I remember there were times where the thing I needed it would cost like $50 and it was just like it was inconceivable that I could afford it. Honestly Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else. I mean, if the iPhone wouldn't have existed, there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy, unlock repair and sell on eBay. Like, if that had not happened, then akio's probably wouldn't exist today. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
Let's Travel. Never looking
back, what's up? We got Palmer. Luckey on the podcast. Palmer is a billionaire. He created Oculus which he sold to Facebook. He's created and drill, which they make weapons for the government. Super is think I'm gonna call it right now. I think this is a Alzheimer episode, you know, you guys know. I don't hype it up like that, unless it's legit. This was an Alzheimer episode Sam. What are some of the things that we talked
about? So, early on, we asked them basically what he did with his money. So we made hundreds of millions of dollars at the age of like 20.
Three or something like that. And we said, where did you put your money? And it was very clear on what he did with it, he talked about some of his early crypto investment so he bought crypto way away early like in 2010 I think he said he talked about how he's making minimum wage and then became a billionaire like 45 years after just making minimum wage. What else
we talked about a couple different things, where he likes to hang out on the internet. We're like, dude, where do you, how do you know about all this stuff where do you learn this stuff? What are your subreddits? What are you? What are you listening to? And reading? Because I need to start doing some of that.
And then, yeah, he talked about basically like is world war three gonna happen, right? That his company builds Tec for the defense department, Department of Defense and so is World War 3 going to happen is they're going to be a nuke. What is a tactical nuke? And then the best part was, we said, all right, you sold Oculus and then you create an Enduro, which is an even bigger success. I think it's like Valley to eight billion dollars something, but there was many years in between. Did you consider doing any other ideas and he opened up? And he was like, yeah, actually, there were these two or three other ideas. He had an idea about creating
A new kind of prison, he had an idea that would try to solve obesity. He had a couple ideas and we go into depth brainstorming with him. So he had it all men. He had the crazy backstory, the success story, but he also brought ideas. And then he also argued with us about why he flies coach, even though he's a billionaire and why he may or may not get into a fight with Jason calacanis, and so this episode had, it all had fighting had ideas, had success stories. It's got it. All right, enjoy this episode with Palmer Luckey.
All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you about some other great podcast that you should check out on the HubSpot podcast Network. I'm talking about the hustle Daily Show, which is hosted by Zack Crockett and his co-host. Jacob Rob and Juliet. It's a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat and informative takes on the business and Tech news of the day. And so, you know, we have episodes like the big business of Margaritaville, which is, you know, Jimmy Buffett's billion dollar Hospitality Empire or, you know, the episode where they say looks like the movie theaters aren't dead after all. And they break down the recent box office developments.
Go ahead and listen to the hustle daily, wherever you get your podcast. All right, I don't know. You don't need too much of an intro but I'll do it. Anyways, Palmer. Luckey is here created Oculus created and to rule really interesting, dude, and and I think we have a bunch of topics. I'm not going to kind of belabor the intro Sam. I know you've been itching. We just you probably can't say the DM you sent to try to get Palmer on here. You really wanted this man on the podcast. Why my friend? My first question is, do you say I'm why?
So Palmer, I am like the king of love.
Handed compliments, at least that's what they say about me. But I mean, I'm as full handed compliments or right-handed compliments, but basically, I love freaks. I love weirdos. I love extremists. Not like in the political sense, but in the sense of like people just go all in on stuff and are just passionate about maybe like nerdy or unconventional things and you go all in on things and I love that I love people even if I don't like what they're going, going all in on, I'm crazy fascinated by that and you see one of those guys who's just goes
They're not things. You've done a lot at a young age and I like weirdos, and I put you in that, in that category. Thank you. I'm happy to be happy to be a weirdo. I'd rather be I'd rather. I'd rather be a person that the people think ill or or well of then somebody nobody thinks of it. All I think well of you, by the way I think well it's ever had a
poster at his office that was like for his employees. He was like Let your freak flag fly that was like, you know, one of those I can't you know, corporate values are typically like integrity and like determination. And
His was like, be a freak. All right, so, so let's start with, let's start with some of the kind of it. We're going to try to as much. We can avoid VR and avoid the Facebook stuff because mostly just because you've talked about it, a bunch of places iMac. Frankly, I'm interested because I am actually a fanboy but Sam has tried to forbid me from from ask those questions. So we're going to leave that at the end. If I get a little extra time but this is a podcast that started. It's called my first million because we're interested in money and we think it's really funny that the Silicon Valley things you to pretend you don't like money.
And like, you know, you're talking about yeah, you know, we're not doing it here for the
money, you know, the money money. Money money is not the real objective. I actually tell them my own employees and onboarding that if you work at a place where your boss is saying that you should be worried because it's one thing, it's one thing to say that to the Press, it's one thing to say that in your marketing materials but you, you know, if your employees don't believe that the end of the day you're trying to make their job. A fiscally responsible decision. If you are effectively telling them, you could be making more money elsewhere and your financial
Success is not my priority, you should be concerned. Hmm,
yeah, yeah, exactly. And you kind of did the best of both like for all the kind of ironic people who are like we're trying to change the world with this like HR onboarding software, you know, you actually kind of did and still made a bunch of money doing it. So you know, it's not like an either or
100%. I mean, when I started Oculus it was not because I thought it would be. The thing that would makes the most money. There's never been a successful PR Company in history to be clear. And I did it because it was something I was really passionate about. Now that said,
The things I'm most proud of in my whole career is that everyone who worked at Oculus achieved Financial Independence because we were able to build something incredible. And I like I feel great that everyone who was part of that mission and who supported me early on was able to make a bunch of money and then a lot of them have gone on to do incredible things. But yeah, I feel this was not was not was not done because I thought it was the best way to make money. It's because I thought it really was going to be the best way to change the world in the long run and roll was a little different. I
At one, it wasn't just oh this will be fun. I want to do something really cool and roll was like I felt like I had to do it or things were things were going to go really poorly. So more of a, more of a stick than a carrot on that one. How much did you make off the Oculus cell? Oh man, I probably shouldn't say because this is also one of those complex things where, you know, there was the there was the sale. So there's what they believe they called the merger consideration portion of the of the compensation. And then they, you know, you cut unemployment deal, where they say, we're going to pay you,
This much for five years, I can say that I was locked. I was locked up on a five-year vesting schedule. So typical would be for most of our employees were for. I got locked up for five because I was a key guy and that money technically is not for the acquisition. It's just, yeah, I heard that too. Yep. So of course, you know, you can't, you can't pretend, you can't say that the same thing or are they, they're supposed to be treated differently, tax-wise compensation wise, and then, of course, there's the bonuses. We had, we had an urn out. That was a. It was a, it was a really huge.
A journey out, it was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company. If we can hit certain sales targets and user hours of time targets and we actually had four years to hit those targets and we we hit them with in less than two years. So, we actually did, it's kind of funny to be like, oh man, that position must not be going as well as people expect. As I know, we maxed out the top bracket of our earn out because we're kicking butt. But anyway, it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I can tell you that in the healthy, hundreds of millions of
dollars, a bunch of people who listen,
Our Founders and like would want to sell their company, some day and both me and Sam. We started this podcast right when we both exited our companies because it's like, all right? What kind of burning out what we can't start another company right now. But like oh, we start a podcast. That sounds kind of fun. And actually just yesterday, I just closed on another sale of a company but these are small scale compared to what you did, right? Like graduations. Thank you. But you sold for, I don't know two or three billion bucks. How does that happen? Somebody, you know, is that comes over to your house and it's like, I'll give you three billion dollars for this. Like, how does that? How does that conversation? Go down.
When when it, when you're talking about the sort of like the Grand Slam type of outcomes. Well, it's a long
story but and I know Sam didn't want to talk all about VR but I can tell I can tell you that. No I this shit's interesting to me. Oh great. Then we do we won't talk about VR Optics and the metaverse said. But I guess on the business side of it, that the interesting thing about the acquisition is that we didn't have any of intention of selling initially when we first had our conversation with Facebook,
That really was a positive thing because actually first time we talked I think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell and we said no we're not interested. We think this company is easily going to surpass that value. We think it's not going to be a problem for us to make more money and we're happy to work with you guys, but we don't want to be, by
the way, was that it was that easy to say no to a billion dollars? I mean, you started this thing like on a Kickstarter dude, like, you know, at some point where you like it was it hard to say no or was it? Not an issue at that point.
It wasn't an issue for me, and I think I think different people had different opinions. I mean, look, if you look over my career I've made a lot of similar decisions. Like when I was starting Oculus when I was deciding, whether I was going to do a Kickstarter or work for someone else, I actually had a job on a job offer on the table from Sony to run a PlayStation VR lab out of PlayStation group and when I turned them down, they actually doubled the offer. And then I had to turn him down again and a lot of people were wondering, how could you have done that, you know, how could you decided to do?
Own thing was so much higher risk, and I think that a lot of it is, is Social programming. You know, I grew up watching media, the condition me to believe that when you have an opportunity, you have to take it when you know, when you almost have to follow the narrative and looking back, I'm not sure I could have done anything else. Like could I have stayed in school instead of starting Oculus? Once I realized I had this breakthrough in VR technology. I think I could not have possibly done it. There's it's almost to the level of free will not existing. I could not have chosen that. Could I have gone?
