Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril Won't Build Humanoids | Moonshots Live | EP #295

This episode was filmed at Moonshots Live 2026. Learn more at https://moonshots.com/ The mates sit down with Palmer Luckey on Moonshots Live to discuss autonomous weapons, AI risk, Anduril’s approach to humanoids, the real threats posed by AI, VR’s peak, and what’s next for the future of technology. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Palmer Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR and defense technology company Anduril Industries, known for helping pioneer modern virtual reality and later building AI-powered defense systems. – This event is presented with: Google — https://www.google.com/ Circle — https://www.circle.com/ Future Vision XPRIZE Partners: Salesforce — https://www.salesforce.com/ ARK Invest — https://www.ark-invest.com/ Xsolla — https://xsolla.com/ Range — https://www.rangemp.com/ Build with Gemini XPRIZE Partner: Google — https://www.google.com/ _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Join Salim’s 10X Shift Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Connect with Palmer: Website X LinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS: Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on September 25th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Wow, es mucho más brillante aquí.

• 0:06Peter Diamandis?

  Es así, el futuro es brillante.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Hay flares de láser en el futuro.

• 0:12Peter Diamandis?

  Sí, bienvenidos a todos a los Oscar de Optimismo que, por supuesto, estamos abriendo el sumo con el rey de los sistemas de armas autónomos.

• 0:26Peter Diamandis?

  Bien, voy a empezar con el hecho de que estamos premiando tres premios de este fin de semana. Palmer, felicitaciones por ganar nuestro premio Wildfire.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Muchas gracias.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Este ha sido un tiempo largo.

• 0:44Peter Diamandis?

  Ha sido, vamos a poner la diapositiva aquí. Palmer ganó dos millones de dólares por Anduril.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Como si fuera necesario.

• 0:52Peter Diamandis?

  Mil millones de dólares de Lockheed, lo que fue algo interesante.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Hacemos mucho trabajo con Lockheed, también competimos con ellos, pero en el espacio de defensa competimos con su división de fighter jet y colaboramos con ellos en algunos de sus cargos. Hacemos mucho trabajo juntos, pero tú y yo hemos estado tratando de hacer que ese sistema de autores de fuego se vuelva a cabo desde hace mucho tiempo.

• 1:15Peter Diamandis?

  Por un tiempo.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Tú recibiste este premio anunciado en 2019, ha pasado mucho tiempo. Anduril, uno de nuestros primeros dos productos fue un tanque de autores de fuego que empezamos a construir en 2017 y terminó en 2019.

• 1:28Peter Diamandis?

  Es loco que dejemos que los fuegos se conviertan en conflagraciones antes de que los pongamos.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Y es algo loco que la gente dice, oh, la tecnología finalmente lo hizo posible. No voy a corregirlo demasiado a menudo en público, pero esto ha sido posible desde hace más de una década.

• 1:44Peter Diamandis?

  Sí.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Se ha vuelto imposible políticamente ignorar el problema ahora.

• 1:49Peter Diamandis?

  Voy a ver un video de una minuta de lo que tu equipo ha logrado y si puedes explicarnoslo aquí.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Claro, este fue un ejemplo de lo que estábamos haciendo en el lugar de prueba donde detectábamos los fuegos, clasificábamos los fuegos. Lo que realmente no ves aquí es que también necesitas rechazar los falsos fuegos, eso fue parte del test también. Así que tienes que saber quién es el tipo que fuma una cigarra, qué es un incendio de campamento, qué es un flare de carretera y luego qué es algo que muestre las características de un fuego real. Eso es lo que necesitas señalar a la gente, eso es lo que necesitas señalar a los servicios de emergencia y luego tienes que combinar el tipo de fuego con el bien que está en la área. Así que básicamente quieres usar la cosa más costosa y efectiva que pueda responder y llegar allí en el tiempo. Y si algo está creciendo más rápido, puede necesitar algo diferente.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Si está en bosques versus en una montaña de brusca, puede necesitar algo diferente. Así que se trata de detección, clasificación, rechazo, combinar y luego atacar el objetivo. Lo último que voy a decir es que con la mayoría de lo que hacemos, nuestro trabajo con el ejército, pasas muchos de estos mismos pasos, pero si encuentras un objetivo, digamos que te toma una hora llegar a alguien versus diez minutos, usualmente no hace mucha diferencia. Cuando hablas de fuego, sin embargo, la diferencia entre diez minutos y una hora de respuesta son herramientas totalmente diferentes con las que vas a necesitar responder. Una bomba es una bomba, ya sea que tome un día o una hora o un minuto para llegar allí.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Pero cuando un fuego está metastasitando, necesitas elegir lo correcto que puede ponerlo antes de que se vuelva demasiado grande.

