Oculus Founder On Apple Vision Pro w/ Palmer Luckey | EP #50

In this episode, Peter and Palmer discuss Apple’s Vision Pro, How it will change the future of VR headsets, and Facebook’s response to Apple. 08:32 | The Power of Virtual Reality 32:44 | Innovative User Interfacing 35:26 | Is Facebook's Push On VR Premature? Palmer Luckey is a visionary entrepreneur and inventor known for his groundbreaking contributions to the virtual reality industry. As the founder of Oculus VR, Luckey revolutionized the way we experience immersive digital worlds with the development of the Oculus Rift, a pioneering virtual reality headset. With a passion for pushing technological boundaries, Luckey's innovative spirit continues to shape the future of virtual reality and its applications across various industries. Check out Apple Vision Pro Visit Anduril's Website Support the Wildfire XPRIZE _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover. Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Palmer Lucky invents the Oculus Rift and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world through the power of the metaverse and everything is great and everyone loves it. Palmer Lucky. The one, the only, the founder of Oculus, the founder of Anduril, Palmer Lucky. He created Oculus.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Anduril Industries founder, Palmer Lucky.

• 0:20Peter Diamandis?

  I'm always looking for what I call user interface moments. Something gets built that transforms the world. Do you see the Vision Pro as a user interface moment, a transitional moment in this field, or is it not that significant?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that way. You're going to see a huge number of people that are wearing headsets used for AR and VR and just like that, boom, something that was lame will become cool. Before VR can become something that everyone can afford, it must become something that everybody wants. And I think that's the approach Apple is taking.

• 0:53Peter Diamandis?

  Hey Palmer, good to see you.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Good to see you too.

• 0:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, a few months since A360, I have to tell you, at A360 this year, you were the hit of the entire summit.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Oh, there were a lot of good people, but I'm glad to hear that.

• 1:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, people loved your message and my mission here is to get entrepreneurs to think big and to go after moonshots, right? Now, I count at least three moonshots we'll talk about and you probably have others. If not publicly stated, I'm sure you have, I think you said you had a list from like high school of all the big things you wanted to do in the world.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I do, I do. I have a list of things I need to get done before I'm dead.

• 1:33Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'm working on extending that, so make sure we get a lot of those done. Let's begin by framing the moonshots, describing them, and then diving into them. So the first moonshot was obviously what you did in your late teens and twenties, it was Oculus VR. What would you describe as the moonshot you're going after? What was the vision that, you were almost religious about that vision, weren't you?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I still am. I mean, the the goal there was to bring virtual reality to life and bring it into the mainstream and set it on its rightful throne as the final computational platform.

• 2:11Peter Diamandis?

  The final computational platform.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  And we said that since the very beginning of the company because we saw it not just as the next step in computing or the next step in gaming, you know, just another another stone, you know, another another stone on the way to something bigger. We saw it as really the final step. I've said many times that once you have perfect VR, you need not perfect a lot of other things. It's one of those things that can completely emulate and aid and replace every form of media that's come before and most of the forms of media that we imagine coming in the future. And the idea that you can modulate people's reality and allow a person to experience anything that a person is capable of experiencing.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Once you do that, all these arguments around, you know, phone screen size or whether you're sitting or whether you're standing or, you know, what exactly the form factor of your computing interface is, they all go away because you have the infinite freedom to do anything. And that was that was a pretty wild dream, not in the the the big picture. Lots of people believed VR was going to get there in the long run. There's a reason it was kind of a science fiction staple. The moonshot was making it happen on a timeline that was short enough to make a company that actually survived doing it. And that was that was the real moonshot.

• 3:30Peter Diamandis?

  And back then, on an incredibly small budget.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Really, really small budget.

• 3:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So we'll dive into that one. The second moonshot, we're here at Andral Systems in Costa Mesa. And by the way, I have to tell everybody that you are the true Tony Stark.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Well, Tony Stark got out of making weapons, so hopefully I can I can I can be different than him there. But other than that, I love the comparison.

• 3:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, it's it's true. As we walk around here and we've got in this in the vision here, a few of the devices. But oh, my God, beyond this, amazing stuff. You just, you know, it's a defense company.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  We got a good showroom and you there's a bunch of stuff in there that we haven't even publicly announced.

• 4:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so the name Andral Systems, I love the name. When I looked it up, it's the elven god in the Dragon Age universe. So some interesting origins. Did you ever consider calling it Stark Industries instead?

• 4:23Speaker 00

  You know, I think that probably would have been a lot more dangerous in a post Disney Marvel world. Disney's not famous for sharing their intellectual property by any means.

• 4:34Peter Diamandis?

  This is true.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  But the fact that I've thought that through is the answer.

• 4:42Peter Diamandis?

  Anduril's moonshot. What is Anduril's moonshot?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  I mean, we're trying to reinvent the defense industry, both on the private side and on the government side. We're trying to make sure that America and our allies have the tools that we need now and in the future to deter the conflicts that could destroy everything that this coalition of nations has fought to build.

• 5:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. We'll get into that. You know, one of the things we discussed in the past, and we'll dive into this, is the way that the government procures things today compared to the way it used to is very different. And a disadvantage for a lot of us, for everybody in home defense.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Well, it's very, very different in the big picture and in the specifics of how the actual contracting is done. You know, how the contracting is done, there's a lot of cost-plus contracting where companies are paid for their time and materials and then a fixed percentage of profit on top, which incentivizes them not only to propose and build systems that are more expensive than the optimal solution, not only to propose systems that are expensive enough to even be worth them working on, but also to make more money by doing things more slowly, doing things less efficiently, using more expensive parts. Because the only way to make more plus is to make more cost.

• 5:57Peter Diamandis?

  It's insane.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  And then the really big picture, if you kind of look past even the contracting specifics, is that the US used to have this muscle where we could take small innovative companies, and we could grow them into large powerhouses of our defense ecosystem, and that just doesn't happen anymore. You know, pre-Anduril, there were only two defense companies that had achieved a valuation of over a billion dollars since the end of the Cold War, 35 years.

• 6:22Peter Diamandis?

  That's insane.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  It was Palantir and SpaceX, and they're both founded by billionaires. And not to be a little arrogant here, but billionaires can do whatever they want. It's not a good model for them. For the average entrepreneur and on top of that, you have these other issues like 80% of the defense procurement budget going to just five companies and 30% of major weapon system contracts have only one bidder. That means only one company even bids to build the system. How can you have competition? How can you have efficiency when that is the industrial base you're working with?

• 6:57Peter Diamandis?

  And for folks listening to give a sense of the size of Andorl started in 2017?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 7:03Peter Diamandis?

  Five years ago, you're somewhere near a $10 billion valuation today. I don't know that you publicly disclosed it, but that's what I could find on the web.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  That sounds about right.

• 7:11Peter Diamandis?

  So congratulations on that. Third moonshot we'll talk about is you were the first team to register for our $11 million X Prize wildfire.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  That's right. We're going to end wildfires, at least the destructive ones.

• 7:22Peter Diamandis?

  Love that. Love that. There are wildfires that are important to keep in forest management and so forth, but the ones that take down your home, let's get rid of them.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Well, and ending the destructive ones is the key to being able to manage productive wildfires. If you talk to any wildlands firefighter, they'll tell you their job is not to get away from fire existing at all. It's to make sure that you're using it as a tool rather than having it use itself as a weapon.

• 7:47Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. So we're going to talk about those three moonshots and I really want along the way for you to extract the lessons you've learned and the advice you have.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Oh man, I'll try my best.

• 7:57Peter Diamandis?

  And I'll pull them out, but our job is to kick entrepreneurs in the butt. It's like, please, not another photo sharing app. Go make a dent in the universe. Go solve a grand challenge. Before I jump into that, I've got one question. How many Hawaiian shirts do you own?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I don't know, about 60, 70, something like that.

• 8:14Peter Diamandis?

  60 or 70. Do you ever wear anything but a Hawaiian shirt?

• 8:16Speaker 00

  You know, I just, I don't, don't really have need to.

• 8:19Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I've got, I've got my black t-shirts.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  It, look, it's my, they're, they're comfortable. I like wearing them and people expect them of me. If I had showed up in something else, I'd be getting, I'd be getting static over it, so.

• 8:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's jump into Oculus. So I'll take you back to the origin. If you could, when did that original idea come into mind? What was that that origination moment that inspired you said, not only do I need to do this, but I can do this?

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Well, those are two pretty different moments. I think I started working on VR when I was 15 or so because I became convinced that virtual reality was the future of gaming, the future of computing, that it was this final step.

• 9:04Peter Diamandis?

  What convinced you? What was going on that you saw?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Well, I was

• 9:08Peter Diamandis?

  What year is this also?

• 9:09Speaker 00

  This would have been like 2000, 2008, 2009. I decided, you know, I was a PC gamer, and so I'd been building my own gaming rigs. I was into modifying game consoles. I ran a game console modification forum called Mod Retro as a teenager. And I started to realize that everything that I was doing was focused on what the next step was. So I had like an eight monitor PC gaming setup with AMD ifinity. And I started to think to myself, okay, well, what's the next step? It's not 10 monitors, it's not 15, you know, it's not just higher resolution. Those are all questions about the next step. What's the final step? Where's this all going? What should I be working on that's kind of the end?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  How can I work on the end game and not just an intermediary step where it's all throwaway? I'm just on this, you know, rat race treadmill of always trying to be a little better. It was clearly VR. And that was when I decided to work on VR, period. My work was really bad at the beginning. It took years, you know, three or four years before I finally made something where I said, okay, I actually can make something that can pull this off. It's not just a cool hobby, a thought experiment, you know, about the future of gaming. This is something I can bring to people now.

• 10:23Peter Diamandis?

  So this is what Elon would call sort of first principle thinking. Where is it all going to end up?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Yep. And start working on that now instead of on the iterative steps.

• 10:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And you'd convinced yourself that the tech to make that happen existed or was going to come into existence?

• 10:40Speaker 00

  I was convinced it would come into existence and I intended to be on the forefront of it, even if it took a long time. So I think if you'd asked me in 2009 if I thought that VR was going to be viable in, let's say, three years, I think I would have been a little more pessimistic, especially based on my early prototypes and their relatively low quality. When I knew that I had had something is when I started showing it to my friends and they started to tell me that what I was building was actually cool rather than that I was wasting my time, which was actually the consensus opinion of my circle in the early years.

• 11:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is if you're building something with a technology that exists today, by the time you get it to market, it's out of date, right? And it's really skying to where the puck's going to be. And so you saw that, you saw that coming. So you create the DK1.

• 11:30Peter Diamandis?

  It goes on fire, you saw what, like 55,000 of them to developers?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. So, yeah, I mean, DK1 was never intended to be a consumer product. We were very clear about that. You had to check a box during the order process that I am a game developer using this for the purposes of game development and understand that I will not be receiving any content support, installation support, whatever. Because we were, we also weren't staffed up for that. We weren't staffed to run this like a consumer electronics company.

• 11:57Peter Diamandis?

  But there was nothing else?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  But there was nothing else. And then I think we had a lot of game developers buy it. And then quite a few just really early, early adopter type people who were willing to, you know, lie about being a game developer and buy something that said, we're not going to give you any real support. And nonetheless, they wanted that glimpse of the future.

• 12:15Peter Diamandis?

  And so you get a call one day from Zuckerberg. How did, how did come, how did that come down?

• 12:19Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, that was quite a ways, quite a way, you know, that was a couple of years later after we started the company. At that point, we had much better hardware, especially in our, in, on the research side. We had, we built a system that had full positional tracking, low latency displays, much higher resolution, OLED displays. We were deep into our controller development process, which I was actually. Actually, leading at the time. So I was I was kind of leading the control team because I believed that virtual reality input was going to be as meaningful as VR output.