To work for Sony looking back. I don't think so. I think I couldn't have made that decision and I think it's actually the same thing with that billion dollar offer, like, I almost could not have said yes. You know, like at that first offer, I like narratively, it makes no sense. It doesn't align with what I've been trained, is what you do when you're, you know, when you're a free-thinking iconoclast and so I couldn't have done it. I think what happened is a few things changed over over time. After that initial offer, you know, we didn't talk to Facebook for for a
Months after that. And a few things happened, one it became clear that our competition was not only serious, but was going to be putting massive dollars into their successes something. Not a lot of people remember, but I certainly do because it was a big deal in my mind, the day that we announced. No the day we fight it. Wasn't anyone out the day? We finalized the Facebook acquisition was the same day that Sony announced PlayStation VR and we had known that it was coming for a while. We actually even shown each other prototypes.
And stuff, but it really reinforced. This is a serious thing. We're gonna have some of the biggest games companies in the world. Putting hundreds of millions of dollars in a competing with us and that made the the pitch that Facebook came back with what just listen. You maybe you could make more money as an independent company but if you're with us, we're going to make VR happen, much faster. So at you, yes, you'll you might make more money but you're going to go much slower than if we were able to artificially, supercharge your growth far beyond even what you could do with venture capital and they were willing to commit billions of
A year for a period of a decade or more. And that's that's a really tough thing to turn down when you really believe in
something and is this like literally Zach coming to your house and talk to you about this, or is there like an army of lawyers in between you guys that are like no, it wasn't hers and corpulence people. It
was a very small number of people. I mean, it was, it was, I mean I think that the the, the the lawyers and accountants are much more likely to be involved in a deal. When the deal is contingent on your revenue and your multiples and European
Mel's, like, that's where you need to drag those people into really make a an assessment. This was such a high level bet. It's not like, oh, I think that you have this margin on your headset and you've sold this many developments. It was so early and the technology. So nascent, the real bed is, Do You Believe In The Meta verse? Do you believe that there's going to be a virtual world parallel to our own, when you're living in your working or playing? And the most poorly, do you believe this is the best team in the world to do it? And I didn't know this at the time, but I found out later that Mark had been going around and talking to various University.
Labs Government research Labs, talking to a seeing what other companies were doing and their conclusion was we were way ahead of everyone else. And that if if this was going to happen, this shift to immersive Computing. The final Computing platform arguably that we were the people in the best position to do it. And that's not something that a lawyer can really give an opinion on. It's not something that accountant can put a value on. It's a very high level bet. What was your personal financial situation when you turn down the billion dollar offer? So yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I started Oculus using my own money and at that time, I was working a minimum-wage job and living in a 19 foot camper trailer. I was 19 years old. So, for people who aren't familiar with the story, to that degree, I mean, I had almost no money literally had a few hundred dollars in my bank account, because I spent all the money that I made putting myself through school and working on virtual reality technology and I was extraordinarily and I had a minimum wage job. I was also fixing computers on the side for a while. I've been buying broken iPhones, put fixing them.
Unlocking them, selling those for spare cash. And so, I burned a lot of money on my, on my, on my nutty Hobby. And when we started Oculus, we didn't pay ourselves very much. By the time, the acquisition happened, I had given myself a raise. We decided that nobody in the company was going to make over a hundred thousand dollars. We called it, the 100K Club. So we're paying the CEO 100,000 dollars. I was getting paid a hundred thousand dollars and to me that that actually felt incredible. I was like, Wow hundred thousand dollars, this is absolutely crazy. I can I can afford
Ford anything, you know, how many
cell phone, how many iPhones I'd have to fix to make a hundred thousand dollars as a lot as UF especially potent like scrubbing, boats or something? I read
is that security? Yeah, well, I mean when I started working on VR stuff, I was at work for a few years, in a boat yard. So yes, scrubbing boats repainting, repainting. The the bottom pay sweeping the Boatyard, you know, that that that type of stuff. So to me, the money was not was not a huge motivating factor also because maybe maybe to optimistically, I
Doc ulis was going to be worth tens of billions are hundreds of billions of dollars, so it really wasn't. The I know this is what contrary to what I said before. It wasn't the money that was motivating me to make the sale, the it was the pitch. Hey, we're going to get you billions of dollars right now. Like not not the not the compensation for the, for the, for the acquisition. But we're going to give you your your organization billions of dollars a year to go out and make virtual reality actually happen. And that's what you're going to need to compete with.
Google to compete with Sony, the compete with Microsoft, all of which have seen what you're doing. Bought in like they've drunk your Kool-Aid, but they're going to try to kill you over at. That was kind of the situation we were in and Facebook was one of the very few companies that had a strong incentive to make virtual reality and immersive. Computing writ large to come about as quickly as possible. Because unlike Google unlike Microsoft, they did not benefit from the status quo in the hardware space. You, if we kept using mobile phones and normal,
Hers for, you know that 20, 30 years Google and Microsoft are going to do just fine. Like they're already the winners in that Paradigm. If you can shake everything up and force a reset with immersive Computing, arv RMR, whatever you want to call it. It could be that Microsoft is one of the top players and that could be that Apple and Google are some of the top players but it's unlikely that all of them are going to remain the dominant players. And that's an opening for a company like Facebook to come in. And even if they're not first place, forcing the
It puts them in second or third place instead of being totally subservient to the operating system vendors and to the hardware vendor. So it was one of those things where there were other companies that were interested, none of them actually had a strong incentive to put, billions of dollars into VR on an ongoing basis. And when you can see Google killed their VR program first, they killed their PCV, our team. Then they killed their mobile VR. Team. Microsoft is winding down their internal efforts, I mean, it's a tough business and I'm not convinced that Oculus would still be around if we hadn't had.
Resources, I'm going to move on from like asking you these money questions, but I want to ask one more because I do think it's fascinating, because you went from, like maybe not having a lot to having a lot. And you're also like not ball. Yeah. Which I like when I sold my business, I put everything into bonds and just Vanguard Total index funds. It just did like a normal 80/20 split and then eventually some real estate and then HubSpot stock and just normal, like, basic stuff. What did you do with your money and what have you? Because I know you bought like a
Marina. I think. Are you trying to buy? I don't know if it went through, but like, what does like someone like you do with that amount of liquidity? So most of it, I did what you're talking about. I generally don't believe in trying to beat the market through Market transactions. I mean, it's one thing to build, like, I think you build wealth by building companies, that's where you should be focusing. Your effort, not trying to be smarter than all the finance guys, we're sitting around and using every tool at their disposal to try and dig game the financial market. So actually at Vanguard funds like Vanguard 500
Total index funds by. My grandpa taught me a lot about investing in about how you shouldn't try to beat the market. Probably the, my investment philosophies and for mostly by John Bogle, little black book on investing is like, look, you keep your fees low. Keep your costs low and just go with the market. And if the market goes so poorly that I become poorer than United States has bigger problems. So that was that was that was most what I did? I bought the marina, not as a financial investment. It was actually, it was one of the only marinas. So, this is getting a little into the Weeds on something. Probably very few.
People care about but just so, you know, in California, almost all marinas. The water is owned by the state or by the feds and then they do long-term leases, like 30 or 40 years to operators that are allowed to operate those marinas. And they might own, let's say the parking lot, the operator, but they do not own the water, they do not own the docks. It's just a long-term lease and they redo that over. There's only a small handful of marinas in the entire State of California where the underlying land under the
Water. And the water itself is deeded to a private title and the marina that I bought was one of those and without getting into my whole seasteading delusion. I think that you're going to end up eating if you want to have transport fairies that are operating from Land, out to international waters, you do not want to be in a position where the place you're doing. That from is totally dependent on state government. Bureaucrats choosing to renew your lease on a particular Marina. So that was actually that was actually a purchase that all it'll pay off.
If someday, you'll see, you'll all see.
See, I bought my house just like, I like the walk-in closet was nice and I was like, oh that's good enough reason for me I didn't have to like it. I go into international
waters and make it all in my case I did my I mean, I did it. I did a few things like, as soon as I had money, I immediately started learning to fly helicopters for real. Because I'd always wanted to be a helicopter pilot ever since being a little kid, don't like, it was like it was a two weeks after the wire completed. I was I was flying helicopter so that was really cool. I bought a 69 Mustang convertible, that was really cool and I bought a
Duration, Tesla Model. S. That was cool. And then, I bought a house for my parents, you know, it's like the, the, it's, like, the basketball player contract. Move, you know, you get the money to buy the, you buy the house for your parents, and then I bought a house for myself. That was close to my grandpa actually. And unfortunately, we then ended up having to move up to Silicon Valley, because the acquisition, and then he passed away while I was up there. So, one of my, one of my regrets, but I'm still in that
house. Wow. Okay, that's amazing. And one other thing I had seen was that you
I don't know if this is even a real thing, or it's like some Twitter fake, you know, fake photo or whatever. Did you buy Bitcoin in 2013? No, no, I bought Bitcoin much earlier than that. I
wasn't here. 20 2013 is when I was on, I was in the Forbes 30 under 30 and they asked everyone on it for a quote for the print edition and it was the theme was what is your advice to other young Founders. Am I quote was buy more Bitcoin Ed but I've actually been involved in Bitcoin since before there were any
Changes. I like I was at ruo. Jie on the Bitcoin talk dot org forums. There were no exchanges, you can only do direct transactions for goods. I actually sold a banner ad on my game. Console modification Forum, it was a one-week Banner ad on this forum with almost no traffic, and I sold it for 400 Bitcoin and then I ended up, I ended up buying someone's Samsung Samsung Galaxy Vibrant which was the T-Mobile variant of the first Galaxy phone or 800 Bitcoin I believe which at the time was
Well, under a dollar per Bitcoin, right? So I've actually been in 60 million the very early days. Six evil my God, how do you hide? So like, all right. Yeah, we had biology, you know, biology on the pot and like he was one of these guys where he would like give an analogy. He's like, oh, you know, Bitcoin is kind of like the Battle of tames and I'm like, bro, you I needed analogy for your analogy. Like I can't tell you about the Battle of the Thames in WWII like I can't have that conversation with you and you're a little bit like that where you're talking about like you just like through enough, you fly.
