Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is an inventor, innovator, and the founder of Oculus VR and Anduril Industries. At 16 years old, he built Oculus’ first offering, the Oculus Rift VR headset, eventually selling the company to Facebook for $2 billion. He went on to establish Anduril Industries in 2017, a company focused on developing autonomous systems and AI solutions for military applications. Aiming to modernize the defense capabilities of the United States and its allies, particularly though Anduril’s recent takeover of the U. S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, Luckey continues to be a leading figure in both consumer tech and national security. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  If you're going to have an opinion on something, you need to at least be well-educated by your own standards, right? You shouldn't be going out and saying, "Oh, I have these strong opinions, but I've never really developed..." Never looked into it. I've never looked into it. I've never gotten the information that would allow me to see if I'm really right. And so if I'm gonna have opinions on shoes, I need a theory of feet. And one of the things that struck me was in World War II, we had this problem where guys were breaking their ankles, damaging their ankles, pulling their ankles, jumping out of airplanes, paratroopers, landing on their feet off of a parachute. And so one had the bright idea, "Well, let's make some specialized jump boots for these guys. Let's make combat boots that really reinforce their ankles,

• 1:07Speaker 01

  keep you from breaking your feet." And they were a huge success during the D-Day invasion. There were a lot of people who landed on their feet, didn't break their ankles because of those boots. But then something interesting happened. All these guys, who, when they wore the boots, saw a decrease in injuries, all of a sudden started getting more and more injuries, doing the exact same thing. Still landing. Still landing. Same case. Same case. Okay. Same boots, same people. Doesn't make sense. And it turns out that a major factor was that the first time, when they started using these boots, they were taking guys who had been using much more flexible shoes, you know, normal shoes, you know, corn-fed Iowa boys. And then they were putting these stiff boots

• 1:51Speaker 01

  onto those really strong feet that they had been working out. The muscles were well-supported, the ligaments were well-supported, their feet were healthy. As they had these guys continue to wear stiff boots all the time, their feet actually compensated. They basically got used to the support. So their arches... So they lost the musculature that they had built up. Exactly. And so all of a sudden... It weakened them. It weakened their feet. I understand. And so all of a sudden, it turns out the tool that made you stronger... In the short term, maybe weaker in the long term. And so to me, it seems pretty obvious. There's something you should do every day. And then there's just something you should do for game day for, you know, the thing where you're really pushing the limits. And this is at odds with a lot of military philosophy.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  The army in particular has a new mantra, train as you fight. The idea is that you should train wearing all of the gear that you actually fight in. You should train the way that you're going to fight because you wouldn't want to, for example, train in, you know, Nike trainers and then all of a sudden you put on all this heavy gear and it turns out you can't perform. But I think that that misses the point that sometimes you should train as you train and then fight as you fight. And your training should take into account what you're going to need to do. Like you should be preparing for it, but you should not necessarily train every day in the thing that you use. The much shorter example of this is like a carbon plated running shoes. You probably shouldn't run every day and then they give you a little bit of extra boost. They return a little more energy to your step, but you probably actually should be

• 3:18Speaker 01

  training in shoes that challenge you more and then you wait for game day to actually run this stuff. So, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not in the shoe business. Have you read Born to Run? Of course. What a great book. I just reread it recently and it's interesting because some of the science in it is no longer consensus. Is that true? It's a mix. Some of it still holds up. There's other things that we've learned since. There's also people fight about these things nonstop. It's never really settled. But yeah, Born to Run, I mean, it's, it's an inspiring book. If people haven't read it, they should, they should check it out. Very good narrative. And I mean, at the end of the day, whether the science is in line with what people claim is the most modern science, the reality, like there are facts in it that cannot be disputed.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  There are people who live in the desert, who run barefoot or in absolutely minimal shoes and they kick the ass of 99% of the runners in the United States who are using the fanciest gear that costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And I like, there's something interesting there. Absolutely.

• 4:16Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about this Game Boy.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So that is the Mod Retro Chromatic, which is the world's best reproduction of the Game Boy color. It's a project that I've been working on off and on for over 15 years. We finally shipped them to people last year. The kind of general idea is, what would a Game Boy be if there were absolutely no limitations? Because when you're making a commercial product, particularly one that's oriented largely at children, you have to think about cost. You have to think about scalability. Can I make millions of these a month? But what if you didn't worry about those? And the chromatic is kind of the result. It has a magnesium aluminum alloy shell, extremely durable. You can run over it with a car without it denting or bending.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  It has a sapphire, lab-grown sapphire screen lens. So instead of just like a sheet of plastic, it's actually made of the same type of sapphire you'd see on a high-end watch. But it's actually, as far as I know, the largest expanse of sapphire in any consumer product ever made. It has a one-to-one reproduction of the original Game Boy resolution screen, so 160 by 144. It was actually very hard to make displays that low res in the modern day.

• 5:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  People have kind of forgotten how to do it. But we wanted it to be a perfect reproduction. And so just across the board, all these decisions, it's been a pet project of mine, probably a lot more creative than a lot of the work I typically do that's more in the function side. And so it's been fun to build something that's a little more, you know, because it's delightful, rather than because it solves some problem. There's no problem this solves, right?

• 5:54Rick Rubin?

  No. Well, I didn't know anything about you. And I saw this Game Boy, and I read about the Game Boy. And I thought, whoever makes this, I want to meet. This is interesting to me because someone who will go to these lengths for a passion project, that really is what creativity is about.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 6:13Rick Rubin?

  I love it.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  When I hire people, I look for that same sort of mentality. When people ask, well, what kind of projects do you want to see? You know, work or school? I say, no, what I want to see is the projects that you did that you weren't paid to do, that weren't part of your government mandated, you know, high school education. What did you do in your own time with your own money that wouldn't have happened but for your care? Because people who... Create things because they want it to exist and there's nothing else making them move forward. Those are the people who I like to work with the most. Anybody can get shit done when somebody's beating you over the head. But to create something because you want it shows a very special type of mentality. When did you first come in contact with VR?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny because Oculus actually is so deeply tied to mod retro, if you can believe it. Really? So, most people know me for starting Oculus when I was a teenager. And it was a virtual reality company I started. I was living in a camper trailer, working a minimum wage job, putting myself through school. And I ended up figuring out how to make virtual reality headsets that were better and cheaper than anyone had previously figured. Tell me the history of virtual reality, so I know. Sure, I mean, VR is interesting because it was one of those dead technologies. It was the future and the past. Like a Game Boy, really? A little bit, yeah. I mean... Obsolete, in this case. Exactly. And the difference is, you know, the Game Boy achieved a huge level of success and then, you know, kind of fell out of fashion.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Virtual reality never came truly into being. It was this technology in the 80s and 90s where conceptually, people understood why it would be so cool to have great virtual reality technology. I mean, the ability to put yourself into any virtual world you could imagine, to do anything without limit. It almost sounded like, you know, waking dreams, but collaborative. Like, these were really cool ideas. The problem is, in the 80s and 90s, the people that were most excited about VR were typically the ones who hadn't actually tried VR in its current status. It was just, it was so low quality and so heavy and so bulky and so low resolution, so laggy, it would often make people sick. People who tried it would say, "Oh, I see. This is a thing way off in the future." And so it kind of died. There had never been a successful year. Do you know when it started?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  When's the first iteration of it? So, the first iteration is, it's debatable. There's people who fight about this. Arguably, some of the first virtual reality devices may have been head-mounted displays that were integrated with robot control systems for managing nuclear waste. But the people say, "Well, that's not really virtual reality. It was remote-controlled, but it was..." Not actually synthetically generated by a computer. The first, and there was also something called the Sensorama, which was a machine where it reused recorded film reels and motion and wide field of view in 3D. But it wasn't computer generated. So the first computer generated VR device was created by Ivan Sutherland. It was referred to as the Sword of Damocles, because it was actually hung from a chain.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And it was actually held from a frame because your neck couldn't support the weight. It was such a heavy device. And it was showing very, very basic wireframe graphics in stereoscopic 3D.

• 9:22Rick Rubin?

  And when was that?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I mean, that would have been the late 1950s, early 1960s. I mean, people have been trying to do this for a long time. NASA had a large VR development effort in the 70s through the 80s.

• 9:35Rick Rubin?

  What would NASA's use for it be?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  So NASA wanted to use it for all kinds of things. They wanted to use it for training astronauts. So training them in systems that had not been built yet. Imagine, for example, putting them in a space capsule and testing different layouts or control panel configurations without having to actually build it and test it. You could iterate much faster. They were also looking at it for telepresence. So there was a product called the Leap Telehead that was funded by NASA in, I believe it would have been the late 80s, early 90s. Don't quote me on it, though.

• 10:07Rick Rubin?

  And that would have been like FaceTime?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  So the idea, even crazier. The idea for the Leap Telehead was that you would put on a VR headset and a pair of data gloves. And then a head with cameras and robot arms could be 10 feet away from you, 10 miles away from you, 100 miles away from you. And you could log into it and over a wireless link, control the robot on the other end, feeling as if you are the robot. So you turn your head to the right, the robot head turns to the right. You're seeing full field of view, 3D. The idea was that if you're a NASA astronaut, you could have a robot go out and do spacewalks, do repairs on the outside of a vehicle. Or imagine if you're-

• 10:47Rick Rubin?

  So it's always been connected to robotics in some way?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  For a very long time it was. I think because the computers were so limited that you couldn't make computer graphics that were really useful enough for- VR to be all it wanted to be. So a lot of the early applications were for robotics, tele robotics. Also, imagine like a nuclear power plant's melting down and you need to go in and you do something. Wouldn't it be great if you could send a robot to do it and you're teleoperating it through this VR system? It's a lot easier than doing it with your keyboard, mouse and screens because you can feel as if you're present in the environment. And it's how a lot of surgeries are done today. Exactly. So there's a company called Intuitive Surgical. They have their DaVinci surgical apparatus. And you've probably seen it's a remote surgery apparatus and magnified surgery apparatus.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So a guy looks into a VR device that projects onto his retina is a very wide field of three dimensional view. And then he has these large controllers that track his fingers and his hands and they have force feedback. And he's making huge motions with his arms to do the surgery. And then those are minimized into a tiny little robot head with teeny tiny little stereoscopic eyes and teeny tiny little robot hand pincers. And so you can, for example, have a guy doing what looks like, you know, big orchestra movements, but then performing tiny micro millimeter movements stitching together the lining of somebody's heart on the other end of this robotic link. So VR has been used for a lot of interesting robotics. You said project onto the retinas. Is that how it works? More or less. What you need to do is you have a display and that's generating

• 12:17Speaker 01

  an image. People often think of VR as you take a screen and you put it right in front of your eyes and you don't want to actually focus on a screen up close. It'd be very uncomfortable. You use optics to... We think about like a page in a book. You could only get it so close to your face. Exactly. So what the lenses in a VR display do is magnify that image, make it larger to cover more of your field of view, and then also refocus all of the photons to a different angle. So that they're, instead of the rays coming in at these convergent angles that require you to strain your eyes to focus, they're coming in as parallel rays which allows your eyes to relax and focus in infinity. And was that already being developed since the 1950s? Yes. Yeah. People discovered that principle a long time ago. What I figured out how

• 12:59Speaker 01

  to do was make VR headsets cheaper, lighter, and better than anyone had by doing in...

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Software, what most people thought had to be done in hardware. So, most VR displays up to that point, these optics I'm talking about, they had to not only magnify the image and re-project the image, they also had to, in the process, not ruin the quality of the image. So if you've rendered a square, it needed to come out as a square on the other side. It couldn't be a warped, you know, a skewed view. The problem is the types of lenses that are good at being wide-field of view, while also being lightweight, have lots of optical distortion. And so typically, VR headsets had to use many lenses per eye in a complex projection system.

• 13:43Rick Rubin?

  Which would make it heavy.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Make it heavy, bulky.

• 13:45Rick Rubin?

  And expensive.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. So heavy stuff would give you neck strains. So have you needed robotic arms to hold the device, you know, and you would move it around with your hands? I figured out how to build a wide-field-of-view, high-quality device that was lightweight, because I realized something. You could describe the distortion characteristics of a lens as a mathematical function. And then, you could generate an inverse function that is the opposite of those characteristics. And then I could render an image using that inverse transformation. And it would basically render an image that is hugely distorted. It looks gross. So you have chromatic aberration, colors separating at different frequencies. You have geometric distortion, meaning, you know,

• 14:28Speaker 01

  that maybe just bowed in, and at the corners, it's, you know, all dredged out. And you would render this horrible-looking image. But then, when you put it through the horrible lens, they would cancel each other out, and you have a perfect image again. And I realized that you could do this in real-time on a graphics card on a modern computer. And this wasn't really a new idea. NASA had actually had this idea in the 70s, but computers were nowhere remotely powerful enough to do it. I realized that computers had finally gotten powerful enough to make a head-mounted display that only worked if you had a powerful graphics card continuously compensating for the deficiencies of the optics. Rendering a distorted view that my optics would then undistort.

• 15:13Rick Rubin?

  What in your experience before that led you to be able to know what you just said?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  So this is actually where it gets back to Mod Retro, crazily enough. Mod Retro... was actually something I did before Oculus. I started it when I was 14 or 15. It was an online community for people who wanted to modify vintage game systems and computers.

• 15:31Rick Rubin?

  Did you create mod retro?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  I did. I'm the creator of mod retro.

• 15:34Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Well, it was me and a few of my online buddies.

• 15:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  We'd never actually met in real life, but we were a bunch of online buddies and we said, we're gonna make this website. And it was, it was actually really popular at the time. We were getting millions of page views a month, back when that meant something.

• 15:50Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  These days, you know, millions of page views, lots of people get millions of page views. But this was in the 2000s, you know? And what we did was combine old technology with new technology. So we would modify, for example, a Nintendo 64 and turn it into a handheld portable system, using modern batteries, modern displays, transforming it from one thing into an adjacent thing.

• 16:10Rick Rubin?

  Was gaming always part of it?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  It was usually part of it. We were also, like, one project that someone did was modified a music player. And at the, at the time, MP3 players were relatively new. And they put one into a cassette tape. So they made a cassette tape that itself stored hundreds of songs. And it had its self-contained battery and it looked just like a cassette tape. But you would put it into your car and it would play songs that were MP3 files in your normal cassette tape player. And it's like, it was, it was usually gaming-related. Super, it was, it was-

• 16:42Rick Rubin?

  Super, super cool.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Especially back in the 2000s, you know? I mean, this was, you know, there's products you can buy like that now 20 years later. But we were just a bunch of kids. We were mostly teenagers, college students, you know, wacky nerdy guys, just building cool projects.

• 16:54Rick Rubin?

  I can remember the early days, there was a cassette that you could put in that had a wire coming from it.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Sure, an adapter.

• 17:00Rick Rubin?

  That you could plug something in when you needed that.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 17:02Rick Rubin?

  At one point in time.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in this case, it was cool because it was totally self-contained, no wire.

• 17:06Rick Rubin?

  What a great idea.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  But, so gaming was often involved, but we, there were not, it was really just, it was combining, you know, modern technology and retro technology. It was in, over the course of mod retro, that I got into display technology, electronics modification. That, that, like, I'm a self-taught engineer.

• 17:20Rick Rubin?

  Were you a math guy?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I was not super good at math, but more practical engineering.

• 17:25Rick Rubin?

  I understood.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  You know, like mechanical design, optical design. So when, when I started.

• 17:30Rick Rubin?

  You said that that is your main thing, your mechanical.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  I would say mechanical, electrical, optical. I'd say at its core, I'm a guy who understands enough about everything.

• 17:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  To know when there's opportunities to put new things together.

• 17:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And when I started Oculus, all the first people that I hired were actually people from Mod Retro. It was crazy. We're like a whole bunch of, you know, nerdy kids.

• 17:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. The first person that I hired at Oculus was my friend Chris Dykes, who was one of the administrators on Mod Retro. And I hit him up and asked him what he was going to be doing for the summer. And he said, oh, you know, I'm going to be working this job until I go to college in fall. I said, no, you're not. You're going to come and we're going to build virtual reality headsets because I've just cracked the code. We're going to start this company. That was on a Friday and on that Monday, I drove to his house in my minivan, picked up him and all of his stuff from his mom's house. And he never went home. We went and we, and we went and we, we lived in a motel during the early days of Oculus because we didn't have an office or a house. It was pretty wild.

• 18:37Rick Rubin?

  DIY.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  It was totally DIY. We, we were the DIY spirit embodied. Like a bunch of DIY guys trying to turn our DIY virtual reality project into a real consumer product that would be manufactured by millions.

• 18:51Rick Rubin?

  No. Again, you said at this time, it was a dead technology because since the 1950s, people had tried doing it.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:58Rick Rubin?

  It was always too heavy. It was always too expensive and it was just sort of forgotten about. Is that correct?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  It was forgotten about, except as maybe a punchline. From time to time, people make jokes about virtual reality, you know, like The Simpsons has some joke.

• 19:10Rick Rubin?