• 12:53Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I want to talk about haptics in a little bit.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  For sure. But you know, that was I we actually the the first the first connection to Facebook actually came through Mark Andreessen, who was who was who was on the board of directors at Oculus very recently because he had led our Series B. And so that was that was how that connection, how that connection happened. And it's actually took quite a while for that connection to go from first meeting to any any kind of acquisition offer or even even interest. But, you know, once you once you start using VR, if you you can see you can see the potential.

• 13:30Peter Diamandis?

  So Mark says to you, Zuckerberg says to you, I want to buy the company after some engagement. Yes, he offers you a billion dollars. You say, nope. How long before he came back and offered you two billion?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Oh, he disappeared for a few months. So I and you know, I think that was fine with us. I mean, to be clear, we weren't looking to sell the company and we made that clear. We were looking to build the next major computing platform. We believed that we were going to do that. We weren't interested in being part of, you know, someone's someone's scheme to just set up a gaming platform or to, you know, have a cool Halo product. We were going to try to be the next Microsoft. We're going to try to be the next Apple. And the thing that convinced us when he came back wasn't going from, you know, one billion to two billion. The real thing that convinced us was the commitment that they would be they would commit to putting in billions of dollars every year for the next decade. And that was the thing that really got us excited.

• 14:31Peter Diamandis?

  And they did.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  And they did. And they've more they've more they've more than made up on that particular promise. They've done it.

• 14:38Peter Diamandis?

  They centered their company around the technology.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean, yeah, I mean, now that they're now they're meta and they're spending many billions of dollars a year on bringing VR to life. And, you know, it hasn't even been quite 10 years since the acquisition. So that that that that promise they did. They did keep and that was what was exciting to us. We we knew that doing what we were doing was going to cost an enormous amount of money, more than we could reasonably raise and more than we could organically derive from profit on selling hardware and software. And so we we knew that doing this ensured that VR would happen.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  It it it ensured that we would not get wiped out by factors beyond our control. And it's worth noting, there were a lot of people who had different visions of VR, which I respect greatly. But, you know, let's look at Sony. You know, Sony had just. Their PlayStation headset. Yeah, Sony had just announced their PlayStation VR. They were going to be a really serious competitor for us because we knew that in the long run VR was going to be the future of all computing. But in the short term, when, you know, the quality is not that great and when the content is relatively limited, you're kind of limited to that tech, tech, tech lover, early adopter and hardcore gamer audience. There was a real risk that we were just going to get, you know, smothered in the cradle by Sony's vision of VR.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Facebook was someone who believed in the future of VR that we believed in, that this was the next major computing platform and that they were going to beat everybody to the punch by investing like crazy into it.

• 16:05Peter Diamandis?

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• 16:46Peter Diamandis?

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• 17:24Peter Diamandis?

  Visit www.eightsleep.com, that's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com/moonshots, and you'll save 150 bucks on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. I hope you do it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now, back to the episode. So as a moonshot entrepreneur going after this, you've gotten to a point, you've got momentum, you've got a sizable exit, you've got a sugar daddy, for lack of a better term, that's going to fund it and grow it and help it scale. Did they promise they'd leave you alone?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah. I mean, we've, this is, I'm not even revealing anything new here. We talked about this. The explicit, the explicit deal is that we would be run as an independent company, that we were in control, that it was our vision. And the reason that it could be our vision is because our visions were aligned. And to their credit, that is how it went for a few years. It wasn't until later that they really started to centralize control, not just of Oculus, but of all of their acquisitions. You know, we're not a unique story. You look at what happened with the founders at Instagram, you look at what happened with the founders at WhatsApp, and all of them have similar stories.

• 18:38Peter Diamandis?

  Do you have a club?

• 18:40Speaker 00

  We actually do.

• 18:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Um, but, but, but, you know, it was, it wasn't so much that Oculus, uh, had, you know, it wasn't so much that Oculus had the deal changed on them. It's that Facebook changed what they were and how they wanted to run their company. And that impacted, that impacted everybody.

• 18:57Peter Diamandis?

  When you're talking to an entrepreneur who's considering selling their company to a large acquirer and has the benefits of a, of an exit and, uh, and deep pockets.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:07Peter Diamandis?

  Any advice to them?

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Well, usually the advice I give is ahead of, ahead of the acquisition, you know, but before, I, I encourage people to think about if they would sell their company long before they are actually getting that offer. Cause they should have some kind of principled understanding of why they might sell or why they might not sell. Um, which is something I had to develop on the fly. And I, I think I would have been better served by, by coming up with a better answer. Uh, what I tell people to consider is ahead of time, early is, is your company really better off as an independent company? Or is it better off as part of a larger company with more resources? Uh, you know, when, when those resources might be a bigger brand, it might be better marketing, it might be more money, it might be more people. Uh, but your resources can take many forms, but, uh, there's a lot of companies that people

• 19:54Speaker 00

  start where they are clearly going to be better as part of a major company. There's others where they would be better if they can remain independent and that they're only see their, their full potential on their own, uh, without being compromised by somebody else's, by somebody else's interests. And, uh, that it's, it's totally different on a per company basis. I don't, I, I'm not religious about it though. I don't tell people, never sell, or you'll get fired and you'll get screwed and you'll be lost to the sands of time. Uh, nor do I tell them to always sell out and, you know, take the money. It really depends on what you're doing.

• 20:24Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to come back to Facebook, but a couple of weeks ago, finally, Apple debuts Vision Pro.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 20:34Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, you had tried the headset before.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 20:36Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, at an earlier stage and then.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  I talked about that at a abundance. And then everybody dug up my comments, uh, that which they had to, had to kind of miss the first time. And then, then everyone was digging, digging, digging it up. Cause I guess I apparently I'm only one of the only people who is, was willing to, willing to say something.

• 20:52Peter Diamandis?

  So did you see the debut as well?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Oh, of course.

• 20:54Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, good. And what did, so what up? What do you think?

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Eight.

• 20:59Peter Diamandis?

  Did they nail it?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  I think that there's things that I would do differently if I were Apple, but

• 21:05Peter Diamandis?

  What did they do right?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  And that's what I was gonna say. They did basically everything, everything right. They didn't do anything, anything, anything terrible. I mean, I think Apple's going after the exact right segment of the market that Apple should be going after. So the thing you have to remember is different companies, I think, have different products that are right for them to be building. I think if Apple had tried to go after the low end of the market, that would have been a mistake. They are taking the exact approach that I had always wanted Apple to take and really the approach that Oculus had been taking in the early years. You know, I actually went, when, when Apple, when Apple, when Apple launched the Vision Pro, I retweeted a tweet of my own from 2015, where I said that before VR can become something that everyone can afford,

• 21:52Speaker 00

  it must become something that everybody wants. And I think that's the approach Apple is taking. You know, they're trying to go balls to the wall, the highest possible resolution, the highest quality possible displays, the best possible ergonomics. And they're going all in on that with little regard for it being affordable for everyone. And I think that is actually the right approach for Apple to take right now. That approach will change. Obviously, they're gonna do a cheaper version in the future. It boils my mind when you have all of these pundits coming out and saying, this is a blunder, it'll never go anywhere. Who the heck is gonna spend $3,500?

• 22:26Peter Diamandis?

  A lot of people.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's the real secret. There's a lot of people who are gonna spend it. But more importantly, there's 100 times more people who are gonna spend a quarter of that when it gets to that, to that, to that price. That's, that's that's really where you need to be looking at this. The price right now, it's, it's kind of irrelevant. The people who are gonna buy it at $3,500, we would have bought it at $5,000. We would have bought it at $2,000. The price just doesn't matter for the group of early adopters that they're targeting. But what they're gonna do is inspire lust in a much larger group of people who, you know, as I dreamed all those years ago, see VR as something they desperately want before it becomes something they can afford.

• 23:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, people have to desire it. I had this experience when I was trying to price my Zero G Flight. I wanted to get the price below 2000, couldn't get there originally. And I had it at 3500 and then realized that the same number of people would pay 5000 or 7500 bucks.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 23:21Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, having a viable company and product that people aspire to is super viable. Then eventually get the price down as we always do. What are the features that you think are the most important that surprised you in the Vision Pro?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Oh, man, let me see, things that are surprising. I don't want to sound arrogant here, but most of the things are just things that I totally expect.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, what they're doing, when I say they're doing it right, they're doing things that people have talked about as the right thing to do for a very, very long time.

• 23:55Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I found the

• 23:56Speaker 00

  One of the things, you know, one thing I'm surprised on a little bit is that Apple did go for having the external puck

• 24:05Speaker 00

  tethered to the headset. To be clear, that is the right way to do things. And I was a big advocate of this in Oculus. Unfortunately, it was a battle that I lost in my waning years. And they went all in on putting the battery, all the batteries, putting all the processing in the actual headset itself. And not just in the headset, but in the front of the headset itself, which hugely increases the weight of the front of the device and the off, you know, the asymmetric torque load. And it's not a good decision. The fact that Apple did that was something I was afraid they wouldn't do because it does look less cool than having it all in one kind of magical thing that you just put on your head. But getting the weight off of your head is so important, especially for the future. I think the real reason Apple got the battery off of the head is not because

• 24:49Speaker 00

  this device couldn't have had a battery on, let's say, the back of the headset and been fine. It's because they are setting that expectation in people that it's okay to have it off of the head. So then in the future, they can add more processing, they can add more radios, they can add more batteries to an external puck rather than keeping it in the headset. Because that's what's going to allow the Apple device to become basically, you know, a thin pair of glasses. As long as you're keeping all your processing and all of your battery and power in the headset, there's a limit to how small it can be. And that limit is somewhere around the size of VR headsets that you kind of see today.

• 25:25Peter Diamandis?

  So take me there. Where is this going? I mean, what would you not be surprised by a decade from now? What's, what's VR look like?

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Well, you're gonna see a huge number of people that are wearing headsets used for AR and VR every single day. They're gonna be using it continuously to blend the real world and the digital world seamlessly. They'll be going between the two frequently, sending data between the two frequently, communicating with people who exist across both of those two planes continuously. And that's, I, I, I think that we're likely to spend more of our waking moments with our reality augmented or mediated or whatever you want to call it. There's a, there's a million philosophical distinctions. That we're gonna spend more times, uh, more time looking at that augmented view than an un-augmented view.

• 26:15Peter Diamandis?

  So, living in the, in the virtual and augmented world. And, and do you think the headsets will get down to a pair of sunglasses?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  They're gonna, I think they, here's the thing. I think that the headsets can get down to a pair of sunglasses. I don't think they will. The reason for that is that you have to make certain trade-offs that get more and more extreme as you get to the far end of what you can do in terms of making a lightweight headset. I'd say think more kind of chunky sunglasses is probably where things are going. But when people say, is it ever gonna get to, you know, this thin pair of glasses? I say, you know what? It's possible to make a virtual reality headset or an AR headset within the laws of physics that fits in that form factor. But the quality of that experience is going to be so much worse than something just a little bit bigger that I think most people will opt for the thing that is a little bit bigger and a radically better experience.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  The real key here is a changing of social expectations. I mentioned this in abundance.

• 27:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  The real way Apple is going to make their headset cool and acceptable to wear in public is not through engineering. It's, it, it, it, it's still pretty big.

• 27:18Peter Diamandis?

  Social engineering.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  It's social engineering. It's, it's, it's marketing. They're gonna put it on the heads of the right celebrities. They're gonna put it on the heads of the right influencers. And just like that, boom, something that was lame will become cool. And it doesn't have Have to get any thinner or lighter.

• 27:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Will Will I Am was at A360 speaking this year and he wears these very large red glasses that could be a VR.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Lady Gaga did the same thing, you know, she really kicked off a trend a few years ago of wearing huge oversized sunglasses that are way too big.