• 3:30Peter Diamandis?

  Increíble, sabes, vamos a anunciar algo en un mes de tiempo, que estás financiando un nuevo premio y va a ser secreto hasta entonces, pero lo vamos a engañar ahora.

• 3:45Peter Diamandis?

  Otro premio de diez millones de dólares, ¿te gustaría compartir con nosotros lo que vamos a hacer?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Claro, deberíamos mantener los detalles secretos porque hay algunos buenos esfuerzos, pero suficiente para decir que no me interesa unirme a la carrera para empujar a la IA hacia adelante con mi dinero. Creo que la parte de la inteligencia artificial de los modelos está bastante cubierta por mucha gente. Creo que no hemos estado haciendo suficiente comprensión de la inteligencia biológica, en particular más allá de la gente, y así va a ser un premio sobre la comprensión de cómo los animales piensan y hacerlo para que podamos comunicarnos con ellos diez veces mejor que el estado actual de la arte para la especie más inteligente actual y no solo animales entrenados, sino animales salvajes en su propio lenguaje.

• 4:34Peter Diamandis?

  Increíble.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Y creo que hay realmente mucho que vamos a poder aprender. Si miras los grandes modelos de lenguaje, son algo así, están basados en la forma de pensar y comunicarse de la humanidad y creo que hay mucho que aprender de todas las otras especies que están en este planeta y no me sorprendería si tuviera aplicaciones para la IA, particularmente la IA donde necesitas ser más eficiente, más eficiente en poder, más eficiente en tiempo. Un punto de vista diferente, dos cabezas son mejores que una, cualquier metáfora que quieras usar.

• 5:10Peter Diamandis?

  Me encanta, me encanta. Bien, voy a empezar con la primera pregunta oficial aquí. ¿Qué es tu problema de doom?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  No me preocupo por la IA destruyendo, supongo que no me preocupo por la IA haciendo el asesinato. Estoy muy, muy preocupado por las personas malvadas usando IA moderadamente competente para hacer cosas malas.

• 5:35Peter Diamandis?

  Exacto.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Y estoy un poco frustrado por muchas personas que son nuevas al hobby de destruir.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Es como cómo tuvimos que lidiar con la guerra en Ucrania, y de repente todas estas personas que han tenido las opiniones más tontas que hayas oído sobre el ejército durante toda su vida y personas que creían que vivíamos al final de la historia, que habíamos pasado por el conflicto, que vivíamos en un mundo donde solo se podía escribir una carta sucia en la ONU, olvidando que eso solo funciona si está respaldado por una amenaza creíble de violencia y de repente cambian sus ideas. Estás viendo esto con la IA. Personas que no han pensado en este problema por más de un par de años o tal vez incluso solo un par de meses están diciendo, oh, Dios mío, esta es la mayor amenaza para la humanidad. Estos son personas que pasaron casi ningún tiempo analizando realmente cuáles son las mayores amenazas

• 6:29Speaker 00

  para la humanidad, no han hablado con ninguno de los expertos en esta área, ciertamente no estaban comprando alimentos congelados y construyendo bunkers de preparación, como yo y muchos de mis amigos que han indulgido fantasías sobre cómo podría verse el doom y también pensado en ello realisticamente. Así que sí, el doom de la IA está por debajo de la lista para mí, soy un gran optimista. Creo que va a reducir masivamente el costo de la extracción de recursos, procesamiento, transformación. Vas a ver que cada parte de la sociedad se convertirá en sujeto de las mismas economías de escala y eficiencia que han visto las industrias automatizadas sin IA.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Así que piensa en agricultura o textiles, puedes comprar dos semanas de calorías por menos de una hora de trabajo minimum federal, eso es loco.