  Failed technology.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  A failed, and it was, it was even worse than a failed technology. It was seen as a failed technology that it was the go-to example for an out-of-touch view of the future. If you wanted to paint somebody as, you know, being out of touch, you'd say, you'd show them like, oh yeah, virtual reality is the future because people had heard it so many times before. And then it was, you know, it was to paint.

• 19:31Rick Rubin?

  It never came to fruition.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  It was to paint you kind of as a nutter.

• 19:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  And, and, and anyone who talked about VR was treated that way as, as just a nutty person who believed in, I mean, you might as well believe in time travel.

• 19:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Was that part of the draw or no?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  It was never part of the draw for me exactly. At some point, I started to get pissed off enough about people treating me that way that I wanted to prove them wrong. But in the, but in the beginning, no, I was, I mean, nobody, nobody cared one way or the other. And did you just want this device? So I was a gamer. Yeah. I loved video games. Yeah. I was modifying all these vintage consoles, but I was also a modern PC gamer. And I built this PC gaming rig. I think it would have been six, six monitors. So it was using an AMD ifinity setup. And it was. I don't know what that is. Yeah, it was, it was, it was their old tech for spanning multiple monitors together. Imagine like a big giant wraparound display made of multiple screens. I had a really high-end computer driving it.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  You know, as I set this up, kind of think of it like the ultimate gaming rig that I paid for using all this money that I made working odd jobs here and there fixing computers, doing stuff. And I realized, okay, this is the pinnacle of PC gaming right now in front of me. This, you can't get any better than this. Well, what's the next step? And it was a, it was a difficult question for me because I wasn't sure. Like, was it going to be instead of six monitors, I had eight monitors? Were the graphics going to get ever so slightly better? And that started to actually really worry me. I was like, well, this can't be the pinnacle of it, right? You know, I sure, if the next step is just like more screens or bigger, I mean, that's not interesting. Yeah. And I said, well, maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. And it was this, I remember this moment so clearly because it was probably the, one of the most important. Where were you?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  I was in the garage of my parents' house. We had a two-car subterranean garage with a ramp up to the street. And my dad had one half of the garage for his cars and projects, and I had one half of the car. Was your dad also a do-it-yourself tinkerer? Do it yourself, but of the previous generation. You know, do like, do it yourself, like, build your own jets, clean your own carb. You know, not, not like build your own virtual reality headset, but exact same mentality. And I realized I shouldn't be asking what the next step is. I should be asking what the final step is. Where's all this going in the long run? Who cares about the two or three next steps along the way? Where is this going to go in a hundred years? What will gaming look like?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And instantly, my mind jumped to, well, of course, it's going to be virtual reality. The ability to feel like a virtual world is real. You're in the game. You're inside the game itself and that it's indistinguishable from reality. That's obviously where this is going. And from there, I said, well, I only want to work on that. I don't want to work on the intermediary steps. I don't want to have slightly better color reproduction in my displays, slightly higher resolution in the rendering engine.

• 22:18Rick Rubin?

  What do you think?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  And that was where I became obsessed with VR.

• 22:20Rick Rubin?

  What do you think were the data points leading up to that that allowed you to have that epiphany?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Pop culture. It was pop culture only. I loved science fiction novels. I loved science fiction film. And I really appreciate science fiction authors and creators in general because their job is to think about what the future will look like. And if you say, well, what's the future of gaming? To someone who grew up in my generation, who grew up watching The Matrix, who grew up watching Yu-Gi-Oh, who, you know, grew up seeing all this. It was obvious, like, oh, obviously, that was the future. Later, I think I was able to back that up with, you know, technical reasons. Well, here's why the ultimate gaming display would be a VR.

• 23:01Rick Rubin?

  It started more just?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  It was, it was just?

• 23:03Rick Rubin?

  Pop culture aspirational.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  I mean, look, it's like, it's, how many things have happened because science fiction depicted them, right? Like, you know, I loved Star Trek growing up. And, you know, the version of the future that I envisioned included virtual reality. And it's like, well, that's where we're all going. Yeah, it was, it was very much driven by just like what creative science fiction had imagined about the future.

• 23:26Rick Rubin?

  And how old were you at this time, when you had the epiphany?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  I was 15.

• 23:29Rick Rubin?

  15?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I started building my own virtual reality headsets that summer, and they were terrible. I want, I don't want to act like I-

• 23:35Rick Rubin?

  Were there mod retro guys all around 15?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  We were probably between the ages of 13 and 25 would be like the typical range. It was mostly high school students, college students, and people who were out of college but not yet in the real world. We joked, not back then, we didn't recognize this till later, but we often talked about how mod retro is basically like, uh, it was The Lost Boys. It was a bunch of boys who hadn't yet grown up.

• 24:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Or, and maybe who never would. And there were a few guys who never did grow up. There were, like, there were these outliers. But it typically was, it was people in school, people in college, or people who had not yet- Get joined to the workforce. Once you joined the workforce, you kind of got suitified and transformed and now you're taking care of, you know, a family or a house and your bills. You don't have time to just work on cool projects necessarily. Were you homeschooled as well? I was, I was. Do you think that that also played into your open mindedness? Absolutely. I don't think that Oculus would have existed if I had not been homeschooled. And I was one of four kids. All of us were homeschooled at one point or another, but if some of the kids did better in public school, some of them did better homeschooling.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I, I, I was the one who was homeschooled all the way through. It worked out really well for me. Great. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be homeschooling my kids. Amazing. When people tell me, um, you know, Palmer, is it important that you homeschool your kids too? And my point to them is, I don't know if it's important that I homeschool them. It's just really important to me that I not put them into the school system. And well, everything else comes from there. Like, is it homeschooling? Is it something else entirely? I don't know, but I don't want to just cram them into the mold. System. Right. Yeah, I, I was lucky enough to be able to pursue my own interests. Yeah. To spend a lot of time working on this stuff. Also, like, it taught me to manage my time, I think, much better than I would have otherwise. I still had to do standardized testing and, you know,

• 25:29Speaker 01

  keep up with a certain level of knowledge. I couldn't just do whatever I wanted. But it was nice to say, okay, I, I can spend, you know, I also started going, doing college courses when I was 14 or 15. How did that happen? So, in California,

• 25:44Speaker 01

  high school students are allowed to attend community college courses. It's allowed and you get to pay the normal community college rate, which is you have nothing. It's, it's, it's highly subsidized by state. Taking, I imagine, things that you wanted to learn. Things that I wanted to learn. So I, I joined like the Long Beach City College Robotics Team, for example. And the best part about that is that you can get high school credit and college credit at the same time. It's fully double dipping. And, you know, if I can pass a college algebra course, why shouldn't I get credit for it? You know what? Why should I do AP Algebra in high school? Because AP Algebra gets you college credit as well. So if I'm going to take the actual college course, shouldn't I also get high school credit? And so that, that's great. And what's cool is if you start attending community college courses when you're a teenager,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  you can turn 18, having done all your general education court, you know, units. Before you even graduate high school. And so now you can just transfer to a to a school that's in, you know, whatever your specialty is, and you can graduate in less than two years. Wow. Which is really cool. Really cool. I've never heard anyone mention this before. Oh, so so here's the problem. It's very, very difficult for most people to actually do this. Why? Because the law says two things. First of all, that you are last in line for all community college courses. Meaning basically there's an enrollment date. Your enrollment date is a non, as a high schooler, opens up like a month after everybody else. So the problem is most of the courses, especially the ones you want, they're already full.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  They're already fully enrolled. I see. And so I actually got extremely good at the art of persuasion because you can often petition into a course. If you show up on the day and you have the petition form, you're like, I want you to same day enroll me in this course. You know, professor. And if you show up to a class and not everyone shows up, you often get in right away. Sometimes you could work a deal with the professor and be like, look, I know that people dropped this course. Keep auditing the class for like the next week or two. And odds are enough people will drop that there will be room for you. And then I'll let you late enroll into my course. So I got very, very good. I had to petition into every single course I took. Every single one. So I got very good at researching, you know, for example, a professor who worked in like for my geology class.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  I would read his, you know, read papers of the professor and then I could go and say, oh, you know, Professor Dine, I loved your paper on, you know, metamorphology in the San Joaquin Basin. And, you know, I I would so love to take your course. You know, that's how it works. So that was the first difficulty, while you've probably not heard. People have to petition in. Yeah. And I mean, kids these days don't even want to answer your telephone calls because it stresses them out. Imagine telling them you need to go and you need to negotiate with a professor you've never met for each of your classes. The other reason is, I think, a little more sinister. It's that. You can only sign up for college courses if your principal signs up to allow it. Why is that?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  The reason is because the teachers unions got really concerned because people were going in saying like, "Why would I take my math course here? I'm gonna go take it at a community college where it's better instructors, better hours. I can do night classes sometimes and I get college and high school credits at the same time." That's great. But the problem is when you do that, then you don't take the high school course and the school loses proportional funding. I see. And so what happened is the teacher unions managed to get a piece of legislation passed that says, "You can only take a community college course if your principal signs off for that specific course." So every time you take it, you need to get a signature from your principal saying, "I agree that you will not take this course here at my school and you will instead take it there."

• 29:20Speaker 01

  And most schools have a policy of saying they will only sign off if it is a course that they do not offer anything like it. So for example, they might allow you to take a robotics course, but like they might have a crappy robotics class. And you might have a world-class robotics team in your town and the principal say, "Our policy is that we'll not sign off on this." This was one of the reasons it was so great for me to be homeschooled. We had our own state affidavit filed, our own homeschool plan, and my mom was my principal. So she could just sign up, sign the paperwork. So I would show up to enroll in the class, like, "Here's my form saying that my principal has allowed me to take this class." Amazing. And I really hate this because it's one of the things like you turn 18 and all of a sudden you don't need this anymore. And I always hated growing up. There's all these things where I'm 16 years old.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Why shouldn't I be able to go to the community college and sign up for a course? Why is it the state is gonna tell me, "No, you are not allowed to be in this class unless you happen to be in one of the districts that will sign off?" Because like, most kids don't get to choose where they live, right? You could just end up in a district where your teachers just won't sign off. And what does that mean? It means you're not joining the robotics team. It means you're not getting the opportunities that I did. Anyway, you can probably tell I've got beefs with the traditional education system here because I often see them holding back kids. It's heartbreaking. Any kid should be able to sign up for the robotics team, any of them. For sure. But you're right, and it is heartbreaking. And I've had kids ask me for help with this, and my only advice then is you need to exit the school.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  How can I convince my school to let me do this? I say, "You need to exit the school system. They're not going to let you do this because it would set precedent." Did you ever get into BattleBots? I loved watching BattleBots. And do you know it's back in Las Vegas as a permanent show? I went to see it. How was it? I haven't actually been... Me and my friends have been planning to go and see it, but we haven't actually gotten there yet. You'll love it. So, I mean, BattleBots, you remember Robot Wars? Yep, so I never participated in that, but growing up, I mean, it inspires you. And people want kids to be inspired by the right things, and I think there's... They want you to say, "I was inspired by John Glenn being an astronaut," or "I was inspired by Greta to save the environment." Like, those are acceptable things.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Nobody wants to say, "My kid was inspired by the violent robots fighting each other." But when you're talking about young boys, like, that's meeting them at their level. Like, I have a young boy, seven months old, and he's already learned what his new favorite activity... He's only seven months old. It is to take one thing in his hand and then find something else and hit it as hard as he can to make the loudest noise he can. And if it doesn't make a loud noise, he'll then try something else. And once he discovers, you know, like, some thing that he can hit on the pan and it makes noise, he'll just do that, and he says, "This is fantastic. I'm just smashing these things together." People have been doing that for millions of years. I mean, it's just... I think it's good to inspire people where they are because that's how they're going to go do something else. Absolutely.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I've argued with parents about this. They're like, "Well, I don't really want to... You know, I don't want to encourage violence." I'm like, "He's not attracted to the violence." Like, BattleBots is not about violence. It happens to take the form of a competitive, gladiatorial-style combat sport. It's about the machines, the engineering, the power of man's will brought to bear on somebody else's... The output of somebody else's mind. It's a duel of the minds, camouflaged as...

• 32:43Speaker 01

  A physical battle and I think even kids understand that and that's why they find it so attractive. And so I argue with them. I say, guys, like if your kid likes battle bots, they're not going to go be a serial killer or murderer. They're going, gonna go on to be like a nap. They're gonna be an engineer.

• 32:59Rick Rubin?

  Exactly.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  For me, growing up, it wasn't battle bots. It existed when I was a kid, but it took a while to get around. But like I grew up going to demolition derbies.

• 33:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And my dad was a car salesman and his car dealership, the guys would build a car for the Orange County Fairs demolition derby every year. And so you'd have all these, you know, car salesmen on their off hours, you know, welding on bars, you know, souping up this car, building something like, you know, for me, that was a really, really fascinating thing. And it teaches, it's so hard to make a kid care about how to calculate the failure point of a span when it's just a bridge drawn on a piece of paper.

• 33:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  But when it's welding a cage onto a car and you know you're going to see it smash in another car, just like you saw last year. All of a sudden that stuff takes on a really real meaning and you all of a sudden understand it and will understand why you should care.

• 33:56Rick Rubin?

  When did you first get interested in the software side of things? Cause I'm hearing a very physical world of view from you.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So here's my secret. I'm a hardware guy who took the hard knocks to finally acknowledge the value of software. I am not a software guy. I'm a quite poor programmer. I have a good understanding of software concepts of computer science concepts and I've obviously worked with software my whole life. But I am not the guy who does a really good job of that. And I know that sounds weird, right? Because the whole like Oculus, it was basically a hardware innovation that relied on a software innovation.

• 34:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And then even with my new company, Andro, I mean, we're an artificial intelligence company, building defense products and we have dozens of products that are all built on our AI platform. I'm not an AI programmer. I couldn't contribute meaning to Philly to that. But we have more people working on software than all of our dozens of hardware products combined.