• 27:47Peter Diamandis?

  Getting ready, getting ready.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And that made and that made it cool. I think Apple's gonna do the exact same thing. They're gonna make the big thing cool. And so by the time we have the chunky sunglasses, I I I think we're gonna be well past the question of will people wear on this? People will look back on this discussion as as a quaint relic. They'll say, man, can you believe people there were there are people who really thought that? Nobody would ever dare wear VR or AR glasses in public. It's just, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna seem bizarre to.

• 28:14Peter Diamandis?

  The social, the social analogy is I remember the first time I watched people with earbuds walking around the street, talking to themselves. And it seemed just weird.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:24Peter Diamandis?

  And now it's totally socially acceptable.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  I mean, you can go back even further. People thought it was nuts when people were walking around with cell phones, even just talking on them. You know, the the idea that you would just be out in public using a piece of, you know, office telecommunications hardware seemed seemed seems pretty bizarre. Uh, but now it's totally taken for granted. You you literally would not even not not only would you not think twice when you see on the street, you don't even think about it.

• 28:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's a fully accepted. I remember Tom Furness at the Human Interface Lab up in Seattle.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:53Peter Diamandis?

  Um, had a vision of what he called the virtual retinal displays where literally you would raster scan.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:59Peter Diamandis?

  With a laser across the back of the retina as a way to.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Virtual retinal display that doesn't form any image plane except on the retina.

• 29:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So are those possible?

• 29:08Speaker 00

  They're possible. I I it's a it's one path to the future. It's not the one that I'm betting on. I think we're just gonna keep brute forcing it through higher and higher pixel density on relatively traditional silicon process displays and micro displays. I I could be wrong there that the thing that people don't quite understand about VRDs, uh, the, you know, these retinal displays is that you still have to project onto your eye from a wide angle. So a lot of people imagine that VRDs can from a small lens project, you know, a a large field of view. That's not possible with any reasonable permutation of the technology. It could change in a few decades, but for now, any VRD with wide field of view needs to also have a large lens that is going over your eye.

• 29:50Peter Diamandis?

  Until we bypass and go directly to the cortex.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Until we go bypass and go directly into the brain, which I'll, I'll be honest, I'm cynical about. I, I think we're gonna.

• 29:59Peter Diamandis?

  You haven't signed up yet?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  So I, I'm a big believer in, in BCI for like arbitrary data transfer. So, you know, basically like psychic power levels of augmentation.

• 30:08Peter Diamandis?

  Think in Google.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that, and, and also, you know, like, you know, knowing directions, having random data input from different systems, you know, reaching out and controlling things. But when it comes to replacing the visual system, I think it's extraordinarily hard to get a BCI with the particular type of bandwidth that we need to do that sufficiently well. I think it's more likely that we are just using glasses. I see a future where we have near perfect brain to computer interfaces for controlling our computers. We're still going to be wearing head mounted displays. That's my opinion.

• 30:41Peter Diamandis?

  And what are we doing with our hands? So what do you think about the hand gestures and lack of haptics? And where do you think haptics are going to go?

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Well, it's no secret that I'm a big fan of VR input. I think that's probably one of the things I would have done differently than Apple. On the other hand, they have, they have a plan for VR input that goes beyond just, just, just the finger inputs. I think they're, they're taking a focused marketing approach, but I think they have a broader, a broader vision for the future than everything just being eyes and fingers. So I'm, I'm a big fan of, of haptic input. I'm a big fan of haptic props. I'm a big fan of especially finger held tools that allow you to do high precision interactions that you simply cannot do with your eyes or with the binary inputs of touching fingers.

• 31:26Peter Diamandis?

  Do we have a lot of room to, to grow there?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  There's, there's a ton of room to grow, a lot of room to grow, a lot of room to specialize. What I like to use as an analogy is the keyboard, you know? Look, looking at things and touching your fingers, that's a human interface. But a keyboard is a superhuman interface. It allows you to do things faster and better than you could do them with your voice, than you could do it even with your, with your, with your eyes. And a mouse is also to some degree a superhuman interface. These are things that require a lot of training to use. They're not natural, like keyboards are not natural. You'd probably agree.

• 31:58Peter Diamandis?

  Especially the QWERTY.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  They take, they take a long time to learn, but well, the QWERTY, that's a whole separate mess. But, you know, let's pretend that the keyboard hadn't been crippled by QWERTY. You know, it'd be, it'd be even better for, for, for everybody. I think you're going to see similar devices for AR and VR in the future, devices where they are specialized, where they require training, where there's a high skill ceiling, but they allow you for. You know, beyond human, superhuman in levels of input and output. They're not going to be used by everybody. They're not going to be used all the time, but they are going to be used for dedicated specialized use cases like gaming, like productivity, like CAD modeling, uh, like, you know, military combat. And so I, I, I'm very, still very excited about the, the future of haptics. I don't think that tapping your fingers together is the end game.

• 32:44Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I, I'm always looking for what I call user interface moments. These moments in time when something gets built that transforms the world. So when Andreessen creates Mosaic on top of ARPA,

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:55Peter Diamandis?

  It's a user interface moment. All of a sudden people can use this incredible powerful tool. Uh, when Steve Jobs created, you know, the App Store, that's a user interface moment. Google was a user interface moment on, on top of all of the, the web uh, sites in the world. Uh, do you see, uh, the Vision Pro as a user interface moment, a transitional moment in this field? Or is it not that significant? Or was?

• 33:20Peter Diamandis?

  Is it going to create sort of a step change? And in approaches and usability of the virtual world?

• 33:29Speaker 00

  You know, that's actually going to be hard for me to predict mostly because whether or not it becomes a step change moment is totally up to developers more than Apple. Apple's come up with,

• 33:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  The App Store's come up with a really powerful UI, but I, I'm not sure I'm comfortable betting against all of the other developers who are trying to come up with their own schemes. I've seen some other schemes that people have come up with around some, you know, crazy ways to interact with computers using VR headsets. And some of them I think are actually, have advantages over what Apple is doing. So I, I'd say what Apple's done is great. I suspect that if someone beats them, they're also going to adapt that. I mean, the, the App Store is a good example. You know, the App Store was not part of the original vision of the iPhone. You know, Steve Jobs was famously anti-native apps. He was all about web apps and not really giving anyone access to the, the core hardware of the system.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  One of the people who is actually going toe-to-toe with him on that was, uh, John Carmack, who was previously the CTO of Oculus and before that, obviously. Yep. Started in software. He was one of the people who was really aggressively pushing jobs to allow native applications on the iPhone. And I think it, I, I, I think, you know, I, I had an Nokia N800 mobile internet device running MIMO. And so I, you know, I was, I had, I had my mobile app repositories on my little, you know, Linux device. And I mean, I basically had everything that the App Store had years ahead of time. I think that, uh, I think Apple in that case, it was one where they got it wrong and they realized that they had gotten it wrong. And they said, okay, we're going to do the App Store. We're going to copy what a lot of other people have done, but we're going to do it really, really well. And that was transformational.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  So I guess I would say, I'm not convinced that what Apple is showing right now is that step change. Whatever that step change is though, you know, Apple's going to be on it. I don't think that they're going to, I don't think they're going to be stubborn about using the best.

• 35:16Peter Diamandis?

  An extraordinary company. Their MO on just driving to perfection.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 35:21Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's going to be expensive, it's going to be white, and it's going to work really well.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 35:25Peter Diamandis?

  Last question on this topic. You depart Facebook.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:32Peter Diamandis?

  What would you have done differently since, uh, on Oculus?

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Oh man, that's a long conversation, but I think, uh, a few things, a few things I probably would have done differently is I would have, uh, I would have shipped a different set of hardware focused on a different set of people. And I probably would have staged it a little bit differently. There's been this consistent push at Facebook to make VR something that everybody is interested in using, but it, I think it's, it's come somewhat prematurely. I wrote a blog post years ago called Free Isn't Cheap Enough. Um, and in it, I lay out an argument for, uh, I laid an argument, not really for, it was an argument against the idea that the thing holding VR back is cost.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  It was this idea that if you make a VR headset cheap enough, then everybody will want it. And that, that might be true in the limit. You have to make the technology accessible and affordable if you eventually want to have a billion people using it. But to do that, you have to first hit a certain level of quality. There's a certain level of hardware quality, comfort, ergonomics, resolution, and especially critical. Content library in breadth and depth that you have to have before the average person will even care about VR. So the argument of free isn't cheap enough was that if you took current VR headset technology as of a few years ago, and you lowered the price to $0, meaning you literally gave it to everybody in the world. I argued that the majority of people would cease using it within a few weeks.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  The only people left would be the hardcore techno heads, the super geeks, the hardcore gamers. You know, a group of people I fall into myself. But I pointed out that cutting the cost doesn't get you to the mainstream if you're not at that particular level of quality yet. And so I'd say that was, I think, one of the mistakes was trying to go too mainstream too quickly to the detriment of the growth trajectory. And you might say, oh, well, they're just trying to get it to take off period. But I think that you kind of, these things have to kind of come in stages. And so that, I think, I think kind of leaving the high end and the hardcore behind was too early was a mistake. And I think things like, look at Facebook Horizons or Meta Horizons now.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Like Meta Horizons is not the thing that is going to convince the masses to use VR. And you could say, well, you got to start building it now, to which I would say, no, you don't. You need to build the things that the people who will use it at its current state will use. You need to maximize your sales at every step of the way, rather than build. There was, there was a thing that I said right before I left, which was that they, I pointed out that, that, that in the, in the, in the marketing and targeting discussions, there was too much Starbucks and not enough Mountain Dew. And I don't even have to explain it for you to understand what I mean.

• 38:23Peter Diamandis?

  That's hilarious. You know, it's Larry Page's toothbrush test, right? Build something that people need to use twice a day and you'll get success.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  That's right. And I, and I think that things like Quest Pro were actually kind of a step.

• 38:39Peter Diamandis?

  Directionally.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Directionally, I think it was a good step, but I think it was also, it was too late and not implemented particularly well. Like, one interesting thing about Apple is their headset has all of these, you know, face tracking and eye tracking features that they're doing incredible things with. I mean, you saw these demos of how they're using it in incredible ways. Compare that with, did you even know that Quest Pro had eye tracking? I did not. It did. That's the crazy thing. They put out this headset. But when I was at Oculus, we did something called feature prototypes. We would put out publicly, we'd show a prototype hardware, a hardware prototype that incorporated one new feature and we would show to developers how you could use it. We would make software demonstrations of how you do this. So whether it's positional tracking or controllers or low persistence, we would show how this particular feature could be used and get devs thinking about it.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Get them excited about it. So they were developing for it ahead of time and then, you know, coming up with concepts they could use once the hardware was out. And we would never release a new feature in our hardware without showing it to devs way ahead of time and showing the public what could be done with it. Quest Pro came out like, hey, we have eye tracking, we have face tracking. The only app that supports it is Horizons and we have no other demo applications. We have nothing that shows you the magic. We have no UI examples that show you how to use this. There's no games that support it. There's no way you can actually even play with it, except in this one app that none of you even care about. And that like, that was a big mistake. If I was, I think Meta could have basically owned that entire eye tracking, natural interaction moment.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Because the idea of looking at things and touching your fingers to interact with them, that isn't a new Apple idea. But they're the ones that brought it out and said, we're putting a stake in the ground. This is what we're going all in on. If I were still around, I probably wouldn't have shipped a headset without any demonstrations of the killer feature of that headset. Anyway, I could complain all day. I'm being unfair. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to the people at Meta for giving you guys a hard time. I know you guys have a lot of issues and I understand some of the inter, inter political dynamics of how these things ended up this way and why they ended up this way. I'm not, I'm not ignorant of the, of the challenges, but I can't help but look and, and think that I would have done things. I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that way. I at least would have made different mistakes. But you know what the good news is?