• 7:20Peter Diamandis?

  Vamos a darle por encima a Palmer aquí.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Vas a ver eso en todo.

• 7:24Peter Diamandis?

  Dave.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Tengo una pregunta realmente presionante en mi mente, soy un tipo de feeds y feeds y chips y AI de modelos de fundación, así que cuando estás poniendo sistemas en el campo, armas en el campo, puedes poner la inteligencia dentro de él y esto siempre ha sido un gran problema para la fuerza aérea. Como si empezáramos a volar drones en lugar de pilotos, ¿quién va a desplegar las armas? ¿Y cómo se tomará esa decisión? Y el downside de transmitirlo de vuelta a las sede es que tiene latencia. El upside es que tienes mucho más computadora. Lo que puedes poner localmente en un dispositivo, en un robot en el campo, en un avión es limitado, pero es realmente muy rápido. ¿Cuál es tu filosofía sobre, creo que mucha gente diría, bueno, ¿vamos a tener armas de decisión

• 8:07Speaker 02

  autónoma, que se mueven en los territorios de enemigos o vamos a tener control en la sede?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Sí, más o menos. La verdadera preocupación no es tanto la latencia o la velocidad de la computación. El problema es que si te dependes de una ubicación central para hacer tu computación, ahora necesitas tener un comando y control que tenga buena comunicación de alto nivel de vuelta y hacia dónde entre tú y potencialmente miles o decenas de miles de activos bienes. Y si tu enemigo te bloquea tus comunicaciones o intercepta tus comunicaciones o hackeas tus comunicaciones, estás terminado. O peor, simplemente saltan al objetivo todas las cosas en el campo y van al lugar donde todo está controlado.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Vimos esto, había este documental que George Lucas estaba trabajando y la Federación de Trabajo. Tuvieron su comando central de AI y control, y así fue como se resolvió la batalla de Nabu, todos los droides de batalla perdieron.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Oh, sí, todos se derrumbaron.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Eso es correcto, todos se derrumbaron y creo que esa es la realidad práctica que está impulsando la necesidad de tener autonomía, vivir no en casa, sino hacia adelante. Hay otras áreas como, vas bajo el agua, no puedes hablar con las cosas. Y a veces podrías hablar con las cosas, pero no quieres. Tener emisiones de radio te expone necesariamente.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  For better or for worse, you're gonna need to do this. I actually don't think it's as much of a shift as people think. There's a lot of people who look at this and say, "Oh, my God, Pandora's box is being opened. You're gonna have weapons that are making their own kill decisions." And they don't recognize the reality, which is that that's been the case for decades. You look at the Aegis system on Destroyers. It has a fully autonomous mode. You can flip a button and it will shoot down anything that comes within whatever range you've programmed it with, without any human confirmation. You look at SeaWiz and SeaRAM for shooting down incoming missiles, incoming mortar, incoming artillery fire, incoming missiles, or incoming speedboats. Same thing. You can put them in fully autonomous

• 10:13Speaker 00

  modes. And, I mean, going back into Vietnam, we had missiles that you could launch from an aircraft. They flew over the horizon, tried to identify the right radio emitters that they believed corresponded with a surface-to-air missile sight, and then struck them. Without any, you know, the person that decided, "I'm gonna send it in this area, they're gonna look for this signal, and I know that there's this probability they're gonna get it right." That decision is gonna remain with people. But autonomous weapons are widely, widely, there's a whole nother talk we're not gonna have today, but I will, I do have a rant about this. Where actually autonomous weapons have existed for thousands of years. If you look, and defined as kind of weapons that can execute the intent of what you program

• 10:55Speaker 00

  to do, independent from the operator or the engineer. You look at, for example, pitfall traps that allow people to walk over them, but then capture the commander on his horse when he walks by, and it's heavy. Or you look at certain poison traps that would, that would kill people who had, who had certain characteristics, not kill people who had other characteristics, or not kill animals. You look at many types of landmines and sea mines, and even, even torpedoes. And so it depends on, on your exact definition. But even going into myth, where people are creating golems, like you go out and fight on their, fight on their behalf, or defend, defend their city. I guess my argument is, we've had autonomous weapons for a very, very long time. It's just a new set of technology

