EP 34: Interview w/ Oculus & Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey + Jon Sakoda Predicts Record VC Investments

In the 34th episode, Palmer Luckey discusses founding Oculus VR, the controversy that got him fired from Facebook, and having to fight lies in the media. Plus his current success with Anduril and what the job of a CEO really entails. Decibel’s Jon Sakoda also makes an appearance to talk about his prediction of record VC investments and the revival of startup funding in the coming years. (0:00) Intro (1:02) Welcome Jon Sakoda (6:13) Jon’s charts (14:49) Internet Bubble (20:34) Public vs private market valuations (32:58) Other takeaways and predictions (35:45) Welcome Palmer Luckey (36:21) Journalism school (39:10) The Oculus story (41:41) Choosing VR over personal issues (45:26) Donating to pro-Trump group (50:44) Game studios “not” working with Oculus (57:19) Facebook leadership’s intent (1:05:29) The takeaway from Facebook controversy (1:12:16) Founding Oculus (1:15:11) Following talents vs passion (1:22:33) Selling Oculus (1:27:17) Founding Anduril (1:40:54) What Anduril does (1:46:40) Knowing a little about a lot (1:50:18) Morality in war (1:53:42) Building technology before war occurs (1:57:15) Going to Ukraine (2:00:51) Being a CEO (2:05:21) An executive’s actual job (2:07:51) Wrap up Show Notes: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/opening-floodgates-290-billion-venture-capital-reserve-jon-sakoda/ https://twitter.com/jonsakoda/status/1572269690810159105?s=21&t=FLkGcKd2el-h38sX9AMsaw https://twitter.com/jonsakoda/status/1572269690810159105?s=21&t=FLkGcKd2el-h38sX9AMsaw https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Hyn4FWHSNRrWJeddi0BMEQIMlmXy2SNj50T8jJcrKbw/edit#slide=id.g1273c4d3e67_15_0 Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb... Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0... Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 34th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I have with John Sakoda from Decibel Partners about a post that he had and the information this week with a bunch of different data on the state of the venture capital ecosystem and the amount of money that sits on the sidelines. And he and I, I think, had different opinions about how that's going to play itself out. And so, an interesting conversation. And then on the back half here, you're going to hear a conversation I had with Palmer Lucky last week in Orange County, covered a whole bunch of ground, talked about what the media got

• 0:41Logan Bartlett?

  wrong in his firing from Facebook after donating $9,000 to a group that was pro Donald Trump. We also talk about founding of Oculus and Androl, his philosophy of leading companies, a bunch of different things. So I think everyone's really going to like both of these conversations, which you'll hear now. John Sakoda, thank you for coming on. I'm glad we were able to do this.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for inviting me on. I am a big fan, big fan of your show.

• 1:11Logan Bartlett?

  Well, thank you. That's nice of you to say. I don't know if you know this, but when I was a lowly boutique investment banker at a small shop in New York, you were at NEA at the time, and you were so gracious with your time. And just like very, I don't know, we did one intro call with my boss. And I've always had, we haven't had a chance to like formally work together on deals or anything, but it's funny, you never know, you never know which like junior associate at a boutique investment bank is going to turn into a podcaster. So let that be a lesson. John Sakoda was nice to future podcasters out there. So.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Well, Logan, I'm so glad you brought up this story because I do remember you. You were at Spurrier Capital Partners. Your boss was Clark Spurrier, if I recall, and you were calling on a really amazing enterprise software company called Science Logic, which is still doing really well in the mid Atlantic. And I do remember you fondly and I have followed your progress and I'm a big fan of your show, so it is exciting for us to reconnect.

• 2:13Logan Bartlett?

  Well, thank you. I know that's too funny. Well, so the reason I wanted to have you on was something that you published this week, but maybe for people that don't know, we referenced NEA, but maybe give your journey to date and what you're up to, what you're up to now, and then we can dive into what you wrote this week.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the reason I'm in the tech industry is that I graduated from college in 1999. I started my first company in 2001, right after the internet bubble burst. Wasn't the greatest time to start a company, but I started an instant messaging security company. If you remember before, there was Facebook and Friends, there was products like AIM and ICQ and Skype. Those were the social networks of their day and they were creating a big security problem for corporate enterprises. So I built an instant messaging security company called IMLogic and we were acquired by Symantec in 2006 and that's when I joined NEA.

• 3:08Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at NEA for 12 years. So just to bring everybody back in time, NEA was one of the oldest and one of the largest venture funds. I grew up in the 1970s.