• 40:51Peter Diamandis?

  You left and you started Andorol.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 40:54Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, if you had been, you know, had reign and continued, you might still be there building that out, but so you leave Oculus and you start a defense company. I mean, like, where did that come from? That sounds, it feels like a right turn in life.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  It was, but you know, you and I have talked about this quite a bit.

• 41:15Peter Diamandis?

  But I want people to hear about this. It's an interesting conversation and important one for entrepreneurs to hear.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I'd say a lot of it came out of fear and the rest was a sense of obligation and patriotism.

• 41:28Peter Diamandis?

  Would you call those deep emotions for you?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:32Peter Diamandis?

  Can I make a point here that doing anything big and bold in the world, taking on any moonshot has got to be connected with emotion?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 41:39Peter Diamandis?

  Because it's hard otherwise.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Well, moonshots are almost never the right risk-adjusted move. They don't make any sense if your goal is to make money or start a successful company. There has to be some, you know, extra, extra realistic factor, you know, outside of, of, of the reasonable and rational risk management process.

• 41:59Peter Diamandis?

  And it can be a positive aspiration, like, oh, my God, I want to open the space frontier, or it can be fear, and I cannot allow this to go on anymore, but that drive.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  And that was, that was really the combination of things. I mean, look, there were specific technologies that I had in mind that I wanted to make. There were things that I knew I could bring into the world that wouldn't be brought into the world otherwise, but the, the, the driving force for Andorol was a recognition by me and other people that I respected that America used to be really good at building the tools we needed to defend ourselves and to deter conflict. We used to be good at equipping our allies and partners around the world with, with the same, and that we had lost that, that we weren't in the lead on a lot of important technologies, that we didn't have a system that would allow our existing defense primes to lead in areas like autonomy, artificial intelligence, network systems, swarming systems.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  And most importantly, I realized that our big tech companies weren't refusing to work with the DOD largely because they were beholden to China. At the same time, new startups couldn't raise money because investors rightly said that there was no chance of success. They said, "Look, why would I invest in the defense company when there's only two examples of success, both founded by billionaires who can really do whatever they want in the last 35 years?" And I mean, that's a that's a kind of terrifying landscape. And it was it was something I felt like I had to I had to try to tackle because nobody else was going to do it.

• 43:21Peter Diamandis?

  So first of all, I think for listeners, it's important to note, when Palmer was on stage at Abundance 360, he got, when he announced the mission, he got, you got cheers. You had people standing up and applauding, which, you know, I'm proud of that, but I was also a little bit surprised. I mean, there was an emotional reaction that was evoked.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Well, I think there's a few things driving that. First of all, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I think, has been a game changer. That's right. There are a lot of people who I think bought into the idea. You've heard heard probably heard this phrase that we lived at the end of history, that all the borders are static, that the commerce is too powerful.

• 44:03Peter Diamandis?

  Economic entrenchment is going to keep us safe.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. There that there will never be a major war again because there can't be because peace is too profitable. And it's a really beautiful idea. And I've had a lot of smart people lecture me on how my vision for the future was somewhere between immoral and and a waste of time. I got some people saying that Andorol was wrong. I got actually more people saying it's a waste of time. Like, there's not going to be any more wars of significance. There's no fights of consequence to deter. You're just wasting your time. And I think that, you know, Russia's actions have been a wake-up call. I think that Xi's feverish drive to secure the heavenly mandate and take back Taiwan has been another

• 44:46Speaker 00

  wake up call for people. And I'd say another big wake up call is this self reinforcing loop where I believe that five years ago, when everyone was acting like Android was controversial, you know, when Bloomberg was running articles saying we're the most controversial company in tech, when we won Wired magazine's worst company in Silicon Valley.

• 45:05Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. What year was that in?

• 45:06Speaker 00

  That would have been 2018. So a year after we started. But when all of this was going on, I honestly believe that nine out of 10 people in the tech industry did support the military. They did support the idea that our military should have better weapons than China and better weapons than Russia. But all of those nine out of 10 people believed that they were one out of 10. And I think that they wouldn't have cheered five years ago for that reason. They were worried about what their peers might think. They were worried about what the public might think. And I think that really, we've seen this tipping of the scale where that nine out of 10 feels free to say, you know what? This is important. We do need this. America is something special. We do have a particular role in this world.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And there's nothing wrong with recognizing that the world needs to be met as it is, not as we wish it was.

• 45:56Peter Diamandis?

  That's beautifully stated. Listen, it's still a right turn in life to go from Oculus to defense.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Oh, it's true. No, it's been tough mentally.

• 46:04Peter Diamandis?

  And I want to, I want to take you back to that moment because I want to hear that story. I mean, I remember talking to Elon about, you know, him driving across the country and from Wharton to California and deciding a good space needed to happen. And he was going to embarrass NASA by originally sending a mouse around Mars, then landing a greenhouse on Mars. And he goes to Russia to buy a rocket and he realizes there are 50 year old ICBMs and he's being charged a fortune for it. And this is a dead industry he could reinvent. And that's a moment in time and experience in time that led him to create SpaceX.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:41Peter Diamandis?

  What's yours? What was going on that led you to say, I need to go and reinvent the defense industry? I need to enable it?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I think probably the biggest recognition was Yeah, I I believed in tech. I believed in the tech industry. But I realized that our technology industry, which was really poised to revolutionize so many areas. Transportation, energy, computing, obviously, was completely abdicating from any responsibility to national security. And I think that was the real thing that was driving me. The realization that Google was not going to work with our military to protect us or our allies. The realization that Facebook was not going to do the same. The realize realization that really you had a whole generation of our best engineers not working with the military and that that was a unique moment in US history. This terrified me.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  You know, imagine if this had been the case during the run up to-

• 47:33Peter Diamandis?

  But was it a dinner conversation? Was it an event that occurred?

• 47:37Speaker 00

  You know, it was, it was, um, I'd say it was more of a slow burn and it was also a development-

• 47:43Peter Diamandis?

  Just evidence mounting and mounting.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Exactly. I mean, look, there was a time where I didn't even think about these things. That there was no one moment. I mean, look, I was part of the problem to a certain degree. I manufactured millions of virtual reality headsets in China. And, uh, you know, I spent time in China and as time passed, I started to realize that this was a really unprecedented situation. There'd never been a situation where a foreign adversary had more influence over our innovation ecosystem than our home nation. I mean, that's, that's, that's extraordinary and unprecedented. I wish I could point to a particular meeting or a particular moment. Probably, probably one moment for me that was a big deal

• 48:26Speaker 00

  was a moment that was a big deal for a lot of people, which is, it's not really a rational thing, but it's a psychic and, and, and mental thing. It was when the F-35 program surpassed $1 trillion in budget.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  I, I guess if I could point to one thing when I realized things were broken, it was that. And it wasn't just me. Yeah, it was you. It was everyday Americans. It was people in Congress. They said- They were just going about their life. And if it had been 990 billion, I think nobody would have thought about it quite the same. But when it surpassed a trillion, a lot of people said, what the heck are we doing? How did we get here? How did we let this happen? Are we really gonna let this happen over and over again? I'd say that that was a big moment for me, even divorced from the problems I saw China creating in our economic incentive structure.

• 49:15Peter Diamandis?

  This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't.

• 49:56Peter Diamandis?

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• 50:37Peter Diamandis?

  use not only for myself, but my friends and my family, that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So, check it out. Levels.link/peter. Give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is gonna be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm gonna be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. I want to get back to the way that the government buys products and in particular in the defense industry because it is so broken and I love the fact that one of

• 51:16Speaker 00

  I'm glad that a trillion dollar program broke people's minds too. I mean, how much, think about how much more frustrating it would have been if it was something where, you know, I got frustrated, maybe you got frustrated, but it kind of just passed everyone else by. I'm so glad that that was one of those things where everyone got it.

• 51:31Peter Diamandis?

  What I feel right now, my, one of my moon shots is I'm pissed at the healthcare system.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 51:37Peter Diamandis?

  How absolutely ineffective and inefficient and broken it is, right? And so I've got my own set of disruptions wanting to do there. But I see that you did it here. Let's talk about that. You know, you said a few things earlier that I think are important for people to hear. The defense industry, and let's narrow down on defense versus government in particular, is really bad at buying from entrepreneurs.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, yeah. I mean, the incentive structure doesn't reward it. Their contract structures don't allow it.

• 52:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. What else do they do poorly in contracting?

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Oh, man. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things I could throw at you.

• 52:16Peter Diamandis?

  What's egregious?

• 52:17Speaker 00

  So a couple of things are pretty egregious. One is, I think, one of them is relying on the fox to tell you how to, how to, how to kind of

• 52:27Peter Diamandis?

  Build a hen house.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Not just the hen house, but the business plan for the hen house and the supporting farm and how you're going to hire all of the people who are going to protect the hens and what exactly they're going to do.

• 52:38Peter Diamandis?

  The self-licking ice cream cone.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I mean, this manifests in really destructive ways. For example, until very recently, the United States Army, their plan of record for remotely piloted autonomous vehicles was that they were going to begin fielding them in the late 2030s and they were really not going to be fielding them at scale until the 2040s.

• 52:57Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  But the reason for this is that they had the, basically, the Army was relying on the representations, not of cutting-edge technology companies, but of large defense companies. And they're saying, this is how long it's going to take us. You're going to have to give us billions of dollars a year for decades and then eventually we'll build vehicles that are able to do some of this. And now, obviously, a lot of entrepreneurs have come in and with a tiny fraction, and again, we're spending a lot of money on self-driving cars, it's a tiny fraction of the money that the defense ecosystem wanted the taxpayer to be giving them to do the problem over a much longer period of time. And luckily, now those schedules are getting pulled in.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  It that I'd say that's pretty egregious. I'd say here's another really egregious problem that nobody's talking about except me. Um, I've, I've been, I've been, I've been hitting people up in Congress on this for years, people in oversight roles for years, and it's our patent system. Uh, I, I like to refer to patents as Chinese instruction manuals. You're basically taking your best technologies and your best approaches and you're putting them out in the public domain and saying, these are the things I think are most important and that are most valuable. And the problem is that we, we have told our commercial companies that in order to protect their ability to compete in the private sector, they must put into the public domain, which is really the Chinese domain, everything that they think

• 54:19Speaker 00

  is important. And to a company like, let's say, Google, uh, that makes sense. They say, well, look, I don't really mind if the Chinese military rips me off on an economic level, right? It doesn't hurt Google's business if let's say the Chinese.

• 54:30Peter Diamandis?

  You're not depending on that market share anyways.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  They're not competing for that market share anyway. They were never going to make money off of the Chinese defense contractors ripping off their technology. Uh, but, but the United States used to be better about this. We used to be better at finding certain technologies and saying, hey, this is of massive strategic importance. This is the difference between winning and losing a war. We're not going to let you take this technology and put it out there. And there is actually a process by which you can obtain classified patents, but that process is extremely limited, very difficult to navigate, almost impossible for any startup to utilize. One of the things I would really like to see is for the US to take a proactive approach and say, you know what? We want, like the, the, the whole idea of patents is you get a monopoly on your idea for a period of time in the United States

• 55:13Speaker 00

  and you get to protect your idea. And in exchange, you have to give that idea away to people who should have it. I think that we need to limit that a little bit and say, you know what? The goal of this is that you have to put it out there and you have to share it with people who we don't mind having our strategic, our, you know, our, our strategic assets. Like I would love to see maybe not a classified patent system, but a US only accessible patent system where if you're going to go in and see this stuff. You have to be a citizen, or you have to be a citizen of an allied nation, and they're going to keep track of who's accessing these things. You're not allowed to just print it all out and put it out there into the public domain. And look, I know this sounds controversial, anyone who's kind of an open source, can't stop the signal, information wants to be free type of person.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  But the things that I've seen China take out of our tech companies' patent portfolios, and then put into the field as military technology terrifies me, because we are slow at developing and fielding new military technology. China is fast. We can't afford to also be their R and D lab.