• 34:53Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  It turns out that that's where a lot of the value is these days. And it takes a lot of effort. You know, these things are not easy to build. Yeah. And so I'm a hardware guy trapped in a software world. Have you ever met Marc Andreessen? I have. You know, I mean, he famously said, you know, "Software is eating the world." And he was right. Now, Peter Thiel has his book Zero to One about, you know, bits versus atoms. And I'm much more on the atoms side of the X specialty than... So continue the Oculus story. Sure, sure. So I start this company. Yep. I hire a bunch of my... And you're 15. So I started building VR headsets when I was 15. Okay. My first ones were awful. Yep. My second ones were awful. I built dozens of prototypes over the course of about four years.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And when I was 19 is when I built my first set of prototypes. Where when I showed it to my friends, instead of making fun of me, they said, "I get it now." I had a series of different breakthroughs that all culminated in a prototype. Do you remember what they were? Oh, yeah. Tell me. What was the first breakthrough? So the first breakthrough was the one that I described where basically you do geometric pre-distortion in real time in a shader on a graphics card. So doing in software what everyone else had previously done in optical hardware. And is that how it's done in video games? VR video games, yes. Yeah, like basically I had figured out how to make lenses that were very wide field of view to make you feel like you're in the game and very lightweight. How do you learn about lenses? So when I decided I needed to build VR headsets, I decided I had to educate myself.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were talking about I'm building a theory of feet. Yeah. I needed to learn everything I could about optics. How do you start? How do you do that? So you start by just looking into the fundamental principles. So you read some of the college, you know, textbook level work. Yep. Then you want to say, "Okay, I've learned the basics. I understand the concepts of reflection versus refraction. I under the idea of compound optics. I understand the a-sphere versus spherical opticals." You learn the basics. Then you need to say, okay, where are the people who are pushing the limits? Or who are the people even who disagree? Who are the people who are taking unconventional approaches? And to do that, you need to go into published literature. You need to read academic studies. Would you reach out to people directly? I often would. A lot of that was available online, and so I was able to get studies.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Sometimes they would be available in paid databases and that I didn't want to pay for. And if you reach out to the authors of the study, they'll often send you a copy just because, you know, as someone who's- Yeah, you're interested. They're interested, yeah. They don't make money off of it, the database, people do. And then I also started buying old virtual reality headsets. And at the time, they were really cheap. So like, there was a system, one system that I bought, that originally, when it was sold to hospitals as a data visualization device, like basically, you know, pre-looking at 3D scans of stuff. They bought it for about $90,000 in the 1990s, and I bought it for less than $200. Wow. They're, I mean, they're basically throwing this stuff away. Nobody cared about VR back then. No, it's obsolete. It's garbage to anyone else. It's garbage.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And so I actually, over the course of those four years, built up the world's largest collection of virtual reality devices, over 100 different devices. And this is a teenager. Yeah. And it's so funny, because now, everyone holds on to that stuff. And it's like, it's not even that the prices have gone up, they just don't even sell it. And so I actually, single-handedly destroyed my hobby of collecting virtual reality gear. But I bought this stuff, and the first thing I would do when I would get it, is take it apart. And when you take something apart, you learn, you might not learn so much. If you took apart a VR headset, you might not learn all that much. But when you've immersed yourself in the field, it's almost like you can see what they were thinking as you take it apart. You can imagine the conversations and the trade-offs. Say, "Oh, I see." The choices made. The choices.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  "I see why he did this. He was trying to get that weight out from here, up to here, because he didn't want to have to have a strap over the top of the head to counterbalance it. I see what he was going for there, not the choice I might have made." And you could kind of- But would you see some good ideas also? I would see good ideas as well. You'd see what wouldn't work and what might work. And many of these people, you'd see their older work. So I would even buy multiple headsets, you know, maybe- They were built by, like, there's a company called Olympus. They have the Olympus iTrek line. And you could actually see over time, the design changing. And you could say, ah, they realized this was bad and that this was good. And a lot of this was just lost knowledge. There's nobody talking about it out in the public because it all happened decades earlier. Not as an academic thing. It didn't go anywhere. It didn't go anywhere and it was commercial.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  So it happened privately inside of these companies, didn't go anywhere. And so like, you've probably read a book about the creation of the iPhone at some point, right? Or Steve Jobs, never? No. Well, I'll tell you, there are dozens of books about it. Because the iPhone is a success. Yes. There's endless material. If you wonder, how did they decide to do this? You could educate yourself a lifetime over. Yes. But VR failed. And so all that material was forgotten. No books were written about it. Nobody did anything. You know, one of the other things I did was track down people who had worked in the VR industry in the 90s. And I met with them. And there was one group of people. They were, they were the people who were some of the original co-founders of a company called Virtuality. It was one of the almost successful virtual reality companies.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  It had gone bankrupt, but they had a run of success selling virtual reality arcade machines to theme parks, casinos. They had some at Walt Disney World. And I managed to track down a couple of the guys who owned the assets, remaining assets of Virtuality. And I met with them in an Olive Garden in Kansas City, Missouri. And I just wanted to ask them a bunch of questions. Why did you guys do this? Why was this done? And then my final question then was, would you consider selling some of the intellectual property of Virtuality to me? Because I'm looking at starting a VR company. At this point, I was 18, thinking about it. And their advice to me was to run, not walk. Not just from them, but the VR industry.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  They said, dude, you'll never raise money. Nobody takes it seriously. Everyone will think you're a kook. And it won't, they said that the real problem with virtual reality, we've learned, is not that it will fail. It's that it will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will be that idiot who believed in virtual reality. And everyone will think you're a cookie nutter. And they, and they said, we're, we're lucky. Like, we've managed to find a second career as like... Commercial real estate broker. They escaped, but only by hiding their past. Yes. And so their advice was, yeah, run, run. And I did think about that because here's two guys who have experienced it. But I was just so obsessed with it. I just couldn't get away from it. And a lot of their advice ended up being right. I struggled to raise money.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  People thought it was crazy. So Peter Thiel's fund, Founder's Fund, they were the first institutional investor to write a check into Oculus. They gave us $1 million before anyone else really believed in us. And it was a very interesting conversation because I was talking with one of the general partners, Brian Singerman. And he's basically beating me up and saying, well, there's never been a successful VR company in history. What makes you think that you're so special? And I think their final thinking was, okay, for Palmer to be successful, this has to not just be a successful company. He has to create a successful industry. Yeah, market. He has to create it and it'll be the first successful VR company in history. If he's right, it's because he created an entire landscape through this company. Which is difficult.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  It's very difficult. It almost never works. And I think their final conclusion was this probably isn't going to work. But you know what? Here's a million dollars. Why not? Because venture capitalists, their business model is, you know, they're going for power law. They take risk. Yep, a few massive successes pay for a long tail of failures. And I think they said, you know what? We've got $6 billion in our fund. We've got to invest in something. A million dollars, like, you know, one six thousandth of our fund that we need to invest this year. You know, it's worth that. And of course, I'll jump ahead to the end of the story. I ended up selling Oculus just two years later. Two years later. Two years, actually, well, less than two years later. It was actually exactly 18 months.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  So you get a million dollars and 18 months later, you sold the company for what? $2.3 billion. So it's pretty. It's unbelievable. It was the right technology at the right time. I mean, and like they invested because they saw my demo. I showed them my headset and they said, holy shit, this is incredible. This is the best VR we've ever seen. Their problems weren't with me or with the tech. It was just can VR in general even be a thing?

• 43:29Rick Rubin?

  The market had already rejected it.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  The market had rejected it. And they knew, and it's not just their money. They say, okay, well, you're going to need to raise money from other people and you'll struggle. You're going to need to convince employees to come to work for you. It's going to be a struggle. You're going to need to convince game developers to support you. That's going to be a struggle. So that, the lack of belief wasn't even necessarily in even the tech. It's like, you're going to need to convince every group of the gaming and tech society to believe in this. And we somehow pulled it off. You know how we pulled it off?

• 43:57Rick Rubin?

  How?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Remember I said in the eighties and nineties, the people who were most excited about virtual reality were the ones who hadn't tried it. They like, they'd seen The Matrix or Lawn Mower Man, but they, they had never, they didn't understand how bad it was. We took the opposite approach. We had a small marketing budget. We didn't buy billboards. We didn't buy TV ads. We didn't buy social media ads. We just went to game conventions. We went to game conventions, set up a booth, set up a headset, set up a game and said, come try this.

• 44:26Rick Rubin?

  Play the game.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Play the game. Put it on your head, feel like you're inside the game. Our slogan at the time was step into the game.

• 44:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  And so we had our little, our little banner at our little crappy booth. Step into the game.

• 44:36Rick Rubin?

  And anyone else used it for gaming before?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  People had tried to use VR for gaming, but it just, the quality, not even close.

• 44:43Rick Rubin?

  Right.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And so we were the first VR headset, I think, ever where the people who were most excited were the ones who had tried it. That was how we got people excited. We, we went to the game developers conference, which just happened in San Francisco, you know, 2025 version. We went to GDC.

• 44:59Rick Rubin?

  Do you still go?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  I don't have a reason to. I, I actually, that's not true. My company, Andorl, has a recruiting team there because we're, we hire people with that skillset. But I used to go every year for Oculus, but I just can't justify. It's the same, I used to go to Japan three or four times a year because all the game developers were there. And I don't have a, a good reason to go to Japan every year, which makes me sad. But yeah, that, that's how we got people to care. We showed it to them. They saw it and then they, once you tried it, you understood, oh, it's actually here. The time has come.

• 45:28Rick Rubin?

  Okay. Now I have a controversial question. In here now, 2025, did VR fail again?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  That is a fair question to ask, and I will take maybe the unsurprising position, absolutely not. It has not failed. There is a narrative going around where people are like, "Oh, VR has totally failed." But like, let's look at this in perspective. The Oculus Quest 2, the last version of the best-selling VR headset, Oculus Quest, or I guess now it's Meta Quest. They just launched the Quest 3, but the previous version that they launched a couple of years ago, sold over 20 million units.

• 46:04Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  It outsold the Xbox.

• 46:05Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  So I read even these game outlets, like, "Oh my god, VR is such a failure." Like, it's outselling the Xbox. It is the third best-selling game console platform in the world, this one VR headset. Also, there's like PlayStation VR. PlayStation VR, the first one, sold millions of units, and the second one has sold millions of units more. So I would say, looking from where I started, where nobody cared, like, for it to go from, people think it's literally like a failure, to it is one of the most successful console platforms in the world, and Apple has launched a headset, Meta's launched a headset, Google's now kicking off a new effort, like, it's hard for me to look at that as a failure.

• 46:46Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  The United States of America is only 350 million people, and they've bought like 35 million VR headsets. Hard for me to look at that as a failure.

• 46:55Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  But I think where the failure narrative comes from, and where it's fair, is the hype level that people put out, where they said, "We're gonna have this on a billion people, this is gonna change computing, it's gonna become the dominant computing platform." I still believe all those things, by the way. I believe that it will become the dominant computing platform, and not necessarily like big bulky VR headsets, but something, you know, like a pair of Oakleys you put on, and they augment your view, they trans... Sometimes you'll be in VR, sometimes you'll be in AR, sometimes you'll have nothing.

• 47:24Rick Rubin?

  What's AR?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Augmented reality. So think of VR as I've been transported to a virtual world. Augmented reality is, I'm putting directions, you know, for where I'm going in my view.

• 47:34Rick Rubin?

  I'm in this world, but I'm getting more information. It's like the heads-up display in your car.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's this old concept called the virtuality continuum. The idea is that AR and VR are not different things, they're actually different. ends of the same spectrum, one that is fully virtual and one that is fully real. Like, imagine I'm in the real world and then I add one dot marker. That's a little bit here. Imagine over here, I'm in a game, but now imagine that I'm able to see my hands in the game. That's a little more augmented and then somewhere here in the middle. Imagine if we were sitting here like we're sitting now. Imagine if around us was, you know, some arbitrary, I don't know, what's a place you like?

• 48:14Rick Rubin?

  Italy.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Italy. Suppose that we're sitting here and it's me and you sitting and we're in Rome. And then imagine that it is that it turns out maybe you're sitting here and I'm sitting in my house in Newport Beach. And we feel like we're sitting in the same place and in Rome. That would be, you know, it's a mix of virtual content, real content.

• 48:31Rick Rubin?

  And you think that's something that's coming?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I think it's absolutely coming.

• 48:35Rick Rubin?

  That's cool.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  I still believe it is. But the future of computing, you just ask the same question again that I asked about gaming. Okay. What's the next version of this phone going to be? That's pretty easy, right? You're like, oh, it's gonna be higher resolution and that the internet speed will be higher. And I guess maybe it'll be a little thinner.

• 48:53Rick Rubin?

  Better camera.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Better camera, right, exactly. But then ask yourself, well, what's the final version of this? What is this gonna be in a hundred years? Is it still gonna be like a rectangular thing that I put in my? No, it's probably not like at that point, it's probably some data implant that gives you superhuman vision where you can also see in the dark so you don't run into things at night.

• 49:14Rick Rubin?

  Will there be a way to talk to our devices directly, mentally, without an implant?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, I mean.

• 49:20Rick Rubin?

  How will that work?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  That whole field you're talking about is typically it's either BCI, brain to computer interfaces, or HCI, human to computer interfaces. There's already very compelling technology to do this without implants. Actually, a lot of this has been developed by some of my former team members who are still at Meta. They have a device that you can wear on your arm and people think that it just detects your muscle movements. But it's actually much more sensitive than that. You can actually send it signals using your nerve cords that it can detect that are, have no motion at all. You can basically learn to use it as an arbitrary data link to control things, type. That's where all this stuff is going in the long run. Eventually, you'll probably wear some wristband or, you know, something.

• 50:04Rick Rubin?

  And it'll just read your, essentially read your mind?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  It'll essentially read your mind. It may not be reading your brain directly, but to be clear. I've got this particular opinion that I haven't talked about too much, but I believe that technology has moved in the wrong direction as a result of the iPhone exclusively. What happened with the iPhone is that it was so easy to use that everyone wanted to make things that were similarly easy to use. I mean, you could hand it to somebody who, and with no training, they could puzzle it out in about one or two minutes. And it was, it was just extremely easy to become proficient. And up until then, mobile computing devices, but also a lot of normal computing devices, they required a lot of practice to use. It probably took you a while to learn how to type, right? To how to type well.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  I still don't know how to type. It takes hundreds of hours of dedicated practice to become a good typist, minimum. But once you do it, it's a superhuman interface. It allows you to do it, you can type faster than you can talk, extremely accurate. Yeah, you know, it's an input and output stream. Reading is much faster than, than talking. And so computers up to that point had been a superhuman input device. They elevated what we could do. We could do things that were far beyond what we could do ourselves. Steve Jobs famously said, uh, he wanted a computer to be a bicycle for the mind, to make you more efficient, faster, able to get where you needed to go with less effort. The iPhone, I think, was a detour on that. It was, we're gonna just make computing really easy to use. An iPhone is not a superhuman productivity device, right? Like, you can spend hundreds of hours using it

• 51:36Speaker 01

  and not come even close to the productivity of a person with a full-size keyboard and a full-size mouse and a full-size monitor. And this has been true for applications. People stopped making video editing applications for consumers that required a lot of learning. And instead, they wanted to make really basic, simple ones. And they're successful. And like, that's what TikTok is. TikTok is like, you know, Sony Vega Pro collapsed into like five buttons and made extremely easy to use. And that's why millions of people use it every day. But there's only so much you can do with TikTok, right? It limits your creativity. There are creative limitations to what you can do with an easy to use platform that has a low skill ceiling. Where I'm going with this is, I'm a huge fan of technology that raises the skill ceiling for dedicated users.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Like, I'm a big fan of technology that if you're willing to put in the time, it can make you something beyond human capability. And I'm finally coming back around. Human to computer interfaces, HCI or BCI, brain to computer interfaces, I'm not excited about them for making computers easier to use. I don't mind if my BCI requires 150 hours of training to even begin to be competent.

• 52:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  If that means that at hour 1,000, hour 5,000, I'm like a superhuman god of information control who can seamlessly convey things out of my brain and into the world with no barrier. Like, that's, I would train for thousands of hours.

• 53:00Rick Rubin?

  If we start with the idea that language isn't specific enough. If we could skip the language step.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Right. What people want is the Vulcan mind meld, right? They wanna, you know, they wanna touch hands and then just the full conceptual idea, go back and forth, the emotions associated with it.

• 53:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  And I think that that's where we can get, but not if we keep using devices that cap the skill ceiling extremely low to what can be done with no training. No, nobody even bothers to make devices or applications anymore unless they can be taught to somebody in a matter of 10 minutes. And I think that is to the detriment of society. The best things that I know how to do, not just in tech, in

• 53:42Rick Rubin?

  Anything.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Anything in life, they're not things I was able to learn how to do in 10 minutes.

• 53:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And usually with those things that are difficult to learn, over time, you find ways to make them easier to learn as well.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 53:54Rick Rubin?

  Just naturally.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  I mean, look at how we used to train typists on typewriters. We then invented better schemes, we invented typing programs that were much more effective. So the amount of time it takes to become a competent typist, for example, is in order of magnitude reduced to when we first developed that skill. I think it's also the same for surfing. So surfing used to require a lot more falling and a lot more, a lot more trial and error. But as people have turned it I don't know if it's exactly a science, but more like a science. They've seen, okay, it's a waste of time to even have people try to surf this type of condition. Like they're just going to fail and they don't learn from it. We've been able to basically perfect it and say, no, like we can train somebody to surf now in an afternoon. Like that would have been unthinkable in the 60s. Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  In the 1960s, like, oh, we're just gonna teach this guy to surf today. What? No, you can't do that. You have to be in the ocean for, you know, hundreds of hours. You need to be in the waves. You need to deeply learn to understand it. Then you need to learn to body surf. But now we've kind of perfected that. Did you ever learn to surf growing up in Southern California? I did learn to surf. I mean, I grew up in Long Beach, California, so I'm not saying I was ever particularly good surfer. But did you enjoy it? I did enjoy it. The problem for me is that I was, um, I was captured by technology. So I was an outdoor kid until I discovered how awesome computers were. And then I became an indoor kid. I don't want to say I stopped going outside, but like maintaining proficiency in surfing, it takes a certain level of investment. Would you say you're obsessive?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm an obsessive person. Yeah. Sometimes that's good and sometimes it's bad. Yeah, if you want to accomplish something, it's really good. That's right, that's right. If you want to build something, it's what it takes. It is. I mean, and that's, I think some of this is like, it's a creator versus consumer mentality. Yeah. There's some people who are like, oh, you know, but like, I think they, they look at people like me and say, oh, you're a workaholic. And my point is, it's not the act of working that consumes me. It's the nature of the work itself. Like, I enjoy it and it's engrossing and I, I, I'm immensely satisfied by it. But there's a lot of people say, but Palmer, you have all this money. Why do you still work? You sold your company for billions. I would never work. You, you're just obsessed with making more money.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I have to make, guys, it isn't the money, because I just have plenty of money. Yeah, you like to build things. I love to build things. And there, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a more consumer mentality. Like, there's people say, if I had your money, I would go retire to an island, my tie in hand. I'm like, you know what? That's actually totally reasonable. There's, there's a whole continuum of people. People in the world and just different people want different things.

• 56:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and many people who think they want that, get that and then quickly realize hmm, this is kind of empty.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  It's true. I mean, my, my grandpa was a pilot for United Airlines. He knew, he was like me. He liked what he did.

• 56:46Rick Rubin?

  Hard charger.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  He was a hard charger and when he retired, he became a, he got his pharmacy license. He became a pharmacist, specifically a prison pharmacist. He was basically like a sub, I know this sounds crazy. But he was basically a substitute teacher, prison pharmacist. So prisons need pharmacies, right? They just do. They need people to dispense the drugs. You gotta have all the right licenses. But imagine that you're a prison that has a pharmacist who needs to go on vacation. Or imagine that your pharmacist trips and falls down the stairs and needs to go to the hospital themselves for a week. Well, all of a sudden you need a, you need a substitute. And so that's what my grandpa did. And he found huge meaning in that work. And then he had other friends who, you know, your boys, they were tired and then they realized they didn't have anything to do.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  And then some of them went back into the workforce and some of them just went crazy.