• 11:40Speaker 00

  that's, that's making them better.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Technical question on that. The foundation models that go into those, those remote systems, right now, yeah, well, so that, right now, the open source models are all Chinese. So I'm pretty sure you're not gonna be putting Chinese models into remote weapons. Are you gonna build Anduril foundation models? Or how are you gonna get AI in those devices?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  I mean, we've been doing it since 2017. So we're way ahead of everybody. We're a decade beyond that question. I think that we also don't, the foundation models that people are building are not the types of models you want to be doing this. They're not, they're largely non-deterministic. They're non-auditable. It's a very different category. The thing that we are building, unfortunately, has very few consumer applications, and vice versa. There, of course, are LLM use cases for defense that make a lot of sense, but it's not guiding my missile, or classifying radar, radar, radar feeds. I mean, and we're also, we can't build models that ingest text and then spit out text. I need to process

• 12:43Speaker 00

  raw data, radar data feeds. I need to process sonar data from passive listening stations on submarines. That's, it's pretty highly specialized. And I will take some credit here. All these people who are talking about how AI is gonna change everything, they are mostly recent converts. Anduril Industries, you might notice, the acronym is AI. So, and that was not, that was not a mistake.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Alex, jump in. Yeah, I think maybe dovetailing on our discussion of Driving Bench, we're now in an era when it's possible to take frontier models, drop them into a robotic embodiment, and get pretty stunning results. So I'd love to ask you a question, maybe about the scaling hypothesis as it applies to autonomous weapon systems, or autonomous systems in general. If you have to extrapolate out, is there a Moore's Law? Is there an experience curve for what, as obviously the capabilities of underlying frontier models, whether they're from frontier labs proper, or from AI, as, as those progress, do we see any equivalent of a Moore's Law for the autonomous systems themselves? And, and maybe the, the second

• 13:52Speaker 03

  half of the question would be, do you think ultimately we achieve some sort of convergence? Anduril, it makes a variety of embodiments and a variety of different form factors. Do you see ultimately some general-purpose category killer robot that is equivalently the generalist robotic embodiment, just like we now have generalist models that are capable of doing substantially any task?

• 14:15Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so on the defense side. I think that for manufacturing, and for hospitality, and medicine, you might see this, because you get economies of scale that, that are really, that are really material for those types of businesses. And, you know, a humanoid robot may not be the optimal form for a burger griller, and it may not be the optimal form for a firefighter. It may not be the optimal form for a, for a nurse, or an assembly technician.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Saleem is smiling.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  But, even if it's not optimal, the fact that it is shared with humanity in its form, makes it a really, really good form factor. Now I can make one robot that does all of these things, and I would probably rather have a, let's say, robot that's 5% slower, or, or, you know, less reliable than the optimal burger flipping robot, if I can share commonality with that, with that nurse. In defense, that's not really the case, because you are in this constant race to not just barely beat your adversary, but to massively overpower them. To try and make it where, the goal is not to just barely win a conflict

• 15:22Speaker 00

  on the margins. It is to fight unfair, to have overwhelming threat of violence, underpinning whatever diplomatic overtures or negotiations you have. And everyone's always pushing the limit. So if I, if I have a jet that has a reliable 5% every time edge over the enemy, that's worth paying a lot of money for, right? Like, I, and, and I think the, the, the loss in performance you would see through lack of specialization probably makes it non-viable. Like, to, to go to the, to the extreme, like, you know, I build robot submarines, and those have a specialized form that needs to dive to 6,000-meter depth, and, and sit on the bottom of the ocean for months at a time. And then I have other stuff that's on the

• 16:07Speaker 00

  surface, and, and, you know, they're robotic systems that, you know, roll up a hill, and they loiter. And then I have other things that are, you know, aerial vehicles that are doing very specialized tasks. And I just can't imagine a convergence that would make sense. Unless you're telling me that we're gonna get something cool, like, like, humanoids that have, like, you know, onboard fusion reactors, and they can dive to 6,000 feet depth.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  So Palmer, why aren't you building those? I mean, if anybody, you should...

