Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #37 How The Founder of Oculus Plans to Save America w/ Palmer Luckey

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

In this episode, during this year’s Abundance360 summit, Palmer and Peter discussed Palmer’s experience with Facebook, turning down $1 Billion dollars and shifting into the military tech industry.  You will learn about: 06:40 | The Transition From Gaming To Warfare 20:52 | Have We Already Connected Our Brains To Computers? 32:23 | Quantum Computing VS Quantum Communication Palmer Luckey is an inventor and entrepreneur known for designing the Oculus Rift and founding the company Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook for $2.3 billion. In 2017, he founded Anduril Industries, which integrates a consumer technology business model with mission-driven objectives to transform the defense capabilities of the US and its allies by fusing Al with hardware advancements. Learn about Anduril Industries >Become a part of my community. Learn about my executive summit, A360. >Join me on a 5-Star Platinum Longevity Trip at Abundance Platinum.  _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor:  Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. You sold the Oculus to Facebook. You were basically a kid and he offers you a billion dollars and you say no. So in the end, it ended up being a $2.3 billion deal.

How do you turn down a billion dollars? How old were you then? At the time, I would have been 20. Yeah, I would have been 20. I didn't know anything about AI. When we started the company, we didn't even know what product we were going to make. In 2019, we won Bloomberg's Most Controversial Company in Tech Award. In 2017, we won Wired's Worst Company in Silicon Valley Award.

You're doing something very different now. We need better weapons if we are going to ethically engage in warfare. People are like, oh my god, you've opened up Pandora's box. How are we going to deal with that? It's basically already solved. We're just waiting for the products to come out. That's how they're going to make VR cool. It's not engineering, it's marketing. It's a virtual reality headset that kills you

when you die in the game. This is a science fiction concept that has existed for decades. We build robotic submarines that can dive to depths of over 6,000 meters. It may be down there right now, we just don't know. I could tell you, but. But then you'd have to have me play your headset.

This was going to be the future. It was going to be not just the next computational platform, but the final computational platform. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. My conversation today is with Palmer Luckey, the incredible inventor, entrepreneur, the creator of Oculus, who famously turned down a billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg to go on and ultimately get $2.3 billion for selling Oculus to Facebook. But today the conversation was on a

different subject. It was on a conversation that was titled Rebooting the Arsenal Democracy, because after Palmer sold his company to Facebook and exited, he didn't go and start another VR company. He started a defense company of all things, combining AI, robotics, drones, and machine learning to create a new layer of defense for the United States. An extraordinary pivot. So I sat down with Palmer at Abundance360 to talk about his company, where it's going, and it buzzed the entire audience. He was probably rated the number one conversation, and it really surprised me. So depending on how you feel about our military, is it something that makes you proud and excited, or you don't like talking about defense, this is a conversation to have because in the world today, defending

democracy is a critically important thing. And how our exponential technology is going to be used. My massive transformative purpose is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future in humanity. And that's what I'm doing with this podcast, to open up every relationship, every conversation I have with you, to inspire you, to support you in going big, in helping uplift humanity. If that's of interest to you, please subscribe to this podcast. Allow me to share with you the wisdom that I'm learning from the most incredible moonshot entrepreneurs on the planet. Let's dive into this conversation with Palmer Luckey, the CEO, founder of Andral. And get ready, hold on.

Hey, buddy. Very high energy. Very high energy. Well, you got to be. Come on. It's the most exciting time to be alive. I agree. Come on, you bounce out of bed in the morning excited, don't you?

Most mornings. Most mornings. So I have to start with a couple of questions just because I have to. So you sold the Oculus to Facebook and you go and meet with Mark Zuckerberg and he offers you a billion dollars. Now, I mean, you were basically a kid who had this sort of working prototype. And he offers you a billion dollars, and you say no. And then he offers you how much? So in the end, it ended up being a $2.3 billion deal, plus $700 million in performance bonuses, which we actually achieved all the performance metrics years ahead of schedule. So that was pretty cool.