• 56:13Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's educate the world here, at least those listening, about the procurement process of what a cost-plus contract is.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:23Peter Diamandis?

  And who's taking the risk compared to the way contracting used to be done 100 years ago. Because it's changed a lot, I think mostly because of World War II, where the government just needed to pour money on companies.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Well, they needed to pour money on companies, and they needed to get a bunch of companies that were not in the weapons business into the weapons business. And those companies fairly said, listen, I don't know how much it's even going to cost me to build this airplane, this tank, this weapon system. I, because I, that's not what I do. I can't model it as well as I can building, you know, let's say, a bunch of cars. And the government said, listen, we'll just pay you a fixed, we'll pay, we'll pay for the cost, whatever it is, and then we'll make you a fixed percentage of profit on top. And that was a good system for a society in total war mode.

• 57:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Where nobody ever would have dreamed of slowing down, or pushing up expenses, or trying to come up with something that was gonna take twice as long as it needed to. It just, it simply wasn't going to happen. But we've kept that contracting system even as we've moved into, you know, times of relatively incredible peace.

• 57:25Peter Diamandis?

  And trillion dollar contracts.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  And trillion, and trillion dollar individual contracts for individual weapon systems. And of course, the problem is with a cost-plus contract, when you get paid for your time and materials and then a fixed percentage of profit on top, and especially where the government is taking on the development risk, what it really means is you make more money, in some cases, by failing than by succeeding.

• 57:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  You make more money when you're over schedule. You make more. Money when you're over budget, you make more money when you buy the most expensive parts, the most exquisite architectures and when you sell as many of something as possible, rather than simply the right amount. And it's, it's just a

• 58:01Peter Diamandis?

  Wrong incentives.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  It's a perverse incentive structure. And I, I, I've, I've talked about this many times. I'm not saying that people in the defense industry wake up in the morning and say, ah, another day, another chance to screw US taxpayers using Cosmos contracts. But the incentive leads to natural incentive structures that reward certain types of thinking, certain types of behavior. And pretty soon, the people who naturally, because of those incentive way in structures and, and ways of thinking, the people who drag out the contracts, the ones who figure out how to come up with exquisite, exquisite systems that make money, they're the ones who end up running the system. Because the people who are extremely efficient, extremely fast, they don't make any money in that system. They often don't even get a chance to participate in it. And so unfortunately, it's a, it's a self reinforcing problem.

• 58:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And before World War II, you know, most people probably don't realize that companies who are bidding on a government contract had to post a bond. They had to put up money for the right to bid and get the contract. And if they didn't perform, they lost and the government was made whole.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 59:05Peter Diamandis?

  Very, very different. These were called performance bonds. They were called bid bonds and payment bonds.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Well, it was also very common to have people accountable in other ways. They would structure contracts such that they would have multiple, multiple vendors building the exact same system. So that if one of them stopped performing, they'd say, you're out, your, your business, your scale, your volume, the volume that we allocated you, it's going to somebody else now. But again, in a world where 80% of the contracts go to, uh, sorry, 80% of the contracts go to five companies, where 30% of the major weapon systems have only one bidder.

• 59:39Peter Diamandis?

  That's insane.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  How can you do that? You, you, exactly. There's no, there's no, and, and the companies know this. They say, you literally can't take it away from me because there's nobody in the entire country who We'll build this and even if there are people who maybe could, most of the people who could compete with me, the tech companies, refuse to compete. I don't have any competition. I don't have to worry. I don't have to look over my shoulder and

• 1:00:01Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, there is a model and a solution and Andor will be one of the solutions here, but looking back, you know, I spent my first 30 years in the space business and it was Lockheed Martin and Boeing. And then, of course, they combined to create United Launch Alliance.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:00:15Peter Diamandis?

  And there was Orbital Sciences and Thiocol. And this massive consolidation occurs until there's only two suppliers.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:22Peter Diamandis?

  Right. But what changed was Elon and Jeff Bezos come in and then a whole slew of small entrepreneurial startups. And the old industrial military launch complex is gonna go the way of the dodo. And though, you know, we've got companies bringing the dodo back, but that's a different story. So I'm massively impressed with the way Andor is doing it.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  And just since it hasn't been explicitly said, like, I guess, I think we've talked about how bad the other types of business models is. I mean, our primary business model is using money to build products, which we then sell to our customer, which is the government.

• 1:01:01Peter Diamandis?

  Let's slow that down because it's really important for people to realize what you're doing is amazing.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Well, and it's also the way

• 1:01:07Peter Diamandis?

  Going 180 degrees, you know, out of phase with everybody else. It's risky, but it gives you the freedom and it's the best thing for America.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Well, and I'd say the best part of it is, you're right, it is risky. It is novel in the defense world, but the thing that really makes our business model special is how unspecial it is. It's not like we're coming in with this new concept like software as a service. That was like a new idea as a model. What we're coming in saying, we're gonna do business the oldest way that business has been done.

• 1:01:37Peter Diamandis?

  And the way the tech industry has been doing it forever.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Oh, I'd say, I mean, the way that commerce has worked for thousands of years. It's the way thing where I use my money to make a thing and I stack it up in the marketplace and I wait for people to come and they give me money and I give them my, my, my thing, you know, my clay pot or whatever it is, but you'll get my, my, my, that's really what's so powerful about the model that we're pursuing is it's not Really new, it's it's it's only new in the recent history of the United States. And so it's really just getting back to the basics. And that's why I'm such a believer in this model. This, we're not trying to get people to shift over to some crazy like, you know, subscription software as a service model as, you know, that that has a short history of success. Most of what we're doing, there are things that have actually worked out for for a really, really long time.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  And I think it's a good model because you talked about speed. I mean, there's a reason that we were the youngest company to win a federal program of record since the end of the Korean War, the AST program, the Autonomous Surveillance Tower program, a $250 million program with its own line item in Congress's budget. There's a reason we keep winning major programs of record. The reason we're able to move so fast is because we're not going to the government and asking them to fund our white paper and then fund a prototype and then fund an evaluation program. We're going in and saying, hey, we believe in this ourselves. We use our own money. We moved 10 times faster than you're able to move because you're not able to give money away as fast as we can spend it. And then we're coming to you with the problem already solved. I think that's a really powerful model. And I think it puts the risk where it should be on the people who are making the decisions

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  about what system they're building rather than on the customer.

• 1:03:11Peter Diamandis?

  So you enter this marketplace with very strong principles, right?

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 1:03:18Peter Diamandis?

  No, they are, and they're

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Opinions on me vary, but I sure think, I sure think so.

• 1:03:24Peter Diamandis?

  I'll stand up and applaud. And what do you enter first? I mean, let me ask, let me, let me give some perspective here. How many products, contracts, services do you have to the extent that you can say? Because you deal in the defense world.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Well, we've got about, we've got about a dozen hardware products, about half of which are publicly announced. So a lot of the new stuff we're doing, we're not able to talk about yet anyway. But our core product, the thing that touches everything we build is Lattice. It's kind of the AI platform that ties all of our things together, that merges data from all of the sensors that we have, all the sensors that we plug into that are not made by us, that allows people to command and control these systems, that allows small numbers of people to plan, simulate, and eventually manage and command and control Large scale conflict with huge numbers of autonomous networked systems working alongside people. I mean, that that was the first thing we worked on and we started day one.

• 1:04:18Peter Diamandis?

  Percentage of the company is software or AI based?

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  We've twice as many people working on software as hardware. That's a thing people don't quite understand about us often is that we're really a software company wrapped in hardware. If if you've seen Silicon Valley, the HBO television program. You you do remember the box Gavin Belson signature edition? I mean, I we we joke about that a lot where they took this compression algorithm. They just put it in a box so it could go on a rack and that was really the incredible business model. As soon as it was in a server rack, they were able to sell it. You know, that that's honestly a lot of what we do. I mean, we, yes, we sell hardware products. We sell, you know, strike drones and we sell surveillance systems. We sell robot submarines. We sell anti drone systems that protect military bases and critical infrastructure.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  But at the end of the day, all of those things are really just hardware hardware extensions of an artificial intelligence platform that we've been building for the last six years.

• 1:05:13Peter Diamandis?

  We've got a couple of of your products here in the room. You mind just pointing out what's here and what's over your shoulder?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. I mean, you know, over over here, we've got our ghost. Uh, you know, it's a it's a tactical drone. It's basically a small helicopter. It can fly for a couple of hours on battery power, six and a half hours on a hydrogen fuel cell, totally silent. But the really and has an enormous payload relative to quadcopters. Also very quiet. We call it ghost because it's acoustically inaudible at about one hundred years.

• 1:05:41Peter Diamandis?

  Or is it hand drone?

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Fully autonomous. Now, there is a manual control override, but it's used for maybe one percent of our flights. The vast majority of the time it's operating totally autonomously. And the the cool thing about it is you treat it less like a remote controlled plane and more like a really dumb helicopter pilot inside of a helicopter. You can tell it, go find this vehicle, go look for this thing, tell me when you find it. And until then I can go and do my job. I don't have to man micromanage you. And you could have one guy managing dozens of ghosts covering a huge area, finding things, looking at things, striking things. Uh, and to be able to do that with one or two people versus a huge group of. Hundreds of people, you know, in a piece of, in a piece of fixed infrastructure is a huge deal.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Um, this is Ultia six hundred. This is an air launched effect and loitering munition that we build. It's able to carry a significant warhead or a significant ISR payload, uh, flies for about four hours. It could be shot out of a, you know, shot off of a helicopter, shot out of a ground vehicle, you're launched by an individual ground troop.

• 1:06:41Peter Diamandis?

  Comes out of a tube.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Yep, shoots out of a tube, unfolds itself, pops out the wings, extends the wings. It's an extremely efficient design. But the thing again that makes it really powerful is that we've integrated autonomy that makes it less of an RC plane and more of an AI pilot that works alongside you. So before, uh, systems like this have existed. But let's say that I shot one of these out of a helicopter to scout ahead and look for surface to air missile launchers as I'm flying through some air corridor. Uh, you would have had to have a guy in the back of the helicopter dedicated full time to flying it around, looking at the screen, trying to find things, flying and orbiting around, talking to the guy in the front. And if you want two of them, you need two guys now. Very quickly, you end up with an entire helicopter with a team of dozen people in the back who are just flying these things around.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  How, now you don't have anything left for that helicopter.

• 1:07:29Peter Diamandis?

  And so lattice provides all of that.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  And la- lattice is the tool that lets the pilot push a button, launch 12 of these to cover a huge area far out in ahead. And he doesn't have to do anything. He waits for them to find the, to find the threats. It waits for them to say, hey, there's something that's come up. You need to alter your course or alternatively, I'm going to take out that SAM site and then you're going to be able to get through here more quickly. Uh, that's, that, that's the type of thing that's only possible with autonomy. There's huge swaths of tactics that do not work. When you have a one to one ratio of systems to people, you have to turn that on its head and have a lot more robots than people for these tactics to work.

• 1:08:08Peter Diamandis?

  I, I think I do remember the scene from Iron Man, uh, but that's a different story. Uh, any, any, uh,

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that, that's, that's actually a fun, fun fact about Iron Man is he's like, like they don't really stress it in quite this way, but Iron Man is only able to do the things he does because he has Jarvis.