• 16:31Speaker 00

  It's, it's, look, you could potentially build such a thing, but then, very quickly, you realize that specialization would allow you to build something even better. You say, "Okay, I've built something that can dive to the bottom of the ocean and fly to the moon. Man, it could get to the moon a lot faster if it didn't have to also dive to the bottom of the ocean." So I think, I think defense is gonna be this one, where, kind of like, you know, you, you look at, for example, the difference between cars, where everything has shared platforms within a manufacturer, you know, manufacturing, they also share a lot of the same standards in the interfaces. I think that you compare them with, like, motorsport, where it's all completely different, and it's continuously pushing forward. I think the defense side is probably always gonna be this, this weird

• 17:15Speaker 00

  branch of exotic, highly specialized robotic system.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  You know, Palmer, I expected if anybody was gonna be building humanoid robots, it would be you.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  You said, you said absolutely not.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  I've opted out because, because I believe in them. If I didn't believe that humanoid robotics had such a powerful future, then I would probably build them. But I want Anduril to build things that wouldn't exist otherwise. That's what I generally want to do.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  You want to maximize your marginal impact, but they...

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Correct. All the other people are already doing a great job. Like, I, I want to use their robots, and, and do things with them. Like, I think humanoids are gonna be an incredible general artificial intelligence interface between AI and remote systems, and a lot of legacy platforms that were designed for a person to, you know, pull the lever, push the button, read the screen. Like, we're gonna be able to take all those and automate them without replacing them entirely. So you have a lot of things like radar systems that cost millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody wants to man them during a hot conflict, because they're the first thing that's gonna go. But if I can put humanoid robots in them, I've now been able to automate them without that. So, yeah, I'm not gonna build humanoids. This is also why Anduril is not building, like,

• 18:25Speaker 00

  small quadcopter attack drones. Too many other companies doing a great job. There's a, there's a lot of, a lot of areas. And, and we're not gonna do space launch. Like, we do space products. We have a lot, we operate a lot of our own satellites, and a lot of our own sensors in space. But I don't want to be a launch provider. That's for all the other billionaires to...

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Let them handle that. That's fantastic. Saleem.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  You know, when you're operating Anduril Industries, you're decentralizing defense, right? The Pentagon and ministries of defense globally have been the most centralized entity in the history of humanity. You're sitting on the edge, dealing with that. You must have a massive immune system problem, where people inside the entity are going, "No, we've done that before. We can do it better." They either try and suck you in, or they try and spit you out. How are you navigating that interface? Because you're doing it in a way that I've never seen anybody succeed do it.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  I think that this is a problem that's very, very hard at the beginning.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Oh, I said the wrong thing.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Well, until someone gets on the intercom and tells us...

• 19:32Speaker 02

  The AI...

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Some one million dollars. Congratulations. What were we talking, what, what was?

• 19:44Peter Diamandis?

  Seriously?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  I knew the intercom was gonna come on. What were we talking about again?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Centralization of Pentagon versus decentralized.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  I'm gonna keep talking till somebody tells me that I can't. So we've gotten through this a bit. I think early on, there was that concern that Anduril was not gonna be able to get through that. Our hardest problem raising money.

• 20:04Peter Diamandis?

  Skippy, would you please shut this down?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  I've been through enough of these to know how it's gonna work. There we go. I imagine. One of our early problems was that our investors said, Palmer, potential investors. They said, look, we believe that you'll be able to build things that work. We believe you'll be able to build products that are great. But we don't believe the government is capable of actually purchasing them at scale. Because I mean, you talk about centralization, you know about the issues. For people who don't, until just a few years ago, you had about 80% of M.DAPS, Major Defense Acquisition Programs. So basically, anything that matters. 80% of M.DAPS went to five companies, and that's it. And I think you've seen incredible consolidation, centralization.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Anduril has been successful because we use, we're less of a contractor and more of a product company. We use our own money to build products, then we sell them. And we've gotten to the point now where people in government have done very, very well betting on Anduril. And then miraculously, we finish on schedule, we finish on time. And then the next program manager says, I know how I can make my job easy. I just give the contract to Anduril.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 21:15Peter Diamandis?