It's like all this gaming for my have when I was like, well, I could have go down that path, but then you're talking about like this boat, marina thing? I'm like, that's a whole conversation, like, how on Earth you discovered that? And then now obviously, you're doing government stuff and you've done. And you have no bunch about politics, whatever. How are you becoming? So well-versed and also. So opinionated on such a broad set of topics because you have to most of the time. Like the best things that I've done that I have done in my career have not been going super
A super-deep on one vertical, and then finding the really, really hard gains that are at the end of a long fight that everyone's made. Like, I think sample here would be with dislike Optics, technology. Most people are fighting way at the end of the spectrum where they're trying to like we're using new cutting-edge materials. That increase the ability to control light more precisely by 2%. And we're trying to figure out the physics of how we can manufacture these polymers. Most of my best ideas have not come from that. They've been from knowing things in.
Totally different fields that have nothing to do with the field or at least people don't think they do. And then pulling ideas from those fields and applying them in a new way. Like the the really key thing that made the oculus rift work is just one example, rather than focusing on trying to make these Optical Stacks that cost thousands of dollars in weighed a bunch. And that's was really what was making these headsets way many pounds and cost, tens of thousand dollars was the high-end Optical stack that was able to project images on your retina, with minimal Distortion, but you needed,
Bunch of lenses. They're all very very expensive, very high Precision, but I did is figure out that you could just render a distorted image, we see render your image, distort it on the graphics card in the inverse way that the lens distorted it, and then basically, you would render an image, it looks terrible on the screen but after viewing it through the lens that I had, which was optimized for high field of view, low weight, low cost but not optimized to have low Distortion low. Chromatic aberration or geometric aberration. It would come out looking looking perfect. I like that.
Something where an optical engineer. Someone who's working on just Optics would not would not think of that. The oh, that's very much like a software idea, but the software people are also not necessarily thinking about how they could obsolesce expenses of Sixpence of pieces of Optics. And of course, there are people who do that, do that. I think that some of the best entrepreneurs are people who have understanding that is sufficient. In enough areas to pull from one area and solve the biggest problems of another. So I mean, I make it a priority.
Ask, how do I do it to make it a priority to know a little about a lot?
So two questions one, just go back to the Bitcoin thing for a second. Wonder, how did you get into, like, why were you on the Bitcoin talk forums or why did you see it even before? You know, almost anybody. So, what were you doing there and why did it catch your eye? And then, you know, today, ten years later, there's a whole bunch of people that are disillusioned by. They say, oh, it's all the Times. Gone by 10 years, didn't work out. Other people are more bullish than ever. You know, where do you stand now? So, what caught your eye. And where do you stand now?
So wait, I think I got into Bitcoin, it would have been mid mid to late 2010 and an eye. I was really fascinated because I mean look, I'm a guy who was into virtual reality and the metaverse, this is just adjacent to that it's another super cool cyberpunk concept. The idea of you know, untraceable internet currency. That is based on only the consensus of all of the Cyber punks who are using it cryptographically verified and secured with no nation state controlling it or issuing, it or diluted
Dang it or manipulating I like what a cool thing when you're at when you're an anti-authority teenager who loves who loves cyberpunk science fiction and so that it was like, I bought into the very original cool Vision, not the, oh, this is going to be huge for everybody, one by like this is, this is, this is cyberpunk Incarnate. I have to be a part of this. And when I started like my, my initial thinking was not that it was a good store of value. That was that's actually been. I think the most contentious thing about crypto is after it started
I didn't buy it because I was speculating. Nobody was even thinking about that back then. Like it's crazy to me to watch all these new crypto kids get in. And it seems like it's all about just having having coins. Pumping the value dumping them. It's really just, you know, these this financial markets play that I've never believed in life because I always believed in, you know, investing in the whole Market. But to me, it was always values a, as a means of moving wealth around. It's not as a store for years or decades, so way that you can move wealth around without being beholden to any any centralized
E or centralized power. And I think today like even for all the issues Bitcoin has and people you know, putting it down because of it crashing. Well, first of all, every time there's a Bitcoin crashed like oh no, it's Crash to only 10x what it was two years ago every single time. Every crash is like that but more importantly, it's still a good way to move value around that said my prediction in 2013 was a Bitcoin will go to about a hundred thousand dollars and then stabilize I'm sticking with it. I think I think it'll get there, I'm not I'm not sure that it in between.
Killer has the has the appropriate utility to reach a higher store
of value and wow, okay, amazing. And then did you,
by the way I have and I have to throw out there. I'm one of those guys who lost a bunch of coins in the mountain. Toxic, I mean, I got gox, good, and it was, it was one of those things where there was no, like, looking back. Everyone's like, oh my God, I can't believe that, you know, you would have. And I had most of my coins in, in my own wallet, but I had a significant amount on on gox because people were transferring coins to my God, to my docs account.
Aunt. And now everyone's like, oh my god, of course you would never keep your coins in an exchange but like I was 16 years old and like, you know, there was there was no, there's no like idiots guide to bitcoin back then it was it was the type of thing. You only used if you were a crazy, A crazy internet Nutter
and so you've mentioned forums and I'm a big Forum sky. Like I still I remember BBS. I wasn't like that or be whatever was before BBS. That's not me. But I've been on forums and I love for him.
And you talked about amen. The Bitcoin talk forums I went and read a bunch of your early posts on the what was the name of the like odd retro? No, no, no. The the headset one that had mtbs 3D. Yeah. Exactly. What we go, your old post there. I went and like stalked him just to be like because I like to see the origin. I'm like, it's fun. Like what are the like, archaeologists for? Like the internet. I like to go find the original shit and so, you know, I saw you posting the air in your like, hey, I'm trying to build this thing. I'm thinking about doing this. You did a bunch of, like, kind of really cool crowd Source stuff, I think you
Been like asked credit like, you know, should I buy that, should we buy Vive or something like that? You did a bunch of cool stuff on forums and I thought about that and some of them like I, when I learned poker, I learned it through forums. Yep. If you think about today, like if who's the sick the 16 year old version of you today, what forms? Do you think they're hanging out in? What's the thing? Because when you were doing this is 15 years ago, like VR still early and you were early early early. Same thing with Bitcoin, you were early, early, early. And so, what do you
Think are the interesting forums today that people are hanging out and that you think will play out over the next decade or so.
And also wonder what are what are some of your favorite pockets of the web and informs that you're hanging out in? I mean much to my chagrin I like I love forums to I think they are more or less the Pinnacle of asynchronous communication. Like if you are doing collaborative project, the all of the incentives are correct. So I like I ran a forum. The mod retro forums, it was a forum for people who modified vintage game consoles in.
The focus on turning them into handheld self-contained unit. So, cutting apart Nintendo, 64's and Super Nintendos and PlayStations. And then replacing the Power Electronics with modern Power Electronics, running them off of the latest lithium battery technology. Although it was nicad back when back when I started putting in LCD screens, that were designed for portable DVD players in the like and building these self-contained units and forums are interesting because your currency is attention, but you can only get attention by getting people to come in and you
Pond and engage with you. And so there's a strong incentive to update people on what you're doing to write really interesting things and to get people regularly coming back and engaging with your stuff. I mean that's the dopamine high, right? It's other people care about what I'm doing today. It's been so algorithmically driven that you don't have the same incentives in terms of long-term sustained engagement and, you know, collaborating with people, there's a lot more incentive to do things on your own do. One big push in a form that will cause
Nari people who are not necessarily technically competent to, you know, watch it for at least three minutes. So that it's seen as you watch a long enough and I like, I think the pockets, which is what you asked, like there's great pockets on YouTube just great pockets on Reddit is actually a lot of private, Facebook groups. So like one, I like I'm a member of a, of a Night Vision Group, where people build their own night vision goggles, and it's got all couple thousand people, but it's a private group and very, very much not virally driven, you know, it's not like the tick-tock.
To talk techno heads. It's not like the YouTube techno heads. But man, I really miss forums. You know, mod retro. We had a core group of a few thousand active members that were that were doing stuff in the Heyday. And we're doing a few, a few million page views a month. And you would, you never see those ratios these days, you know, of of of of of engagers to to Watchers one. Last thing I forgot actually a huge fraction of the people that I hired for Oculus and the early days were volunteer moderators on The Mod retro forums like people.
Is yeah. They hire their Network, right. They hire the people that they know that they can trust and that they know are competent and that was my network. When I was a teenager, it was other, it was other loser gamer teenagers on the internet and so we like that. Like we let some of our lead electrical people are lead. Hardware people are lead mechatronics, people were all people who had been moderators on mod retro. In fact, the first person I hired for Oculus was was one of the other moderators and I actually sent him a message said, hey what are you doing this fall? And he said, oh, I'm I'm starting.
During college. I said, no, you're not. You're going to come work for me. And I literally, I like, I told him that on a Friday and I literally drove out in my minivan, to pick him up from his mom's house on Monday and he had all his stuff and like four boxes. I picked him up. We got in my van and we drove to The Condemned motel that I was living in. It was it was, it was wild, I mean, did that? And that was that was my network so it's always funny. When people are like oh you know, your network is your net worth, you know, look, you know, we're
We got on the stand for kids, get the IV kids and we were just a bunch of Internet losers and we did better
than any of them. You're like, I'm hiring hmd, alumni the like I was at Harvard Medical, no. No head-mounted display Forum, alumni.