• 1:08:24Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  And Jarvis is not one entity. People think of Jarvis like, oh, he has one person who's assisting them. But Jarvis distributes across all of his systems, across his suit, across the, a lot of his other weapon systems, even across, you know, individual munitions and sub munitions that his suit launches. All of those are actually guided by individual instances of the artificial intelligence. And so you have Iron Man multiplying himself into a powerhouse that's, you know, people think of him as the one, you know, the one, the one man pile driver. He actually is a man who's amplified by AI. And that is something that we are building as well.

• 1:08:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, I would imagine, well, first of all, I imagine that Jarvis as a version that's going to empower the warfighter on the ground and in whatever vehicle, um, flying suits ever?

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  I mean, look, they're, they're, they're, they're already sort of viable today. I mean, Gravity is doing this. Jetpack Industries, which I guess is now, um, Myamen Aviation. Um, the, the physics totally work out and I've.

• 1:09:24Peter Diamandis?

  Energy densities work out?

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  The, the energy, energy densities work out. I think one of the real problems is less the flying part and more the man part. Um, I think there was a, a point in our, in our history, probably sometime in the early eighties through the mid two thousands, where exoskeletons, flying suits, uh, you know, kind of super soldier, super soldier, soldier, exoskeletons made, made some sense. Uh, unfortunately, the type, and when I say unfortunately, I mean, unfortunately for us as science fiction fans.

• 1:09:53Peter Diamandis?

  Geeks, right?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  The types of wars that were likely to fight in the future are not the ones that are going to win by that. And here's the thing, if you can build a system that's good enough to wrap around a person and that you and a person can control it and keep that person safe, you probably should just have a person remotely piloting that.

• 1:10:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, which is, which goes to our advanced fighters.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I love it. I love keeping the soldier safe. But look, I, I mean, I want, I want the space marines dropping out of orbit into, into, into the drop zone as much as any science fiction fan. But unfortunately, I, I suspect that that, that time has, has passed. There was a, there was a brief period where the AI wasn't quite good enough. The sensors weren't quite good enough. The communications links weren't quite good enough to imagine having, you know, fully robotic systems performing the role. We're now getting to the point where the human is the limitation, not the enabler. And as, as, as unfortunate as that is for us as science fiction fans, we should be thankful for it from the perspective of keeping our guys alive.

• 1:10:48Peter Diamandis?

  And it's the reason we're to go to fully autonomous fighters instead of putting the, you know, the smushy meat body in the middle of the thing.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. And it's, it's the same thing. Like I, I don't, I don't like it from a, uh, you know, boy, isn't that cool perspective. From a boy isn't that cool perspective. I want manned space fighters. I want guys, you know, with, with, uh, with, um, with, uh, uh, perfluoro, uh, what, what is it? Uh, um, perfluorocarbon. Yeah. I want, I want pilots perfluorocarbon in their lungs, sitting in their liquid G beds, pulling 400 G turns in space. Like, that's what I want, but it's not what it's going to be.

• 1:11:23Peter Diamandis?

  You'll do it in the virtual world.

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  Um, and it's really of shame because there was again, a period, I think probably in like the late seventies through maybe the late nineties where it actually may have made sense to have things like manned space reconnaissance planes, maybe even manned fighters. But unfortunately the-

• 1:11:39Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's going to take us out of the question. Does it make sense to take man to Mars? Or out to the, to the outer planets?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I, I'd say that's a philosophy question, you know? There are people who say, why send a man to Mars when we, we can learn everything we need to do with robots? And that really comes down to, what do you think the role of man is? What is man? What should we be? Where should we go? And, uh, I'm like, yeah, sure. We, we definitely could just send robots instead of people.

• 1:12:02Peter Diamandis?

  Well, listen, I'm a Star Trek fan all the way down. So five year missions, baby. Let's talk about something where I have a disconnect with you and I want to drill through this. Following your purpose versus following what you are best at. So I'm out there saying, listen, if you can do anything big and bold, it needs emotional energy. You need to be driven by that. And having something that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night and is purpose driven, right? Uh, and you're saying what?

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Well, I've told a lot of people, you shouldn't follow your dreams. You should follow your talents. You should follow your skills. And I, I would say we might disagree with this, but there, there is, there is a way that it can come around to your way of thinking. I mean, the, the problem is, and this is general advice. If someone has a really good dream and they're equipped to make it happen, then they should pursue it. The problem is, one, there's a lot of people with dreams that they are not equipped to pursue. They don't have the relevant talents. They don't have the relevant skills. I don't think that there's a lot of value in bashing your head against a problem that you do not have the skills to have. So you, you have kind of two choices at that point. Either you can go after something that you do have the skills to do, or you can change the set of skills that you have. If you are really so passionate about something and you recognize there's a certain set of skills to do,

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  you could change your skills.

• 1:13:20Peter Diamandis?

  Or you could surround yourself with the right group of people.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  I mean, the number one job of any executive is to make yourself obsolete. And I'm all about that. But like, I know a lot of people where their specific dream doesn't lend themselves to that goal. And this is something, I think I mentioned this at Abundance 360. One of the really, one of the things that gets me down about society is how bad people's dreams are. You know, we started telling kids, and I did a review of the literature. When did we start telling kids, follow your dreams? And it was actually during the 60s and the early 70s that that really took off.

• 1:13:51Peter Diamandis?

  It was a space program.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  It was a space program. And the number one most desired job for a kid in the late 60s was astronaut.

• 1:13:59Peter Diamandis?

  Sure. And that was great. And that was me as a young kid. I was born in the 60s. But that dream drove everything I've ever done. Right? It was, I reached, I did my calculus when I was at MIT saying, okay, my chance of becoming an astronaut are like one in 5,000. I have a better chance of being an NBA All-Star.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:14:19Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And so, okay, I want to go to space. The government can't be the only way to do it, so I'm going to go and pursue commercial space.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:14:27Peter Diamandis?

  So that dream drove me to start X Prize or National Space University, zero G and everything else.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  Well, you had a good dream. Most of the time, the reason that I tell people to not follow their dreams and follow their talent is because a lot of people, and I'm talking broadly, not to the most brilliant entrepreneur in the room. I'm talking to everybody. There's a lot of people with really bad dreams. The number one most desired job today is YouTuber. And then after that, it's influencer. So like, why would we tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams are so bad? It's not like, not, not, they're less likely to become it successfully than an NBA All-Star. And it doesn't matter. I mean, like, this idea of, I, I, I'm so, I'm so repulsed by this idea.

• 1:15:14Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, everybody's listening to this conversation on YouTube right now, so.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  But I'm so repulsed by this idea that we have to tell people to follow their dreams and that anything that they want to do, they can do. And that if that's what they feel they want to do, then they should do it. I feel like it's this ultimate manifestation of the, you know. Get rich quick, feel good, you're good, you're the best.

• 1:15:37Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody gets a ribbon.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Everyone gets a ribbon and whatever dream you have, of course it's good and of course it's worth pursuing. And I have to tell people, no, your dreams, like most people's dreams suck and they shouldn't pursue them and it's also going to lead them to unhappiness. They're also going to fail at them. If you're a kid who isn't, let's say you have an average kid. The average kid is not particularly charismatic. He's not particularly good at video editing. He's not particularly good at any of the things that he needs to do to become a successful YouTuber, even if that was a good dream. Why did we then go and lie to these kids and tell them, if you just follow your passion, anything's possible. You're lying to the kid. If he pursues that path, his life will be miserable because he's doing something he's

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  not equipped to do. He doesn't have the talent to make it happen. Think how much happier he would be if he could look at his skillset and say, what can I do? Or at least what skills could I acquire? And then what could I do in the world where I have the skill to do it better than everyone else? Where's something where I can go do it and I am punching above my weight?

• 1:16:40Peter Diamandis?

  Having a skill and having a dream are not out of line, right? I can have a skill and apply it to a particular industry that I dream about.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:16:50Peter Diamandis?

  Right?

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Oh, and I would say, like, and you can, look, that's definitely true. Unless your job is, unless your dream is to be a YouTube influencer, you know, but let's say your skill is actually that you are very good at running financial models. You know, there will be a certain disconnect where that kid, I'm going to say, listen kid, I know what you want to be right now, but you might want to get a different dream. Because, you know, there's probably better things you'll do for the world and for your psyche. If you pursue the dream that you can equip yourself to excel at, rather than the dream that's been implanted in you by society. That's my concern. Now, look, I'll make a compromise with you.

• 1:17:32Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, please.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  The second that the number one job is astronaut again, then I'm going to start telling kids to follow their dreams. I'll be all about it.

• 1:17:40Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, you can buy your ticket to space now and it's going to be coming down. I believe in Starship. I believe, you know.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Oh, when I say astronaut, I don't mean a government astronaut. Look, we've got, we've got private astronauts now, right? The FAA gave out, gave out wings.

• 1:17:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yep. We drove that with the X Prize and, you know, my mission, I don't want to go to Mars. I want to go to the moon. I want to go and start a city on the moon. I think I want to take a role of mayor of my own city on the moon.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  That's a, that's an awesome dream.

• 1:18:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  And you know what else is great?

• 1:18:05Peter Diamandis?

  And asteroid mining, that's the other part.

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  And the best part is, I think you've probably got the skills to make it happen.

• 1:18:10Peter Diamandis?

  We'll combine those two.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  It's a good thing my dream isn't being, isn't being the mayor of a city. I don't think, I don't.

• 1:18:15Peter Diamandis?

  You'd be, you'd be a.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  It's not for me.

• 1:18:18Peter Diamandis?

  You'd be a benign dictator.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Oh, there we go. Yeah, you know what? I could be, I could be the, I could be the guy who, who, who, uh, who has the mayor in my pocket. How's that?

• 1:18:26Peter Diamandis?

  Let's not talk about that in the context of the defense industry.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  Not you, a different mayor, a different mayor, a different mayor.

• 1:18:32Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech,

• 1:19:17Peter Diamandis?

  increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So, uh, I'm going to get to the third moonshot of, of ending destructive wildfires, but I want to just read something I wrote here. I said, "I believe that the smartest minds are not yet geared towards solving humanity's grandest challenges."

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:57Peter Diamandis?

  It's something I'm, I'm trying to lead a wake up call for people to, uh, to find something big and bold and significant and go after it. We have so many incredible entrepreneurs out there in the world.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:20:10Peter Diamandis?

  And, um, I still wake up every day saying, where are they in going after the, you know, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities? How do you think about that? Do you agree?

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  I think that a lot of the world's biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities. At the same time,

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  At the same time, I think there's a lot of huge business opportunities that people have not even yet begun to explore. I mean, VR is one of them, right?

• 1:20:35Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Like, that people didn't know that that was something that needed to be, you know, made a priority. They didn't know that it really even could be done in the near term. And so, like, that was something that came out of the blue. I think there's a lot of industries that people have not yet realized are going to be absolutely massive industries. Um, and I mean, like, this is like, just, just one of, one of many examples. I mean, everyone is talking about, uh, things like healthcare and the economic impact that it has on our nation. People are talking about how we're going to solve that. People are talking about, uh, you know, how do we bend climate to our will? How do we make climate what we need it to be, rather than just whatever it happens to be on the basis of what we accidentally do? Or, or, or even what nature does.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  But I'd say, like, right now, there has not been maybe a focus on things like birth rates. You know, there, there's a lot of nations in the world that have hugely negative birth rates.

• 1:21:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  And that's, that, that is something that catches up with every nation in the long run. It causes huge demographic problems. It causes huge economic problems. That's something where I think not enough people are talking about it today. It's actually a huge opportunity. I think we're going to see huge companies built on solving just that problem. How do we get birth rates up? How do we build stronger family units that are able to stick together and provide an environment where it's good to have rising birth rates? And of course, there's people who agree with what I'm saying, but I don't think there's enough people who are looking at that as an, as a business opportunity.