  So it's gotta take guts to enter the defense industry, right? The most incestuous, you know, self-licking ice cream cone on the planet.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:25Peter Diamandis?

  And what insanity, you know, gave you the balls to do that?

• 21:31Speaker 00

  The insanity was the reason that I got into it. The first page of our pitch deck said Anduril will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year. The idea being, we're not just making products that we're selling, but we are displacing the systems that cost needlessly 10 times what they should. And, yeah, thank you.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  And so it does seem crazy, but you know, I can't put myself on the same pedestal as him. But one of my mentors and idols, growing up and then also early in my career, was John Carmack, the founder of Id Software.

• 22:09Peter Diamandis?

  John is great.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  John is incredible. And for people who don't know, he's basically the inventor of the modern 3D game engine, first-person shooters, also started a rocket company that competed in the...

• 22:20Peter Diamandis?

  He was competing in the X Prize. And I remember...

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And he was one of the, if not the only one, to be doing reusable vertical takeoff and landing. Which nobody else was even trying to do.

• 22:30Peter Diamandis?

  And I remember, I remember this name on the side of his vehicles, Nvidia. How do you pronounce that thing? If I could only know.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  That's right. He was using, yeah, he was using, he was building his own sensor fusion algorithms. He was processing them on modern, or on, you know, like, commercial-style graphics hardware using his game programming experience. Anyway, the point is...

• 22:52Peter Diamandis?

  It was called Armadillo.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Armadillo Aerospace.

• 22:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  That's right. And the thing, and yeah, they were doing vertical takeoff and landing long before SpaceX was, I mean, doing anything.

• 23:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, before it existed, for sure.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  That's right. And, but anyway, the point is, he ended up becoming the CTO of Oculus VR. I managed to poach him away from Id. But after he left, he went to work on AI, actually even before I did. And so he started, he started his own company to work on AGI. And I said, why are you doing this? You know, the odds of you succeeding, and to be clear, I still believed AI was going somewhere. But he said, I'm gonna start a company that's just going all in on the end state. Like, I'm not trying to incrementally get there, it's just all in on AGI. And the point that he made was, Palmer, even if I've got a 1% chance of succeeding, which maybe is an overestimation, but suppose I have a 1% chance of succeeding,

• 23:50Speaker 00

  and suppose that I could pull it off, the risk-adjusted outcome kinda demands that I do it. And that was how I felt about defense. If there was a 1% chance that I could help solve this problem, then it was one that would be massively impactful to work on. Versus, let's say, starting another gaming company, getting into space launch, you know, building a car company, which, all of the billionaires, they end up doing the same thing. You don't have enough people getting into defense or putting on a bat suit. It's just, it's just cars and rockets, and they just go in circles like that for...

• 24:31Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, when I interviewed you on the Moonshots Podcast last time, you mentioned that you're part of a billionaires' boys' club chat.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 24:39Peter Diamandis?

  Are they working on anything worthwhile at this point? I mean, I gave them shit for saying, like, god, you've got all this capital, solve the world's biggest problems.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  I think the B-Boys are doing a lot better now than we were a few years ago.

• 24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. They're stepping up?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  And then for people, the thing we're talking about is, I was giving a lot of people a hard time, especially some retired B-Boys. And I was telling them, what are you, what are you doing? You have, because money is one of the resources they have. But one of the resources people don't talk about, especially for the retired B-Boys, is that they have credibility, which would allow them to gather people around them, teams around them, and capital. Like, they could, and it's just sitting there, unutilized, if they're doing nothing. They have the credibility in that people trust them as a leader to be able to lead an organization like that. They could have the same ideas and the same words as somebody who's equally smart or smarter, and they'll still do better for that.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  And so my point to them is, you have a responsibility, not only as someone who's got a lot of capital yourself, but who's got this underutilized resource of the ability to do more.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  If you're not doing that, then are you really, like, what are you even doing? Anyone can sit on a boat. Few people can start another multi-billion-dollar company that does something that matters. And the good news is, most of them, I think, I think a lot of people have gotten the itch to solve some of these problems that are out there.