• 3:18Logan Bartlett?

  Actually a derivative of like the original venture, right? Dick Cramlich worked with Arthur Rock way back in the day, so like.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Right, in the 1960s.

• 3:26Logan Bartlett?

  So yeah, some people give George D'Orio credit for like venture, but Arthur Rock is kind of like the OG. Still, he's still around too. He's been quiet for a while, but I feel like he's, he's 95 or something and he occasionally pops up every now and again.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and you know, I had Venrock as an investor in my company. So obviously, I feel like we're all sort of like following in the footsteps of giants that came before us. So in, in my case, I joined NEA in 2006 and this was maybe the beginning of the era of institutional venture capital that we all live in today. So if you remember going back into the 1980s and 1990s, you know, the industry was very small, smaller funds, you know, tended to be more of a cottage industry. And by 2006, I think NEA and many other funds started to pioneer the multi-stage, multi-sector, multi-geography venture capital model. So maybe when you could, you were in the 1990s and early 2000s, you could do

• 4:21Speaker 01

  an IPO that was really small and companies tended to go. Public sub a billion dollars, they would, they would raise a modest amount of venture capital and then eventually go public at a mid-market market cap. And then in, in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, post the financial crisis, you could actually raise a lot more money and companies could stay private longer. And I think that in many ways, the backdrop for the industry that we're all in today, the, the asset cost is a lot bigger, companies can stay private for a very long time. And venture capitalists now have the manpower and the firepower to really keep companies going for many, many, many years and to create market caps in the private markets that are

• 5:03Speaker 01

  orders of magnitude greater than we saw in the 1990s and 2000s.

• 5:07Logan Bartlett?

  And so you were there for 12 years and, and now you have your own, you have your own fund. So, so maybe take us through what exactly you're doing now with decibel?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, my passion, Logan, after maybe having invested in lots of different companies at lots of different stages is helping technical founders at the earliest stage find and accelerate product market fit. So decibel is a relatively new fund. We were anchored by Cisco back in 2019 and our goal is to partner with technical founders who are building technical products. Generally speaking, they're in technical markets. So the category that we invest in is called infrastructure software. These are products like developer platforms and tools, data engineering and machine learning, cybersecurity, you know, tends to be products that are deployed in the cloud. And when you open up your phone, the apps that you know and love on your phone, usually

• 6:00Speaker 01

  there's a lot of infrastructure software or building blocks underneath, products like databases and products like developer platforms that really make all that possible. And those are the kinds of companies that we back today.

• 6:12Logan Bartlett?

  Great. And so, so the, the impetus for us, for us chatting was you published something this week that, that seemed to have gotten a lot of pickup. It ran in the information and then we'll, we'll show it on screen here for folks that are listening on YouTube or on Spotify video, but maybe, maybe talk a little bit about what you, what you posted this week, what the rationale was, some of the takeaways and that.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this story really starts, I have to give some credit to Kate Clark at the information. Who years ago, if you remember during the very early days of COVID, when everything was shutting down, people were worried about everybody running out of money. You may recall like the industry, the economy kind of went to a standstill and oil dropped below zero and the money wasn't really moving. And I think there was a lot of stress testing of balance sheets across every industry. And Kate was really the one that came to me and said, hey, you know, is the venture industry going to run out of money? And it was a really great question. If you remember in March of 2000, right? The markets were tanking. You know, I think everyone was wondering how money was going to flow. People were nervous about calling capital.