It was actually, the guy that I was hiring is name's Chris Dicus and he had never built a head-mounted display. But he was, he was very accomplished on the little, his horrible izing. See ya. They just game console and I knew he was very
Competent. I knew exact like you talk about a job interview where you meet someone for, you know, whatever they are you know, maybe an hour or something but I had been seeing this guy's work published on the Forum over the course of years. And so I knew he had I knew he had skills and I do that work. Exactly. We me and Sean have hired. So many people on Twitter and I tell people all the time that I want to get a job. I'm like man if you just like, you need to post your thoughts. So people understand your texture and your taste and your character like that is significantly.
Better doing it there and then just dming someone and then they're just going to click your profile. Like, oh, this person is tweeting all this like, interesting Insight that aligns, exactly, well, that and that's harder to fake to. If you have somebody who has a history of building things for themselves of doing things, because they want to, not because they're getting paid to that, you can't fake that. The way that you can fake an interview, it's easy like, oh, I'm Pastor out X y&z. Well, show me your years of work that you've done for no money showing that you really are. And that, I mean, we still hire a lot of people like that.
At and real, like we have benefits that are intended to lure people like that, like one of our benefits we have is that we will by anyone in the company. Any tool they want for their personal projects, as well as work projects. And that's the type of thing, where people who don't have personal projects, who just, you know, they show up to their to their wage machine and they clock in and clock out. They're not attracted by that, but the types of people who want to create for the sake of creation, those two, those people. That's a golden ticket.
On that note, we did the same thing. My co-founder, he's
Not like you like 15 at age, 15 started working at a.com during the.com. Boom. It was like I had a job and was like what the hell's going on? And always, was just doing his own thing. And so he used to buy like 3D printers and Robotics and we're building like social apps as I we didn't need any of this stuff and I was like, what are you doing? Like why are we doing this? He's like because hey I want it. Like I want to come to a space and like when I'm done with work, I'm just going to go downstairs to their lab and I'm going to build like a drone or I'm going to like take this Raspberry Pi and like shove it over here and figure something else out.
Things like also that's also how we'll get great people. Like I want to work with other hackers like that who like to Tinker on this stuff and he's like, he's like he had had an exit. So he's like, you know, doing very well as last company went public. And so he was like you know when I was like 16 18 21 like I just couldn't afford the like the thousand dollar thing that you would need to you have he's like I just got lucky that the dude down the street would let me come over and play with his thing and that was like that was like a life changer of a moment. He's like so I just want to do that for people.
Like I just make it free, anybody can come in and maybe could use this stuff and he was totally right. Even though like our CFO was like, hey, we can't justify this, he's like, don't worry, I'll pay for it all out of pocket and it was
like, I know and I know that struggle, you know, we're like, and it doesn't have to be a thousand dollars. I mean, I remember there were times with the thing I needed. It would cause like, $50 and it was just like, it was, it was inconceivable that I could afford it. Like, honestly, Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else. I mean like if the iPhone wouldn't have existed,
I stood there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy unlock repair and sell on eBay. Like I because I mean tens of thousands of dollars as a teenager on that on that side hustle, like if that had not happened then Oculus probably wouldn't exist today. That's amazing. I want to ask you a bit about and roll. But before before we get to that, what ideas were you pursuing? Or I bet you if you're like us, I imagine you have a list of like things that you're contemplating what was what was on that list prior to starting Andrew. I know there was
Prison thing and but what else were you interested in?
Well, what was the prison think? So, start with that one because that one sounds interesting.
Also, there are two things, I was seriously considering and then one thing that I'm going to do some day. So see setting is off the table right now. It's too long term but there are two short term things that I was looking at aside from and also the three choices were fixed National Security, solve, obesity or solve incarceration. And the I tried to think about it. What are the ways that I would tackle these issues? And way I solved the fence was
I want to build a defense Products company that upends, the incentives that typically exist in the military industrial complex, but the prison one was that I wanted to basically take out the incentives of the private Prison Complex that exist today. Right now, private prison companies are growing, there's more and more people being housed in privately operated prisons there publicly traded. And those companies have a strong incentive to lobby for and and perpetuate laws that incarcerate people for the
This period of time for the least serious crime. In other words, they don't want murderers and terrorists, they want, they want nonviolent drug offenders who will be in prison for a long time and when they get out of prison, they want them to come back and be a repeat customer.
They want good tenants, they want good, high
occupancy, good and the incentives they've set up with the government where the government prepays for these beds. The government basically says, well, we've already paid for the bed so if they're not full, then we're not locking up enough people. It's a very
a bad set of incentives. So my idea was that I could start a private prison company. They would run as a nonprofit organization and we would use the tax advantages of that to out-compete private prison companies. And more importantly, we would have a business model they would in send everybody towards the right set of incentives. So what I want to do is go to the government. Say listen, I'll lock up your prisoners but you don't get to pay us upfront. In fact, you can't pass up front. You have to pay us after the person, serves their term and then stays
A prison for five years, then you're going to pay me. And the idea is that now all of a sudden I'm motivated and every by my whole organization is motivated to get people through as quickly as possible, release them as quickly as possible and then have them stay out of prison and not return to crime. And I mean, that would have been that would have been a game changer and would have been a very attractive business model to these governments that are always looking to delay their expenditures. The biggest problem that I ran into as I looked into this is it wasn't a technological problem.
Mmm, it was a lobbying and marketing and government Affairs problem. And it wasn't at a federal level where you can basically convince a handful of people and then achieve success. It was going to be this like this Locale by Locale thing where you have a lot of people who depend on prisons for jobs. You have a lot of politicians who are very involved in, it was and also the deals are not re competed very often. This isn't like Enterprise software where people are always on the lookout for a way to get an edge, or move to a new provider that could reduce their costs or risk.
It's like, oh yeah, we're going to recompete this deal in 35 years and so it would have been this thing where I just couldn't have made an impact fast enough. And so I've been involved with other people who are making impacts in other ways, okay? So that was one. Well, you couldn't just have like some Silicon Valley guy wearing like tight jeans and brown shoes. Like every other salesperson sit down like so we'd like to have a conversation about your prisoners. We'd like to have your business like you know. No. Give me some of your again. Fortunately not yeah unfortunately not and the thing is the people who make the decisions
Ian's would not have benefited from a succeeding. So, in business, look, when you're in, this is a big, we can get in this one and all to one of the biggest problems with selling to the government versus with private individuals and businesses. You just have to convince them that it'll be, it'll be a good thing for them and then they'll buy them. The people who are in charge of purchasing for government, they often don't benefit from saving money or reducing their Manpower or any of those things. In many cases, the guy in charge of making the buying decision, his political power and earning power are directly.
Tied to his ability to keep costs high and to keep Manpower up and to not allow anything to displace that. So that was actually the big problem. I realized that it's nice to think you can solve any problem with, with new ideas through disruption, but some things are kind of self-reinforcing, very hard to
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The other thing I was looking at is obesity. Obesity is one of, if not the leading preventable cause of death in the United States either there's so many there's so many other health problems that are the result of
Of
obesity. And some people say that we need to make exercise more popular. Some people say that we need to stop normalizing obesity. Some people say we need medical treatment for your we, you know, we need to make eat healthy eating better. I took a pretty cynical view of it. I said, no, obesity is not going away. Unless you let American people eat whatever they want, whenever they want, as much as they want with no Lifestyle Changes, no exercise. And absolutely no effort on their parts whatsoever. And So within that constraint,
ain't what could you do to solve this issue? And the, the result? The the idea came on was long chain hydrocarbon, based synthetic food. So in other words, oil based foods you guys are familiar with impossible, Burger Beyond Burger. Have you had them? Yeah, so I mean it was probably better than the worst beef burger you've ever had, right? It was at least at that level it's worth. It's better than the worst one you've ever had. Yeah it was a whatever I'll eat this. Yeah yeah. Whatever you like this but certainly not up to the level of the best beef burger. You've
Had no. And so one of the one of the interesting, this is where I was drawing from outside, you know, an outside world. All these people trying to make fake food, they're all trying to build fake food out of food. I said, well wait, let's think of this from first principles, if I'm a materials engineer and I'm trying to solve the set of problems that a fake Burger manufacturers, trying to solve, you know how it feels in your mouth, how it comes apart, in your mouth, how it, how its ears, how it Cooks, how it changes texture when it's cooked, if I were a chemical or mechanical
Material engineer, trying to build, let's say it's not food. Just uh, you know, apace a substance with a certain set of parameters. What am I going to use? Is it, is it beans? Is it chickpeas? Is it corn? No, of course not. I'm going to use oil because man is a master of oil. We can make it an anything waxes gels, solids, anything. In between rubbers Pace, we can do anything with oil. We can make it into truly.
With almost any material properties that we want. And so I said, well, let's leverage that. Let's leverage, everything we know about making inert hydrocarbons that are non-toxic and use that to make fake food for people that tastes and feels like real food. But has zero caloric value. That cannot be absorbed by your body. It just goes right through. You just like fiber and things like that. Crazy. Talk about Diet Coke for a yeah, it's yeah, that exists, dude, it's called why.
Castle fly here. Let me yeah you're just like the diet coke cheeseburger yes exact Diet Coke cheeseburger the diet coke cheese, the diet, the diet coke, dairy products. And so I actually started making prototypes of this and I was messing around with frying foods and mineral oil with with, with high flash points because mineral oil also no calories. I made some paraffin based cheese, so it's basically, like paraffin wax based fake cheese product that you could still make grilled cheese sandwiches with and it tasted great.