• 26:04Peter Diamandis?

  So we've got...

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Not only is it on the downs...

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Maybe the solution is we need more T-Boys and fewer B-Boys.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's an interesting point, although, like I said, I think most of the T-Boys, I think they seem like they keep pretty busy.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  That's the point.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  I don't even, I don't have a problem with B-Boys who don't do enough. Like, some people, they mistake what I say. Like, oh, Palmer wants other billionaires to work on defense, or energy, or biology. And you're like, my point is not that people need to distract themselves by doing more things. A lot of people can only do one thing. You know, and that was what I did for a long time. What I hate is the people who are not doing anything. That is, that is like, repulsive to me.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  So maybe a message to the audience, you get to join the B-Boys Slack group, or whatever this is, Telegram, if you're doing something new and differentiated.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  The group, the group actually got shut down. And we've been talking about now, we need to do a B-Boys 2.0. But I think, I think people posted...

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Maybe some B-girls as well?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  I think people posted the wrong memes a few too many times.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Boom.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  I, look, there was, there was a time where there were no, there were no B-girls. And then there was this Business Insider article whining about it. And the reality is, like, it's just like me and some guys. Like, you know, it's not like, this isn't like the Illuminati Conference. You know, it's like, they're like, oh, there's a group, and you know, but no women have been invited. I'm like, it's not that no women have been invited, it's just like me and some, some of my boys. But actually, there was, there was, there was, there was a girl in it by the end. So, we need, yeah, we need to restart that, we need to restart that group.

• 27:41Peter Diamandis?

  So you're in Facebook commercials now?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:45Peter Diamandis?

  So the new Meta VR is out. How does it compare against your vision of what you wanted to achieve? Is it, yeah?

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Look, it does a lot of the things that, it's not exactly what I would make, were I the guy who's waving the magic wand and...

• 28:01Peter Diamandis?

  You've got lots of magic wands.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Spinning the CAD, but, look, the new Meta VR glasses are a lot closer in a lot of ways. So I've long been a believer that you need to decouple the compute and the battery from the head. It should not be that. And I'm not even saying the head totally, it's more the front. So, or before Oculus Quest. So Oculus Quest was the last thing that I worked on before they fired me. And the prototypes at the time were a prototype series codenamed Santa Cruz. And we were actually showing that publicly before they fired me. And Santa Cruz had the battery and compute on the back of the head. And then the light, you know, the part on the soft tissue on the front of your head was kept as light as possible.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And then at some point after they got rid of me, they jammed it all into one big giant lump in the front, and they ruined the ergonomics, they forgot why you need a top strap. But, you know, it bothers...

• 28:55Peter Diamandis?

  Served them right.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  It bothers me most, look, it bothers me mostly at this point because the Oculus Rift CV1, which was the first modern consumer VR headset, it got the ergonomics more or less perfect in 2016. And, you know, we were showing it off in 2015. And literally, nobody has done as good of it as it, and it's been over a decade. Every single person screws it up, even Apple. And I just, I don't, I can't comprehend it. How, how could it be that the ergonomic design, led by a 19-year-old kid with no experience, is better than anything that anyone has come up with since? Anyway, the new Meta VR glasses are the closest thing.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And they're very lightweight, they've off-boarded the compute, they've off-boarded the batteries, they have really high-quality pass-through. It has a feature that I invented for CV1 called Transformo Fabric, which they do not call it. Basically using a fabric, a soft, flexible, black, light-absorbing matte fabric to, one, minimize reflections, but, two, basically seal the cavity between and around the lenses. That means that you can move them, and the fabric just stretches to meet where the lenses are for different inter-pupillary distances, rather than having like sliding mechanical interfaces in plastic. And they brought Transformo Fabric back for the first time since my era.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  So I'm a huge fan, and, you know, it's a third of the price of Apple's product, and somewhat higher, higher pixel density. I think that's pretty extraordinary. Oh, and one-eighth the weight.

• 30:33Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  That's pretty good.

• 30:34Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 30:36Peter Diamandis?