So how do you turn down a billion dollars? How old were you then? At the time, I would have been 20. Yeah, would have been 20. That's kind of life-changing amount of money. Seriously, why did you turn down a billion dollars? Did you really think he would come back? The main thing is we weren't looking to sell the company. When we had this first discussion, we were actually, by then, quite a ways beyond having

just a work... We had sold our DK1. We had sold about 55,000 virtual reality headsets to game developers around the world. We were on a path to launch a consumer product. We had a lot of game developers that were supporting us. We were true religious zealots of VR. We believed that this was going to be the future.

It was going to be not just the next computational platform, but the final computational platform, the only one fully capable of encompassing every other form of media and human communication. We really bought into the into this and so when it came in with a billion dollars like look I that would make us a lot of money but I think that we're going to be able to do what we need to do on our own there's no reason for me to sell this to another company

and so the thing that changed it wasn't really the offer going up to two billion dollars it was the fact that that was paired with an offer to continue spending billions of dollars every single year for a decade plus until we achieved mainstream adoption. And that's the thing that really gets to you as an entrepreneur. Like, well, I could do this on my own. I might even make more money in the end

if I maintain ownership in this thing as it becomes a multi-hundred billion or trillion dollar company. It was giving birth to your vision. And on a much faster timeline than I would ever be able to do. And Facebook was in a different position almost 10 years ago than they were today. I mean, there were other companies interested in buying us. And I won't say necessarily who they are, because I don't want to be that kind of guy. Nobody's going to want to talk to me anymore. But there were companies who were interested in buying

us. But the problem is these other big tech companies, VR was an interesting sideshow for them, not the way they saw their entire business pivoting for the next decade. They weren't going to change the name of their company for that. They were going to, well, they would change the name of the company. They'd use you to sell more game consoles. They'd use you to kind of be an interesting marketing gimmick. But their, Facebook was one of the only companies that came in and said, this is, this is our future. We believe that we are going to pivot the entire company So when people acted surprised when Facebook changed their name to meta, you know that that that wasn't something that happened overnight

That was you know, the culmination of ten years of of and you know Really part of the pitch that got us to sell to them in the first place. So you're doing something very different now Explain to the group what and roll systems does Sure, so and roll is a defense product company. We build weapons It's obviously pretty different from working in the gaming and entertainment and virtual reality space But it was something that I really felt was going to be very important The reason I ended up in the space is because in short, I looked out at the world and I realized there was this fiction taking holds in the minds of people, even smart

people, that we lived at the end of history, people called it. That there was never going to be any more large-scale conflict. That economic entanglements precluded the idea of large-scale warfare and that therefore it was not something that was worth investing in. We didn't need to get better at it. We didn't need to be more efficient at it. We didn't need the ability to increase our precision in our military action, because at the end of the day, it's an outdated thing that was a thing, you know, part of the past. And so you had a lot of tech companies that were also hugely dependent on China and thus unwilling to do anything that would upset the Chinese government. You had a lot of tech companies refusing to do work with the Department of Defense, a lot of defense companies that were totally incompetent in areas like artificial intelligence, sensor fusion,

high-end networking and processing, robotics. And then startups didn't get into the defense space, one, because it's not cool, two, because they couldn't raise money to get into the space, and three, because the government is so bad at buying from startups that they shouldn't raise money to do that even if they wanted to. And I realized that this was something I was pretty worried about. There's never been a point in US history where our best technology companies have refused to work with the military. So imagine if in the run-up to World War II, if Westinghouse and General Electric had said, you know, I don't think that we can work with the United States military. Imperial Japan is just too big of a revenue opportunity for us. Imagine if during the Cold War, if you had had General Electric or Bell Labs saying, you know, we love America and all, but I think that we need to be

a transnational corporation that doesn't really pick a side between things like democracy and authoritarianism, because, you know, we really think that the Soviet Union, they've got a really good concentration of energy resources that we just need to, you know, make sure we have unfettered access to. That really spooked me. I felt like we were in a similar situation today and I wanted to do something about that. So that's how I ended up in the defense base. I get it. You got even some standing applause here. I will say, I've just got to do a quick, a quick detour to say this. This is the Palmer Lucky I Told You So Tour. 2022, now into 2023.