• 7:21Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. I just joined a new venture firm. And so I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Yeah, very weird time to be, to be joining a new firm.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  But yeah, no, most, most public companies on their earnings calls would talk about how much cash they had on the balance sheets or weather the storm. So, you know, at the time she asked, I thought a very smart and provocative question. And that is, does the venture capital industry have enough money to get through whatever we're about to go through? And, you know, it was a very inspired question and I decided to try to look up the data to see what was possible. And, you know, the venture industry traditionally is pretty opaque. So most funds are not required to register any information. I think more recently, because a lot of funds take money from states and are required to disclose some information. And a lot of funds have registered to become RIAs.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And, and also because of services like the NBCA and PitchBook, there's just a lot more data now. So I was able to download the data file of all of the funds that have been raised recently and also all of the capital that had been called. And so it was actually very interesting for me to see just how rich the data set was, that you could actually build up effectively a balance sheet and a P and L for the venture industry. So what are the total number of funds that have been raised and how much of it has been called and how much is left? It's, you know, if you were a startup, you would maybe think about the. Dry powder in the funds, that's the term that everyone refers to. It's how much you can actually invest as the amount of cash that you have.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And then the rate at which you're investing as your burn rate. So I sort of looked at this data and built a model for dry powder. And it ended up being the case that the industry had a ton of money back then. It had $150 billion and we all got through that crisis and were able to raise more capital. And I think 2021 ended up being a really sensational year for everybody. But fast forward to just a couple of weeks ago, we've had a massive market correction. We've had huge tech layoffs. We've had a lot of uncertainty about the economy. And most startups today, most founders that I talk to feel really uncertain. And I think a lot of venture capitalists also maybe feel a little uncertain.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  This might not be like a downturn that they've been through before. And it just, she came back to me recently and asked, I think another very insightful question. And that is, I see a tale of two stories today. People pitch me all the time on how there's doom and gloom and there's going to be layoffs to companies. Yet at the same time, every venture fund is announcing a record new fund. And so what's really the story is there doom and gloom? And companies should be slowing down and laying people off? Or is there really a lot of money in this industry? So if companies continue to perform, they should be able to raise more capital and continue to grow like they've been doing for the last decade.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And it was, I think, another good inspiration for me to refresh the model and see where we are. And I think what was surprising to me and soon to everybody as we announced the data is that the industry had raised a record amount of money between the beginning of COVID and now the end of COVID. So much money that in fact, the amount of dry powder or the amount of cash that funds had is nearly twice what we had going into COVID. So we were raising more money than we were investing throughout all of this, which strengthened our balance sheet as an industry to levels that are incredibly

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Rich today, it's what, you know, $290 billion, which is the highest it's ever been.

• 11:06Logan Bartlett?

  And I think what was interesting, I mean, I think implicitly, you pulled all this data together. Implicitly, I kind of knew, just based on seeing the fund announcements over and over again, you kind of knew that like, we were at a record point, right? And then you actually did some of the data of how much of that is, it has been put into the ground or invested versus just sitting on the, on the sidelines currently, which was, which was an interesting, interesting analysis to see. But you also did some historical analysis and looked at and speculated on like, what, what could happen going forward and kind of the so what for founders? And so maybe talk through like, what was based on data?

• 11:48Logan Bartlett?

  And what was your kind of speculation or perspective after having looked and thought about this for a while?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I don't know, Logan, how much of this was visible to people, which is why I went through the exercise. And that is, you know, there's maybe not as much knowledge as to how venture funds deploy their capital and reserve their capital. And so I, you know, I thought I would just take the time and try to understand, in general, once a fund raises capital, how does it end up deploying it, right? And on what, what cycle does that capital end up getting deployed? And is there some consistency? Is it, is it, you know, it tends to be deployed over three to five years? Or is it usually the case that the market itself, you know, has a lot to say about whether or not you're deploying your capital? And what was really surprising to me when I looked into the numbers was,

• 12:37Speaker 01

  for as long as I could look back in the NVCA database, venture funds are relatively consistent in how they deploy their capital. So through good times and in bad, and through the financial crisis, the venture firms tended to deploy the same amount of capital as a percentage of their dry powder. So if I was to translate this into the world of startups, like when a startup raises a certain amount of money, There's a comfortable burn rate or a comfortable amount of runway that you have. And you know, in some ways, if you are burning too fast, right? Your runway may drop to be, you know, less than 12 months. And I think a lot of people would feel uncomfortable with a burn rate that that has a runway that's less than 12 months. But similarly, if you have a runway that's four or five years, maybe you're not investing fast enough, right?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  But maybe you have too much capital. And so the venture industry similarly has this natural rhythm of raising a certain amount of capital and then deploying it appropriately. And when I looked through the math, not surprisingly, the venture industry deploys capital

• 13:41Speaker 01

  roughly like a startup does. I mean, it has about a three year burn rate. It it it invests about eight and a half percent on average of its dry powder every single quarter. And sure, there are some quarters where there are variances and there are some years which are a little bit higher. But then the next year might be a little bit lower and vice versa. So, you know, I think, I think in the moment, it might feel more volatile. But when you are looking at the numbers in aggregate, it actually looks fairly consistent. And, you know, as as maybe we all feel in retrospect, looking at the data, it's because we're we're trying to make long term bets, right? So in the short term, usually there's maybe some reason why in any one particular quarter, you might have variation or you might have swings based on, you know, what's going on in the market or the industry cycle.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  But, you know, over the long run, most of the time, we're making bets based on technical progress or based on, you know, the creation of new products which invent new markets. So in theory, our asset class is supposed to not be as correlated in the long run wholly with the equity markets. And that's, that's perhaps why in retrospect, you see this consistency of the deployment of capital. If a company is making technical progress or the company is making you know, proving out milestones along the way, venture capitalists usually will fund them because they're making long term bets, not short term bets.