• 1:21:55Peter Diamandis?

  Sure. And for those who don't know the numbers, uh, 50 years ago, it was something like 5.7 children per family globally.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:22:02Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And this is when the population bomb book comes out and the Malthusian, you know, fallacies are portrayed. And today, we're globally down at 2.4. The replacement rate is 2.1. The US is below the replacement rate, as is Canada, as is most of Europe and much of Asia.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  Italy's at 1.27.

• 1:22:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  I mean, that, that, that's like, that's like free fall. That's like... Not existing in a hundred years.

• 1:22:26Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  And Japan has huge problems here.

• 1:22:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  It's an enormous, enormous problem. And I think of it not just as a problem for us here on earth. I also think of this as a problem for expanding into space, partly because I think one of the big economic impetus is for expanding into space.

• 1:22:40Peter Diamandis?

  Is more territory.

• 1:22:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. Where are the people going to come from? And I also look at it as even a national security problem. I mean, how?

• 1:22:48Peter Diamandis?

  For sure.

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  Like, the United States is a dominant economic superpower, hyperpower. But I feel like there's people who believe that the United States is a nation of 500 million people will somehow be able to economically compete with another nation like China that has 2 billion people in the future. And I think to myself, how could that possibly be the case? I mean, it can be the case right now because we have a head start and because we have a higher quality of life and because we don't have, you know, this kind of challenge of pulling a country up from nothing like China has.

• 1:23:18Peter Diamandis?

  It takes 18 years to bake an adult.

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. And like 100 years from now, with 100 years of baking, how could a 500 million person nation possibly beat a competent 2 billion dollar, billion person nation? You basically have to bet on their incompetence. You have to bet on them to stumble. That's not really a bet I want to make. And so at the end of the day, our national security and our ability to self-govern itself is directly tied to how many of us there are relative to the kind of democracy of the world, if you will. You know, at the end of the day, those 2 billion people, they get a vote over our lives, whether they're part of our democracy or not. Anyway, that's a problem I think people are not sufficiently worried about. So, yeah, like definitely the biggest problems that people have recognized, huge opportunities.

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  I think there's all kinds of huge business opportunities that people have yet to become sufficiently alarmed about. I think that if you give it 10 or 20 years, people are going to be even more concerned about the birth rate than they are climate change.

• 1:24:16Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about perceived and real problems. So Jeffrey Hinton leaves Google and he's raising alarm bells about the progress of AI. I was recording a podcast recently with Mogadad, who is the chief business officer at Google X. And he wrote a book called Scary Smart. And there is a lot of concerns.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Great title, by the way.

• 1:24:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it is a great title and it's a great book. There's a lot of concerns around not necessarily AI becoming, you know, the...

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  Skynet.

• 1:24:50Peter Diamandis?

  Billion fold. Yes, I was gonna go to Skynet, but.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  You can all, you can just jump straight there.

• 1:24:54Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Uh, Skynet's gonna destroy us, but it's the use of AI in the interim. You know, elections are coming up, uh, and AI is gonna be used by, uh, by evil doers, to use Reagan's term, uh, against us. Um, and one of the questions is, are we building AIs that have a, because they're built around defense or offense, uh, dystopian nation that could become a dystopian intent, that could become a Skynet. How do you think about that? Any concerns? Do you have those conversations?

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  I'm concerned about it, but to be honest, I'm way more concerned about bad, evil people using very primitive AI than I am about where the extremely smart AI is necessarily going to bring us. I think the really bad outcomes are by people with rational but destructive self-motivation. You know, like Chi- China's actions are very rational. They're just destructive to their neighbors and to the rest of the world. And I think you're saying the same thing with Russia. Like, people think that Putin is, is mad, but I would say the fact that he's gotten away with so much with, you know, with, with so little in pushback relative to what he's done, shows that he actually may have actually made a smarter bet than people gave him credit for.

• 1:26:07Peter Diamandis?

  He's pushing the edge, but not stepping over it.

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:26:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  And people say, oh, he's crazy. Look how he's been punished. I say, what, what punishment? He's, I mean, he's getting away with it. And to be honest, the only reason he hasn't is because of the bravery of Ukraine fighting him. If Ukraine were to collapse, that would be the end of the real punishment for Russia. I mean, they, they, they would just win.

• 1:26:26Peter Diamandis?

  And return to a normal status in five years' time.

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. You, you think that, they think the European Union's gonna pick up where Ukraine leaves off? Absolutely not. It's, and that's why Ukraine is fighting the way they are, because they know we won't, because they know that they are the, they know they are the backstop. Uh, but anyway, set, setting, setting, setting that aside, um, I am, look, I'm concerned about advanced AI and the things that it might go, but I've got a long list of things that I'm terrified about. You know, one of them is, uh, homebrew bioweapons. I think homebrew bioweapons are a huge threat. I think they're becoming more and more accessible.

• 1:26:58Peter Diamandis?

  Especially using AI to brew them.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  You know, people do point that out, but I think AI maybe makes it a little bit more accessible in terms of the timeline for making it easy. But all it does is it kind of pulls in the timeline. In other words, you know, maybe, maybe instead of five years from now, people are able to do it two years from now. But then there's going to be another 100 years after that where we need to figure out how we're going to deal with the fact that two guys in a garage can build a targeted bioweapon that targets people of a particular race or ethnicity or, you know, neuroproclivity. Or at least they're going to think that they can. There's a question as to whether they can actually build something that does what they want, but they might believe that they can. And that's, that's almost a danger. Or maybe they'll understand that they can't make something quite as targeted as they want. And they're okay with collateral damage.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  I mean, this, these, these are things that terrify me more than the kind of, you know, ultimate AI, super, you know, new physics type of stuff that people are worried about. Or, you know, attacking our financial system using AI. Um, I, I'm, I'm optimistic that we're going to be, that we're going to be okay there, mostly because I think there's things I'm more afraid of in the next 10 and 20 years, which is, I think probably the time where I'm also most afraid of, of, of bad AI stuff.

• 1:28:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And the question is, can we get over the hump where super advanced AI is actually peaceful looking towards supporting life in the future?

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  I'd say peaceful and defensive, you know, like, like one question, open question and the question right now is, you know, can we develop AI that is smart enough? Like right now, protecting things like our, in our energy infrastructure from cyber attacks.

• 1:28:30Peter Diamandis?

  That's my, that's my concern, right? Something that takes out Wall Street or energy grid.

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  And the key is that we're going to have to apply these technologies to building defensive systems. And the good news is that unlike, unlike, unlike, unlike manned systems, I think that artificial intelligence does accrete to the defender. Um, you, you actually do have a home field advantage of sorts, whereas, you know, with, let's say, you know, people committing terrorism, the defender has to be right every time. The terrorist only has to be, only has to get through one time. I think that AI is one of those things that does lend itself to the nation state actor on the defensive posture side. So I would hope, for example, we have amazing. AI protecting our energy grid from attack long before we have hyper advanced AI that's attacking our energy grid.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  I'm I'm pretty optimistic about that based on the things that I've seen, based on the things that I know. And based on the posture of the United States in this, you know, they they the the if if the the United States has been behind on a lot of things. We've missed the boat on a lot of things. One thing that I do not think we are poised to miss the boat on is AI. I mean, this is something where it's a whole of society.

• 1:29:37Peter Diamandis?

  And Mark Andreessen wrote a beautiful blog, I don't know if you saw it, about how AI will save the world. And and the point he's making is AI is all the ultimate defense.

• 1:29:48Peter Diamandis?

  Are you concerned about AI stealing jobs?

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Well, depending, this this this starts to get into my libertarian vent where, you know, is there such a thing as stealing jobs? Or, you know, is whatever price the market offers by definition fair? I mean, look, people were concerned about the same thing.

• 1:30:04Peter Diamandis?

  For a hundred years, we've seen they've seen it for a hundred years.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  And I mean, people were people were talking about this when like there were people who were, you know, film backdrop artists who would draw these beautiful backdrops. And they tried to say, oh, my God, these computer tools are going to destroy all of these jobs. And then what happened? The size of the industry exploded. There's a hundred times more people in the business of making motion graphics and visual effects than ever existed before. You know, to use a trite and old example, the automobile. People said, I can't believe this. All the coach builders, they're going to go to this.

• 1:30:37Peter Diamandis?

  Awful.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  And now the automotive industry employs a thousand times more people than that coach industry ever could have possibly employed. And so I think that it's.

• 1:30:45Peter Diamandis?

  Without all the horse manure filling the streets.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  I think what it really boils down to is that man is a beast of burden. And he wants to work. And I think that as holes get filled and as it work becomes automated. People will find work that is meaningful. We we always have, I think we will for quite some time. And the nature of that work might change. Like, I I think that probably you give it, uh, it it look, if you talk to like truck drivers. I I I see people using truck drivers as kind of their rhetorical example. Usually these people, by the way, don't even know any truck drivers, say, all these, all these, basically, here's their argument. All the dumb, stupid, poor, redneck truck drivers are gonna get crushed by AI. Don't you care about those dumb, poor, stupid, redneck truckers? I do. And I asked them, do you even know any truckers?

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  Do you know what they think about AI? Because all the truckers that I know have a totally different view than that kind of like intellectual elitist, elitist view. So, most truckers in the United States are independent operators. I don't know if you know this, they don't work for somebody else, they work for themselves. And they run a truck. And their dream, for many of them, is to run more trucks, to have a fleet under them where they're managing it and where they're able to kind of be in a more manageable. All the truckers I talk to say, I would love it if AI could take over the part where the truck is being driven around. That's not the job I want to be in. I want to basically be in the moving people around, moving, moving things around business. I want to have a whole fleet of AI trucks. I want to be managing them, I want to be repairing them, I want to be making sure that they're, you know, that they're efficiently moving stuff, not breaking down on the side of the road. That's what they want.

• 1:32:16Speaker 00

  They're not thinking, AI is gonna destroy me and my value in this world is that I'm able to turn a steering wheel and push on a brake pedal real good. That is not where truck drivers see their value. They see it as this much larger ecosystem and constellation. And I think that that's what we're gonna see with AI. You know what, AI is gonna get rid of the part where you turn the steering wheel real good. But all those people are going to move on to doing other jobs that are of much more value. And they won't have to spend any time doing the part that they see as commoditized.

• 1:32:43Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. All right, third moonshot, destroying or getting rid of destructive wildfires. So, some numbers for folks, in the past 20 years, we've seen the average size of wildfires increasing by 40%. Uh, some numbers from 2018, wildfires in the US alone created $14.6 billion in damage. Uh, we saw in 2022, uh, 7.6 million acres burned. And globally, uh, something on the order of the size of India in terms of total burned, uh, land area.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:33:16Peter Diamandis?

  And what hit me five years ago is the way that we're fighting wildfires hasn't changed in 50 years. It really fundamentally hasn't changed. And I was being evacuated from our home in Santa Monica. And I was like, this is ridiculous. Didn't they see when the wildfires started? And why didn't they put it out at the very beginning?

• 1:33:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:33:33Peter Diamandis?

  And so I ended up going to a friend, Dick Merkin. I said, Dick, I want to create a wildfire X Prize. He gave us half a million dollars to design it. It took five years to get the funding for it, which is ridiculous.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  It's been a long road for you guys.

• 1:33:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's been a long road, but persistent, consistent. We finally got PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, the Hilton Foundation, Lockheed. We got the Gordon Moore Foundation, Minderoo out of Australia, raised 11 million dollars in prize money. And a few months ago, for those who didn't see it, I was very proud to have Palmer with me on stage in front of the Capitol Building, announcing that he was going to be the first team to compete for this. We had 100 teams now. And to win this prize, what teams have to do is monitor 1,000 square acres, identify a wildfire at ignition, if it's two meters or larger, or if it's moving, they shouldn't be moving, put it out autonomously within 10 minutes.