Because people are cheering. When we started this company, we were vilified. People were told, the most charitable interpretation we got from those people was that it was a waste of time. It was somewhere between your evil and what you're doing is irrelevant to the future. And you're just wasting your resources. And I mean, like in 2019, we won Bloomberg's most controversial tech company in tech award. In 2017, we won Wired's worst company in Silicon Valley award. I mean, so I want to put it in perspective. It's we've had large-scale conflict, return with a vengeance.

Now that people understand the dynamics of China and Taiwan in the near future, it's easy for everybody to say, oh man, this is great. I love what you're doing. But man, it was not popular. I remember my first web summit. I'd been to a web summit twice at Oculus.

I came back with Andral. Just glares. It was brutal. This episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that i do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that i eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it's really important high prolonged levels of glucose what's called hyperglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it's not good the challenge is all of us are

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Where's the name Andoril come from? Is Warner Brothers legal here? No. All right. Well, in that case, unofficially, it's named after Ondoril, which is the sword that Aragorn wields in the Lord of the Rings. There's a few reasons. It's named the Flame of the West in Elven, the idea being that it is the sword that allows the kingdom of man to stand against the oncoming thralls of Mordor. And there are two quotes from the books that I think really drove us naming the company.

One is, the man who bears this weapon wields a sword more deadly than any that has ever existed. I'm like, oh yeah, that's pretty sweet. But then there's a better one that actually drove it. And it is, I love the sword, not for the brightness of the blade, nor the keenness of the edge, but for that which it protects

and that was what we wanted to get across and internally too and i wanted to reinforce this to my employees we're not building weapons because it's cool because of the brightness of the blade the keenness of the edge you know the the fastest of the drone we are building it because of that which it protects, which is America and our allies around the world who believe in self-determination, democracy, freedom of speech. And I thought that that was important. We're not, you know, we're not an inanimate object. We are a conscious sword that fights for a specific side. So when I was looking to try and find a faculty member here to talk about exponentials, it's so challenging because there's so many different technologies. But what I loved about what you do, Palmer, is you're converging so many of them, right?

You're bringing them together in extraordinary systems. Can you just talk a little bit about the various games and toys in your toy chest? The Android toy chest or my personal? Actually, they're probably both very cool. Well, I have a submarine, so that's pretty cool. But Androle also has a submarine. So my submarine, you put people inside of it because I want to be inside of it.

But Androle, I mean, we build robotic submarines that can dive to depths of over 6,000 meters. One of them is actually the longest range electric vehicle in the world of any kind. It has a range of thousands of miles, totally autonomously on all electric power, totally silent, impossible to detect, non-nuclear. That's impressive. We've got some good stuff in there.

So robotic submarines, advanced autonomous aircraft, autonomous ground vehicles. We're building things that are in space. We have a few Space Force contracts that I can't talk about the specifics of. We have a few Space Force contracts that I can't talk about the specifics of. And we're working on something that is not a domain that has been heretofore unexploited, has been the underground domain. The thing is, nobody since the Cold War has conceived, they're called subterranes. So submarines that go into terrain.

Subterranes, they're not practical to put people into, and you can't communicate with something that's deep underground. But autonomy and artificial intelligence allow you to, for the first time, have payloads that can do useful things operating autonomously deep underground for long distances. So I know- It may be down there right now, we just don't know. Yeah, it was interesting. I could tell you, but-

But then you'd have to have me play your headset. We'll get to that later. Drones. How many drone designs? I mean, that seems like the most interesting place to play. We've got six aerial vehicles that we've announced, and then we've got another half dozen that have not been announced.

They're all purpose-built for specific use cases. Some of them are protecting military bases from incoming drone threats right now. So, I mean, overseas in combat zones right now, some of them are doing it here in the United States. We have other drones that are providing targeting for long range precision fire systems. So you don't have to move.

