people like talking about the AI part of the missiles but honestly if our missiles had no Ai and we're just able to make them 10 times faster that's pretty good all on its own even if we were doing nothing else geez do any of do any of our adversaries have this type of technology that you're developing China definitely has the technology in terms of manufacturing press they know how to make stuff fast they know how to make it cheap they have automated cruise missile production facilities that are capable of turning out more cruise missiles in a week than the entire United States turns out in a year I mean like it is do you know do you know the multiple for Chinese ship building capacity so so China China has more ship building capacity than us they can build ships a lot faster than us if if we start blowing up boats in the Pacific they're going to be able to build more what how much more ship building capacity do you think they have how much more five times you think it's five times more you think it's 100 times what do you think it is I honestly have no idea make a crazy guess 20 times it's 350 times they 350 times more ship building capacity than the United States an equivalent ship so no it's so it's worse people will try to argue with me that sometimes they'll say but Palmer all of that is commercial ship building capacity so it's unfair to compare you know uh all of China with all the United States because you're counting all of China's commercial shipping but you know why it's fair because in China the law says that all commercial vessels have to meet military standards if you are building a roll on rolloff passenger ferry to for transporting people in cars you have to have deckplate supports that are strong enough to transport tanks and armored vehicles on they are requiring even their civilian vessels to all be military standards compliant because they foresee a world where they're going to nationalize their entire ire domestic Fleet and use it in a whole of China fight against the west and it's funny people like oh they're just doing that just in case just in case it's not just in case China understands how much more it costs for every single ferry to support military operations they are taking that cost on because they expect to do it they're not going to basically spend billions of dollars for absolutely no reason in an economy that knows how to cut Corners like no other like they are doing do this cuz they they believe it's a core part of their strategy so yes when they're not quite equivalent like I would say US ship like ship for ship our ships are better but quantity has a quality all its own and when you're talking about a 350X difference people will say oh well the Chinese Navy is only twice the size of our Navy well yeah today but on day 10 they're going to be probably a lot bigger and then every day we're going to crank like we're gonna crank out a ship a month and they're going to put out 350 ships a month like you can see where this just becomes an impossible problem for the United States and so what really happens is we become an ally that is unreliable that says we're there for our allies but only in the way that people say they stand for things right like it's very easy for us to say oh of course we stand with Japan okay well what's that going to mean when every single one of our ships is at the bottom of the ocean and we have one new ship coming off the line of month it's a meaningless promise and so our adversaries see that and a lot of them are going to our allies and China is saying hey you know the math you can do the math you need to end up in the sinosphere and like and the US can say they love you all they want reality is they can't back up they can't cash those checks and so uh my my belief is uh that the United States should stop being the World Police we need to stop sending our people all over the world to fight everyone's Wars for them and we need to become the world's gun store we need to just sell them the guns that they need to defend themselves and we need to make sure that we actually keep those shelves stocked because if like look at What's happen in Ukraine we're not sending them more stuff partly for you know various partisan political reasons and strategic reasons but we're also out of stuff to send to them like we we're out of artillery shells that we can spare to Ukraine we're out of a lot of M like we don't have any javelins to send to Ukraine we're all out and so how can our allies stay allied with us if they think that they're going to get into a conflict and we're just say oh sorry actually we forgot how to make things uh we forgot like a hundred years ago sorry geez do they have any of the technology so manufacturing wise which I just talked about they're ahead of us you're talking about like AI the sensors do they have that luckily we're ahead on that like the United States is ahead of China on a lot of this Advanced sensing technology on a lot of advanced AI now China like don't underestimate them you know we've seen like with deep seek and stuff they're doing very interesting things in the AI realm I don't think that're like a decade ahead of them in technology we have what I'm doing at andal is ahead of what China's doing in most Ways by a few years but that's it I'm a few years ahead of them I hate to admit this but I was part of the problem for a long time I made millions of virtual reality headsets in China that's where we made Oculus Rift that's where we made gear VR that's where we made Oculus Quest millions and millions of those things and I know how good they are not just at manufacturing but at the actual technology development side they understood exactly what what we were doing they knew how we were doing it they were able to rip it off they were able to do it with their own domestic companies when we were developing cuttingedge technology we were never more than a few months ahead of China like anything that we figured out they would be able to copy it and figure it out very quickly now I I think they don't have a culture that's particularly good at leaping beyond what we're doing but you don't have to LEAP Beyond what we're doing to be a threat to us if they're really good at manufacturing and they have way more people and they have Tech that is about as good as ours that's all you need to win yeah I mean it's my understanding isn't a Chinese law that any anything that gets developed in that in that country that could help their military has to be that's right has to be shared so you're you're you're you're talking about a particular provision of a policy a legal policy that they call civil military Fusion uh anything that is civilian is inherently military as well and if the military wants to use it they have all rights to it you cannot deny it to them you you cannot tell them no you cannot refuse to sell it to them they they are basically saying the military apparatus and the civilian apparatus are one and the same and you may you cannot operate within the Chinese social contract unless you equally support both I'm actually glad that the United States has given companies the freedom like like you know I'm I'm I'm a Libertarian leaning guy I think it is good when you have the right to self-determination if I decide that I want to be a pacifist and never sell a single thing to the United States military I should absolutely have that right I think that people should berate me for it I think that's the wrong opinion but isn't it good that you're allowed to make that decision that the state can't come and say you have to work for me if I want you to that I I'm glad about that but we have to recognize that there are disadvantages to that one disadvantage has been the way that the United States technology industry has treated the United States of America for the last 20 years I mean I I know it sounds crazy today when you have Mark Zuckerberg begging Congress to ban Tik