That almost no calories. It was there are a few other wild things that came with. I also built a device that injected soda syrup through a stream onto your tongue directly as carbonated water flowed over it. Because it turns out you can only detect what it's a weird perceptual thing. People think of optical illusions as you know, the main type of Illusion that's out there but there's also physical Illusions. Like if you if you put putting putting in your mouth, your body assumes that the full mass of the pudding is comprised of whatever is touching your tongue.
Young. But if you can create physically structured Foods where the part that's touching, your tongue is different than the bulk of the rest of the material. Your body still thinks that the entire bulk of it is whatever's touching your tongue. Anyway, I went down this rabbit hole for a while, dude. What what is your house look like? Well, I mean it's a little more boring now, but at the time, when I was acquired by Facebook, I moved up to the Bay area and we had about ten people living in a 13,000 square foot home, that was built in the 30s.
On 6 acres. And so we turned to the dining room into a machine shop. We turned we turned the there was like a like a ball room for dancing and we turned that into an assembly area and and and Welding welding room. I mean, if we had a soft goods room and as one done the area, as someone does, it was it
was, I don't even know what that means. What are soft goods? It was
just like, so, like a cheese. I'm like the traditional example that when people have like a soft goods engineer would be
Like like tennis shoes, bras, you know, things that are incorporating fabrics and also apply or think you like a tennis. A tennis racket is is an example of soft. Good engineering, where you've got, you know, the handle and the shock absorption and all that. Like, in our case, it was for head-mounted display stuff. So like head-mounted display straps, the fat the fabric associated with it. We also were, you know, we're also cosplayers. So we are also building our building our anime costumes there, so a lot of stuff. Good
stuff. The more you talk, the more I realize you do, the one thing that we celebrate,
Most on this podcast because they're like, people are like, I don't get it like you and Sam. You do a certain style of Entrepreneurship, right? But for example, I optimize for just I wanted to be me and one other dude, I don't want any employees. I don't want to go to an office and I just want Max the bridge and I'm not trying to be a billionaire, don't want to raise money, I want to own the whole thing, and just do it my way, and whatever projects are fun. But then sometimes we'll celebrate like you and Elon musk's of the world that are going huge. And sometimes we celebrate this dude who's making this Chrome extension. He makes twenty Kay a month and lives in, you know, Bali and he's having fun and so people don't get it. They're like,
what do you respect, which one do you admire? Like I get it, TechCrunch admirers of this thing and VC's of Meyer, this thing. But you guys seem to be across the board and we're like, we like people that just defined the wind defined winning on their terms and then like actualize it. So like you have in a house with 13 other people that has like you know an assembly room and a soft goods room and whatever it seems like you're living your best life in that state may be 100%
and one. And I mean, it's the weird thing about what I get to do now, like these are these all sound,
Yeah, like fun things but I'm still getting to do that and like and roll. We have all kinds of stuff like that going on, actually. That the tough thing is the coolest things that we're doing here. I can't even necessarily talk about because the most successful projects that are doing the coolant going in the coolest directions, are the ones that we have to keep kind of unwraps. Oh, I have to say on petroleum food, just in case anyone's wondering why I didn't do that one. I thought National Security would would be a better use of my time and that was because I realized Tech. What national security was a technological
Chuckle problem, in addition to being a lobbying in marketing problem and sales problem. The, the problem with petroleum Foods is that it was not sustainable. If using new oil as a feedstock, it would just be which consume too much and the good news is you can recycle hydrocarbons but then if you don't know, if you can see where this is going, but it means you're going to literally be like centrifuging oil out of the sewer system and then reusing it to construct new food. And I realized they have you seen all the media coverage Pink's pink.
I am at McDonald's and that's what I saw going out. Thanks kind of gross. Yeah man, do you think people want to buy food that's literally remanufactured from sewage? You know, that that was kind of the main problem. I said, you know what, I'm pretty good at marketing and sales. I am not good enough to sell sewer food to people. I'm going to need to, I mean, need to figure that out well and it's it's like it's almost too good of a story, right? Like like I under some times I think the media is unfair but it's like
could you expect them to not? You know sensationalize literally a guy who's selling reprocessed sewage as food. Like it's like they have to cover it in a sensation away and I can't even blame them for it and I decided I would rather work in an area where technological Improvement would be the main way that you would compete. We didn't need to do crazy marketing, you just had to be competent and be better than all of the other players, which was not necessarily that high of a bar.
Do you? You talked about the meat
For a second and I when I was doing research, I was like, you know, there's this great Silicon Valley Post, that's called like the hands of time of social media of media and Silicon Valley. It's like it starts at noon and it's like you're born a, you know, that nobody's ever heard of you then that one. You're like emerging at three you're like the star. Everybody loves you and it like goes and then it Cycles all the way back to midnight. And it's like you're evil, you're ruining society and you like destroy democracy and whatever else. And this happens with every
Every hot company and every hot founder, whatever. And when I was looking at your media coverage to do research, it's all like, this is the boy wonder, he's 19 years old. He's making virtual reality real. He's doing this out of his garage and his house, whatever. Yep. And then it turns into like, this guy is like, you know, the Maga super evil guy, he's getting fired by Facebook and then it's like the defense stuff. So you've seen kind of both sides of the media machine that make you kind of jaded. Like where do you trust the media today? And I, how do you think about you?
The
media, there's an interesting quote that people often misuse from the Nolan Batman movies. You either die a hero or live. You see yourself live long enough to become the villain and a lot of people misunderstand that they think that it means you start out as a hero and then eventually descend into into being, you know, a bad guy and they look at Harvey Dent and they think that's the moral but that's not what was what what what Harvey Dent was saying. Harvey Dent had actually always been kind of crooked power
or seeking political type. What what what he was saying is that he had always been the same person fighting for the same ideals and that he just lived long enough to see the world change around him that. So that people started saying that what he was was a villain you know he didn't say that you become the villain, you literacy to see yourself become the villain in the eyes of everyone else and I feel like I've definitely been through. Then through that a little bit. I mean it's worth noting, I'm not inclined to dislike the
Naturally, a lot of people assume that that must be the case, I don't know if you know this I was a journalism major at Cal State Long Beach. I was actually the online editor of the of the school paper the daily 49er. So I by no meat like there was a time where I thought I was going to go into a career in Tech journalism and so I never really had had any issues with it as as you know, I thought it was a very very honorable thing to do, you know, to go out and be the guy who digs and gets the truth and lets people know what's going on that they otherwise,
Would not have the ability or the time to suss out themselves and then, unfortunately, I've had quite a few experiences with the mediums. Like, do I trust the media? It's like, well, I mean I've had like literally dozens of major Outlets post literally fabricated quotes from me things that never happened. They said the all we did all these terrible things that just never even happened and then refuse to correct them for years on end. So it's one of those feel like, oh Palmer, why do you attack the media? It's like, I don't know, like there's not any real way to get to get around this. I mean, like, if we're not
Out tiny Outlets like the New York Times posted a quote for me that I literally never said and I told him like, hey, you said that I said this I never said that they said, well, it's more or less. What you said we don't think the meaning is different. I was like yeah but your ethics guide. I know what it is. I was taught the New York Times style guide when I was in journalism school. It doesn't, it doesn't say you get to quote, me and paraphrase me. And you think that it is, it doesn't mean anything different and then, of course, everyone re quotes they're fake quote. So,
You know, at the end of that, it's hard to say, oh yeah, I trust the media. You're like, I don't think a quote means what you think it means, you know, you're like those those like, you know, those little signs in the paper that say it's a quote, that means, something different than what you, what you guys are saying. Well, I explained to them. I said, I said your quote, for me is literally missing six of the words that I said, but you have it in quotes with a period And I never said that and it was actually it was there was no period because it was part of a longer run on argument. I was making that did not even have a period there. They're like,
We don't think it really changes the meaning. So just without belaboring the point, I think you can't trust the media to do the right thing and if you do you're probably going to get burned at some point. It worked for me for a while until it did, what does andrel do? And what made you realize that the the the approach to solve that problem was the approach that you pick? Because that seems like such a grand. I mean I understand the high level what you do but it's so Grand that I think
Well like Oculus was fairly Grand but I kind of get that you can kind of take your in your garage and come up with a Nifty product and whatever and like no one's going to like it hurt really and it's like a pretty simple process. It hard but simple and row. I'm like oh my God I don't even know where to start. I mean I get I've seen the movie with Jonah Hill where he's like a war dog or whatever, it's called re like buys and sell weapons and I'm like his that way and roared us. And yeah yeah I'm like is that what Android does and how on Earth does even a rich guy who's 28 in his apartment or as
House come up with this. This is crazy. Like who do you call you call a hey hey Brock. I was thinking, you know, maybe we could try this like MVP. You don't I mean, I don't even know how you start that. I mean it's tough and it is such a big problem and so on approachable that very few people do approached it. I mean very big picture and are all is trying to build the next major defense prime. Meaning we were the prime contract holder. We're not a subcontractor to existing primes like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon and Northrop Grumman or Boeing 8.
80% of the US defense, budget goes to just a handful of companies, these big crimes that just completely dominate the industry and they get paid on what's called a cost-plus basis. They get paid for their time materials fixed percentage of profit on top, which means that they're incentivized to move slowly. They actually make more money when they come up with more expensive systems, more money when they sell more of something more money, when it even breaks more often because they get to sell more parts for it. I mean, it's a really bizarre Contracting system that we created in.