Like right now, the way that you put a laser on a target, a lot of time you have a JTAC, you have a guy who literally has to get close to them, point a laser at them, and then he's the one guiding it. The problem is the enemies that we have all have sensors that detect that laser. And the second you start lasing,

they're going to try to kill you. If you can replace that job with a drone, you can take a person out of harm's way that had a 50-50 shot of coming back from any real conflict. Amazing. AR and VR, what are you doing in that world? I mean, that's your legacy or your starting point, I should say, not your legacy. You have plenty of legacies left.

How far has that tech gotten? Are you happy with the advances and what are you doing in Anduril? Look, I'm happy and I'm unhappy. I don't want to complain too much because everyone who gets blown out of their own company, I was fired. I don't want to complain too much because everyone who gets blown out of their own company, I was fired. I didn't leave Oculus. Everyone who gets blown out of their own company looks at it and says, oh, I could have done it better.

I would have made different decisions. And I, of course, would have. And I think that meta has dropped the ball on quite a few things. I think Magic Leap dropped the ball on quite a few things. It really pains me as a VR enthusiast. At the same time, though,

my fundamental outlook hasn't changed. We are clearly on a path to where we can make virtual reality devices that provide matrix-level immersion within our lifetimes. And we're going to be able to replace at least the sense of vision perfectly within the next 10 years.

And we're going to get very close in the next three years. And it's an incredible thing to allow you to virtually experience anything that you can conceive of, that you can imagine, that you want another person to experience, whether it's practical or for entertainment, you know, or for any other purpose.

I'm still a big believer in it. Is the tech there, or do we need to invent something to get to, I guess, resolution of the visual cortex? So we're going to be fine. Like the great thing about VR is it's not, it's like AI. I'd say 10 years ago, it was not clear when the breakthrough would happen, what it would look like. How would we get to AI that scales to something that if not AGI, at least it, you know, it appears to be JGI for, for,

for many use cases. And it was kind of unclear what the path was. For VR, it's a very clear path. You can literally chart it on the roadmap of every major contract manufacturer in the world. You know exactly what's going to happen, what resolution you need, what nanometer processes you need to use to make it happen. And so it's just this march towards implementing things

that have already been invented. We don't need any new inventions. We don't need any new technology. We don't need any new technology. We just need to keep iterating on what we already have and we'll brute force our way there within a few years. So if I were going to be critical of the VR world right now, because I've got a whole bunch of Oculus headsets,

unboxed and boxed still, it's still the cumbersomeness of wearing it for any length of time. Yes. How are we going to deal with that? It's basically already solved. We're of wearing it for any length of time. Yes. How are we going to deal with that? It's basically already solved. We're just waiting for the products to come out. So like Quest Pro weighs over 700 grams and it's pretty big.

It just came out. It's pretty advanced, but it's not using a recent advancement that has been made possible, which is called PanTake Optics. They reflect the beam inside internally a few times. They've been around for actually decades, but only recently have displays become bright enough that you can emit polarized light that is high enough brightness to overcome the optical inefficiency of pancake optics. There is a headset that just came out.

It's called the Big Screen VR headset. Highly suggest you guys check it out. It costs less than a Quest Pro. It's $990 instead of $1,500. And instead of 750 grams, it weighs 179 grams it's a fifth of the weight it looks like a tiny pair of the smallest ski goggles you've ever seen and it's super close to your face better tracking higher resolution and the apple headset that's coming out soon is the next generation display from the same company that makes their displays so like there's

some stuff coming that is extremely good. It's not sunglasses, but it's very close. And Apple is going to market it well enough. They're going to pay to put it on all the celebrities. And then everyone's going to believe that it's cool, just like with shutter shades and those big giant Lady Gaga glasses. They were really dumb, but people loved them

because they were on famous people. And Apple's going to do it again. That's how they're going to make VR cool. It's not engineering, it's marketing. Amazing, Amazing. You know, I remember the human interface labs up in Seattle used to talk about these virtual retinal displays where you would paint with a laser on the back of the retina. Sure. Is that tech ever going to see the laser? Yeah. So VRDs, virtual retinal displays. There's a few companies that have been working on it. I think it's a really cool technology that made a lot of sense. There's a company called Microvision