Tock 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 2 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 they would appease the Chinese authorities it was used to censor search results and also collect and report on information on any dissidents to pipeline that to the Chinese government so anyone who would be using it to try and search for things they shouldn't it was going to alert the Chinese authorities and tell them how to find them you basically had for a period of about a decade a total abdication of responsibility on the part of our tech companies to do anything for the United States they were all refusing to work with our military protesting our military Google famously pulled out of the project Maven contract because their employees were about it that was a project to use Google's AI to do better targeting that would better avoid civilian casualties and their employees protested and they gave in the exec say okay we won't do it we're going to pull out of working with the military actually YouTube banned the andil YouTube account about two years into our company they banned it they said that our company promoted harm of people we said guys what like that's what war is like it's it's either it's either threatening you're going to harm somebody or actually doing it like that that that's the whole game and they said sorry uh this is this this is this is not allowed under our threat of harm policy and they didn't actually unban us until years later when they uh in the midst of this new reignment of tech with our military and and our government uh when they launched the new Google Federal team doing government work and they realized they needed to integrate with something that we made and I told them guys I'm not integrating with Google Federal until you unban our YouTube account like like I'm not that cucked right could you imagine what a cuck I'd be to to like let them integrate with our weapon systems even though they literally Banned Me from the largest video platform and deplatformed me from the largest video platform in the world because some shitty pencil pushing blue-haired person in San Francisco doesn't like my politics or my company and to their credit they did unban us we've been unbanned for years so like good for Google the point I'm trying to make is people are coming back around and they're starting to say they're going to work with the military Google is saying that meta is saying that Microsoft is saying that apple is not saying that pay attention to that but there was this period of time where we ran a very dangerous experiment which was decoupling our most Innovative most valuable companies from the military entirely and that's an experiment we've never run as a country has there ever been a time where our most Innovative companies didn't work with the US military could you imagine how World War II would have gone could you could you imagine if General Motors and IBM and general electric had said well we're not going to work with you we we we think that's we think that's wrong in fact we're going to work with Imperial Japan because we think that's a huge Revenue growth opportunity for us in the future and we think manufacturing is going to be cheaper there that's what our big Tech corporations were doing imagine if during the Cold War if all imagine if Zenith and RCA and Westinghouse had said you know we love America in a abstract hypothetical way but actually we're going to team up with the Soviet Union and we're going to manufacture all of our chips there like could you imagine what would have happened to America and so I I was when I was in Silicon Valley this was one of the things that it was rolling through my head was oh my God I'm sitting amongst the best technologists in the world and none of them care about our military none of them care about America and they're thrilled to work with China I'm so glad that China I I think China's actually made a misstep and I'll end I'll end this rant with this China H has made a misstep that we should take advantage of they tricked all of our tech companies and our media companies into believing that China was this Revenue opportunity and so they basically caused our Technology Innovation economy to decouple from our government and our country and our national responsibilities what they should have done is actually given them a slice of the Chinese pie they should have let Google in they should have let Facebook in they should have given them some money and then a little more and a little more and a little more to keep them on the line you know like basically to just to string them along keep them in the Communist bucket but what they did instead was they eventually said haha we tricked you we're not going to allow you in and we're going to subsidize bite dance and also bite Dan is going to sell Tik Tok 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 I G is making a tactical error he basically should have kept controlling them by allowing them to get a few dollars here and there we should take advantage to the fullest of this mistake that he's made and when people have asked me Palmer why why are you like forgiving why are you forgiving meta or Google or Microsoft or apple like what why are you letting them get away with changing their allegiance from China to the US my point is we need to let them get away with it like the whole point should be to persuade them to do the right thing even if it's for the wrong reasons and what we need to do is take advantage of this moment in time and say hell yeah you're on our side let's go and get them so integrated that they don't really have a chance to change their mind in the future because if we push them away and refuse to allow them to engage they're going to eventually divorce themselves from the US interests again wow that's smart that's really smart it is interesting to think about the apple one in particular yeah like Tim Cook I have nothing against the guy personally like if I were him I would feel a little humiliated that I can't say anything about China despite supposedly on paper being one of the most powerful men in the world like he speaks out against climate change and he speaks out in favor of diversity and he puts all this money into like ads for Mother Earth and he and he and he tweets about how we all need to you know respect the rights of black people in America and we need to solve these law enforce problems so he he's he's politically engaged imagine what would happen if if he said something like I believe concentration camps are bad like China on account of the weaker Muslim issue would immediately lock them out of the country like he can't say that isn't that crazy like the most power powerful executive in the country running our most valuable company on account of the whims of a foreign ruler can't say things like human rights are good concentration camps are bad I think you probably shouldn't lock people up for their religion like he he can only comment on our domestic issues because here our government says you're allowed to say whatever you want about anything and I I if I were him I'd be I'd feel a little humiliated about that I'd be like I'm not I'm not the big boss man I'm not actually powerful I'm actually just the stooge of the country that makes the thing that I sell because they they they can't do it if he did this like imagine what would happen if x locked Apple out of China $2 trillion in market cap gone just like that almost everything they make is made in China made with Chinese Parts like that would be the end of Apple the most valuable company in American history exists day-to-day at the whims of the dictator that runs China isn't isn't isn't that like an insane situation could you imagine if that had happened during the Cold War imagine if the Kremlin could have just like put out a single legal document that would have destroyed what was the biggest company during