• 57:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  And some of them died.

• 57:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, people die early when they have no purpose.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  That's right. I, I think it's, it's really important to have that purpose. And I mean, there's a group chat called the B-Boys Club. Stands for billionaire boys club. It's, it's a, people who have sold a company for at least a billion dollars. And about half of the B-Boys are obsessed people like me, who are like now on their second or third company and just loving it. The other half are people who are cruising the Mediterranean on their yacht. They're hanging out in Monaco, watching F1. And it's, it's so fascinating that you can have such disparity between people who, like, we obviously all had it in us to do it. And then I, I think it's when you get the money is where you find out what someone's true nature is.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Cause there's some people where they were doing it because they loved it, but also because they wanted that financial independence and the money. Once they had it, they had what they really were looking for, which is financial stability. And there's nothing wrong with that. My grandpa always stressed to me that financial independence is. One of the best goals in life, not not being wealthy.

• 58:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Independence. The idea is to achieve the level of wealth that allows you to say, I don't have to work today.

• 58:50Rick Rubin?

  Not have a boss.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  To not, I don't have to have a boss. If you have a boss, it's do this thing that you for, you know, your principles disagree with. To have the power to say, no, I'm independent of you. I reject what you're what you're directing me to do and I I'm not going to do it. And you can fire me, it doesn't matter. I'm I'm perfectly fine. And so that was that was for me an early goal.

• 59:11Rick Rubin?

  Was a goal of Oculus in building the company to sell the company?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  No, it was the opposite. I honestly felt like I had.

• 59:19Rick Rubin?

  You'd have it forever. It was your baby.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  I thought I'd have it forever and just, I mean, to be totally honest, if you start a company to sell, you start a company where there's buyers. There's lots of big laundromat companies that buy laundromats. There's lots of big tech companies that buy, you know, compression algorithms. There's lots of hardware companies that buy new display technology. There's nobody to buy a VR company like that. There was there's no market.

• 59:45Rick Rubin?

  No market.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  I assumed that I was just going to be this crazy guy tilting at this windmill.

• 59:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  And I saw a very high probability would fail, but I at least I would have.

• 59:55Rick Rubin?

  Got to do it.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  I would have got to do it. I would. I would have gotten to for at least a few years, work on my passion, which was trying to make the best virtual reality the world's ever seen. And I knew that if it did work, we would create an entire industry. And if I've been creating it to sell, I would have picked something different, which feels like there's something to learn there.

• 1:00:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Was there any emotion involved in selling it?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  There was some emotion, but it might not be what you imagine. I mean, usually when you sell a company, they take over your company and they like that's it. When Facebook bought Oculus, there were two elements of the acquisition that made it. So there were no negative emotions, or at least very few. The first is, they said, you'll be a wholly owned independent subsidiary. You'll get to make the calls, you decide what to do, you're going to keep get to go make this happen. Now, okay, so that that sounds great.

• 1:00:45Rick Rubin?

  That's good.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  And the other bit, you know, they originally offered us $1 billion. And we said no, because we just weren't interested in selling. They came back and wanted, said, okay, 2 billion. We said, no, we just weren't interested in selling. Because I, at this point, like 18 months in, when we started the company, it seemed crazy and nobody believed in us. 18 months in, every, we had, you know, because we'd gone all these game conventions and showed it to everybody. Everyone believed, all the top game developers were making games for our platforms. All the gamers were excited about what we were doing, so we, we, we convinced people. But the thing that really convinced me was when Facebook came back and said, okay, not only will we buy your company for 2 billion, in addition, we will commit to giving you a billion dollars in research and development funding. Wow.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Minimum for the next 10 years. That's incredible. So, to me, I'm running the numbers, I'm like, well, shoot, how many VR headsets do I have to sell to get a billion dollars of research and development? And they weren't willing to do this because they saw it as a long-term Yeah. investment in the future of computing. Yeah. I mean, I would need to sell millions and millions of VR headsets at a huge profit margin, which is hard. Yeah. And I calculated, like, at our margin at the time, we're like, we were making 20, you know, 20 dollars a headset. I was like, shoot, I'm gonna have to sell like hundreds of millions of headsets to get this amount of money. Yeah. It's just not gonna happen. Yeah. And so as a guy who really wanted to push the state of the art forward, that was, that was an impossibly good offer.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  10 billion dollars in research and development funding to do whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Which is all you wanted to do anyway. And then, and all of a sudden, I was gonna have 10 billion dollars to do it with instead of a few million dollars. And so, that was really what motivated me. I remember really explicitly, uh, when, when, there was an email thread after Mark had made this proposal to us. And someone said something like, well, they say that they, you know, care about it and they do that, but like, you know, who's to really say what would, how things will go in, you know, the future? Uh, and I said, look, if Mark is playing us, then he's Van Halen. Because, I mean, he was, he was masterful, right? It would have been like he came in with exactly the thing we wanted to hear. Yeah. And, and was just lying about it. And I, I couldn't imagine that.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  It was very clear that Mark did also believe in it.

• 1:03:04Rick Rubin?

  Did you see a life for VR past gaming? Or did you think gaming was the ultimate play?

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  No, I knew there was a huge past gaming. Actually, before I started Oculus, I worked for about eight months in an Army Research Lab on a program called Brave Mind. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.

• 1:03:21Rick Rubin?

  I feel like I have. Why would I have heard of it?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  So it's based in Los Angeles at the ICT Mixed Reality Lab, which is an Army affiliate research center between the US Army and the University of Southern California. It's basically, the idea is to bring Hollywood-type technology and work on military problems. So the Brave Mind program was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. The idea is that you could train them to mitigate their physiological responses, reduce their dependence on medication, improve their quality of life. And so I was working on that even before I started Oculus. I wasn't like an important guy in the program. I was a lab technician.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  But I knew from that experience alone that VR was going to be huge beyond just gaming. I was personally most motivated by gaming, but there was another factor that made gaming the right place to start. At the time that we started the company, the only computers that were capable of running virtual reality at a high enough frame rate to make you not get sick were gaming computers, very, very high-end computers with high-end graphics cards. And so who owns gaming computers? Well, gamers, exactly. And so you could say, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could make this, you know, to help, you know, relaxation or meditation experiences or like, you know, virtual travel for, you know, your grandma? But your grandma doesn't own a gaming computer.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  And so all of a sudden, for her, the price to buy into VR is thousands of dollars. She has to go buy like a $1,500 gaming PC and all these accessories and then buy a VR headset. Whereas the buy-in for a gamer is a few hundred dollars, which is a much more reasonable thing. And so we always knew that as technology progressed, it would become more accessible. And in particular, we invested very heavily. In what we called standalone VR technology. So, building VR systems that had their own processing onboard. So, they didn't need any external computer. And that's what became Oculus Quest. At the time that I was fired, it was called Santa Cruz. It was the internal name of the prototype. And we had just started showing it publicly.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  A virtual reality headset that did not need a computer. It rendered all of its own imagery using specialized chips on the device itself. And that was a crazy thing back then. But now, most VR headsets are independent. You don't need any kind of PC, much less a gaming PC. Lots changed since 2012.

• 1:05:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Getting fired was not part of the plan.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  It was not part of the plan at all.

• 1:05:55Rick Rubin?

  How did that change things for you?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  It was interesting because it had nothing to do with virtual reality. So, I gave $9,000 to the wrong politician to give money to if you live in San Francisco. I was immediately then put on leave. They tried to find some way, reason, they could fire me. There was a whole internal investigation. Honestly, I thought they were going to find something on me because you work in a place for, you're in charge of 1,000 employees for three years. You assume you did something against the rules at some point. But they did a whole internal investigation and they concluded I'd never violated any Facebook policies. And so, then they had to let me go for no reason at all. It was like, "Well, we can't come up with a reason, but we don't want you around anymore." So, it was purely political. It had nothing to do with my work performance.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  And that was very frustrating because I think it would have been a lot easier to stomach if it had been...

• 1:06:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, for doing something.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Or even if it had been something I did even at work. You know, like even if I just rubbed someone the wrong way at work. But it wasn't. It was purely outside of work that upset them. And I'd already been thinking about what I would do if I weren't doing VR. Because I really wanted to work on something that was impactful. So, I had decided... Quite a while earlier, that if I were going to ever start a new company, I wanted to work in the national security space. And I wanted to apply technology that I thought was important, like augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence. How did you pick that? Well, part of it was what I said earlier. I had worked on this army program, Brave Mind, earlier.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  And so I knew just how bad the government was at developing technology that could really make a difference for men and women in uniform, on the battlefield and off the battlefield. And I know it seems hard to believe today, but if you rewind back to like 2014, 15, 16, 17, all the big tech companies were very, very much in bed with China. They all thought they were going to get into China. They were going to make a lot of money in China. They were making censored versions of their products for China. China was a manufacturing base? So manufacturing base for hardware companies, an investor base for all tech companies, media companies too.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  And Hollywood in particular saw them as a market, right? It's a growing economy, huge population. Lots of people. And so tech saw them the same way. They said, you know, maybe China's not a huge part of my business today, but I imagine that in a few years, they might be the largest part of my business. And as a result, tech companies refused to do any work with the United States military. Not because they were, you know, they thought it was unethical to do so. It was a business decision. They said, I'm not going to work with the US military because if I do, China won't let me make money. And I got really worried about this because I saw it as a very dangerous experiment that we've never run in this country. What happens if you completely divorce our most innovative American technology companies

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  from the United States government? This has never happened in history. You've always had a very close relationship. I mean, that's where Silicon Valley came from. It's where microwaves came from. It's where semiconductors, it's where GPS. Exactly. And this was a very recent thing. And I said, shoot, this is like, this is actually a very dangerous experiment to run because if it goes the wrong way, we're just going to be.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Irreparably far behind dictatorships like China, Iran, Russia, who are heavily investing in technology for military applications. And so I'd been thinking about this for some time. To be honest, if I had not been fired, I think I would have been happy to keep working on VR for the rest of my life. I had said so many times. But if I was not going to be allowed to work on VR, then I knew what I wanted to work on. Did you ever consider buying Oculus back? The problem that you have with that is Mark Zuckerberg truly does believe in VR and AR and just the virtuality continuum. I mean, he changed the name of Facebook to Meta because he believes in the metaverse,

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  the idea of this virtual world that exists parallel to alongside and enmeshed through the physical world. He really believes in it. To the point where he believes the future of computers is that. The future of communication is that. The future of the internet and social media is that. So I guess the point is, when you say, "Could you buy back Oculus?", it's really, "Could you buy Meta?". And I need to check right now. But I think Meta has a market cap something like $500 billion, $600 billion. I don't have that much money. Yeah, he wouldn't sell the thing that he believes is the future of the company. It's just not practical. Do you believe it's the future? I do. I think different people maybe disagree as to the timeline.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  But something really strange would have to happen, I think, for augmented reality and virtual reality to not be the end game. Like, virtual reality is interesting because it allows you to have literally any kind of experience, any kind of interface, without physical limitation. And so imagine if you said, "Oh, the future is not AR. It's actually phones." "Okay, but my AR would allow me to simulate any type of phone you could ever imagine, if it's good enough, which it will be." At some point, AR and VR are indistinguishable from reality and their quality. So if I can simulate literally any type of physical device, any type of user interface, any type of environment,

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  how could it be that some small subset of that capability is going to be the thing that actually we're using? I just don't see it. Are we already living in a simulation? This is a classic question, right? Are we living in a simulation? I think that if we are, there's insufficient data to determine it one way or the other so far. There's lots of very interesting thought experiments and one of the ones that I've always liked, it's not based on data, it's more of a logic puzzle based on probability. It's, okay, do you believe that VR can ever become, for an individual person, indistinguishable from reality? And some people don't believe it. I, knowing the tech, I just can't imagine a world where it's impossible. Like, it will happen at some point.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Maybe it'll take 10 years, maybe it'll take 100. Surely 1,000 years from now, we'll have figured that shit out. If we're still around. And if you believe that, then the next obvious question is, well, if you are sure that we can build VR that is indistinguishable, what are the odds that you're living in a base level reality right now? Like, if it's possible in the future, wouldn't it have been possible, you know, if you're in a simulation, wouldn't it have been possible in the past? Like, what are really the odds? Because imagine a world where, you know, we build perfect simulation, we all live in a giant simulation, or maybe just one person is. Maybe everyone is our personal simulation. And then imagine in that simulation, there's a simulation, and that level there's a simulation. If you believe that perfect VR is possible, how likely is it that you're in the base level reality?

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  And it's kind of hard to argue with that one, but there's no data to really support it. And of course, there's one conclusion you could take away from that, which is that we will not be able to build VR technologies in this region. Like, you're familiar with the idea of the great filter? Oh, there's this concept, the great filter. It's basically, there's this problem. If life is random, and if life can spring to life randomly, why is the universe not full of life? Why is the-- But we don't know that. So we don't know that it's not full of life of some kind. But why is it not full of life like ours? I mean, we make a lot of radio waves. They travel out of the universe. If there were intelligent life all over the galaxy,

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  there should be just a huge amount of background radiation. We should be able to detect something. The great filter is the question, what is stopping that from happening? What is the thing that's stopping there from being intelligent life radiating signals all over the galaxy? And there's many theories. Like, one theory is that species typically don't develop. Like, maybe there is life all over the universe, but it usually doesn't develop to the point where they have radio waves. Another is that once you-

• 1:14:15Rick Rubin?

  Why would radio waves be the thing? It's like, maybe that's our thing, but that doesn't mean it's their thing.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  It could, and that's part of it. It could be that most, like, maybe they're-

• 1:14:24Rick Rubin?

  Maybe we don't have the receivers that pick up whatever their thing is.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  These are questions that go into the great filter. Like, one of the theories is that they're communicating at some extra-dimensional level. That, like, maybe we've spent way too long muddling about with radio, and normally they go straight up to, like, psychic, telepathic, multi-dimensional communication, and we're tuning in on the wrong dial. That is one of the great filter theories. Another theory is that any civilization that invents nuclear weapons extinks itself very quickly. And so, maybe there are briefly pockets here and there, but we don't see it everywhere because they all just wipe themselves out. One of the other theories is actually virtual reality. It's that eventually they develop sufficiently, and they all just plug themselves into VR. And they don't bother emanating radio waves or exploring the galaxy.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  They're just insular and in their own planet. And it's one of the things, there's a lot of theories for why this might be. So, like, but we don't know. There's not enough data. You can only really speculate. So I see a lot of similarities between the, "Are we in a simulation?" question, and "Why don't we detect intelligent life?" Is it because there is no intelligent life? Oh, here's another one you might like. One of the theories is that societies that develop quickly realize that maybe it's not a smart idea to radiate into space because you're announcing to everybody, here I am, I'm a threat, I'm a developing society that might come for you and your resources. And it could be that everybody who emits radio waves just gets whacked out of existence

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  by extraterrestrial powers who don't want any competition.

• 1:16:01Rick Rubin?

  That's what most of the 1950s movies, sci-fi movies are. That's the story.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And there are some pretty smart people who look at things like our search for extraterrestrials where we're listening, but also broadcasting, and they're saying this is the dumbest thing ever because anyone that could get to us, anyone who has the technology to get to us, probably not going to be good news for humanity. Of course, we want to believe that they're going to be advanced in morality and that they're going, but the problem is our version morality is uniquely human, right? It's not even a matter of, it might not be a matter of morality to them. It might be that we are like ants to them. Like, what if that's really the level that they see us on? It's not even, it's not even immoral for them to just wipe us out.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  One of the great filter explanations is that we are living in a simulation and that that's actually why we don't detect anything. That it's all just a simulation and why would you simulate endless civilizations out there if you don't need to?

• 1:17:02Rick Rubin?

  Will there be a time when the virtual reality experience can happen without wearing a device like a communal location where everybody gets to beam to another place?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  The technology to do that is certainly physically possible. There's even systems that can do this to a certain degree today. What it comes down to though is that most of the schemes to do so aren't as good as just wearing a pair of glasses. And remember, it doesn't need to be a big pair of goggles. You could, like even being able to wear like a pair of Oakleys is a huge step over trying to do it without them. Like, there's a few ways to do this. So like, one of the science fiction favorites is go straight to the brain, right? You pipe all the information right into the brain. The problem is the parts of the brain where we do. That type of visual processing are very tight clusters.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  It's actually very hard to stimulate individual neurons inside of it from the outside. It's hard even with implants to do it. They're so tightly clustered that really they only want to talk to each other. It's very hard to activate actually individual neurons without activating the ones that are around them. Effectively, it's a resolution problem. It's the matter is so dense. It'd almost be like saying, do you see that giant huge pile of salt over there? I want you to reach in and grab the one in the middle, but you can't disturb any of the others. It's a very difficult problem. For that reason, I'm generally a fan of VR schemes that don't go straight to the brain. They just clip on to the end of our peripheral nervous system. So our hearing, our sight, our touch.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  And then if you're going to do that, you know, I've got to get light into my eyes somehow. And there's some really wild schemes. I've heard people say, well, you could use like focused X-ray beams to activate rods and cones on your retina. And you could have like, you know, everyone could be walking around and you have a X-ray beam firing at everybody, drawing images on their eyes. But there's like, well, but then why wouldn't you just put the X-ray projector on a pair of glasses? Or just put a display projector and just project photons into their eyes, just like the real world does. It turns, it turns out like what we have is already really good. It's probably best to just copy that. You build a system.