that was working on it for years. Hey, Microvision was one of the first three stocks that I bought. I invested $500 in the stock market and it was Apple, Lockheed Martin, and Microvision. And Microvision didn't do as hot as the other ones, but I think that basically that technology is interesting, but I think it's been supplanted by other technologies

that take advantage of these multi hundred billion dollar investments into semiconductor manufacturing, silicon manufacturing processes. Like making high-end micro displays is actually very similar process-wise to making high-end microprocessors. And so I think that in a vacuum, scanning laser displays might win,

but in a real world scanning laser displays might win, but in a real world where there's hundreds of billions going into a different path, that's the path that's going to win. All right. Let's go beyond the headset. Brain-computer interface, BCI. How excited are you about that? And are you going to be one of the first people in line or never? Well, the thing about brain to computer interfaces, it's all dependent. It's kind of hard to define what is interfacing with the brain. You know,

there are people who would argue that your eyeballs are interfacing with the brain. I'm not one of them. There's other people that say that looking at your brain through your skull is interfacing with the brain. Maybe. What about laying on top of the brain? Do you need to go into the brain? What if you're hooked up to the spinal cord right at the base of the brain? What if I'm a little further down the spinal cord? What if I'm tapping into median nerve cords in my arm and I'm using neuroplasticity to feed data in that way? Let me define this. High bandwidth connection of your neocortex where you can think and Google and you can see imagery that bypasses your optic nerve. I not only believe that's going to happen, I think you won't even need to go directly

into the neocortex. I think you're actually going to be able to do it through your peripheral nervous system. You have enough spare bandwidth on your peripheral nervous system. People do this where, like you're familiar with BrainPort? BrainPort was a company that was building an imaging,

it was an electrohaptic pad with a resolution of I think 124 by 124. It went on your tongue and it actually gave it- Yes, I remember this. And it allowed you through neuroplasticity to learn to see through your tongue. There's actually a lot more bandwidth in your median nerve cord,

which is the one that handles these fingers. There's plenty of spare bandwidth on there. They make peripheral cuff electrodes that go on there. People who are amputees have learned to control artificial limbs using it. They've learned to feel from touch sensors using it. And they've even learned to control multiple limbs from a. They've learned to feel from touch sensors using it. And they've even learned to control multiple limbs from a single median nerve peripheral cop electrode.

And I guess I'll close it with this. I believe that the long-term future, not for VR, because VR is going to be very much about mimicking all of the senses with high fidelity, but for AR, I think AR is not going to be visual. AR is going to be entirely based on brain to computer interfaces or peripheral nervous system interfaces.

I don't want to have my AR experience limited to the limitations of the human visual system where I have a foveated region where I have to concentrate on to know any real information about something. I just want to subconsciously perceive the pose of where my car is, where I'm going. I want to have these things

at the level of proprioception. If I make a funny pose, I know exactly what the pose of my body is because of all the mechanoreceptors feeding into my brain. If I can teach myself to perceive things out in the world through my peripheral nervous system as just part of my proprioceptive system, you can now have a much more valuable AR system that is not constrained to the limitations of the vision system and allows you to fully use your vision on other things rather than just data IO. So that's where I think it's all going. AR is going to be a tiny implant in your arm.

You have tiered inputs into your perceptome. VR is always gonna be about strapping a bunch of stuff to your face, getting past the optical nerves, pretty tough. Speaking about strapping stuff to your face, you also very famously about two or three months ago came out with a brand new headset design, which I'm not going to let my kids play with.

Can you describe what you did? It's not just a design. It's built. It's implemented and it works. I really want to make sure people are sufficiently afraid. So it's a simple concept. It's a virtual reality headset that kills you when you die in the game. This is a science fiction concept that has existed for decades.

In fact, the concept of a simulation that can kill you if you die inside of it has existed longer than virtual reality headsets. It's that old. Just in science fiction, it's been around for about a century. So if I remember the design, it's basically a headset with three... Three explosive charges, but pointed at the critical areas of the brain for an immediate nervous system shutdown. Yeah, you don't want someone to be in pain. But look, here's the idea. The idea here was to build something. I mean, it's really a

performance art piece more than anything else. I don't think of myself as an artist, but I guess that's what I've become. I wanted to show, hey, it's an interesting idea. What is real? What is not? A lot of people treat simulations differently because there's no consequences in it. They know it's not the real world. Well, how do you act when you're in a simulation where the consequences are as serious as the real world? How does that change the way you interact with other people in the simulation?