the Cold War in America what would it have been man I have no idea would it have been an oil company would it have been a manufacturing company I don't know like pick any of them whether it's General Motors or Exxon Mobile or uh I don't know who else was really big back then what was the smoking company what was the smoke marble yeah was wasn't it was maror is owned by somebody isn't it like imagine if imagine if that could have just been shut down because uh a dictator in Russia is like oh I I don't like you anymore I'm going to destroy you anyway that and then during the Cold War we understood this at a political level too not to bring it back to Trump but like Trump in instinctively understands this in a way that the globalist elites do not they thought that Outsourcing everything was just a great thing it's amazing they're against tariffs like why why would you make it in the less efficient economy why wouldn't you make it wherever it wants to be made according to the global inter Dynamics and the problem is they forgot that once you can't make anything and once your companies don't make anything you have no leverage and you've just handed it away to everyone else like Trump understands that if we don't make things in America we're actually just everyone else's and like like what what's the price on that it's easy to complain about tariffs making cars more expensive because the parts can't come from China but like what what value do you put on the fact that a dictator in China could destroy our economy overnight by signing a few pieces of paper like is it isn't that situation that we should just be like humiliated by every day as a nation like shouldn't we be wake up saying holy like everything I'm enjoying is because G hasn't decided to screw us yet and and and G's going to do it like when he people think that the first missile to fly is going to be a Chinese ship firing at a US ship in the straight of Taiwan that's not the first missile the first missile is going to be G calling up of his buddies in the United States and saying if the United States government tries to fight this I'm going to destroy your economy I will do it I will do it tomorrow I will kick all of you out I will give away all your special waivers we're going to steal all your factories we're going to nationalize all your workers and then we are going to sell iPhones to the entire world and you will become irrelevant like that that is actually what he has in his quiver jeez that's scary it's heavy stuff right yeah it's and and and the worst part is that not to via VIA caricature like nobody's talking about this like when was the last time you you heard this you know discust in an open like and it's all obviously true like does anyone dispute that X can just destroy Apple I don't think anyone disputes that does anyone dispute that X could literally destroy millions of us jobs and trillions if not tens of trillions in market cap literally overnight with the stroke of his pen like I don't know I I I I I I I feel like maybe maybe how people felt a little bit during the Cold War you know just being under the the pressure of oh man the nukes could launch at any moment uh I I it feels like it feels a little bit like some lesser version of that so yeah I'm a Libertarian who's Pro tariffs now is the is the real conclusion I'm Pro I'm Pro tariffs until we have our own house in order like like I I like t i i i I'm not a fan of tariffs IDE how long would it even take to get our house in order that not even that long I mean you've probably seen what people say oh well maybe tff work in theory but I mean it'll take years or decades to set up factories that's bogus look at what we did when we transformed this country during World War II we went from basically being a mercantilist quasi agrarian society to being the world's most powerful manufacturing Hub in like a year and a half 2 years are you really telling me we couldn't do it again if it wasn't a priority I I just don't believe it it's easier than ever to set up a factory I've done it in China like it's it is easier than ever to set up Advanced manufacturing it's just a matter of Will and you also need to staff it like you know what we've done we've built a country where through globalism no smart kid wants to be a manufacturing process engineer for example is there any world where Palmer lucky let's say I was 18 years old I'm deciding what my major is why in the world would I major in anything to do with manufacturing knowing that there's hardly any manufacturing going on in my country right if I'm a smart kid I'm going to go work in finance or biotech or uh what what what else are kids doing these days I guess maybe working in video games if we don't manufacture here then our smartest people aren't going to want to work in manufacturing and so like this is a problem that's go like at least when we got out of manufacturing stuff and call it like the the the like globalized the globalized decline starting in the 90s to now at least back in the 9s we still had all the leftover people from the Cold War now they're all retired and now we don't actually have anybody so like this is a problem where we can build the factories quickly but the hardest part is going to be uh training the kids like we're going to need to basically get serious about training people to run factories well efficiently using modern techniques and we we we do have a we do have a lack of those I am a big have you heard of the idea of Defector visas no it's one of my pet political ideas um during the Cold War we gave a lot of visas to people to come to the United States to immigrate here from hostile powers like the Soviet Union if they were in a critical role in those countries you B said you're important over there you are one of like the the puzzle pieces that keeps everything held together for you know their missile program come over to the United States we'll give you a job at Nasa and uh and we'll give you you we'll give you a Visa you can come you get you can get an American Life an American Wife it'll be it'll be fantastic you're going to love it I think we need to start doing that again I think that that's one of the ways that we can beat China cuz there's a lot of people in China they're there but they don't really want to be there's a lot of people who hate what China has become I would love it if we could say you know what we need a lot more people in America who know how to manufacture I want American jobs right to be clear I'm not saying we need to import people because we can't survive without immigration I'm not one of those people but if we can steal their very best manufacturing Engineers deprive China of those people and then put them to work here helping us catch up with China on manufacturing I mean that's a great trade you know let's haul over their best plant managers and then let's have a thousand jobs created by each of those guys here in America uh I I I think we need to bring back Defector visas we need to own it and it seems like a type of immigration that even the really anti-immigration people can get behind because the point is like look we're not trying to bring in millions of fruit Pickers we're trying to steal the very best people from our great foe surely we can agree that that's usually worth doing that it's it's better for us to have those people for them for them be running the missile Factory that's going to blow up our there was a little bit of a debate on that uh what not too long ago correct like the skilled immigration versus not so that's true the difference there is that h-1bs are about whether or not there like on theory of course there's so much H1B of use you would not believe what I saw when I was in Silicon Valley it's it is insane it's it's obviously a program to try and replace us workers with basically slave labor that can't ever escape it's like it H1B abuse is crazy but in theory h-1bs are to create