War Two to basically take over the US war machine or sorry, the u.s. industrial machine. Turn into a war machine because companies like Ford were saying, hey, I can't even quote you what it's gonna cost to make a tank because I've never really, you know, this has never really been my business and they said, okay, fine. We'll pay you whatever it costs and a fixed percentage of profit on top to make sure that you are able to keep running your business. And then unfortunately, just kept doing that even though we were no longer in an existential War mode. And so, in the last 35 years, since the end of the Cold War,
The government had completely lost its ability to grow small defense, companies into large defense that it comes companies. I mean, you know, Samuel Colt went from working in his tiny garage Workshop to arming the entire Western world. That's, that's, that's what we used to be able to do. You can start small and get big if you had the best stuff. But in the last 35 years, there were only two unicorns before and Earl and the defense space and 35 years, not just being chosen arbitrarily. It's basically, since the end of the Cold War during the Cold War, we did turn small defense companies and to
The major players, but since then, it's palantir, SpaceX, both founded by billionaires and then nobody else that's it. And so, it's so hard to get in the founders. Say, I have no idea how I could possibly start a defense company so they don't start a defense company venture capitalist. A I'm not going to invest in a defense company. There's no examples of success in the last 35 years, less the billionaires who can do anything. I'm sure they could have done whatever they wanted with their billions. And so, the VCS don't want to invest in it and this is, and then smart employees. Don't want to go work it too.
Fence startups because they look at the landscape. They say, look, this might be a cool lifestyle business but it's never going to grow to a scale where the equity that I'm given is a significant is a significant way to generate money for me and my family. And so I I said, man, you know, it really does take lots and lots of money and lots and lots of influence and really smart people that I'm in a position to start a company that very few people are very few Founders have experience running a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees meant Mass
Factoring millions of pieces of hardware and are and are willing to give up the Adoration of their peers in the media. Like that was actually probably the most important factor if I would have just left Oculus by retiring on my own, it would have been much harder for me to go into an area like building weapons for the us and our allies. Because so many people got so angry about it. You friends that I had who didn't want to talk to me anymore. Investors who said that? Not only would we never make money, but that what we were doing was morally reprehensible
And wrong. And you I was trying to explain to people. Listen, we live in a world where our major strategic adversaries are rapidly building advanced technology that has no peer here in the United States. War machine. Major conflict is imminent in Asia in Europe. With a lot of are strong allies and partners. And we need to be ready, not just to win those Wars. The goal is not to win Awards, to deter a war from happening in the first place. And if we don't have the tools, we need to deter them then
Is inevitable. And I'm you guys probably remember how things were, yeah, I guess bat you about five or six years ago. It was a very, very popular to believe that we're at the end of history and that piece is to profitable for anyone to rock the boat. And that, that was the thing that would keep everybody in line. I think that Russia, invading Ukraine, finally woke up. A lot of people to realize that history is not over land, borders are not fixed. And it like, I mean, look how Wild it is. That Europe is still buying billions of
dollars of goods from Russia, even as Russia literally invades Europe and be like, dude, that's that's how screw, that's how screwed they are. And I think people people did not see this a few years ago and I felt I felt a little bit like a crazy person. And if I'll ramble on one more thing, you've probably heard me say this before elsewhere. But we're living in the first time in u.s. history where the most Innovative powerful and large technology companies in our country, refuse to work with the military, that's never been the case. Our most powerful
Companies have always understood that they had a responsibility to Aid with National Security, but now what I mean, whether you're talking about Google or in particular Apple, I mean apples got 95% of their Manufacturing in China. They agreed to invest that they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing capacity. There, they've agreed to invest a further 275 billion dollars in Chinese Manufacturing, in exchange for being allowed to operate as an independent company in China, instead of being nationalized into a joint venture majority-owned, by
China. I mean they are in a position where if they do anything to upset the Chinese government one person. In China could sign one piece of paper that would wipe out the most powerful company in the entire world instantly. A two trillion dollar company. They are not masters of their own destiny, not by any means and I guess I want to stress this because it's never been the case in history and that had me terrified you know. I five years ago I could see, we're on the precipice of war with Advanced Powers who
Fully suppressed our most advanced technology companies through economic tools and if I don't understand why more people were not scared by that, but I felt like I couldn't do anything. That was more important, starting a drill to start help solving that problem. Thanks for letting me ramble for so long that I know that was a long ramble, but I've, I've got a lot of emotion all built up inside them on it,
not me. That's why we wanted you on is to hear what you're doing and why. And you also flipped at like the common denominator with either. The prison thing, the
the food, the the oil based foods or this is that you kind of looked at it from another angle and also maybe flip the incentives. So, to cost structure. So what you were saying was it less a with the prison thing you want to be incentivized to keep people out of prison rather than in prison for as long as possible.
Exactly sounds. So simple, right? Well, it is simple but it's not easy. Yeah,
yeah. And well and what it sounds like, what you ran into, there was the incentive for the local official who you know, who decides on these things may have been
Have a bigger budget and not a smaller budget. And so, you know, your incentives were sort of class, right?
Whereas, when he doesn't, he doesn't have to say, I'm not buying your thing because my incentives are wrong. You like, oh, we've done an assessment of all the vendors. And this one really has a lot more experience and we don't want to take a risk on a new vendor, it could literally be that simple. He people like oh, but how would they justify the business model? You know. It would be so much better. Like, it doesn't have to you. You can speak. Nope, I'm too much risk.
And so what's the business model with Andrew? Because you're not doing Cost? Plus you're doing something else?
Defense Product
Company. Maybe we work the way. It's not even a revolutionary business model, it's the way every tech company worked. You use your own money. You build a product. You make it work, and then you go to customers and you sell it to them. And that is a very hard thing to do in the defense base, but we've basically bet that we will be able to pick the right things to work on. They will be able to find the right Partners in government to help, tell us what we should be investing our own money in ahead of time. And that in the end when it works, that will be able to sell most of
Time to the government. Now there will be times where we get screwed. There will be times where we don't build things at work and you know and it's our own money that we burned instead of taxpayers. But on the whole we're very incentivized to be efficient. We don't want it things to drag out. We don't want to drag it out, to be a 10-year R&D program on a cost-plus basis when we can get it done in six months with some really, really smart ideas. And so, we've got the right incentives and we're basically out there trying to convince the Department of Defense and politicians. That this is the way that all defense.
Deputies, should be working, everyone should live in fear, looking over their own shown shoulder. Knowing that if they fail that they're the ones who are going to get screwed, not taxpayers.
So, when you get a contract, that's like we got a nine hundred million dollar contract. That's after you've already produced the product and they're basically just agreeing to buy the goods. At that point. Is that what that means in your
case? Yeah, I mean, we recently just want to billion dollar contract with Socom, Special Operations, Command to do all of their counter drone work. So, basically, protecting like building the hardware and software that is
Is defending them from from drones that are attacking their installations and positions. And we started working on our counter drone system, using all of our own money years. And years ago before we had any customer, we just, we started building the hardware and the software building our interceptors, building our Jammers. And then we was after we invested a ton of our own money and proved that this was the right way to solve the problem that we were able to go. And actually there was a full competition for who they were going to select for this, and they did basically a shoot off between all these different companies.
And some of the companies that we beat we're actually getting paid by the government to develop their systems using government money. But we had invested quite a bit more money and moved much faster. And there were literally contractors that were complaining saying, this isn't fair. We have to compete with and roll and they've been investing their own money for years. How could we possibly be expected to compete when the government's only given us? You know, tens of millions of dollars over the course of the last two years? And I'm like guys that like of course this how it works. Like you could have one if
Inspect your own money. If you had spent your own money for five years, you probably would be able to compete with us on an even playing field. But you can't take no risk and expect all of the reward. And we spend a lot less than these companies developing much better capabilities, because we have the right incentives. So you're I think you're 30 years old. So you're we're all about the same age. You're sitting there with a strong 30, a few weeks ago. Well, happy birthday. You're sitting there and fucking Hawaiian T-shirt with a goatee. I you're probably at the type of
Dude, who walks around Barefoot, it all the time and you're talking about Cosplay and yeah you just said we just want a billion dollar contract from the government. How do you work up? Like the whole wave has the confidence to think like I'm gonna go in against all these gray-haired suits and like they're going to the government eventually. Got to take me seriously. I'm going to sell this sell this thing. I mean or do you have people selling on your behalf? I know some people think that I should that I should dress differently and try to kind of you know, appeal to the
Government sensibilities and like, you know, I should be dressing in a suit and I should be very, very straight-laced and you'll be very, very serious all the time. But I think that one of the most important things that and roll is doing is not just Building Technology ourselves but it's inspiring other companies to work in defense not just company like inspiring companies that aren't in defense to Pivot in defense and inspiring people to start new defense companies. And if they see me like becoming a boring guy, who's, who's has to make himself super lame to salt.