How does it change your interactions with even virtual agents inside the simulation? If you know that you are capable of inflicting harm on them and they on you, and you know, it's one of those, I actually did it to celebrate the, if anyone's familiar with the anime, Sorted Online. It's actually a light novel series.

Yeah, I see a few hands go, whoo, there you go. So it was actually, I released it in November on SAO Day, which is the day that in Sorted Online, a fictional tech mad genius imprisons thousands of VR players inside of his simulation

using a headset that will kill them in the real life if they die in the game. I thought, you know, that's just perfect time to put this out there. Celebrate SAO Day. Anyway, if anyone wants to try it, you can't. I've actually already got it locked up in my gun safe. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible

breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with,

go to demandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. The concept is fascinating. How much time do you think? The most fascinating part about it is the fact that nobody's ever done it. If people are like, oh my God, you've opened up Pandora's box. Why would you create such a thing? It's like, guys, it took me literally one weekend to build this. I mean, the Pandora's box was open when we made the first Oculus Rift and whoever invented the shaped charges that I was using. You know, it's a... But I think it was a cool idea

and it definitely got a lot of people talking. More than I expected. How did you get started as a defense company, as a small entrepreneur? I think of the government as a customer is fearful to change suppliers and to take risks. I mean, I experienced this in the aerospace industry and in the rocket business and the satellite business. It's like, it's safe to buy big blue and defense system. So how did you overcome that? Well, the number one job of every bureaucrat is to not get fired.

So how did you overcome that? Well, the number one job of every bureaucrat is to not get fired. And so what you have to do is make sure that you convince them that if they don't do what you want, they will get fired. And typically, it's safer to go with the big companies, not with the new startups. And that was one of the reasons I started Andral. The problems you're laying out, it's hard to work with the government. They don't know how to work with small companies. They want you to spend your own money to get rid of all of the risk because they don't want to take any risk on new entrants. Those are

the reasons I started Andral because I was one of the few people that had the resources to overcome those barriers. Most companies have no shot. They don't have the money. They don't have the connections. They don't have the expertise. They don't have the team. And so we went into this from the beginning. When we started the company, we didn't even know what product we were going to make. How wild is that? I'm serious. This is not like a crazy retro retcon of our founding story. It's well-documented even at the time. Most companies, they start with a technology or a product. And then the people say, who can we apply this to? Who can we sell this to? We started with the problem, which is we need better weapons if we are going to ethically engage in warfare. There is no moral high ground in leaving this problem

to existing prime contractors that are incompetent at many things and totally unable to do other things. And so we started there. We said, we're going to start a new kind of defense company that's going to use its own money to develop products, make them work, and then after they work, sell them to the government as a fully functioning system, not asking taxpayers to take on the risk, instead taking it on ourselves. And then we sat down day one and said, okay, so now that we've started a company, what are we going to build? And that was, by the way, that was how we arrived at artificial intelligence as kind of the core of all of our products. People think we're a hardware company because we build drones and submarines and robots and command and control systems. We have two-thirds of our company working

on software. We're primarily an AI and autonomy company. Our core product is something called Lattice. It's an AI sensor fusion platform that fuses all these things together. Existing military systems, our military systems, command and control of people and robots, getting the right information to the right place at the right time. And we decided to do that, not because AI was hot six years ago. It wasn't nearly as hot as today. It was because we decided, like that not because AI was hot six years ago it wasn't nearly as hot as today it was because we decided like I didn't know anything about AI but it was clear after talking to people in the defense space that that's what they needed and so that's why we started building those products

by the way I'm sure you know this this process of investing it building it and then selling it was the way all contracting in the government was done hundred years ago that's right no cost plus contracting was an interesting invention. It did allow us to basically take over our entire industrial base during World War II without being communist. So we're like, no, no, no, no, we're not taking over our industry. We're just going to pay them exactly what it costs to build them something, a small fixed profit on top. And if they don't do that, then they are not going to get to work with the government ever again. And that worked in a total war scenario where everyone was working as fast as they could. We went through multiple generations of fighter planes in five years. But when you're in a quasi