a job for an immigrant if there is not a person who can be hired to do that job in the United States a Defector Visa adds an additional requirement it has to be something that they care about that you're ripping away so like it's not just that there's a need for them here it's that it's going to hurt China by taking them if if if if China had like if China has a million people that do something like let's say like let's say that we need more rice Pickers here and China's got more rice Pickers uh China's got plenty of rice Pickers taking taking a rice picker is not going to hurt taking the head of an advanced silicon manufacturing facility that can make Cutting Edge computer Graphics chips that is going to really really hurt them so I I say that that was the part of the debate that I didn't see present is using immigration not just as a tool to help the United States but to harm our adversaries I want it to I I I want to stop focusing on the plow and start turning it into a to double win exactly and and cuz there's a lot of people around the world who would rather be here who will cause catastrophic consequences for their home country if they leave like here here's here's like a fun one think about the guys who are running the uhan it would be like if China plucked you yes like that that that's a great example imagine if I had no National Allegiance and they made an offer over there and I really wanted to live in China and they just yeah they got they got rid of me that would cause so much Downstream damage and the best like I don't want to go to China in fact my company is sanctioned by China on account of our sales to Taiwan and so conations if I go to China or Hong Kong I'll I'll be arrested it's it's fantastic also Russia or Belarus if I go to bellarus I will be I'll be arrested I would imagine but uh how do you know that oh they put it out publicly that I'm that Russia has the so-called poison list where they say here are the the individuals that are under extreme sanctions personally individually as individuals and uh and bellus also recognizes the uh I think belus and maybe one maybe one other one other like weirdo Baltic breakoff I can't remember what it was but there's a handful of countries in the world where I where I literally can't go but like uh think about like not even just China like let's look like is that public y yeah it's public I even tweeted about it I I I actually have the I have the notice framed in my office I was just going to say I want to get that have you sign it and I'm going to frame it in I will definitely send one to you I have one in my office my dream is to get it signed by Vladimir Putin somehow like just I just like want to get it on his desk somehow or you know like like a signing or something um by the way he deserves a bit of credit on this AI stuff he was saying before I even started andall the country that wins in the sphere of artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the entire world like I know that today that sounds like not that interesting but this was N9 years ago and everyone thought every everyone thought AI was crazy ping said that too so right and like you have all these world leaders who are saying like could you imagine let's say like uh could you imagine like Hillary Clinton having an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago absolutely not could you imagine Joe Biden like putting a a steak in the ground and it's like of course not it's like Anyway even ignoring China like look at Venezuela let's take whoever's running their like oil and gas Machinery over there imagine what would happen if we identified their top 10 most competent people who are running their oil and gas organizations and we gave them all Defector visas and said come to America and you can work at Exon Mobile on like Industrial refinement Systems and we're going to pay you twice as much as you make in Venezuela you would destroy the whole Venezuelan economy overnight and you just have to take like 10 people so yeah immigration is a sword we need to be doing way more of this because an American passport is worth its weight in diamonds right it is it is so valuable to these people they desperately want it culturally we've dominated the world right everyone loves America even the people who hate America love America even the people who hate America love our movies love our music they love they all want it they all want to date American women like let let's take advantage of that let's talk about anderol in the ivas program the ivas program so when is this coming out I don't know yet all right roughly roughly probably in a couple weeks so ivas is a program that is the modern instantial ation of a very old idea this idea that you are going to augment the vision of soldiers and give them superhuman perception abilities the idea is you can see at night you can see thermal signatures you can see hyperspectral signatures you have extraordinary superhuman hearing you're able to mark Targets in the environment without projecting anything in the environment you can seamlessly see in your heads up display where all of your friends are are where all of your foes are where all of the Innocents and non-combatants are and have that all just seamlessly presented to you as if you're Superman you know you can see through walls you can see through night you can see through fog you are Superman this idea has been around for a very long time of putting a heads up display a computer and a radio on every Soldier you can even go back to Robert Heinen's 1959 novel Starship Troopers and that was really the concept behind the mobile infantry they're wearing these kind of Mech suits with fighterjet 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 calculation showing where bullet impact is going to be in a much more intelligent way than just you know putting a red dot that's quack line but actually saying like here is the impact Point factoring in the wind factoring in your motion factoring in what the other guy is doing people have tried this over and over again through history and the tech just never quite been ready and they've also not maybe worked on it in quite the right way but most importantly nobody's ever built a software back end that could make it work even if the helmets were okay they didn't have this kind of system whether it's AI or something else they could understand the whole battle space taking in sensors from everybody so my helmet his helmet his helmet and that airplane and that airplane and that satellite and that ship and you get what I'm saying you're taking building one common fused view of the world in real time has never really been properly accomplished and so you have programs like Future warrior and net Warrior and connected Soldier and Land Warrior you have all these different programs where the Army has tried over and over ivas is sort of the latest the latest the latest attempt at this kind of individual infantry Vision Vision augmentation system when the ivas contract was first awarded years ago it was a really big deal and I was really excited about it uh I would knew I couldn't compete with it because unfortunately it was being awarded right around the time that I was starting andal so when the ivas program was kind of running through the wickets Andro 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 you know one top tier unit it's to put it on the heads of every single person in the Army who's is bearing a rifle anyone who's making contact with the enemy is going to have superhuman augmented Vision that allows them to never miss anything never miss their shot never hit the wrong thing you you you you probably more than almost any anybody can probably understand how what an incredible tool that would be yeah um the problem is that even ivas has been plagued by many of the problems that have have hit a lot of these other systems you didn't have the back end that could