• 1:19:20Rick Rubin?

  Is there a way to have the glasses without glass where it's projecting onto your eyes, but from locally?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  You mean like, so you're preparing for a pair of glasses?

• 1:19:28Rick Rubin?

  But they don't have any lenses.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  No lens?

• 1:19:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It's projecting at you instead of reflecting.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  So there are, you can make transparent lenses. That is something you can do. So I can make a thing where I'm wearing transparent lenses that are still projecting into.

• 1:19:44Rick Rubin?

  Well, is it projecting into your eyes or is it a screen that your eyes are focused on?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  It depends on the display technology. Like if you're using, there's something called a virtual retinal display where it basically usually uses a scanning laser. Kind of like what you're talking about, coming off of a thing that's on glasses. And there's no display in the whole thing. It's just basically painting an image through your lens onto the retina. So like, you know, an old CRT TV, you know, it goes zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. Imagine a laser. That paints an image like a CRT does. So why would the glass be necessary for that? The problem for it is that if you want a wide field of view and you want to be able to rotate your eyes, it needs to be able to paint it from any angle. So imagine this. Imagine I made something where it shoots in from here and I don't have any lens. But what if I rotate my eye over here? Now I need light to be coming in from this angle.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  I can't shoot light from here that comes into an eye that is pointing over this way. Whatever your scheme of projecting the ray in needs to physically cover the angle at which your eye can rotate and look in any direction, more or less. There's ways you could get around that. For example, the x-ray beam thing I told you, like that doesn't need to go through your eyes lens. That could, yeah, x-rays could go through your head and focus on your eye. They're like, that's crazy shit. Nobody's ever done this. It's a thought experiment. Another one is people have proposed what they call light field displays that create projections of light that are correct from all angles. And there's been a theory where you could make a room

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  where all of the walls are light field displays. And basically, imagine a world where if I'm looking this way and I look this way, the wall over here is now projecting the light field into my eye. And so you could have a full light field room. You could do that, but there's actually things that a light field room can't do for you. Is the sphere kind of like that? The light field room idea? It is a little bit like that. Now, it's a little different in that it's not 3D or capable of doing things up close to you. But yeah, you're right. It surrounds you. It surrounds you. But here's the thing the sphere can't do. What if I'm playing a game and I want to be holding a sword? Sphere can't do it. It can't draw an image of a thing attached to my hand. Let's say that I just want to do, imagine I'm a knight. I want to be wearing gauntlets.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  The sphere can't wrap virtual imagery of a knight's gauntlets around my hand. Whereas if I'm wearing glasses... I can absolutely do that. In fact, there's things that do it today. So there's just limitations. If you really want pure VR, the best way to do it, I know everyone wants to get away from glasses, but at some point- It's still the best way. Exactly. It's not that you couldn't do it. It's with all the trades, glasses are going to end up being the best way. And I think they'll be very slim glasses. You could also, there's a company, several companies actually, making augmented reality and virtual reality contact lenses, where you're going to have a contact lens that flips on and off. That's interesting. There's another whole area, which is companies working on implants for your eyes. They're focused right now on blind people. So imagine people who have

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  some severe form of macular degeneration. There are ways where they can implant a display in their eye. And then it's hooked up to a camera and it gives them their sight back. Of course, once you build this, it's also a VR system. You could pipe in a view that is not from a camera, but rather rendered by a computer. So I think probably for the next couple of decades, at least, implants are going to be for blind people. But who knows? Maybe we'll be getting implants someday.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Who is John Carmack? John Carmack, one of the smartest people in the entire world. He is a genius who deeply understands the nature of hardware and software and how they work together in tandem. He's kind of the father of modern gaming. So he created Doom. He created Quake. He created the modern 3D game engine, the modern first for sure. He's the guy who basically made the foundations of the game industry as we know it today. And not just created like he had the idea, like he personally coded it. And then was at the top of his game for decades after that. That's probably what he's best known for.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  These days, he's working on AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. The idea of building an AI that can self-learn, it's super intelligent, it applies to anything, it can do anything, it's not specialized. He's been working on that for a few years now. But in between those two things, we actually work together. So back when he was still working on video games, he actually found out about my Oculus Rift prototype, reading about it online, and asked if I would lend it to him. And I lent him one of my prototypes. And he had been trying VR stuff for years. And he immediately went online and said, "This is the best virtual reality headset the world has ever seen. This is by far the most impressive system that has ever been conceived."

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Was that before you sold and before you... This was like right as I was starting the company. So I was 19 years old at the time. His endorsement was a huge deal. In fact, him saying that caused Sony to approach me and offer to buy me out, hire me, and let me run a virtual reality research lab in Santa Monica. They said, "We will put you, this 19-year-old kid, in charge of Sony PlayStation's virtual reality research division." That's how good it was. And he had showed it to them. So he had this prototype. Do you think Sony would have fired you too? So this is interesting, because I don't think they would have fired me for several reasons. This is a fun hypothetical to explore. So first of all, Japanese companies, much less prone to firing people.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  They instead will, they'll take away your work duties, they'll make you, they'll assign you to, you know, sit at a desk and do meaningless busy work. They basically try to get you to quit by making your job just really, really awful. But not like awful like they'll scream at you, just you sit at a desk and do nothing. And eventually, you'll tap out. So that's the Japanese way. So that's one reason they wouldn't have fired me. But the other reason is... At the time, all of the 3D and VR R&D work was being funded out of the budget for the Sony Liverpool office. So in the UK, they had an office focused on high-frames-rate 3D rendering technology.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  This was the team that made, for example, the PlayStation 3D monitor. They were the entity in Sony that was doing all the programming to add 3D TV compatibility to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 games. And so that was what was funding all their 3D and VR efforts. And if you can believe it, they offered me this job in, I guess it would have been July of 2012. I thought about it, I actually turned them down, and then they doubled their offer to me in terms of compensation. And I turned them down again. And then, less than a month later, Sony Liverpool was shut down by Sony corporate.

• 1:26:50Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  And so if I would have done it, it actually, I wouldn't have gotten to the point where I would have been fired. I would have been laid off.

• 1:26:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  Because what they wanted to do was not just hire me, they wanted to acquire all my technology. So imagine a world where they acquire my technology and then just do, before we're able to prove it, before we're able to get it anywhere.

• 1:27:08Rick Rubin?

  Shut it down.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yep, shut it down. It was just a decision by Sony corporate in Tokyo, you know? The 3D stuff's not really making enough money, shut it down. We've given them enough shots. There's a world where all my tech was trapped in Sony. They bought all the rights, and then I was never able to use it again.

• 1:27:24Rick Rubin?

  How do you think the world would be different if you weren't fired from Facebook?

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I mean, I probably am no different than anyone who's been fired in thinking that they, things would be better off if they had, you know? I'd be doing things, if I was still there, things would be a lot different. But I'll tell you what I believe.

• 1:27:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  I think...

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  A lot more VR headsets would have been sold. Yep. I think the market would be a lot healthier and more self-sustaining. I think that I would have focused less on the audience that I hoped to have in the distant future, which is like the mom, you know, doing virtual travel to Rome, the grandma doing virtual cooking lessons. I would have focused a lot less on that audience and a lot more on the, I would have doubled and tripled down on the audience that did exist, which was gamers. Yeah, all of them. Get everybody. Instead of outselling Xbox, outsell everything, be the dominant thing, because how am I going to get to a billion ordinary people who have a very high bar for, just for them to spend their money, it needs to be very high quality, it needs

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  to be something they need in their lives, something they would rather buy this than that. And VR just isn't there for the average person. They are better off spending their money probably on something different. A gamer, on the other hand, like his options outside of VR, get back to that story I told earlier. Bigger screen. Yeah, what are you going to get? A bigger screen, bigger resolution? That's it? That's what your future is going to be? And so, yeah, I would have focused very much on capturing the audience, because it's also a matter of how much you spend. You know, there's something called the CAC in lots of industries, but including the tech industry. Customer acquisition cost. What's your CAC? And your CAC can be driven by marketing spend,

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  so TV ads, social media ads. It can be driven by going out and paying celebrities to, you know, to use stuff that then turns into people want to buy. But you blend all of your costs together and divide it by the number of people that you attracted, that's your CAC. How many dollars per person did it take to attract that customer? And when you're trying to attract people who barely need your thing, you might spend hundreds of dollars convincing each person. But when you have somebody who already really wants what you're doing, your CAC might be a dollar or nothing. Anyway, I just feel like there's a lot of the, when I left, right before I left, there was something I said about our marketing efforts. And this was, I'd already been, I was being fired, but they hadn't quite deactivated my badge

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  yet. One of the last things I said to the marketing team was, you need to get some people in this room. Who drank Mountain Dew, not Starbucks.

• 1:30:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Because there's way too much Starbucks here.

• 1:30:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  And not nearly enough Mountain Dew.

• 1:30:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  And I don't even have to explain it. You, you, anyone can hear that and be like, I understand exactly what that is.

• 1:30:18Rick Rubin?

  Did you grow up drinking Mountain Dew?

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  I, I did, of course. I'm a gamer. Gamers drink Mountain Dew. It's just.

• 1:30:24Rick Rubin?

  What was your order at Jack in the Box?

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Hmm. So my favorite Jack in the Box item was unfortunately discontinued a long time ago. It was the turkey bacon cheddar melted sandwich. It was so good. You had crispy bacon, a ton of cheddar cheese, and then a ton of smoked turkey on sourdough bread. Then they would griddle and it had this Chipotle mayonnaise sauce too. And it was, it was really great. They don't make that anymore. The sourdough steak melt was my favorite, second favorite thing.

• 1:30:55Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Also discontinued, if you can believe. I, I don't, I don't, I don't get what it is, but like, I, I really love Jack in the Box. Egg rolls, pork egg rolls. Have you ever had those?

• 1:31:02Rick Rubin?

  I've never had those.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  You should try. It's actually legitimately competitive with egg rolls you would get at a really great Chinese restaurant. And in many cases, I think even better.

• 1:31:13Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  I mean, they're deep fried, so that helps. But um, I mean, yeah, you probably, you probably looked up that Jack in the Box is my, one of my, one of my, it's my favorite.

• 1:31:21Rick Rubin?

  Well, I grew up eating Jack in the Box as well. So when I heard that you ate Jack in the Box, like, okay, we grew up in a similar environment.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  So I grew up in Long Beach, California.

• 1:31:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  And the Jack in the Box was the place where all the delinquents hang out. So you know, like the kids smoking weed and it was not the good part of town.

• 1:31:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  But I loved Jack in the Box and when I was, you know, living in a trailer, I ate a lot of Jack in the Box. Because I know it sounds crazy today when fast food is so expensive, but back in the 2000s and early 2000s, fast food was, was cheap.

• 1:31:51Rick Rubin?

  Super cheap.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  It was legitimately cheaper than buying groceries. And I ran the numbers because I was trying to get, get by, like.

• 1:31:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  One of the coolest things that happened to me as a teenager, it felt to me like I had won the lottery. Jack in the Box used to have a, a loyal customer program and managers could hand out these little cards purely at their discretion. To any customer they wanted, typically loyal customers who came in a lot. And it gave you 10% off of your order, Jack in the Box. Any order, 10% off your order. And it could be combined with all other promotions. So if you had to buy one, get one free.

• 1:32:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  10% off that one that you're buying. If it was, if you had one where, you know, it was, oh, it's not a $5, you know, combo. It's a $3 combo. You still get 10% off. And so I got one of those cards and it felt like I had won the lottery. And every time I go in, you know, I'd roll in with my card, flip it out. Oh, yeah. I'm a loyal customer here. And unfortunately, they discontinued that program. By the time they discontinued, it didn't matter. But by the time they discontinued it, I was already a billionaire. But I gotta tell you.

• 1:33:01Rick Rubin?

  For emotional, you were connected to it.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  There were.

• 1:33:03Rick Rubin?

  You were in the club.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in the club. I was, I was, I was, I forget, what did they call it? It was like the valued customers program. It was something like that. I'll have to dig it up. I still have the card. They didn't take it away from me. But I'm hoping that fast food actually comes back around to being cheap. It has a lot of things going for it. First of all, the portion sizes tend to be smaller.

• 1:33:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Whereas like Olive Garden, a lot of food gets plated but not eaten.

• 1:33:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  So fast food, there tends to not be much food waste on the consumer side, but also not much food waste in the kitchen. They don't have spoiled stuff that they're throwing out. Cause they go through so much volume and they have such a continuous supply chain. They call it just in time delivery. Just basically things get delivered in ideally like just as they need them. They don't have tons of stuff just sitting on a shelf that might go bad. And so their food waste is very low, which then brings their food cost way down. Their utilization of their energy is very high. Like when you make something in your oven, you're heating up that whole oven to make one thing. And then it cools down. When a fast food place, or like imagine if you were gonna fry something.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  I mean, you're gonna heat up a whole vat of oil, probably to deep fry like a few things.

• 1:34:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  There, that same heat energy now gets put into.

• 1:34:16Rick Rubin?

  Everything.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Everything. And it keeps going and it's very high utility. So the energy costs, the food prices, the waste is actually much less at fast food. And so I'm actually pretty bullish that if we can get the right dynamics going in our country again.

• 1:34:29Rick Rubin?

  Healthier ingredients in them.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Healthy ingredients. And then I think the big game changer is going to be autonomous food delivery. Right now, delivery food costs a lot because you're paying for a guy to drive a car around. And it's a whole, I mean, it's a whole ass, you know, multi-ton vehicle to bring you a burrito. That's crazy. When you start seeing this automated drone delivery stuff actually take off, the energy cost of the delivery goes down by literally 100 times. The price of the delivery can go down by literally 100 times. So imagine a world where, you know, for me to build a burger, I have to go buy beef, some of which, you know, has expired at the grocery store. That's packed into the price and the cost, some of which I might not use. That's got to be factored into the cost. I've got to buy all these condiments and I've got to carry those.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Eventually some will go bad or, you know, like they're buying in bulk. I, I think within a few years with autonomous food delivery, we might be able to have healthier, better food, made fresh, fast food style, delivered to your door, cheaper than you'd be able to make it yourself. So this is one of my wacky future predictions is in the future, kitchens will be strictly for rich people. You will not dedicate a huge chunk of your apartment or house to having a huge kitchen to prepare.

• 1:35:43Rick Rubin?

  This food will just be available.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You'll be, you'll be able to get it whenever you want it immediately at a very high level of quality. You know, basically on demand. And the only people who have kitchens, it'll be like people who have, uh, I don't know. What's, what's like an indulgent, rich person thing, like stereotypical?

• 1:36:01Rick Rubin?

  A record player.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  A record, exactly.

• 1:36:03Rick Rubin?

  Turn cable.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  It's the person who enjoys the process. They're not trying to listen to music. They're trying to engage in the hobby specifically of playing vinyl records. They do the same thing. If you're trying to eat, food will come to you from the robot or they'll shoot the burrito missile into your yard. And if you're, if you want to cook, that will be a thing that you do and it'll still be a thing. But I don't know, it's, it's a little dystopian, but it just, it seems, it seems likely that that's where it's all going.

• 1:36:29Rick Rubin?

  What's the first thing you ever remember building?

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  It depends on your definition of building. But the first thing I remember as like a thing I made was I had realized at some point in working with my dad on cars, that shorting battery terminals was bad, right? You know, you have your short.

• 1:36:46Rick Rubin?

  Sparks.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Sparks. And then if you have something that hits the terminals and welds itself, you know, it'll get really hot and you could start a fire. And I realized to myself, oh my God, I could take this principle and I could use it to build a lighter that is purely electric. And so what I did is I took a paper clip and I bent it in a wacky weird way around the negative terminal of a nine volt battery, just a little, little, little, little one. And I bent it so that you could push down on the, you know, the bent other end, touch the positive terminal. And then it would make the paper clip, it was a very thin paper clip, very, very hot. But of course that will burn your finger.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  And so I added a blob of probably JB weld, some kind of. What is that? JB weld is an epoxy that's often used for automotive parts. It's very, it's high temperature resistant. I see. Where your finger was touching wouldn't get hot. Exactly. And it worked? And I put, and I put part of a clothespin on top of it so that it was wood insulated, glued to the metal and I could touch it down. It would make the metal very hot and you could touch it to things and light them on fire and it worked. That was the first thing I ever made that I conceived of myself. I had done like things where I did like little kits, like, oh, I put together the balsa wood airplane with the rubber band. That was the first thing I, where I came up with it myself. Rockets? I did, I did all of that. I went to rocket camp, but that electric lighter was the first thing I ever built myself.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  I think I was, I probably would have been six or seven years old. So, uh, I don't know. I think that's pretty sharp for a six year old to come up with. Super cool. One of the other things I built early on was a, it was a stun glove. So it was a glove that you wore that had two spring loaded pins on the punching face. And then I wired those to a, with really, really horrible, you know, nine year old soldering to a capacitor that was charged up by a disposable camera. So basically I took a photo flash capacitor, used a disposable camera to charge it up from a little double A battery. And so it would charge it up. And if you touched both terminals to your skin, it would give you a massive electric shock.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Knowing what I do today, it was ridiculously dangerous because it was 330 volt photo flash capacitor. Massive amps are what kills you. Volts are what hurts, amps are what kill. Wow. And so like tasers are like millions of volts, but tiny amperage, cause amperage can't, yeah, amperage is what kills you. They want very low amps. So it wasn't until years later that I truly

• 1:39:18Rick Rubin?