  Let's close on this. We've got 1,500 entrepreneurs, moonshot visionaries, and tens of thousands watching on the livestream. What's your advice? What did you learn in high school that made you succeed at the speed you did? We were talking about this on the plane ride back.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  I was really lucky to, I guess, maybe not lucky. I did it.

• 31:02Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you are lucky.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  That's right. I am lucky. I started an online community called Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15. It was an internet forum for people who were modifying vintage game consoles and computers, building handheld units, improving the performance in a variety of ways. We had a few thousand active members and a whole team of volunteer moderators and administrators with me at the top of it for some reason. And I learned a lot of valuable lessons about how you can build an organization, how you market an organization, how you get people to believe in what you're doing. I learned a lot about dealing with the types of problems you deal with when you're running a company.

• 31:46Peter Diamandis?

  With humans.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's a tale as old as time. You've got two people. They're both brilliant. They're both very good at what they do, and they hate each other. And they disagree over something. You need to somehow mediate the conflict or separate them in a way that allows you to get the value, that allows both of them to contribute value to the greater project, but not have them hate you, not have them lose faith in the broader thing, but also not kill each other. Sometimes that means you need to reconcile things between the two. Sometimes it means that you need to put one guy over here and one guy over here. And sometimes you need to make sure that they don't know that that's what you're doing as you do it. I'm not saying that's the key to running a successful business is the management of

• 32:30Speaker 00

  the two assholes problem, but it's, and once you make it a three-body problem now. But it's that and 100 things like it that I learned running Mod Retro that I was able to take into starting Oculus to carry forward into what I'm doing in my other companies. And that's why I'm a strong believer that kids should get a job. And I also had a job starting when I was 14, so I learned how the real world works, too. But I'm a huge fan of people doing things at a scale that's larger than just themselves. In other words, don't just do a project. Do a project with someone else. Do a project with other people. Build in the open.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Learn the good parts of that, the bad parts of that. It's been extremely useful to me.

• 33:18Peter Diamandis?

  Has building changed in the age of AI? What advice do you have? Again, we've been saying on the pod for a while now, forget about grad school. Even college is a maybe. You didn't go to college. High schoolers should, what, find a purpose they care about and use AI to go and code it? What's your closing advice here on that?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  You know, one of the reasons I have not been as upset as some people about, it's funny, there's something on the screen. It's telling us to not talk about something. Just wanted to make sure you saw that.

• 33:54Peter Diamandis?

  I did. We're not going to talk about. Don't think about a company.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  All right. Great. Great. There's a lot of people who love their craft and they love what they do. And they are rightfully mourning the end of, for example, coding things by hand, top to bottom, start to finish, as anything but like a craft endeavor. And I understand that. It's the same way that a lot of artists felt when the camera was invented. They whined and complained about how it ruined art and it made it so that anybody could push a button. These things are always painful for the people who are masters of their craft. I already got screwed in that way a long time ago. When you're a founder, you don't get to actually work in any of the tech anyway. All the other people get to have all the fun. And so I like electrical engineering.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I like optical engineering. I like mechanical engineering. I don't get to do any of it because the job of a founder is to hire people to displace them and to do what they thought they could do or what they like doing better. The job, I've said many times to people, if you want to work on technology, work for somebody else. If you want to work on nonstop bullshit, start a company. And so what I would say to people is AI doesn't actually change the bullshit part of the job very much. You're still on the hook legally. You're still on the hook for all the interpersonal stuff. And you can delegate some of it, but at the end of the day, it's your call. It's your decision. It's the same thing for fundraising. It's the same thing for general product architecture.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  And when people make the wrong decisions, it's your choice as to when you need to overrule them, override them, replace them. I don't see AI replacing that part of it anytime soon, not because it couldn't, but because the gains everywhere else are so much larger that I think we've got a good 10 years of speedrunning all of the other parts of the business before they cover that. So, look, AI changes a lot, but I'm telling you, there's a lot of people, you are in for a rude awakening. If you are like a hobbyist coder or a hobbyist engineer and you think you're going to start a company and you think you're going to be doing all that stuff, no, you're going to learn a hard lesson. Being a founder was always like AI took your job. It's just that other people took it.

• 36:10Peter Diamandis?

  Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Palmer Lucky.