provide all of that data to make it a useful thing rather than just a heads up display you didn't have uh the hardware working as well as it could have there were a lot of soldier reports that it was making people sick that it was making people dizzy that it was causing signature problems there were quotes from soldiers in evaluations who said this is going to get me killed uh it was just it was running into a lot of issues anyway the punchline is uh over the last year I've been working on an angle to try and get the ey 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 Hollow lens system which is now discontinued to build the ivas product and we partnered with them to integrate lattice our AI system with their heads up display so uh we we we integrated that we did it very quickly it was actually a Less Than 3 we process in 3 weeks we went went from teaming up to having lce feeding all of our three-dimensional tracking information into their existing IAS sets of display we did a soldier touch point with it they used it in some exercises and some in 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 you really really powerful stuff wow but here's the really big deal as of just about now andal is taking over the ivas program as the prime Microsoft is transferring all of the employees Hardware IP facilities everything to andal we are now going to be the Prime on the ivas program we are going to continue to integrate lce into it and we are building a totally new system on the hardware side that is going to be better than any anything that anyone has ever seen it is going to be by far the best AR VR Mr Vision augmentation system that has ever been built in terms of resolution in terms of field of view in terms of graphical Fidelity in terms of sensor quality and what you can do with those sensors it is a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus it is a jump that I think cannot be overstated I am very aligned with the Army's Vision in terms of this being something that should be on everybody but I think my vision goes maybe even a little further I don't just want this on every person who's carrying a rifle I want it on every logistician every loadmaster every rotary Wing pilot every fixed Wing pilot I want it deployed with everybody across every service every Branch so that every person is eyes for everyone else if you what about police I think that police is going to be a very interesting it's going to be an interesting but adjacent challenge so for example police you're trying to make something that they can wear all day every day and they're also interacting face to face with people like let me put it this way you can't put a Robocop helmet on uh on most police officers it's it's it's too it's too heavy it's too much protection it's you know for what they're doing dayto day but the software back end is certainly going to inate like I I I'll I'll give an example I think that probably what you're going to see on Law Enforcement Officers is going to look more like a pair of Oakleys that is still running lce it's still showing them we're are but it probably doesn't need the ability to pick up an attack helicopter 15 clicks out and then flag them where they need to go like I probably don't need that type of expensive sensing on there I probably need things that are much more you know of a local web but uh that's definitely going to happen and it's something I'm very excited about also like you look at things like body cameras like you could make body cameras that are way better that do 360° capture and right now a body camera for a law enforcement officer is really just a tool that gets his ass on hot water right like that's that's basically its job nobody not enough people look at footage from these body cams and say oh wow this guy was totally in the right in what he did right if the footage exonerates their actions then everyone ignores it and the media says nothing and if it shows that he made any mistake then they're going to they're going to you know they're going to hoist him by his own pitard 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 sick I want something that's watching for threats that I'm not seeing I want basically a guardian angel on my shoulder that is able to do what backup would normally do for me and at a superhuman level like imagine if you could have not just eyes in the back of your head but what if you could have a hundred eyes all throughout your head all looking out into the world and at the slightest disturbance being like holy I think someone's opening that window and firing like they're they're aiming a gun from that window it should be telling me not like hey you know be aware that someone might be shooting you it should be giving you even more direct commands than that like it should like throw a red threat alert and show you a direction you need to throw yourself immediately to not get shot to get behind cover like you're going to see very tight integration between man and machine on these things anyway I ivas is very much a Warf fighter oriented system and it's oriented towards the things that people at the tip of the spear are doing I think you're going to see similar ideas but oriented around maybe a different form fact factor for law enforcement what does it look like what does it look like it looks like a so one of my beliefs with the with the previous ivas system uh it was not very tightly integrated into the helmet so you wear your ballistic helmet and it basically straps on top of it you like clip it on the brim here you run a strap to the back there's a big battery packing compute module back here there's a big sensor brim you clip onto the helmet um the problem when you're trying to clip onto an existing system is it ends up not very tightly integrated lots of snag points lots of lots of snag Hazard it ends up being very heavy and and and misbalanced where it's really really torquing your neck the thing that I'm building is an all up integrated ballistic shell that integrates hearing protection hearing augmentation Vision protection Vision augmentation all into one seamless ballistic shell that protects you from Air Bursts direct fire rounds all you blast and concussion the whole thing in one integr seamless product and uh I'm I'm not quite ready to show the actual thing but true to andral Product Company fashion we've been investing a ton of resources in this for years at this point so I knew that I wanted this to happen years ago I wasn't sure if I would able to make it happen but we started putting millions of dollars into this years ago so that if it happened we would be ready to go and not you know trying to catch up from the start damn anyway this is going to be crazy I'm I'm I'm I'm pretty so the first the first fully integrated system meaning it has all of the different sensors all of the different compute and vision augmentation systems all integrated into one thing is going to be done at the end of March so right now we're basically in systems test where we have individual systems that we are you know doing doing development and testing of but the first fully integrated helmet with all of this stuff actually working like actually working tied together tied together with lattice feeding tracks like that's all going to be done in in in March and like just to give you an example of how useful this might be like if you want to Mark a target for somebody else you'd have to use a laser right what if you could mark it digitally and you don't emit any signature for anyone else with nods to see and what if everyone else can see it here's an even crazier like and this is when I say crazy I don't mean like a hypothetical like you could just do this with this Tech imagine that you're doing some kind of Pinsir and you have some guys over here some guys over here and I can't see a guy behind that building but you can if you're seeing him it's taking that track it's taking