  Understood how dangerous it was.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  It was extremely, like if I ever would have touched one terminal to this side of my body and the other to the other and caused it to blow across my heart. Extremely high chance it would have stopped my heart because amps kill. And your heart can be disrupted quite easily there, but I didn't know. I was nine years old. I still have that glove. And so I've got a whole bunch of my wacky inventions from when I was a kid.

• 1:39:41Rick Rubin?

  So cool. Okay, so the Game Boy is an old game that you modded and made new. If you were to make a game from scratch with no reference to the past, what would that game be?

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  A game from scratch with no reference to the past, something totally new.

• 1:39:58Rick Rubin?

  Totally new. You could make the game of your dream. What would it be?

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  So I had this idea of a game where severe consequences for playing it incorrectly by whatever you define incorrectly as are an inherent part of the experience.

• 1:40:19Rick Rubin?

  You're talking about repercussions?

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  Repercussions. Yeah, like exactly because in the real world, what you do has severe repercussions. You can't just do whatever you want. And I know in a game, you say, well, I want to do whatever I want. Well, sometimes constraints are what makes something interesting. So like, imagine this. The original idea was that I had was what if you made a game where when you die in the game, it destroys the VR headset that you're playing with and you can never use it again.

• 1:40:44Rick Rubin?

  It's almost like a version of Russian roulette, not as deadly.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  And the idea would be rather than it being based totally on chance, it would be based on your decisions. Like, imagine an MMORPG.

• 1:40:53Rick Rubin?

  I don't know what that is.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  A massively multiplayer online role playing game like World of Warcraft. You have some concept of World of Warcraft in your mind, like Dungeons and Dragons, but it's on the internet. Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?

• 1:41:05Rick Rubin?

  No, I've not.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Oh, you're missing out. I play Dungeons and Dragons every week.

• 1:41:08Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I play as a wizard.

• 1:41:10Rick Rubin?

  Have you played it for many years every week?

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Many years with the same group of people.

• 1:41:14Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  We all get together. I'm a wizard named Nilrum V who's from Atlantis. And he's trying to find where Atlantis went and bring it back. That's his backstory.

• 1:41:23Rick Rubin?

  You didn't give him that backstory.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  No, no, I didn't. No, he's my character. I created it. And he's Nilrum V because he's actually one of at least six wizards that are all identical clones of one another, who have totally different personalities. But he's one particular wizard of the bunch. And there might be more. But he only knows of six, and he's the fifth. Anyway.

• 1:41:46Rick Rubin?

  No, and is it only fun, or is there more? Do you get something from it besides entertainment?

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I think so. I mean, kids get something out of smashing blocks together, and I think adults get something out of being creative and playing pretend. That's not how people usually frame it, but that's what you're doing. And there's creative thinking, thinking on the fly. It's using different muscles than you use in your everyday life. You know, you run a business, you don't get to exercise those same muscles. So, anyway, so, okay, imagine, okay, you've been to a Renaissance festival.

• 1:42:20Rick Rubin?

  I have.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  All right. Imagine a Renaissance festival, but it's on the internet and it's in VR. And anyone, you're live-action role-playing as knights and rogues and wizards and whatnot. Imagine a game like that today. How do you think people behave in it? Well, they act nothing like they would act in the real world. They engage in extremely...

• 1:42:43Rick Rubin?

  Play a character.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  They play a character. And also, people, they don't think about what they do. Because if their character dies in the game, you'll just respawn, you're back, and you're playing the game again. So my thought was, well, how would people act if you had one life? It's a game with one life. You'd probably act very differently. For example, you would probably be more likely to collaborate with other players. You'd be more likely to say, "Let's all get together to go on this dangerous quest." Because any one of us does it, that's it. We're gonna lose, and we get locked out of the game forever. Let's say the towns were safe places where you're... Not likely to get killed. You would really think twice about leaving town. You're like, okay, I'm gonna like before I leave town. I'm not just gonna wing it. I'm gonna go, oh, let me go seed. Let me try to kill the dragon. If I die, I'll just respawn and go try buying different potions. It's like, no, I'm not.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  I'm gonna plan this out. I'm gonna, I'm gonna really, really give this my all. And my thought was that it would force a totally different type of thinking that most games just don't force you to engage in. It would, it would be more like real life, regardless of the quality of the graphics or the fidelity of the, of the simulation. It's a reality of a different kind. Exactly. Where there's consequences for your action and that. And also, like you play in games, there's lots of people who are griefers. They're just out to ruin the fun of everybody else. They just go out and they kill people. It's really easy to do that when there's no consequences, right? Like, oh, sure, they might kill you instead, but you respawn and you do it again. Yeah. But what if all the griefers said, no, no, getting into a fight with another character for no reason? 50 50 shot.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  I'm the guy who loses and I'm locked out of the game forever. Yeah. So that's kind of the background. You can see where this is going. I want to build a game. Yeah. The original idea was. Interesting idea. The original idea was like a headset. Right. Then there's a more extreme version. Like, what if you tied it to something that was even more valuable than a headset? Cause you could just buy another headset. Here's my crazy idea. What if it was a game where when you log in, part of it is you have to give it the passwords to all your social media accounts? And if you die, it wipes out your entire digital persona. Yeah. It's a full digital death. That's great. Wouldn't that really raise the stakes? That's great. Like, for the first moment, you're in that game. You look around, you're like, okay, like I am on my game. I am, I am, and like you see a threat.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  It's not like, oh, it's just some thing. I, okay, I'll go over and fight it. You're like, oh, shit, that thing's coming. Like, I'm gonna run away because I don't want everything to fall apart as a result. The problem is, of course, I love this idea of this game. Who would actually play it? Yeah. I don't know. And I, I don't know if you know this, but I actually took this to its extreme at one point. I built a virtual reality headset as an art project that actually kills you if you die in the game. That's like, you, you, you actually die when the game over screen comes up. Yeah. It blows up your head. And I made it as an art piece to kind of illustrate the, because I've been fascinated with this idea of, you know, games that are more realistic with realistic consequences. And that would be the ultimate version, right?

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Like now you're really gonna want to make sure you don't.

• 1:45:44Rick Rubin?

  I want to make the argument for the benefit of this game in society, which is in the shooter games, it's the opposite of protecting yourself. It's like, life is cheap in a shooter game.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  That's right. Life is very cheap.

• 1:46:00Rick Rubin?

  And if you spend a lot of time in a shooter game, repeating over and over the fact that life is cheap, it's not such a stretch that when you get into the real world, the idea that life's a little more cheap than it was before you started playing the game.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Sure. And a game where, you know, violence has, it's not so you say there's no violence in it. Like, you know, I want to go out on my fantasy adventure and slay dragons. But I like the idea that even in a collaborative environment, your life and the life of the people that you're with is something precious to be preserved. That is, it's a valued commodity in the game, rather than a disposable gameplay element.

• 1:46:35Rick Rubin?

  I remember there was some story I read about how the, the army would look for gamers for certain jobs.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Sure, I believe, for like, for Predator drone operators. They were familiar.

• 1:46:47Rick Rubin?

  Exactly.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Yep. No, absolutely. So, anyway. That is the game that I would love to see. Totally separate from that, what I actually want is, uh, my favorite game of all time is Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo.

• 1:46:58Rick Rubin?

  I don't know what that is.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  It's a Japanese role playing game where you travel through time trying to save Earth from a, well, I guess I can spoil it. Came out in the 90s. It's been a long time. But there's an alien being called Lavos.

• 1:47:13Rick Rubin?

  We don't know that if we're playing the game. You have to get to that level?

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  You have to get to that level. You find out as you play the game and then the mystery unveils itself. But basically, in millions of years in the past, the real story is, the impact that killed the dinosaurs was actually Lavos, which is just one, you know, like how pine cones have, you know, like the mini seeds?

• 1:47:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Lavos is like one of those seeds off a pine cone. There's, there's a being that reproduces by shooting out spores.

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  That fly across the universe until they hit a planet. Basically, the impact that killed the dinosaurs was Lavos landing on Earth, smashing into the crust. It digs to the core of the planet and rests for millions of years, absorbing energy from the core of our Earth. And then the story is eventually, you know, in the modern day, Lavos emerges to destroy the planet and, you know, shoot out its own spikes and then complete the reproductive cycle. And so you have to travel through time trying to stop Lavos. Yeah. And so you go into medieval times, you're going back to caveman times, you're going into the distant future of a ruined world to get things from that ruined world. And it's cool because it has 14 different endings.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  It's, it's very, and you get different endings depending on what you did, how you did it, what you did in the past. Did you save that person? Did you destroy that airship? You know, and it's a, it's my favorite game of all time. So if I could make a game that was not something totally new, it would be to bring that game back for a new generation. Because it's pretty dated, it's from 1996. Yeah. What would be different about your version than that version? I think it would be very hard to improve on what is near perfection from a gameplay perspective and from a storytelling perspective. It's a, it's a great story, dozens of interesting characters, amazing soundtrack, but I think you would, you would update the graphics, update the soundtrack just to be more, more what people want these days.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  But probably the most important thing is make it available on modern platforms. If you want to play Chrono Trigger, you have to own a Super Nintendo. And those went out of production two decades ago. Yeah. And a lot of the ones that are around today, a lot of them have failing components. It's actually quite hard to track down things. Actually, that was one of the reasons I made the mod Retro Chromatic. Like, it's actually kind of hard to play Game Boy games these days. Yeah. You have to track down a Game Boy that is still in working condition, that doesn't have problems with the, like, a lot of them have audio problems these days due to degradation of the components. So like, if you want to be a Game Boy gamer, you either need to be a techno head like me, who can take apart and repair old systems, or you need to pay a bunch of money to buy a Game Boy from somebody who knows how to do that work. If you wanted to go buy a Game Boy Color today,

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  that's been fixed up and, and, you know, put into good working condition, you could easily spend $200. And kids aren't doing that, so. I gotta ask you, were you a fan of the Game Boy when it came out? Absolutely, and I've never been a gamer. My only game experiences with the Game Boy, Tetris. Only Tetris, I didn't play any other games. Well, you'll notice with Mod Retro Chromatic, we bundled it with a new version of Tetris. So why Tetris of all the games? It's because the original Game Boy, there are millions of people who aren't gamers, who nonetheless loved Game Boy and loved Tetris. What is it about Tetris? I think it's a universal game.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  You know, you should try to get Alexei, the creator of Tetris. He's still around? Oh, he's still, so I saw him a few months ago. Mod Retro was sponsoring the Tetris Classic World Championship. So it's basically like a, it's a competition for people who play Tetris. On the Game Boy. On the Game Boy. And Alexei was there. I mean, I don't know if you know the story at all of Tetris. I don't know anything about it. Oh my god. So there's kind of a fictionalized but largely correct version you should check out. I think it's called Tetris. It's a movie about it. Alexei is a computer programmer working in the Soviet Union. It is a Russian game by a Russian developer. And the song, doo doo doo doo. The Russian music. Yeah, it's actually a Russian folk song.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  And so he is just like this genius programmer who built dozens of versions of this puzzle game, and then hit on this magical formula that everyone loved. He ends up licensing it to Nintendo. It's bundled with every single Game Boy in North America. Like, it is a crazy story. Anyway, I love games where you have that universal human experience. Like, there's a picture of Hillary Clinton, sitting in Air Force One, playing Tetris on a Game Boy. I don't think Hillary Clinton is a gamer. Anyway. I can remember it getting in the way of work, because it was super addictive. Jeff Bezos has said the exact same thing. He said when you play Tetris, it starts to reprogram your brain. And even when you stop playing, you still see the blocks falling and it feels like you're still... Dreams about it. Yeah, it's one of those incredible things.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, one of the reasons I wanted to do that particular game on that particular console is because it's so universal. It's like, Mod Retro, we're doing some other stuff. We're also doing an Nintendo 64. I don't know if you were ever a Nintendo 64 guy. Nope. Sounds like not. No. The only game I ever had was Pong, the first Pong. But I'm so glad that we started with this. I mean, I've been working on this project as a side project for years. Like, it's been... It's the coolest thing in the world. But I'm so glad it's one that's so universal, because everyone loves it. Thing in the world. I love it.

• 1:52:30Rick Rubin?

  Are you spiritual at all?

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  I am very spiritual. I'm Christian and I have been my whole life.

• 1:52:35Rick Rubin?

  Cool. Do you go to church?

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  That's a complicated one. I went to church for a very long time. And then my wife and I were unhappy with the doctrinal direction of the church that we were attending. And so we left that church and we're kind of looking for a new church. But also, this was like right around when our son was born. And so right now, our dilemma is we need to find a new church that is doctrinally sound before my son is old enough to figure out that he's not going to church. But he's only seven months old right now.

• 1:53:05Rick Rubin?

  You got a window.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  Got a little bit of a window.

• 1:53:08Rick Rubin?

  Do you pray?

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:53:09Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. Are there other failed technologies like VR that you're aware of? That are due for a refresh?

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Not all of them fit exactly the same mold. Like, nuclear is not exactly a total failure in that it has sort of remained in use by a handful of customers. Like, you know, military uses them for submarines. But the reality is, in the United States at least, we stopped building new nuclear reactors decades ago. It was a failed technology and I think it's coming back around. And it's going to make energy so much cheaper, which in turn is going to make a lot of goods cheaper. I mean, a lot of the inputs to, or even like our agricultural system, like all the nitrogen fertilizer that we make, very energy intensive to make. And so cheaper energy is going to make our food cheaper. It's going to make our cars cheaper.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  It's going to make, basically, everything gets cheaper when you make energy cheaper. So I think nuclear is one whose time has really come back around. Another one is actually artificial intelligence. I know that sounds so dumb to say today when everyone agrees that it's hot. But if you just rewind a few years, I started Endroll in 2017. And the name of my company is Anduril Industries. The acronym for that is AI. And we wanted- And that's on purpose. That's on purpose. It's because our core mission was to build autonomous systems based on artificial intelligence for the military. So, for example, building autonomous fighter jets that can take the place of a manned fighter jet and save the life that would have been lost otherwise.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  You know, to kind of make robots the tip of the spear that's taking the brunt of the impact rather than the people. And when I started Anduril, we couldn't even talk about AI. Like, when we were fundraising, wouldn't say a word about AI. When we were talking to the press, never say a word about AI. Obviously, we were building AI, like, our core product is something called Lattice. It's the AI brain that powers all of our fighter jets and submarines and missiles and everything. But you couldn't talk about AI because AI was like VR. It was this failed technology that was seen as forever in the future, never in the present. And if you think it's gonna change everything, you're like a crazy person. And people might agree, like, oh, AI is gonna work someday. Like, 100 years from now, we're gonna have C3PO.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  But if you said, oh, no, it's right now, people thought you were nuts. And so we had to hide what we were and just actually make products based on AI. Now that AI is cool, now we get to talk about it and admit what we're doing. But I would say that was another- But you were always doing it. We were always doing it. But you asked if there's other failed technologies. I went straight from one failed technology- Yeah. -straight into another failed technology. Because I looked at it and I said, you know what? We actually can build working AI. Like, the tech is actually finally there. You know what I'm talking about, John Carmack? Yeah. Hugely influential to the games industry, basically created everything. And Oculus never would have gotten to where it was without him endorsing it. And by the way, I ended up hiring him as the Oculus CTO a year later. So he worked with me for a few years. Amazing.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  But then- John Carmack, before I did, decided that AI was the future again. So like back when I didn't even think AI was a real thing. I was still focused totally on VR. And he says, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start spending my time on AI. That's, that's where I think the future is going to be. But there's a lot of technologies like this, a lot of ideas like this, that people have just written off as, written off as nonsense. I think, uh, I think genetic engineering is another one of those. People, they always jump to Jurassic Park. But I mean, it's, it's going to be a huge part of our future. If we're going to increase food productivity, which lowers the price of food, makes famine and drought less likely to wreck everybody. There's a lot of people who treat, who treat genetically modified stuff as like this crazy mad science stuff.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  We, we, we should be making it just part of everything.

• 1:57:05Rick Rubin?

  Does Andrel have a mission statement?

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. So we do. I think it's to, to radically transform our national security through the application of advanced technology. We've changed the wording a handful, a handful of times.

• 1:57:19Rick Rubin?