• 1:34:31Peter Diamandis?

  So those are the current rough rules. We'll do another iteration on it. Need to get your additional feedback on the rule set. And you registered. We have 100 other teams. Hopefully we'll get maybe another 100 along the way. Talk to me. This is not the first time you thought about putting out wildfires.

• 1:34:49Speaker 00

  No, I mean, one of the very first hardware products that we built was alongside the Andorall sentry towers was the Andorall sentry tank. So it was a tracked firefighting tank, basically, a large tracked vehicle with heat resistant armor. They could carry a few tons of water or fire retardant.

• 1:35:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  And then fight fires in areas where you would never put a person. So having it fighting in the hottest parts, right on the fire line, right next to where it's burning in places where you would have evacuated even the hottest of hot shot firefighters. And unfortunately, we weren't able to...

• 1:35:24Peter Diamandis?

  So you actually built this?

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  Oh, no, we built it. We have two of them. So, I mean, we built this. We're on the cover of Popular Mechanics. We invested a lot of money.

• 1:35:31Peter Diamandis?

  So you go to, who'd you go to to show it to?

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  Oh man, well, this is probably, I don't, I don't think that everyone would appreciate, I don't, I don't think the customers would necessarily appreciate if I told you, but I'll tell you this.

• 1:35:40Peter Diamandis?

  They were government.

• 1:35:41Speaker 00

  I mean, the problems we ran into were not technological, they were political. There were people who were very concerned about the jobs of firefighters getting automated away. And they were more concerned about those jobs than the fighting of the fires. And I'd say, right, the good news is that over the last five or six years, the calculus has changed. You know, as you've pointed out, wildfires have been getting worse. There have been some really destructive ones that have made people realize that we need help no matter what. In other words, you know, we, we don't, we don't need, we don't need to, we're, we're not doing this to try to automate away the jobs of firefighters. Uh, we're doing it so that they are not overwhelmed by destructive fires, that they have no hope of even beginning to manage without help.

• 1:36:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Does the technology, so the goal here is a fire gets detected.

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  Which, by the way, Sentry Tank's not what we're going to be using for the competition. It's not a good fit for your particular rules.

• 1:36:32Peter Diamandis?

  Cause you want to get to it fast, right? Want to get to it fast.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  But we, but we've got something good.

• 1:36:37Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and I've seen it, uh, and I, I'm under, uh, an NDA, I can't disclose it, but it's amazing.

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  It sure is.

• 1:36:44Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing. Um, it's definitely, uh, Stark Industries.

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  And for anyone out there who's wondering which, which system it is, yeah, I can't show it to you guys yet, but, uh, it's not, it's none of the systems that are on our website. It's nothing even close. It is a, is a radically, is a radically different, radically different system. One of my favorite things that we're working on right now.

• 1:37:03Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, you know, I like to say the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

• 1:37:07Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:37:08Peter Diamandis?

  Right. I got that from Bert Rutan, and this is a crazy idea that holy cow, uh, has a chance. So do you believe the objective of ending destructive wildfires is possible?

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think that people have taken a pretty defeatist approach over the last few decades where fires are only a problem that can be kind of managed. As opposed to, you know, truly the problem is considered solved. I'm hoping that we can look at wild, destructive wildfires the way we look at polio. It's just, it's not a thing. We beat that. It's done.

• 1:37:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I think that that's totally possible, not with the technology of a century from now, but with the technology that literally exists today. It is a matter only of building products out of it and then getting those products into the places in the wilderness that they need to be. If we can, if we can do that, and if we make that a priority. We win. That's it.

• 1:38:00Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. We're running short on time. I want to respect your meeting schedule. If you were to give me an honest answer, which I know you would, how many moonshots do you have in you?

• 1:38:13Peter Diamandis?

  Order magnitude.

• 1:38:14Speaker 00

  It's interesting because they might, you know, they might.

• 1:38:17Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you probably have a number of them under.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  Well, the crazy, the crazy idea list, a lot of them are not moonshots. To be clear, there's a lot of things where it's there. They're very, very specific technical implementations or solutions to small things that are not actually all that important. Moonshots? I'd say there's about, about, about a half dozen that are real moonshots on there. About a half dozen that are really big things that if they could be done, would be, would be, would be a real game changer for humanity. If I can pull off, you know, even, even a couple of them, I will, I will consider myself to have lived a life well led.

• 1:38:50Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I think you have lived a white, a life well led, and it's just beginning. And if our longevity work goes well, you'll have even more life to live. My last question, you're competing in an X Prize, but if I said to you, Palmer, I'm going to fund whatever you want. And, you know.

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  A new X Prize?

• 1:39:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. What X Prize, what grand challenge do you want to inspire entrepreneurs around the world? And you don't have to limit yourself to one, but you know, what do you want entrepreneurs around the world thinking about in their shower time? And scratching their heads on and, and pursuing.

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. I mean, you know, you know, there was a period where I was really interested in trying to solve obesity. But I think there's a lot of people who are working on that problem.

• 1:39:33Peter Diamandis?

  And there's some good, some good drugs and even some good gene therapies coming.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. So that a lot of people are already on that, maybe less than they were five years, you know, six, seven years ago when I was looking at the issue. I mean, one of them is the birth rate problem. You know, we talked about that. If someone can figure out how we can, how we can, how we, how we can get our birth rate up. I think that would be great, but I mean, you guys want to do stuff that isn't going to be incentivized any other way. You know, I, I think that there's going to be. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives to that side of things within the next couple of decades. So

• 1:40:03Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, governments incentivize children, right?

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  They do. And I think one of the problems that we've seen is that the government incentives don't really work. You know, the countries with the strongest incentives are some of the ones with the lowest birth rates. It's a whole bunch of other

• 1:40:16Peter Diamandis?

  Well, there are also religious incentives in some cases.

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  And I'd say there's, it's all kinds of things. It's religious incentives. It's even, it's even national fervor incentives. You know, there's a lot of people who are calling on the leaders of Italy to set a better example and say, hey, like, if you really care about, if you really care about kids, why is it that you're out of your entire cabinet, there's only one child?

• 1:40:37Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  This is kind of a problem, right? You're basically like, if this is really, if this, if these are the

• 1:40:43Peter Diamandis?

  Guys, start having sex, please.

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you could also say, you know what? If it really is a priority, and it is, in Italy, they're trying to figure out, how do you get around a 1.27 replacement, you know, birth rate? And one thing they could do is say, you know what? We're going to show that people who have families are just as able to succeed. I'm going to go out of my way to say, you know what? My cabinet's going to be all people who have, maybe not, if not large families, they're at least not the people dragging the numbers down. But like, you know, that's something, that's not even, that's not even like a government subsidy, but it's a role where government can

• 1:41:16Peter Diamandis?

  Model.

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  They can model it. I mean, that's what we want, right? We want our, we want our leaders to be the best version of us.

• 1:41:21Peter Diamandis?

  Elon's 10 kids, right?

• 1:41:23Speaker 00

  And then I'd say, but like, if I were going to do a new X Prize, you know, it'd have something that's not just going to be done, that is only going to be done if it's incentivized by, by people like you, whose job it is to make people dream. I would love to see an X Prize to raise another species to human or above levels of intelligence. So just then, you know, the classic science fiction concept of uplift.

• 1:41:45Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:41:45Speaker 00

  You take, take, take a species, learn more about how intelligence works, learn how their mind works relative to a human mind. And it's one of those things where the, the doing itself is not the learning, right? That the point isn't, hey, I was able to take African gray parrots and make them as smart as people. And that's the end game. It's everything you have to do to get there. You have to really start to understand. What intelligence is, you have to understand what consciousness is, you have to understand what the mechanisms of the brain that make us who we are, are, and you are now building a new benchmark to compare against people, not just AI, not just computers, but another biological form. I, I think that if you could, if, if someone could get another species to human or above levels of cognition,

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  the learnings along the way would be priceless.

• 1:42:31Peter Diamandis?

  There was a movie about that. It did not end well for us humans.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  You know, but, but you know, I, I'd say this is true for almost every science fiction concept, you know.

• 1:42:40Peter Diamandis?

  It's all dystopian.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  Well, I, I talk to VR authors about this all the time, you know, I, I talk to people who've written all the classic sci-fi novels about VR and I say, hey, do you, do you really think VR is going to lead to an, you know, horrible dystopian, broken future? And almost universally their answer is, of course not, but I have to write a story and stories need conflict.

• 1:42:58Peter Diamandis?

  By the way.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  Nobody's going to read a book where the, the, the plot is Palmer Lucky invents the Oculus Rift and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world through the power of the metaverse and everything is great. And everyone loves it. That's just not an interesting story. So instead you got him, you gotta write a story where VR destroys everything. You know, my, one of my favorite books, The Unincorporated Man, VR is illegal in the future because it destroys humanity.

• 1:43:22Peter Diamandis?

  You recommended the book to me. I loved it. It was a fantastic book.

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  It is fantastic, but you know, I, I think books and fiction, they can be good warnings, but I think that they serve a better purpose as inspiration. So let's build, let's build, uh, what, what, what do people, what, what do people joke about on Twitter these days? The, the terror vortex, um, you know, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's build the, let's build the, let's build the terror vortex.

• 1:43:46Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Last question, uh, recommendation to those listening entrepreneurs who want to take on a moonshot, want to do something significant in their life. They've got a dream. Let's say they have the capabilities, either tech skills, capital skills, whatever. Any thoughts on, uh, having done a number of them? Any advice?

• 1:44:08Speaker 00

  For people who want to take those skills and apply them to things that actually matter.

• 1:44:12Peter Diamandis?

  That, yes.

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  Rather than the people who want to be YouTubers.

• 1:44:14Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, or make better photo sharing apps.

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, one, one of my biggest pieces of advice, assuming you're working on the right mission already. I mean, that, that's the first thing you pick something that you're, that, that, that.

• 1:44:24Peter Diamandis?

  That you're passionate about.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  That you're passionate about.

• 1:44:26Peter Diamandis?

  That you're dreaming about.

• 1:44:27Speaker 00

  That you're passionate about, that you either have the skills or can obtain the skills to work on competently. And then I'd say like, the, the biggest advice I would be is your job is to make yourself obsolete. I mean, you talked about it. You've got to find a team of people. You're, if you are the best at anything in your company for any period of time. I'm not talking about the day you start the company. I'm not talking about the first year where everyone wears lots of hats. But if in the limit, you are the best in your company at anything, it's because you've been negligent in your hiring process. I, I see this sometimes in companies with like, oh man, like the founder, he's still the best programmer in the company. I say, what the hell is wrong with them? Like what, what, what, what kind of bizarre ego game is being played where the guy who's in charge of being the fundraising backstop

• 1:45:09Speaker 00

  and the HR backstop and, and everything else is also the best programmer in the company? What are you talking about? And I, I feel like you, you have to consciously do this. And this was tough for me because I remember when I was launching Oculus, I struggled with it because I did want to be the best person in the company at the things that I liked doing. And I realized, you know what? I can play house at optics and board layout and all this other stuff. I need to hire people who are not just better than me, but who radically outclass me. I need to hire people who run circles around me and grind me into the dirt at the things that I like doing. And then I need to do everything else. And I, I think if, if you can get your head around that as an entrepreneur, and if you manage to hire those great people

• 1:45:51Speaker 00

  who run circles around you at everything that you like doing and everything you don't like doing, you almost can't fail.

• 1:45:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Beautiful. Palmer Lucky, thank you, buddy.

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  Thank you. This was so much fun.

• 1:46:02Peter Diamandis?

  That was fun. All right.