that enemy Mark and it's now putting it into my vision I can now see through the building through the wall and I can see the guy coming around the corner before he's so they're all talking to each other it's all continuously and it's not just the helmets you're also anything that's seed in dadus 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's he thinks he's going to set up on top of that Hill andp pop you imagine if it sees him it notifies you you look at him coming over that hill and you bring your rifle on target literally the moment he clears you're taking out that threat that's the type of kind of combined sensing and combined arms tactics that this enables it's going to make robots and people work together so seamlessly like they're just one cohesive effective unit and like this is also the way that I think you're going to have you know robot dogs robot soldiers integrated with human Force imagine if you see a guy who's you know running around a building you lose sight of him you can't deal with him because you've got something else what if I can now task another robot and say hey just stay on that don't let that guy get into a position where he can fire at me and if it looks like he's going to let me know and we'll make him a priority now I don't have to spend my very limited Vision processing and engagement capability just tracking that Potential Threat who might be running away or might be just repositioning like isn't it great if I can just tell the Drone overhead hey watch that guy if he's really just running away in his sandals like I don't care about that right now maybe we're going to go track him down later but I don't really care about him right now today it's really hard to make that work you end up with people getting basically pulled on to 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 though that a computer can give you can have that computer doing everything for you can say watch every single one of those windows and watch every single one of those doors and just let me know if I need to worry about it I got a question by way that's amazing by the way be so good but would you be able to would would there be any way to do let's say something like the bin Laden rate yeah would there be would there be a way to integrate some type of facial recognition so if you if you were if it was a a capture kill Mission or potentially a hostage rescue um would would would the system would there be a way to to basically identify hey this is that's the hostage you know that could that stuff can get tricky depending on how they're dressed what their eity is I think so I'll be honest I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition mostly because the situations where it works I believe are pretty limited and if you're wrong it's such a spooky thing like like what if it tells you the wrong thing like what what if it is wrong how do you how do you how do you delegate responsibility for that and uh what about but but I will tell you this like here's how I would handle that problem I probably wouldn't use facial recognition if I and I'm just making this up on the Fly I haven't thought this through very well so you'll have to forgive me first of all going into something like the mid Laden raid I probably would have set up drones around that whole site with things like wall penetrating radar systems that are flooding that whole area with with RF energy so that I can actually see people moving around inside the buildings Behind the Walls if I can do that then I can like if I'm a hostage I can probably guess like a guy up against the wall you know who's staying there even when shit's going down probably not someone I need to worry about as much as the guys who all of a sudden start scrambling around like flies the moment that we land in the yard so that you're going to have a pretty good idea even just from like that but if it were me my understanding is during the bin Laden raid there was a live video feed from the team back all the way to the situation room is that is that correct that's what that's what I hear that's what I well that's that's what I hear that's what I hear I would love to see a situation where you basically have the feed from everyone's cameras being fed back to a talk and you've got a bunch of analysts in there who have seen this guy a 100,000 times on every bit of one of bit you know on all their Intel they've built a pattern of Life on this guy they know what he's wearing every day when he goes to take a piss in the yard like I would want a guy where instead of facial recognition trying to make a guess I can look at somebody and there's like 10 Angels over my shoulder in the form of human Intel analyst who'll say that's him that that's the guy that you want I mean there there could be other things let's say let's let me give you another example maybe there's a CIA asset that's on the ground or on the target at time of the raid that's going to be for so you know or or you have the bad guy's phone you know in in it's it's just constantly tracking his phone or or the or the CIS that has some type of a some type of a beacon that appears into the imagery that you're looking at so it just helps with the that will definitely happen and like you think about like uh like I think for that like CIA asset he's probably not going to be wearing the full the system that we're building is called Eagle Eye um he's not going be wearing a full Eagle Eye you know integrated ballistic visor probably he's probably going to wearing more something more like Oakley that just look like he's just a normal dude but it's presenting him with hey that's the target we tring him what I'm maybe I'm misspeaking here I'm talking about okay let's say it's I don't know it's it's it's the target's doctor sure who is reporting to the agency and he's the one that has the go switch that's saying he's here yep Now's the Time to do the hit I'm On Target I'm in the same room as him yep don't shoot me I look just like everybody else you're saying some kind of marker so that we know that it's that's super easy I mean like you basically just so like with Eagle Eye you actually have that inherently all the helmets and I I can't talk about how they do it cuz you know not great information to be out there there are multiple ways for the helmets to know who is who even in really tough environments without the you know without the bad guys being able to pick up on how that works but basically if I'm wearing this helmet if I look over into those bushes and my guys are over there it's popping up their names above their heads well I don't mean they couldn't be wearing the helmet because they're undercover yeah and what I'm saying is it would be trivially easy to make something where if you know what the guy looks like and like you know what he's wearing yeah you could have it just scanning for that and it's looking like I'm all you know it's like man and doctor and white lab coat and it's like it's Dr F in the white lab coat and he's going to be wearing his tortoise shell glasses like that is something you could definitely do where you enter the room and it says you know it outlines him in blue and it says Dr f probably um the the thing no the thing is just makes the decision making well the situation you're talking about that's that that's even a little different than facial recognition specifically like I'm actually a huge fan of height recognition so one of the things and when I say height it's not even height it's actually like skeletal recognition so face recognition is hard because you need pretty good you need a good capture it needs to be relatively dead on it needs to be lighting is it is good enough I'm a huge fan of being able to differentiate between different people on their skeletal pose like if I have a drone that's way overhead and it sees some guy walking through a doorway especially if I know how big that doorway is uh I can take