The government that's not a lifestyle that they're going to want to lead. And so we need to show that they can be successful and show them that it's that. It's going to be fun. Now, I also want to keep wearing flip-flops in Hawaiian shirt. So maybe I'm maybe this is just your post factor just to pick a number board. I feel like I'm doing everyone a disservice if I were to change. Yeah, I think
it's working. Now, you know, we the podcast is all about the future where I was brainstorming ideas opportunities, but none of that matters. If there's not really a future. If this is about to become World War 3 and there's nukes flying everywhere. So you're kind of a lot more in the
Then any guests that we've ever had on this, what's going to happen here? Is this, what are the odds of like, you know, this sort of Ukraine Russia conflict breaking out into something a lot more serious? And like, you know, is it going to be a nuclear weapon, you know, in our near
future. So maybe it's very hard to predict, there's people who are better at this than me. Like what I always tell people is like our role is to build the tools and then you have to trust in democracy to deploy them correctly. And if you would like, oh, you know, when would you stop supplying weapons to you Ukraine? And you know,
Is there a point where you'd be too? You know, we're you think that we should where you would make sure that you're not part of a nuclear escalation and I say, listen, if you believe in democracy at all, then you should not want u.s. foreign policy to be dictated by the ever-changing, whims of Technology Executives like, what an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to set that you'll build weapons for the people. You are politically aligned with and then you'll suddenly drop it. Despite the you at, like what it really is is I will sell to the people that
State department and the u.s. dod want me to like, if that that need because they have information that I don't they have intelligence that I do not and I cannot second-guess that and say, oh you know I would stop supplying if I thought there was this level of of escalation. But with that out of the way, I think that we are going to see a tactical nuke, get used and for people who are not familiar with the difference, tactical nuclear weapons are designed for tactical use as part of a battle for basically conventional Warfare tactics. So blowing up
Up an Armored Division or taking out a wing of bombers or maybe even destroying an Airfield. Strategic nuclear weapons are used to determine Mass nuclear exchange and to engage in strategic level annihilation of cities in the like the United States disassembled, all of our tactical nuclear weapons along time ago, we decided that our warrant Doctrine did not allow for tactical. Nukes. Nukes are only something you use at a strategic level to deter other.
People from using them against you. That is not the case for Russia. Russia has tactical nuclear weapons. If they trained to use them. They it is part of their doctrine that they will use them in conventional conflict and they are even just having that in their Doctrine shows that to some degree. They are willing to bet that the United States and nobody else would respond with strategic nuclear weapons in response to use of a tactical nuclear weapon and if some people say, oh, he even saying that they'll use it
Duke is akin to supporting Russia and saying we shouldn't support Ukraine. It says I'm not saying that at all. I think actually appeasement has the the longer they're actually the greater risk. I mean, if you can show, if you show to the world that even the threat of small-scale tactical nuclear, weapons is enough to deter any kind of intervention in, any kind of can in any kind of conventional Warfare. You actually hugely incentivize the nations of the world to obtain their own tactical nuclear weapons. Like you, you don't really actually want the calculus.
A tip that way where countries look and say, wow, all Russia had to do is threaten to use their tactical nukes and then they were allowed to operate with impunity in a conventional Invasion. And nobody was willing to stop to do anything about it or even stop buying their exports like that. That's the that that would be a very, very bad precedent to set even Beyond this war. And so for that reason this is a little contrarian and not everyone agrees but I think that the odds of a tactical nuclear weapon are very high. It will not be you.
Used on the United States. It will not be used on a NATO Ally. It'll probably be a tactical nuclear weapon used to strike some inarguably military Target. Like it probably they're not going to. They're not going to new cave. It's much more likely that it would be a port or a, you know, or an air Installation or something like that. And the reason I like to talk about this, as I want people to get comfortable with this because there's this idea that you know you use, you use a use a nuclear weapon and all of a sudden you're in World War 3.
I think that's actually probably the wrong the wrong way to look at it because if you do that, you're tacitly admitting that tactical nuclear weapons deserve a strategic nuclear level response. And if you set that up, as you know the nice lubricated path. We all slide down. Ya think so really bad. Really sounds like selfish and tripe but I think I it's important to me and I bet it's abhorrent a lot of people. What does that mean? For me, a wealthy American with money in the stock market who lives in then?
Nice life. Like does that mean that like inflation is getting huge? Does that mean that my investment is going to go down? Does that mean that like, people, I know, I don't know anyone in Ukraine so I care about them. But, like, does that mean people, I know are going to get hurt. What does that mean? For me, it's a fair question. You know, I'm in a different position. I know I know people who are from Ukraine. I know people who are in your crane, so for me, it also, it does get a little bit personal and we have employees here who are who are deeply deeply involved in one way or another with the people of Ukraine, but I think
mostly you need to boil it. Now not to necessarily Ukraine specific question, but the broader geopolitical question is the United States. The world place. Are we going to help our allies and to what extent? And I'm not saying that it's like, means that we need to throw ourselves into World War 3 over every conflict. But we do need to very carefully weigh like what will happen in Taiwan if we completely pulled out like there's a million ways to tackle that so I'm not trying to
Up a straw man here but I'll throw out one. That is actually very popular with certain politicians. They say we should completely pull out, we should not engage. This is not our problem. Let the let the ex-soviet guys duke it out, they can do whatever they want. Well, one there, the first issue is our European allies are going to be in pretty bad shape if they have Russia right on their border, able to move, deep deep deep into Europe without any kind of buffer. More importantly, what do you think China's?
Gonna do if they see that, that's the United States attitude, they say, wow, like there is a price, they will not pay. There is, there is a certain level. They are not willing to get engaged. At, if we can raise the cost above that level, then they will make the short-term decision to not a get engaged. That's very dangerous for Taiwan, which is in turn, very dangerous for semiconductors and for our entire economy, like, if Taiwan actually gets invaded by China, you could see a 30 or 40 percent drop in the stock market beyond what we've already.
He said that that's not even that's not even a, that's not even a crazy assumption. That's like a pretty well backed up by all of the the boring establishment economics, guys prediction. So that that the way that I see it is your question. Why should I care? Because if we want to maintain credibility as a player that can deter Wars not just win Wars. Then we have to take actions that maintain our credibility there if we if we were to say the ultimate version screws you're on your own world.
We're all and we're going to do our own thing. We're going to get screwed by that very very quickly and so there's something between 0 engagement and you know, D-Day 2.0 that we have to
do, this is great Palmer. Where can people find you? If they want to go work at and rule, or, you know, read more your stuff, your blog or Twitter, where should people follow your find you if they like this? Oh man. Well my
my handle my handle across social media is Palmer Tech. But on you can find me on Twitter under the handle Palmer Luckey. There's
Website Palmer, Luckey.com. The number one, Palmer Luckey blog on the internet. And I'm Eric is also a only press sites
but I'm coming for you.
Want a bite - WordPress to Great tool. Yeah, it's all just tell me about Palmer. Luckey. 69.com. He's is
this new project is working on? Yeah, it's got a lot of problems.
Oh man, I gotta check this out. That sounds right up my alley.
Wait, what do you want to rip a WWE style promo at Jason? Calacanis. Who's coming after you, he's challenging.
If you do, I'll fight, why would you challenge a guy who builds weapons for a living to I'll fight? I don't understand this but if you want to rip a WWE style promo, this is this is no place. There are a hundred thousand, entrepreneurs ready to back, you hear if you can get them on your side. I mean maybe
this is because I always like look I don't know if you can tell like I'm actually a pretty big guy like I weigh about 250 pounds. I'm 6 feet tall like I understand the mechanics of fighting well enough and I've done enough of it. Recreationally to understand that.
Unlikely that somebody who's like, you know, 5 foot 5, and 140 pounds is gonna is get is going to have a good shot. But the thing is, I don't, I'm not, I'm not a physical violence kind of guy. I think it's weird to be like, oh yeah, you don't like me. Well, I could beat you, in hand-to-hand combat. It's like, well, I mean, maybe but like, your ideas are still bad, it doesn't one doesn't solve the other. So, no, I unfortunately, I don't think I'll be throwing. I don't think I'll be throwing down the gauntlet Beyond
beyond noting that just you statistically speaking. You know, if you just look at the fights between people of of one bulk versus another year. There's there's a there's a clear Trend. There's weight
classes for a reason.
Dude, is this the most Silicon Valley call out ever? I am 90 the
mechanics of fighting physics. Physics is on my side, bitch
and forever. People are listening and don't know the very short.
Is Jason calacanis said, a bunch of really awful stuff about me for years starting back in 2016. What, you know, when he said that I'm a terrible person that I don't care about my family or my, I think he said Palmer, Luckey is a complete moron who doesn't care about his employees or his family's or his friends and then I'll you know, Palmer's an idiot. He's a moron Zuckerberg should fire him, get rid of him. What? A useless, waste of space. Then I get fired. He celebrates it over and over all, man. I'm so glad they fire upon her.
What a terrible loser. I said I said her anyway, then he just didn't then he just didn't talk to me for years, never reached out and then he invites me to go speak it on his podcast and then at his conference. So I went there and I basically told people, I'm like, I can't believe Jason invited me. It's only because I have clawed my way back to having a second unicorn before the age of 30. Like this guy treating me like total garbage for years, he's never apologized. He spread a bunch of La even insult design is pretty much lies about me and then at the cam and I say,
Here. Look at all this shitty said
about me, like, this is a, you had like a, this is like a hard day. It was
amazing. And and then and and I did that at the end of my talk about basically the future of conflict and particularly war in Ukraine. And then at the conference, he said that he was sorry if he said anything that offended me but then when he put my video up, he said actually I take it back everything that I said was accurate and I don't regret exactly what I said about him and I'll and so now people people keep hitting me up like you guys need to bury the hatchet, you know, meet in the middle like
I didn't do anything to like you you can't meet them in like you're right maybe maybe I don't care about my family but you know we can omit. I care about my friends. Let's meet the middle. It's like no no that's not going to happen anyway. So now Jason's saying that he can he can beat me up on any and you know, look maybe he could but the odds don't seem in his
face and I do think he trains Jiu-Jitsu so that you know, he does have that going for my, if I recall
correctly. Hey, you know, I didn't I didn't correct karate one time when I was a kid.