• 14:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, or at least they, at least they should, right? That's at least what we tell ourselves in our, in our LPs. But so, so over what period of time did you look at the, the data for this? Because one of the, the things That I was thinking about and looking at it is like, hey, I totally hear you. And if we go back to 2003 to 2000 or 2002 to 2022, I bet the data looks pretty normalized, but we're skipping a very important volatile point, which was the internet bubble, right? And we did double, I think we doubled capital deployment from 2020 to 2021. And so you could say, hey, we had this very manic point.

• 15:41Logan Bartlett?

  And that was both capital in the ground as well as funds raised. And so this was a unusually exuberant period. And so is it actually fair to compare it to these other kind of more stable, you know, periods of capital deployment?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  You know, if you remember the late 90s, there was a lot of promise of what the internet would bring, but the internet community was still relatively small. So a lot of companies that went public went public on the promise of metrics like eyeballs. And so a lot of the e-commerce companies, for example, companies like Webvan, which did grocery delivery, or companies like eToys or Pets.com, you know, that were direct to consumer companies. They actually were really good ideas, but if you think about the cost of building an entire e-commerce business back then, you not only had to build the website, you had to build all of the infrastructure to hold all the materials. You had to, you know, build, you know, build a whole bunch of logistics infrastructure that, you know, every single startup had to do.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And you didn't necessarily have these shared elastic services like the cloud and Shopify. There's all these really amazing things that people have now that they didn't have then. And so it was, in addition to it being a smaller community, companies were way more expensive to build and a lot of them went to zero quickly. And that is because the premise was not necessarily that they had great economics. The presence was, or the premise was, if you build it, they will come.

• 17:07Logan Bartlett?

  Wow, this, this sounds eerily familiar to another industry that's relevant today, but I, I digress.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  But, you know, if we, if we look back through lots of generations, there's always like a moment where if you build it, they will come. And it wasn't just, it wasn't just e-commerce sites. If you remember, there was also a telecom bubble. So the internet was built and then everyone imagined that someday we were doing what we're doing today. And so people were raising money to lay fiber and. They also needed equipment to carry all the new internet bandwidth. People were raising money for novel new telecom equipment companies and the unique components to go into those telecom equipment companies. So at one point, even like glass manufacturers and laser manufacturers were trading at all time highs. And that, that if you build it, they will come mentality also came because of the Telecom Deregulation Act of 1996.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So it was actually possible for people to raise a ton of money and then go build out fiber and telecom infrastructure. So it was, you know, it was kind of a gold rush for, for, for many. And I think it ended up being the case that a lot of the ideas that came out of the late 90s ended up being great ideas and maybe just, you know, became better businesses later on. But when I talk to people who have been around and have seen the evolution of the industry from the late 90s to today, the biggest difference is that the businesses that you might see in the stock market today that have come down 50 or 60 or 70% from their highs, there is no way they're going to zero. Some of these businesses are, are some of the strongest P and Ls that we see in the Fortune 500.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  They have some of the highest margins. They have some of the highest net dollar retention. They just seem like incredible businesses and that's very, very different than I think what we all saw in the late 90s where we, we had a lot more, you know, we had, we didn't quite have economics, right? We had promise.

• 19:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, that, that, that I totally agree with, agree with that. How, how do you think that, that ties into the, the dry powder point? Because I guess one of the things that, obviously with, with how these companies have traded, I think there's much more material businesses out there. The dry powder thing is interesting because one of it, one of the questions here is like, so what does this mean for founders, right? And what's ultimately from your perspective going to happen to these big funds? And so first and foremost, I guess, what do you think this means for, for founders that all this dry powder is sitting on the sidelines?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think a lot of founders today have been led to believe that somehow the venture industry is going to slow down for a long period of time. I think people have been told to buckle down for a long winter. And the numbers don't suggest that. The numbers actually suggest that the amount of venture capital that has invested in startups this year may go down slightly because we will likely see some slowdown in the Q3 and Q4 numbers. But Q1 and Q2 looked incredibly strong, and we probably will see blockbuster years next year where we're setting new records for the amount of money that the venture capital industry is reporting, wholly because so much money is sitting in the dry powder

• 20:21Speaker 01

  reserve, right? So this is this assumption that I make that we're going to have record years largely is because there's so much money that is available. And I think consistently venture capitalists have found a way to put that money to work.