that video run it back and I can basically build a model of how long his wrist to arm joint to shoulder distances are and we're all different like we're all uneven too like my arms are slightly uneven uh if I can basically say oh look it's a 6' one guy with an arm that's 2 in shorter on this side and he leans a little bit to this side like you can be pretty freaking sure that that's the same guy that you saw get into the car stuff like that is paired with facial recognition a lot more powerful and what you're describing it's like almost like clothing recognition you know it's like yeah he's got a white lab coat he's got the glasses and he's got the face and he's got the hair and like if if you have all of that but the guy is only like four feet tall then it would say oh that's that's not Dr f it doesn't I don't I don't care what his face looks like yeah basically I'm just looking at like an identifier something to identify and it shows now are you imagining and you're imagining that this is like happening on the like we can't give him a beacon or something ahead of time cuz if he has a beacon it's really easy if we can give him it would be easy to get an asset of Beacon if I can give you could imp plant something in the inside of them you could you give them a water bottle you know that has something in it or I don't know honestly like there's there's so many ways so I mentioned like hyperspectral Vision using hyp spectral cameras you can look at things and they can tell you what it is made out of based on its spectral response across multiple frequencies so you can say like that is Stone that is glass and they you can have you ever seen hyperspectral cameras that are used for detecting drugs they can just look at something and like that's cocaine mhm it's really wild there have been attempts in the past to use hyperspectral cameras for doing covert marking of vehicles so like you'll have an operative walk by a car and they basically take a piece of invisible paint that you can't see with your human eye and they just like smear a line along the hood as they walk by and it looks just like a smear of you know dirt to a normal person but on a hyp spectral camera it shows up as a bright orange streak on it you could just say like hey I'm going to give you a hypers like a pen made out of hyperspectral stuff I mean like out of a weirdo material like b a chemical you would not normally see in a pen you could say I'm going to give you these eyeglasses or honestly you could give them some makeup you could have them smear some yeah you know some of the right Compound on their head and you could have a system just see that and say oh it's it like that that that it's that guy don't we're gonna outline anyone who has this on their forehead we're g to outline their whole body in blue as a as a hostage there's a lot of interesting things you can do there I haven't thought that much about these applications I got to admit I've I've mostly been thinking about it from a you know more big army versus you know special tactics I mean it' be I mean you know well that's the world I come we'll have we'll have to bring you out once we have theun develop it well the cool thing is I talked earlier about lce the goal is to take and like maybe you can see where like my my grand scheme is all coming together here like when I started we said we're going to save taxpayers hundred 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 like the things we're building today are literally what we said we were going to build eight years ago but remember I talked earlier about how Lis were basically taking all this expertise of the world's best operators and boiling it down into an AI model that can help you imagine if you're an operator who's wearing something like Eagle Eye ivas and imagine if I not only have a system that is watching my six and telling what's going on imagine if it can look at an aircraft that's coming to engage us and then ALS like on board the AI has the expertise of the world's best fighter pilots like isn't that extra or you best rotary Wing Pilots like by building all this expertise in you're potentially building a guardian angel that is like the super human super intelligent thing like imagine if we could look at it says oh that's a Russian pilot based on the you tactics that it's observing or the way that it's working says oh he's going to come back around to do a low attack run like this stuff is Way Beyond just oh there's a DOT and there's the enemy if you have the world's best expertise of the world's best war Fighters distilled into one super AI it's like you're rolling around with a whole team of experts sitting on your shoulder telling you what might happen next and that's just I'm so excited to live in that world because I imagine that's not the world you live in right like or lived in like I bet there were plenty of things you did where you said man I wish that we had the world's leading expert on X Y or Z here with me to tell me what was going on and uh and so like you have you've probably played with the AI stuff where you're like hey like you know who won the 1960 World Series like that's that's that's fine but what if you could say Hey how do I defuse this bomb like we like like like or like imagine like seeing a vehicle be like how do I hotwire this car damn and if it can just have all of that on tap for you and say oh well e either here's how to do it or just say you're out of luck you can't Hotwire this car in the five minutes that you have you need to move on really excited about living in a world where everyone's working with access to the best information I need one of these helmets we're going to so it's interesting this is a little bit of an off topic bit but people have inter inter Ally been discussing this are we going to sell this to civilians and it's one of those really shitty situations like I'm a gun owner I own about 400 guns and I own a bunch of other gun related type systems as well so like I'm I'm I'm really down the rabbit hole and I'm a big fan of weapons companies especially gun companies that sell the same things to the military that they sell to civilians that that's great like I I I hate it when they say oh we're not going to sell this to you we're only going to support the government the problem and I when I was like when I was not in the defense space I was always pissed about this I'm like how dare they not sell me the cool like how dare they not do that but then I'm realizing anything that I sell to civilians I effectively also selling to Chinese Special Forces to Russian Commandos now I'm not saying that you'll be able to that they'll be able to get enough to outfit their whole Force but anything you sell to civilians is eventually going to get sold to a traitorous American it happens way too often I hate that it happens but you've read these stories right you know some guy sells on eBay night vision that is top-of-the-line night vision to like literal Russian Russian cutouts and so I'm I I would hate to build this incredible capability and then all of a sudden it's in the hands of the top tier units that we're potentially going to be fighting against and also I don't want them reverse engineering it like I don't want them using it and learning how it works learning whatever might problems like because there will be problems I am going to do my very best to minimize the impact of those problems like I I know I'm something is going to be wrong with our system I would prefer that I don't have a bunch of you know Russian cu's walking around and trying it every day and realizing that there's a way to for example you know trick the Dr far facial recognition so that it swaps the two things like not that I'm not that I'm going to let it do that anyway but you you get what I'm saying so I've been struggling with this I want to sell to civilians but I also know that the National Security impact is actually