Eventually you get old? Yeah. Well now it's been wild for me because I mean, my whole career. I've been a whiz kid, you know, it's like the Palmer, Luckey, value proposition is, wow, look at that guy, he's improbably successful given his age and now it's just look at Palmer. He's he's successful. I guess, you know, 30 anyway, so I've been dealing with the psychological impact of that.
I would really want to be with you anything and also you know, I find Jason very entertaining. I don't know personally very well or anything but
But, you know, he's entertaining but he also, I think was totally wrong in this circumstance. I remember when I first heard him, say all that shit. I looked up, I was like, man, Palmer must have well, actually called you Parker lucky? I was like, oh man, this Parker lucky. That's right. This this Plucky little guy must have done something, really messed up and then I saw what was actually done. I saw the coverage and I was like oh he donated ten thousand dollars just you know this thing or whatever. Right. But
Jason is out there saying he says Palmer's paying Trump
supporters dream to hurt
rolling. Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Extreme Terror trolling. He said, not quite violent, but close to it and he's posting anti-semitic memes and misogynistic. Hate attack. Just like, dude, was nine thousand dollars to a billboard like, you've given a heck of a lot more. Yeah, spicier political stuff than that a bit. You know that, that's how
we do it in a political cause our political donation. It's nothing like, you know, I think that's one of the big. One of the big hypocrisy is not as mainstream as you can handle. Big blockage of Silicon Valley is like it's all about open-mindedness.
Unless you disagree with us unless you unless you believe in the thing, I don't agree with then, how dare you believe that, you know, how dare you support that candidate. I don't like how dare you, you know, that have to kind of, you know, votes for whatever, it's one of the Great Apocalypse.
So it's so foreign to me too, because I'd be like one of my best friend's is socialist. We have we strongly disagree politically, but running Oculus. I was never like I had my political beliefs but they were like one percent of my time. I'm thinking 99% of it was on VR in my company and it's actually very funny.
They were like there was a story recently, said you'll Palmer Palmer Luckey. You know, a very outspoken Republican. I'm like, I mean I've literally tweeted about politics two times, eight years like the I'm not outspoken by any means, but because that means like, oh, there was this story years ago, where he privately donated not using his name. And that means he's an outspoken Republican. Then, you know about, imagine if people like, Mark Zuckerberg outspoken, Democrat does acts like they don't even know whatever.
Nobody would ever know.
Correct would be like, you must have made a mistake. The sentence doesn't take tight,
but that's the best part about enderal is that like, I have my political beliefs, like, our CEO Brian ship. He's very much a Democrat. And we have a huge mix of people at and are all across the entire political spectrum. And what we've done is said, listen, we might not agree on everything but we agree on the importance of National Security. We agree that United States needs to have the tools that deter Russia, China and other aggressors from getting
The fight with our partners and allies and we agree that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year while we make tens of billions of dollars a year and we agree on those things. We need to put aside the differences and you focus on what's the same. And I think that's been a really healthy company company culture like a lot of other companies, you know, they'll they want to take one political side of the other and we've been very clear. No, we are not a politically oriented company. We are mission oriented company and to the extent. Like, if a republican, does something that's bad for our mission, we're going.
To push back on it. If a Democrat does something that is bad for our mission. We're going to push back on it, but it needs to be about our ability to defend the West, not our, you know, our personal opinions on how the country should be run. He's like, so that's that's I highly encourage people to set that to set that tone when they're starting their own companies, if you want to be able to attract people from all over the country, all over the world of all different political Persuasions because if you pick a side you're alienating, huge swaths of people not just the people who disagree with you but also people who
Don't want to be in a company that's partisan and might not even care one way or the other. I know there's a lot of people here. Like look I don't even really have a strong political set of beliefs, but I do know, I don't want to work in a place where that's the thing that drives all our decisions
you're like oh we got the office socialist just walking around giving away snacks. It's awesome. It's great. You need a diverse workplace like this. This is awesome,
dude. You're awesome man. I'm that's right. I'm so pumped that you came on at this is this is this has been amazing. I would love you to come on again. Why I have to bring up one more thing so I get
A chance. Bring something up. I know we got we got to talk about the, the Tweet you made, where you said that. There's no way that there's any billionaires out there that actually fly coach. And don't fly. Yes, good. You have got a good memory. Do you fly coach? Oh, you do fly coach. You said that you're an idiot. What are you doing? Jake L was
right?
I mean so so I the reason I wanted to chat about is because yeah I think I respond. I totally like hey you're wrong. Like I actually do I don't fly private, I do fly coach for me.
It's a, it's a reason thing. We're with exceptions for long-term like long, long international travel. We only cover coach travel for our employees. It's like look, it's only a few hours. Like it is a very bad use of company money for us to be buying business or first class for people because we have so much travel at the company. We could easily spend a very serious fraction of our resources on, just people traveling in slightly better seats and so and it's, especially, especially bad. When it's I go, I'm I Really Gonna Pay you to like, you know, fly
my business class for three hours to a place where you're then going to like, sweat it out in the desert for a week. Like, you know, it's only like a, it's the, the coach seats better than the desert when your wife, or your girlfriend ever. If you're going to Europe, you're going to fly coach. Even when I use my own money, I fly coach. And people say, well, why don't you just fly first class? Why don't you fly business? And here's why, because I expect my employees to fly coach and even like, yes, I have a lot of money but it's if I don't also do it. It feels like I'm out of touch, or I don't know what it's like or, you know always
Easy for you to say that we should fly coach because you don't have to do it because you happen to have a bunch of money. And so for me, a lot of is setting example look, it's not actually that bad. I am willing to do it even when I pay for my own travel because that's, I think it's not that bad and so don't you have like people who want to like kill you or like hurt you? I mean, aren't you like a? I mean like you've got the whole anti-trump crowd up who sees you in there, like go after yourself and then now, you're like deal with Lockheed Martin stuff. Surely, they want to like, kneecap you, your got
All in podcast fanatic.
Yeah, you got Jason calacanis gonna compare any value in an ugly like something's gonna happen. You know, we beat like a surely like there's like some type of security risks. Also, I maybe you have life insurance or something like that, if they're going to ensure you, I'd be like dog, you're doing your, you got to have this, a security person with you, or you got to like, have someone with you. Like surely, there's some type of security risks. We gotta think like Beyond just like, hey guys, I'm in solitude with you on this flight, like I get it. Like, I mean, surely there's some type of like your tote you're totally right.
And I mean, it depends on the trip where the trip is and what I'm doing and like, I make sure to keep myself safe and I probably don't want to get into the specifics because, you know, like you said, there's people out there who who are not fans of me and like you mentioned, you Jason calacanis and the Trump people. But like what about the Mexican cartels that we've cost hundreds of millions of dollars in drug trade? What about all the people who have been foiled in attacks on US? Military forces because of our stuff and like there's actually a long list of people who are more
Who are scarier than Jason calacanis. If you can believe it, look you, you're right. But to some degree that's a worry but I also think that in general if someone's going to come to kill me, it's probably going to be a place where they know I'm going to be and there's there's there's actually much higher like to me. The high-risk place is actually not on a, on a flight in the secure Zone. Yeah. It's not on Southwest in the secure zone of an airport. It's actually probably more likely to be the restaurants. I go to too much, but anyway, I guess I want to explain. That's why I do it. If I'm gonna ask my employees to do it, I need
It too even when it's my own money, even when it's my own cost because otherwise you are like you but you become an out. It's not just that I appear out of touch. I would literally be out of touch. They look maybe one day coach gets so bad that I tell everyone guys you know what I hear you, we're all going business now but I think I think today is not that day. You're crazy. I've agreed with everything you've said except for that you are crazy.
Yeah, I know I'm actually glad you said this because I was feeling like, man, this guy is great for his funny. He's smart. He's just really big thinker.
I'm glad you have something you're totally wrong about, it makes me feel so much better. This interview, that's a great service you did for everybody here, by having this absolute nonsense policy for yourself. You know, like if I go get you a bomb the guy who flies to go get that billion dollar contract and I'm flying back, you know, in the sea zone of Southwest, I'm riding the next day at work
and tell you. I love that. I love the back of the plane, on the window. No, but nobody bothers you, you can get on. You can let everybody get off the plane before you.
You don't have to fight anybody, you just, you know, let everyone look until I know, what? I gotta put this in. My grandpa was a pilot for United Airlines for all over 40 years. And so, I also grew up around commercial airlines and so this might be another thing like, to me, there is a certain Romanticism to, like mass-market Mass available air travel. Like what an incredible thing. And we did it, America did it. We figured out how to make it economically viable and we build everyone else's airplanes. Like it is an American thing and so I
Even when you're on everyone else's planes, they're mostly made by Americans and the ones that are made by Europeans were made with American Technology. So I I also like
science Advisory board feet. I think feet are gross. You're into coach. I think I'll just rest boy, you know, to each their own and I think we'll leave it at that. Agree to disagree there on?
No, no. I disagree with that opinion, but I respect it like, hell. And I respect you. You're the best. Man, I would love for you to come on if you want like in a few weeks, a few months whenever and talk some more about ideas, I'm a fan of yours.
URS. So this feels really cool that you're here. Maybe we thank you. I appreciate that. This is has been a lot of fun. We covered some good ground to. Yes. And maybe we've suckered you into becoming friends with us. So if you ever want you could dies on the. DM us on Twitter. We come up hobie's. Who knows? I don't know. Maybe we'll see what happens. But this has been awesome coming coming out anytime.
All right, so we thank you so much. All right. See you guys later.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to travel. Never looking back.
Back.