  It's always been a version of that.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  It's always been a version of that. I think that at one point it was of American national security. But, you know, I, I take a broader view of our national security. Like I would apply it to basically the Western world, the free world, the democratic world, whatever you want to call it. There's, there's a group of countries in the world where we don't always get along and we don't always, we don't, don't always.

• 1:57:41Rick Rubin?

  What are the rules of like, are you allowed to sell weapons to?

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  Great question.

• 1:57:46Rick Rubin?

  Other country? I don't know how many of that works.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  So we can only sell to people that the United States government allows us to sell to. It's totally up to them. Sometimes that comes in the form of them saying, we will allow you to sell to them if they want to buy it.

• 1:58:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Other times, it's the US coming in and saying, we are going to help subsidize it slash buy because we want someone to have this capability. For example, imagine if there's some nation that we're working with and their airfields are critical for our national security. The United States military has a strong incentive to make sure that they have air defense systems that keep those runways from getting blown up. And so they might come in and say, we, we are going to invest in this. People outside of the defense industry rarely ask me these questions, but when they do, it's, it's usually in the context of like, well, Palmer, like what, which countries would you sell to? And which would you not? How do you, how do you determine that? And the point that I always make to them is, You shouldn't want that decision to be up to me.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Because I am the top executive of a for-profit, private corporation. And if it's up to me, maybe you like my list. Maybe I make a list and you say, "Oh, that's great. I love the list of people you'll sell to, and I hate all the people you won't." But why would you want that list to be up to, you know, a billionaire executive? You should want that to be decided by government officials, who are elected by the body populace and are accountable to them, who, when they make bad decisions, can be removed through an election. You can't remove me from under all if you disagree with my decisions. You can maybe vote for somebody who will not buy my stuff, but you can't remove me. And so the point I made to people is, if you believe in democracy at all,

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  then you have to believe that the right path is to let the democratic process guide what we sell and to who, and then hold people accountable when they make bad decisions. People say, "Oh, but Palmer, you know, like, what about the war in Afghanistan? What about the war in Iraq? Were those just wars?" And my point is, thank goodness, we can hold the politicians who are responsible accountable, or not. Thank goodness, we have the ability to hold them accountable. Imagine if the decision to sell a lot of those entities' weapons had been just up to a bunch of executives who needed to make their quarterly profit. That would have been a disaster. So I don't want to say I abdicate all responsibility. It's more, I forcefully reject-

• 2:00:05Rick Rubin?

  I just want to know what the rules are.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And I forcefully reject even the idea that I should have even any choice.

• 2:00:12Rick Rubin?

  And do the rules from the government ever change? Like, do they say-

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  All the time, all the time.

• 2:00:16Rick Rubin?

  It's like, in World War II, Russia was our ally.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, I mean, here's another example. We just sold a bunch of F-35s to Japan. How crazy that we've gone within a lifetime. Like, people are alive who have seen Pearl Harbor-

• 2:00:30Rick Rubin?

  We joined the Second World War-

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:00:32Rick Rubin?

  -against Japan.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Because of Pearl Harbor.

• 2:00:34Rick Rubin?

  Because of Pearl Harbor.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Imagine, how imagine, it's wild. We've gone from Pearl Harbor to selling them our most advanced weapons and working with them. And I don't know if you track this side of politics, but-

• 2:00:45Rick Rubin?

  I don't.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Japan is amending Article 9 of their constitution-

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  In a way that will allow, so their constitution prohibits them from engaging in offensive military operations. Their military is called the JSDF, the Japan Self-Defense Force. And so they are prohibited by their constitution from owning weapons that are designed for offensive applications. Of course, there's a lot of overlaps. Fighter jet for defense is very similar to fighter jet for offense, but there's some things they haven't been able to have, like aircraft carriers, long-range missiles. But because of the rising threat of China, China is now saying that they want to take parts of Japan. They're saying that Okinawa, they have a historical claim, that shouldn't belong to Japan. China also wants to take Taiwan. And so Japan is saying, you know what? We need to change that. And it's so wild because their constitution, you know why it has those

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  limitations? It's because we made them as part of their surrender. It's not, they didn't choose it. We forced it on them. And now we're saying, yeah, that's great. We want you guys to be a partner with us. We want you to help keep China at bay. We want to help deter them. And so I guess the point I would say is that things are always changing and nothing is ever set in stone. Like, I would love to see a world where China, which is today our largest strategic adversary, economic adversary. Does everyone believe that? There are people who disagree. I think there's people who think that Iran is a bigger threat because they're irrational to a larger extent. Like China's only willing to start a war if they think they have a good shot at winning it. They're only willing to invade Taiwan if they believe

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  there's a very good chance they'll successfully take it. Iran, on the other hand, due to their political and theological dynamics, is more willing to like, to win by losing. They'll start a war that they know they can't win. And that's very, so there's people who rationally, they think Iran is a bigger threat. There's also people who point out that Russia is actively engaged in, you know, an invasion in Europe. So it's pretty, there are people who say Russia is obviously the bigger threat than China. China's only hypothetically might invade democratic nations. Russia is literally doing it as we speak. And I'm sympathetic to that argument. But big picture, China has the economy to really matter. Like they have the population and the economic means. The manufacturing means, I mean, they're brilliant at building technology.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  I was part of the problem. I built millions of virtual reality headsets in China. That's where all my factories were when I was at Oculus. So, yeah, generally, China's our biggest adversary. They are at odds with all of our friends in the area. Like, they want to take over the Philippines. They want to take over Korea. They want to take over Taiwan. They want to take over Japan. We'll see what happens with Vietnam. They probably don't want to try that again. The last time they tried to invade Vietnam, it didn't go so well for them. But they've got ambitions. And I think it's totally possible that within our lifetime, we can see China change and have them turn into a Japan. What's interesting about China is they're not radical against the United States. Like, Chinese people, they like America. They like American culture. They like American movies. They like American music.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Like, there's a reason that our media does so well there. And so it's not like Iran, where America is seen as like, you know, theologically repulsive, at odds with how the universe wants humans to live.

• 2:04:00Rick Rubin?

  That wasn't always the case.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  No, no, of course.

• 2:04:03Rick Rubin?

  I mean, it was recent in the 1960s.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Iran has managed to stay so socially conservative for so long. It's hard for me to imagine how they come back, at least anytime soon. China, if they had different political leadership, I think that they'd love to be an American ally. The average Chinese person has no beef with America. The people who have a beef with America are the members of the Chinese Communist Party, who don't like our interests that contradict theirs, like them wanting to take Hong Kong, them wanting to take over Taiwan. But what's interesting about China, too, is most of China is not a member of the Chinese Communist Party. I don't know if you know this, but

• 2:04:39Rick Rubin?

  I don't know that.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  In Germany, you really had to be aligned with the Nazi Party during World War II. And the Soviet Union, you needed to be aligned with communism. You weren't really allowed to have

• 2:04:50Rick Rubin?

  You didn't opt in.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  In China, it's actually not like that. The CCP, no, most, I want to say it's like 25 or 30% of people are in some way a member of the CCP. And they are not pressuring the rest of China to become a member. Most Chinese people are actually quite apolitical. They just, they want They want to get by, they want to make money, they want to provide for their family. They're not that different than most Americans. They like America generally and they don't really have strong opinions as to where they should be invading or not. And so it's very interesting that China's created that dynamic because it's much easier to imagine how they change in the future. You don't have to flip like 100% of society. You just need to flip the 20 or 30% that are members of the CCP. Or not, let them keep believing that America is awful.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  That's fine as long as 70 or 80% of the country changes their minds. So I'm actually quite hopeful. I would love to see them become like Japan. Ideally without a world war in between.

• 2:05:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  That's the rub.

• 2:05:47Rick Rubin?

  How is the business model of your company different than the munitions companies of old?

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  So the way that Andorol works is very similar to the way that most companies work. Not defense companies, but just companies in general. We use our own money.

• 2:06:04Rick Rubin?

  Defense companies work differently than most companies?

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. Oh, absolutely. Well, again, let me talk about how defense companies work.

• 2:06:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  So most defense companies work on what's called a cost plus basis. So they get these cost plus contracts from the United States government, which pay you for your time, your materials, your costs, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top of that. So they might say.

• 2:06:29Rick Rubin?

  So the more it costs, the bigger their percentage?

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  You immediately identified exactly the problem.

• 2:06:33Rick Rubin?

  The incentive is to spend more.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  It's to buy, build the most expensive thing, to pitch the most expensive thing. And then even once you win, you often actually make more money when the contract takes, you know, twice as long. Things break all the time and you need to replace them. You actually make more money. And the reason, there's a lot of reasons for why we do cost plus. It really boils down to we needed to nationalize production of war material during World War II and basically have all of our automotive and industrial factories build tools of war. But we didn't want to nationalize them because that would have been communism, which was politically unpermissible at the time. Imagine that I'm Ford and you say, hey, Ford, build me a tank. Ford might say, I have no idea how much that's going to cost. I've literally never done it before. At least not in a long time.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  And the government said, okay, okay. We'll pay you literally whatever it costs and some profit on top to make it worth your while. And so if it goes on too long, like, don't worry about it. You'll be taken care of. And that is a reasonable way to pay for. Tanks in the middle of a world war where you're fighting for your life.

• 2:07:38Rick Rubin?

  Short-term emergency.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  But to keep doing that for then decades, you end up growing a very, very toxic dynamic that costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year in waste. It's like, actually, you asked what our mission.

• 2:07:52Rick Rubin?

  It's even corruption, not even waste, really.

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  There's a lot of corruption as well. I mean, you asked what our mission statement is, which is transforming national security through applications and technology. But the first page of our pitch deck to investors said, "Androl will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year." The idea is to not just make money, but to kill legacy problems. It's to go and say, "I'm going to replace this thing that costs $10 billion a year with something that costs less than a billion a year." And you had to do that over and over and over until we can take this money and spend it better on other things. So that's a typical.

• 2:08:34Rick Rubin?

  And is it easy to do based on how overblown the old model is?

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  Sometimes, I think. It's so radical to the duty, like, here's what our business model is. We spend our own money to build a working product, and then we sell it.

• 2:08:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Of course, that's like, that's the way Jack in the Box works, that's the way that music labels work. Everything works this way. But the way everything works is radical to the Department of Defense. Culturally, it's hard, and they also have certain cultural objections to it. Imagine you make something for $1, and you try to sell it to them for $2. They're going to say, "Well, wait a second. That seems really unfair to the taxpayer. You're making 50% on that thing. You know, it don't cost you $1. Why should I pay you $2 for it?" Meanwhile, they're probably paying some other company $100 to make the same thing. But basically, there's all these rules around that were designed to limit the problem.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Basically, there were all these laws passed to limit the amount of profit that you can make, and it was to try and keep costs in control. But then, once you start spending your own money, those laws are still around. They're like, "Well, no, we won't let you make more than 5% profit margin." And I explain, "Guys, I can't run a business where I run my own money, my own risk. I do everything that the taxpayers, like, I will fail from time to time."

• 2:09:57Rick Rubin?

  And you're selling it to them for way less than anyone else.

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  For way less money. And so that is the biggest problem we run into.

• 2:10:04Rick Rubin?

  What are some of the products in the new company?

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  I mean, we build all kinds of hardware systems. They're all powered by the same AI called Lattice.

• 2:10:14Rick Rubin?

  And what does Lattice do?

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  So Lattice is kind of the AI brain that operates all these different systems. And you train Lattice to do what it needs to do for a particular system. So for example, Endrol makes, among other things, autonomous fighter jets, autonomous submarines. These are real fighters, but without a person in them. And that means, there's a lot of ways to put this.

• 2:10:37Rick Rubin?

  Could a person get put in them?

• 2:10:39Speaker 01

  No, because we've, we've built them around not needing a person. So not needing a person means you don't need the space for a cockpit. You don't need the life support systems. You can, for example, do maneuvers that might kill a human pilot.

• 2:10:52Rick Rubin?

  But there's a lot of advantages to not having a person in it. Also them not getting killed, obviously.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  So like, what you're trying to do is build an AI that can pilot that submarine, operate its sensors, also fly this fighter jet.

• 2:11:05Rick Rubin?

  Submarines as well?

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we make autonomous submarines for the Australian Navy and also the United States Navy. But like on the fighter jet side, in particular, the idea is not to have them fighting on their own. The Air Force calls the program Royal Wingman. So their formal name of the program is CCA, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The concept is to have several CCAs for every manned pilot. So imagine I'm a pilot. I'm flying my F-35. I now have a whole wing.

• 2:11:33Rick Rubin?

  An army behind you.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  So behind me, but then I actually am probably going to push them out in front of me. Because that way, they have all these, they have the same sensors I do. They have the same weapons I do. Now, if I'm flying out there and waiting, trying to find something, I can send these guys out. They're the front line. And so when somebody comes across our radar, I can sense them and then even tell my wingmen, my AI wingmen, to take shots at it while I'm still way out of range.

• 2:12:00Rick Rubin?

  Can the other party not know which is the one that's manned?

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. You want them to be confused as to which is which. Because if they do know, they're going to want to go for the manned pilots. Because that's how they cause the most damage to the United States. The other interesting thing- About it. I mean, you've seen Top Gun.

• 2:12:15Rick Rubin?

  I have not, but.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  You've never seen Top Gun. Well, I will tell you, Top Gun is not really a war movie in that it's about guys learning how to fly fighter jets. And they have a whole book of maneuvers and tricks that they can use. Because you have to manage your energy and your speed. You only have so much. You have to make sure you don't run out of altitude and get too low to the ground. Now you run out of ways you can maneuver. You need to make sure that you don't run out of energy, that you don't run out of altitude, and that you don't get in the wrong position. Because you might end up in a position where you managed to shoot a guy down, but now he's going to kill you too. And that's not a win. There's also, separate from that book of maneuvers that we've been developing since the dawn of manned flight,

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  a book of maneuvers you can't do. It's the maneuvers that leave you with not enough altitude, not enough speed, in a bad position. Some of them are extremely powerful maneuvers that will get you the kill, but you're probably dead at the end.

• 2:13:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  You first see where this is going.

• 2:13:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  Once you have AI fighter jets, you can take those tactics and you put them in your playbook. You say, yeah, we're all working together, and you know what? I prefer to have all my AI fighter jets live, but if I need to, I can now start.

• 2:13:31Rick Rubin?

  Sacrifice one for the greater good.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  You have to sacrifice your pawns. I mean, imagine playing chess and you couldn't sacrifice your pawns. It just wouldn't work. And that can have real impacts, even not just against fighters. Imagine you're trying to get into an area, like imagine you're trying to take out the launch of a nuclear weapon. You need to get to this facility, and if you don't destroy this facility, they're going to be launching nuclear weapons. And it's protected by surface-to-air missiles ringing the entire facility for hundreds of miles out. No way can any manned fighter get in close enough without dying. Like, if you can get close enough to shoot a missile at it, they can get a missile at you. You're both gonna die. Imagine if you could come in with a huge number of autonomous fighters, and you could have unmanned fighters go in, destroying those surface-to-air missile capabilities,

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  clearing a corridor for you to go in and actually strike the nuclear launch facility.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  You can do that without losing human life. And so that's, it's extraordinarily powerful. Do you think of it like a video game? I think most of the people who think of things like this, like war is a video game, they're the people who just, they haven't been close enough to it. Haven't had enough experience with it. When you work with these customers every day, and like, not just hypothetically, like Anduril has our systems deployed in combat all over the world. We have our systems protecting military bases all over the world, critical infrastructure all over the world. How many, how many weapons do you have out in the world? Nobody's ever asked me that. Let me think.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  So it's in the thousands, but it's, it's one of those things where it's not, it's not like thousands of fighter jets. Yeah. So like, for example, we also build a system called Anvil. It's a counter drone drone. So it's a drone that basically flies out and then accelerates to 188 miles an hour and runs into other drones and knocks them out of the sky. We have a whole bunch of those on military bases all over the world, protecting bases from drone attacks. And those are used every single day. Bases are getting attacked every single day. Is that true? The United States is continuously under assault. And you might not hear about every attack. I don't hear about that. Well, there's a few reasons for that. One is that it's so normalized. Like some of these bases in the Middle East, they're attacked so frequently that it just starts to turn into noise.