material and real and I haven't figured out how to reconcile that yet one would be to like sell a more limited version to civilians um you know maybe it doesn't do everything like you probably don't want the civilian version to include the model that includes the weapons tactics advice of the best master Chiefs and the best pilots and the best Admirals of you of History right like that's probably dangerous thing for our allies to or for our adversaries to have yeah um You probably don't want it to be able to it take about five seconds and it's in cartel's hands I I yeah I had not even run through my mind now but like that's another thing we we do a lot of work with CBP uh we actually have our AI P so our lattice Sentry towers are along about 30% of the border now we're covering hundreds of miles we are responsible for hundreds of thousands of apprehensions that would not have happened otherwise wow I am so proud of the work that we do with border patrol and could you imagine if they start going up against cartels who have helmets telling them how to evade our systems how best to bypass them sharing tactics on when to send decoys across to distract him and saying okay based on the average Transit speed of a Humvee in this terrain we think you have 16 minutes before they are able to get line of sight on you like that's what I want to be doing and I I don't to want to just tell soldiers What's Happening Now I want to tell them what's probably going to happen I want to do predictive analysis and use data processing to say hey like based on what we've seen in the past tactics we've seen for the from this enemy in the past this is what's they're going to be doing 10 minutes from now I do not want the cartel having that could you imagine if you would to say to Facebook what do you mean there you mean this wouldn't be happening it's an interesting thing to ponder but you know Mark's come around Mark's based now it's pretty interesting to watch sure you you you you you've seen this going on for oh yeah I've seen it it's a it it's I think it's a reflection of a lot of things you know like the world's changing it's clear China's not our friend it's clear they're not the friend of our corporations uh it's clear that there's crazy people running our media crazy people running our politics and eventually people who are smart and Zuck is smart right he's not he's not an idiot at some point you at some point you come out of the Matrix right and I I think that's what I meant was andrel would have Oh you mean if I wouldn't have started ocul 100% I I mean I don't want to I don't want to complain too much here but one of my biggest beefs with the US defense system is I could not have started andril before Oculus I've only been successful with andril because I'd already made billions of dollars at another company and that's kind of an indictment of our system if you look at history we have a long history as a country of finding the best technology wherever it is and then building those people and those technology up into incredible parts of our war fighting apparatus are you familiar with like uh the Samuel Colt story no or Smith and west so like Sam Colt was about to go bankrupt for the second time when he was handmaking revolvers out of the back of a covered wagon and then he got a order from the Texas Rangers for like two dozen of his Pistols that paid his bills for the year and then after that the United States Army adopted his revolver as the standard service weapon because it was so obviously Superior to anything else that that had come come before so like the six shooter of the time was an extraordinary sidearm and he went in his life from almost being bankrupt working out of a covered wagon to arming the entire Western world with his weapons like the designs that he made went from out of the back of a wagon to literally tens of millions of units spread across America and Europe defending defending America against Nazis and the Japanese like isn't that like insane isn't isn't that amazing that our country used to be able to have those stories of finding the right guy and so my like my question to people is always could the United States military effectively buy something even if it was a game changer from Palmer lucky of 2011 back when I was a teenager building Oculus if I had gone to the military and said I've changed everything I've built a VR headset that is better faster Cheaper by an order of magnitude it's $300 and it's better than your best 3 $100,000 headset and a tenth of the weight do you think they would have been able to buy it or use it like no we it's this muscle we used to have that we've lost as a country we're we're only willing to bet on people who have already made it companies that are already big nobody wants to take any risk and in doing so they take more risk than they ever should you know a bureaucrat doesn't want to risk his job so instead he just risks our national security it's it's and so my the point I always make to people is we need to fix our procurement system so that the pal lucky of 2011 can successfully sell into the military we should not Pat ourselves in the back because and people are they're saying oh well I'm so glad things are changing the success of andril shows that we're really getting our together I'm like guys like that's a good first step but let's not Pat ourselves in the back for a billionaire successfully starting a new company right that if if America like that is not the problem America has is that billionaires aren't good at starting companies like if you have a billion you can do whatever you want you can start an ice cream company you can start a defense company but we need we need to we need to open it up to a lot more Innovation that doesn't come from people like me man I love that you just said that and uh I got to be honest there I had a lot more than I want to talk with you but I think this is a perfect I think this is a perfect place to end this and um well it's an important one and I hope that people who are listening are considering working on National Security problems because even if you think that you are not relevant or not helpful you're probably wrong like if you are good with computers there are places that desperately need you if you are good at Metallurgy mechanical engineering electrical engineering there are places that desperately need you if you're just good at talking and good at sales there are places that desperately need you like there's there's a a whole new wave of new defense companies that are nipping at the heels of the big guys now is a great time for someone who cares about the future of our country to shift out out of you know building parking apps and into building things that are going to keep people from getting their heads blown off right that that that is where we need our best and brightest and it feels it feels like I hate I hate to be uh I hate to be mimetically aligned to this degree but the vibe shift is real like I I and I I think people should take advantage of that definitely is definitely is would you come back 100% this has been a lot of fun and I got I got to get you into an Eagle Eye though I would love that we let you know as soon soon as it's as soon as it's uh as soon as it's cleared by as soon as it's cleared by the Army for us to start showing people perfect well we won't release that we won't release this until the announcement comes perfect and I and I think it will come in time I'm I'm tell I'm telling you ahead of the announcement but the announcement I believe is going to get cleared by the customer before before this air so fingers crossed Perfect all right well Palmer I really appreciate you and damn what a fascinating interview I'm just wow it was a lot of fun thank [Music] [Music] you no matter where you're watching Shan Ryan Show from if you get anything out of this please like 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