peacetime kind of Cold War type situation, cost plus contracting incentivizes people to be slow, not innovative, and to never reuse building blocks they've already built, because they make more money when they build from scratch, more money when it takes longer, and more money when it's more expensive. It's a perverse situation. And you will always get what you incentivize. Unfortunately, our government created a system that created the monster we have today. Robots. Are you looking at humanoid robots? We are. And if you're a humanoid robot company, you should reach out to me. We're not building humanoid robot hardware because there's too many good people doing a good job. I only want

to do things that other people are not going to do. I'm not, I don't want to be in the business of just building the same thing as the other guy, but I slightly beat him and put him out of business, or he slightly beats me and put me out of business. I try to find the empty space and fill it best I can. But we have a software product that needs to interface with humanoid robots. i can but we have a we have a software product that needs to interface with humanoid robots um so it's a universal api that allows our software to operate uh existing legacy weapon systems so things like old radar systems old anti-air systems the type of things that are in ukraine in poland in europe that we gave them decades ago if right now it requires a team of people to be operating it which they're a target. A radar site is a high priority target for any strike.

If you could instead say, we're going to basically build an interoperability layer that consists of a humanoid robot that can pull the levers and push the buttons, and then our software can just tell it, turn on, turn off, give me the targets, do this, do that. It's a really useful thing.

Anyway, to get more, email me. Are you thinking about quantum computing? No. it's a really useful thing anyway um to get more email me are you thinking about quantum computing no it's like it seems like it's far enough away from practicality that uh i can just let other people think about it for a while we are interested in quantum communication well i should i should have said quantum technologies okay quantum communication is a game changer if anyone can promote if anyone could build a technology that could promote a stable enough bond that you don't get, that you don't get disentanglement, it's going to be a total game changer for... We're going to be talking about tonight with Jack Hittery, who's the CEO of Sandbox AQ. Do you know Jack? Yep. Great. And so we'll be talking about quantum chemistry, quantum

encryption, quantum... It's going to be a game changer, but I can't say much more beyond that. Yeah. What technology do you wish existed that doesn't yet? Oh, man. There's so many. I mean... Okay, let's list them. Well, for a while, I experimented with petroleum-based foods that would have zero calories because your body doesn't do anything with them.

Basically, if you're going to build foods, you should... My son told me like a gram of uranium has got like five billion calories or some shit like that. If you're looking at it from a certain point of view, that is true. But long chain hydrocarbons are, man is master of making them into anything. Gels, rubbers, pastes, polymers, solids. And so if you want to build something that, you know, tastes, has the mouthfeel of a real food, it's actually easier to do it with oil products that are inert in your body

than it is to start with plant-based stuff. The problem is that the only way to make it economical is to recycle the output. And people don't want to eat sewage food. It's just, you can't market it. And so I gave up on it for that reason. I would love to see it though. It'd be a big deal.

Okay, what else is in your sort of advanced tech world? You know, I'm pretty excited about de-extinction of species with practical applications. Are you an investor along with us in Colossal? Maybe. Maybe. It's not a secret. Ben Lamb's a dear friend. He's been on the stage many times.

Well, look, I've been chatting with those guys. Okay. And I'll say, like, there's some pretty interesting possibilities. People are always looking at the species that are the cuddliest and the coolest. I think, and I think they agree, there's going to be species you can de-extinct that have practical applications in restoring ecosystems and doing all kinds of stuff. A cuddly woolly mammoth, I get that. And also imagine this, 600 pound dire wolf canine units for special forces.

Yeah. Anyway, that's my, that's my dream. That's my dream. Fingers crossed. Okay. Hey, you can put a lot more body armor on a dire wolf than a German Shepherd. Who wants to have a 600-pound wolf

with 100 pounds of body armor on it coming at you? Oh, God. Amazing. Let's give it up for palmer lucky thank you guys