• 2:15:46Speaker 01

  Two, when nobody dies because companies like Anduril successfully, you know, our tools successfully stopped the attack. Like, nobody dies, no harm, no foul. Like, if you want to read like defense publications, you'll find the news. But there's also attacks where they happen. And imagine that there is an attack that has an impact. Maybe nobody dies, but it destroys some equipment. We don't necessarily want to go out into the world and announce, "Attention, everybody." Yeah. "The autonomous drone attack from these people successfully destroyed a billion dollars in, in equipment on this airfield." Because in doing so, you, like, they might not know. You're inviting more trouble. You're inviting more trouble. And they might not know, right? They might have been taking pot shots. They got lucky.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  You don't want to go tell them, "What you did, that just worked. You should do more of that." So there's actually an incentive to downplay these things. But US troops are under attack almost every single day. Wow. In one part of the world or another, drone attacks in particular have been on a huge upswing. We won a billion dollar contract with SOCOM, Special Operations Command, to do all of their counter drone integrations. We just won a 600 and something million dollar contract with the Marine Corps to do the same thing for them. Drone attacks are turning into a huge problem. How much competition do you have in this area? Tons of competition. Really? Tons of competition, but most of it is quite old school companies. All the rest of them are cost plus? Most of them. Yeah.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  So with CCA, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, Loyal Wingman, we were competing to build AI powered fighter jets against Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. People who make. People who make. That's what they do. And we beat all three of them. And this was after the CEO, I won't say which one, but the CEO of one of those companies had been going around telling people that Anduril had a 0% chance of being selected. And in fact, none of them were selected because we had the most credible manufacturing plan. We had the most credible technical plan. We had the most credible plan overall to get to having thousands of unmanned fighters

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  deployed on a time scale that is relevant to keep China from trying to invade Taiwan. That's, that's really what it's all about. The goal is not to beat China in a war. Yeah. It's to make it clear that a war would be too painful for them to even consider. We want them to look at what we have and, and say, oh shit, well. He's through strength, they call it. I think it's a powerful doctrine because wars almost always start when one or both sides disagree as to the outcome. Yeah. Both sides think they can win. If one side is not, and it's not that one side has to know it will lose. If China isn't sure it can win, if they say. They won't attack. No, they, nobody wants to start a war that's a 50 50 coin flip.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  Because you, if you do that, there's a 50% chance you get what you want. And a 100% chance that you eat the pain. Yeah, it's bad deal. It's a bad deal. We don't, so we don't need to make it impossible for them to win. We need to make it where they aren't sure. And I think we're not in that place right now. Right now, they are feeling pretty certain. There's a reason that you have Xi out there saying, I'm president for life. I do what I want. And before I die, I'm going to reunify with Taiwan. He thinks they can get away with it. And that's the whole, I don't know if you know this, but China has 350 times more shipbuilding capacity than we do. For every warship we can build, they can build 350 of them. It sounds almost impossible, right? Yeah, that's wild.

• 2:19:19Speaker 01

  But the reason for that is that they also have a huge commercial shipping industry. Whereas we've lost our shipping industry. So we have almost no shipyards remaining in the US. China is building all the ships for basically everyone on the whole planet. Where do you make your stuff? We make our stuff here in the United States. All of it? Not all of it, because there are some things that we make with partners in their nation. So for example, a major customer for our AI powered submarines, Royal Australian Navy. But the Royal Australian Navy. So you, you make those there for them? Exactly. We make those in Australia. And yeah, that, that makes sense. Absolutely. But everything we make for the United States, we make in the United States. And most of what we make for the rest of the world, we make in the United States too. And I'll tell you, it's really, really hard to make stuff without leaning on China. Because everything's in China.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  It's so easy to make stuff in China. If, if, if I had no national allegiance and I had no sense of patriotism, I would move to Shenzhen tomorrow and just start making stuff like. So actually, the Model Tachyonic, made in all North America. Wow. It's not made in China. I could have made that in a 10th of the time if I had just gone to China. It would have been so much easier. Is there a possibility that over time, America could get back its manufacturing base? Absolutely. The problem that we did, I mean, there's a million problems, but. What we did is hollowed out our country by allowing China into the World Trade Organization and allowing American companies to outsource manufacturing to China without penalty, without import tariffs, without any reason to not do it.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't you? If you're allowed to just send it to another country where... Everything's cheaper. Where it's dirt cheap and there's no environmental regulations and no labor laws. Why wouldn't you do that? And we've been able to get a bunch of cheap shit over the last 50 years as a result. Like that has helped the United States. We've been, everyone's able to buy cheap TVs and cheap cars and cheap stuff because of China's rise. The flip side of that is that there's no more manufacturing in the United States. And so if you're a smart kid coming out of high school and you're deciding what you're gonna do with your life, you are never going to become a manufacturing process engineer. You're never going to say, "You know what I want to make is injection molding equipment." You're going to go work on Wall Street, you're gonna go work at Google, you're gonna go to where the economic opportunity is.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  Because that's what most people want to do. Most people, they want to take care of their families as best they can, to the best of their abilities, within the opportunities available to them. There's very few people who say, "No, I'm gonna go work at a lower paying job with fewer prospects where I'm more likely to be laid off because I really love manufacturing and industrial equipment." It happens, but not rarely. And so what happens is, fewer people even know how this shit works. The people who do are either, a lot of them are very old. A lot of our manufacturing expertise we do have, it's like the leftovers. These are people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, who are now retiring or close to it. And for us to bring back manufacturing in the United States, we have to undo all those incentives.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  We need to change it so that a smart kid does want to become a manufacturing engineer. And this will get back into politics, but I generally lean libertarian. I'm a little libertarian. I generally am a fan of free trade. But what we've had with China and others is not free trade. They don't let us into their markets. Like when I was at Facebook, I wasn't allowed to sell Oculus Rift headsets into China, even though they were made in China. They wouldn't even let me sell to their people because they locked out all these American companies. They don't want us making any money in China. What we had was not free trade. It was a one-way money expressway, straight into China and nothing comes back out. And that's one of the reasons, even though I'm a libertarian and it's very much against libertarian doctrine to believe in tariffs,

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  I basically feel like we've, we've made a bunch of really bad decisions and had unfree, one-sided trade. The only way to do that, I think, is some sort of tariffing. We have to basically go to, and tariffs aren't just about the other countries. Tariffs are about signaling here, going to investors, banks, and saying, if you invest in, like, imagine 19-year-old Palmer Lucky, but for manufacturing. I want a bank to meet with that guy, and he says, "I want to start a factory to build this thing that America needs, and there's tariffs on the Chinese one, so I know that I can beat them even though China has slave labor and coal power."

• 2:23:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37Speaker 01

  You want the bank to say, "You know what? We believe in that. We will give you a business loan for, a small business loan." But if you don't have a tariff on that, they're just gonna say, "No, you're gonna fail. China will just beat you because they have no labor laws, and their energy is dirt cheap because they burn more coal than anybody in history ever has." So, yeah, I, I fall on the side of some problems take decades to create.

• 2:23:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  They take decades to fix. It isn't gonna be easy. It is gonna be painful.

• 2:24:03Rick Rubin?

  But you do think it's possible?

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  I think it is possible, and I think it's necessary.

• 2:24:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  If we can't make the things that we need to maintain our quality of life, then we are actually just subservient to our, to our adversaries.

• 2:24:15Rick Rubin?

  So I imagine for you to build the things you build, you must spend a lot on R and D.

• 2:24:19Speaker 01

  Well, we sure do. We, I mean, we put all of our profits back into R and D.

• 2:24:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  The most defends primes, put about 1% to 3% of their revenue back into what they call IRAD, internal research and development.

• 2:24:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  This is differentiated from CRAD, which is customer research and development. So this, IRAD is where you pay it yourself. Androl puts every penny we make back into IRAD. We are continuously researching and developing new things, putting every penny we make into making new stuff.

• 2:24:45Rick Rubin?

  Based on that, can other companies copy your stuff and not have to do the R and D?

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, not always. There's some things where there's it's hard for them to copy us. Yeah. But a lot of what we do, the concept itself is kind of the crazy thing. Like, we build this new product called Roadrunner. It is a small micro fighter jet that can take off and land vertically with two thrust vector jet engines. So it basically takes off and lands on its engines. Wow. So it's your height? Yeah, it's it's it's it's, you know, it's a little bigger than me. It's man-sized. It's man-sized. But wider. And so it's basically a teeny tiny fighter jet that can take off without a runway, fly out somewhere, shoot down an aircraft, and then come home and land right there. It can even operate from the deck of a small ship. Most systems to shoot down aircraft are rocket-powered. Yeah.

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  Because they can launch instantly and they're very fast. A lot of people, when we started working on Roadrunner, said we wouldn't be able to build an aircraft that could take off fast enough, because jet engines usually take a while to start, like a full minute, so you don't have them bind and fail. They said you'll never be able to get them to start fast enough, and you'll never be able to make it reusable and still maneuverable enough. And so people just told us it wouldn't work. People in the government told us they didn't think we'd be able to do it. So we used all of our own money to develop it. It was about an $80 million development program. And we went from first drawing, like idea, to combat validation, meaning it was actually used in combat by a customer in less than two years. Wow. And that's because we used our own money. If it was a government program, it never would have gone that fast. But we cut all the red tape by using our money.

• 2:26:22Speaker 01

  That's a way that the other companies can't compete with you. Well, but so spending our own money, yes, that's really where it is. Here's the thing. We proved you can make jet engines that start in just a few seconds. We proved you can make a reusable missile that is very cheap and still doesn't.

• 2:26:36Speaker 01

  Did you use your 9-volt lighter to get it to start? No, we have to use a very fancy system to get those engines started. As far as I know, they're the fastest starting jet engines in the world. Wow. I've done, I've searched high and low, and I've not found anyone who's ever done it faster. If it does exist, it's some kind of classified program. But us releasing that system and showing it has made it where, like, if people want to copy it, they're gonna have to do a lot of hard work. Yeah. But we showed that it was possible. Exactly, and so, and so now it's a lot less risky. They could say, you know what, it's gonna be expensive to copy it.

• 2:27:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but it's worth doing because now we know it works.

• 2:27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you know what, there's companies that are, that are copying it. There's companies that are trying to do exactly what we did. And so the key there is, we just need to keep investing. And so like, we're working on a new version of Roadrunner. It's even better, it's even faster. Eventually, there is gonna be a supersonic Roadrunner. So imagine a tiny jet that takes off from, you know,

• 2:27:28Rick Rubin?

  Anywhere.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  A parking lot, a parking lot, a ship, and then turns into a supersonic attack aircraft. And then comes home and lands right there to be refueled. I mean, that's, it's gonna take a long time for anyone to catch up with that.

• 2:27:40Rick Rubin?

  What have you learned about warfare since going into this business?

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  I've learned a lot about warfare. But I think, like, especially what I've learned is it's the conditions that lead to warfare. One of the things that's really stuck with me about the invasion of Ukraine, for example. When I was in Kyiv, and we've had, we've had weapons and people in Ukraine since the second week of the war. So we've been involved from the very beginning. And one of the things that struck me when I was in Kyiv, training guys on how to use some of our weapons platforms. This is earlier in the war. It's that the Russians that invaded Ukraine really, truly thought they were the good guys. But not because of a real disagreement as to what makes someone good.

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  It's that they were just lied to. They've been told by their media and by their TV and by their politicians that Ukraine was basically ruled by Zelensky, who was a puppet of the West. And we were actually just using, which is so, isn't it funny now to like, look, nowadays running all these political problems. But they were saying, oh, he's a puppet of, you know, Donald Trump. And he's a, you know, he's a, he's a puppet of the West. And, you know, he's, he's literally just their installed dictator that is running Ukraine. And they told all these Russian troops that the people of Ukraine would welcome them as heroes. They say they want to be liberated, they desperately want you to come in. And so a lot of the guys who went into Ukraine from Russia, they went there thinking this was gonna be a week-long special operation.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  They went in with a week of clothes. And a parade uniform. They literally thought there were going to be parades for them. My favorite example of this is there was a Russian pilot who got shot down in his K-52 attack helicopter. They were trying to take over an airfield at the Antonov Aircraft Company corporate airfield, and they got shot down by the equivalent of their National Guard. He crashes. What do they find in his flight bag? They find about three days of clothes, a parade uniform, and 50 condoms. Because that is what this guy thought he was going to need after the...

• 2:29:49Rick Rubin?

  To celebrate.

• 2:29:50Speaker 01

  To celebrate. They were literally told the Ukrainian women, they are going to be all over you.

• 2:29:56Rick Rubin?

  They were rescuing them.

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  They're rescuing them, and they hate Ukrainian men because Ukrainian men are all, you know, joining the military because they, you know, because they're tools of Zelensky. I mean, like, crazy shit. The wildest thing I've learned, like, the biggest thing I had not realized is, yes, weapons are an important part of controlling the battlefield, but the most powerful weapon is control of information with your own population. Because I guarantee that when China invades Taiwan, or the Philippines, or Vietnam, or wherever they go...

• 2:30:30Rick Rubin?

  They will be the good guys.

• 2:30:31Speaker 01

  They're going to come up with some story. They're going to tell, they're going to say, "You're freeing these people. They desperately want to be freed. Their women are going to be all over the place. You better bring some condoms." I mean, that's...

• 2:30:42Rick Rubin?

  The information war.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  The information war is the true new battlefield that I think people have not fully yet understood.

• 2:30:50Rick Rubin?

  How do you imagine the future of warfare? How will it be different in 10 years, in 20, and 50?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  I actually, I feel like we have a pretty good handle on it, for the most part. Like, you look at something like the CCA program. Right now, that's just prototypes. And then it's going to turn into real aircraft, and then it's going to turn into thousands of real aircraft. Those aircraft are gonna, we're gonna be using them for a long time. Like, this is not a, they're not doing it for like, one year. Like, you think about like, like the F-16. We're still using it, decades on. Like, I think in 30 years, they're still gonna be using CCAs. It's not, it might be, you know, a different variant, but it's gonna be pretty similar stuff. So I think the future of the battlefield is pretty well understood.

• 2:31:32Rick Rubin?

  And it'll be much less manpower.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  Much less manpower, a lot more autonomous systems. And I think also, a lot fewer boots on the ground in general. Not just, like, manpower, but even, I think, the types of wars that have people on the ground for decades at a time, I think they, I think they're gonna fall out of fashion. I think part of that is technology, the other is just politics. You know, like, post-Vietnam, America was weary. We were not gonna get into another war like that anytime soon. It was politically impossible. It wasn't until 9/11 that you had, all of a sudden, a renewed willingness to, you know, fighting a bunch of guys with AK-47s out somewhere in the world. I think that we are in a similar dynamic today.

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  People saw the war in the Middle East drag on for decades. We spent trillions of dollars fighting. We didn't get even a fraction of what we hoped to get out of it. We didn't build an enduring democracy in the Middle East. You know, we, we, we really messed it up. And I think that probably for the next 50 years, the United States is not going to be the world police. We are not gonna send hundreds of thousands or millions of troops to go save someone's ass. I think we're gonna go from being the world police to being the world gun store. We are going to give our allies everything they need to turn themselves into prickly porcupines, so that nobody wants to step on them, nobody wants to mess with them. But we are probably not gonna send our people to go die for them doing it.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  And I, I personally am a big fan of that development, I think.

• 2:33:05Rick Rubin?

  Is it possible that we could get the technology of defense so good that everyone is defended and there's no, there's no reason to try an attack in the future?

• 2:33:19Speaker 01

  That is the dream. That is the dream. Now, I'm, I think there, there's place, there's edge cases where it falls apart. So like, can we stop China that way? Yeah, I think so. But imagine, like, you know, you have an ISIS-style group or Al Qaeda. What do you do about guys who say...

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  When I die in this suicide bombing, I get to go to hang out with 72 virgins, right? Like, how do you stop that? It's really difficult. And so there's always going to be irrational actors, edge cases, extremist groups. Something I'm really terrified about is also biological weapons. What happens when a nation-state can, for example, build a tailored biological weapon that is only lethal to a particular ethnic group? Or maybe they think it's only lethal to a particular ethnic group, but actually it kills everybody. Or maybe it mutates and then it starts killing everybody. These are the things that I'm really worried about. And it's one of the reasons, you know, you asked if people agree that China's our biggest threat and how Iran, you know, some people think it's a bigger threat.

• 2:34:16Speaker 01

  To be specific, Iran has specific religious and ethnic enemies. They can kind of boil down their enemies into a very particular group. One thing that's terrifying is what if Iran, without taking credit, because they don't want to get nuked, what if they don't take credit, but they do cause a biological weapon to come into being? You know, if they took credit, then they get wiped out. But what if they didn't take credit, but they say, "Ah, you know, praise be, this is just such an incredible, great thing." But of course, they actually made it happen. How do we fight that? That's something I'm really terrified about. And I know people who are working on this problem. It's not one that I'm deeply involved in myself. I don't have any specialty in biological weapons.

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  I only know what people tell me, but they're really smart people. And what they tell me has me, has me combination of spooked and hopeful. So, who knows? Maybe someday we're going to end up with a whole bunch of nanobots in our blood, watching out for these engineered viruses. But we've got to figure out something. I am a techno-optimist. I am so optimistic about our future on basically the front of every technology. You look at transportation, energy, biology, medicine.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  Even entertainment, everything is looking really good right now. And I don't think it was even that way even 10 years ago. There's just been, there's been so many breakthroughs. There's really no area of technology where I feel like our lives are not going to be made significantly better over the course of the next 10 or 20 years. Amazing. For all of the people who feel like everything's going to shit, I think we're going to be looking back in 20 years as we're eating our 10 cent Jack in the Box burritos, given to us by burrito cannons and drones. And we're going to be in our, in our $5,000 cars, charged up by nuclear reactors. I, I, I think we're going to be looking back and saying, whoo, that was a little tough for a while there, but we really came out the other side of it.

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