• 20:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I guess the question I sort of have in this, and I don't disagree with that. Well, one, maybe we can talk about, almost implicit in this is, one side is can managers help themselves if they don't see the opportunity? Do they need to deploy dollars, right? And so that's an interesting question that I would love to talk a little bit about. But the other question in that is, ultimately, I agree with you, just what I see is the opportunity set is so plentiful out there, and some of these trends are so big. That said, so many of these businesses over the last two, three years were funded to a point that didn't make sense from a return or valuation standpoint, valuation and therefore

• 21:19Logan Bartlett?

  return standpoint. And I don't know exactly, when you have the public markets trading off, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70%, as the case may be in some of these stocks, how much of the capital that has been raised was predicated on not those trading off 70%, but actually going up 20% or whatever it is, right? And so that's the part that I just don't know the answer to is ultimately, with the valuations and the public markets down where they are, how much is that going to squeeze what's ultimately happened in the private markets as well? And will there be this big divorce that exists between public market valuations and private market valuations for an extended period of time?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're hitting on a bunch of different questions. And so if I were to maybe take each of them individually, one is is private company valuations, especially the closer you are getting to IPO have have been at historical highs because public markets were at historical highs. And so a lot of people say those companies, generally speaking, have raised a lot of money and need to grow into those valuations. So I think one strategy for a lot of late stage managers who are wholly trying to invest before an IPO is to let the companies grow into those valuations. So I think with with time, these companies, generally speaking, have been growing at phenomenal growth rates, right, on average,

• 22:47Speaker 01

  well over 50, sometimes well over 100%. And this doesn't take very long for them to double or triple their fundamentals and and eventually hopefully surpass whatever their historically high valuation was that they can get at least a flat or an up round. So valuation is one of the ways in which the market can continue to invest. But, you know, similarly, I think a lot of people are noticing that there's, again, a very large crop of companies who have been funded over the last couple of years, and those companies are now growing up and, you know, sort of getting on product market fit and finding revenue traction, becoming more available to a lot of funds. So the the crop of seeds that was planted from 2018,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  2019, 20, you know, 2020, there's billions in dollars and thousands of companies that have been seeded, and a lot of these companies are starting to break out. And that is, again, more in effect, availability for venture capitalists to deploy more capital. So I I sort of, I sort of see this as a mostly just a question of math and time, right? If you have all these companies with all this money doing so many things, you know, unless you think you're going to have unusual survivorship, meaning like a lot of these companies just won't make it, then there should be plenty of opportunity for people to deploy the capital. And then that

• 24:10Speaker 01

  It maybe gets to your point, which is, you know, can people, can people find that opportunity in a time period that is relevant for their fund? And, you know, I did get a lot of questions on, you know, will venture capitalists sit on the money? Will venture capitalists return the money? Will LPs ask for it back?

• 24:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, one of the big ones, I mean, in reading this, and a cynic would say, we say dry powder. Our dry powder is another person's unfunded liability, right? And so it's not sitting, and I guess this is a mechanic that we should explain for people that don't understand it, but John and I will go raise money from a fund and they will commit to us that they're going to provide the capital when we call it and we come to terms and say, hey, we expect to, you know, raise it rough or start deploying it around this point in time. And we'll deploy the majority of it in the first three years and then the balance of it in the next seven, right? And they'll say, okay, we're, I'm in for, you know, 20 million bucks or whatever it is, right? But they don't actually give us that

• 25:14Logan Bartlett?

  money at that moment in time, right? It gets, it gets called over time. And so one thing that, that I think people would push back on is, is this actually dry powder? Because it's not sitting in our SVB account, right? We need to go to our, our LPs and ask for it. And so I guess when you get that question, what are your thoughts on like the unfunded liability versus dry powder? And will some of the LPs just say, hey, you know what? I know we said that, but never mind.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have been calling around just trying to make sure that I completely understand, at least my perspective, on how binding these commitments are between LPs and their funds. How much history has there been? What have the precedents been? So just to go in order, one, capital commitment. So when a big institution like a state pension fund makes a commitment to a fund like Redpoint or like Decibel, it's a binding commitment. And very, it is very unusual for a large institution who represents the vast majority of the capital in the venture capital ecosystem. So sovereign wealth funds, state pension

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Large institutional fund to funds, these groups tend not to walk away from their capital commitments because they're binding commitments. And there's actually a fairly significant cost to walking away from one of your capital commitments. And so, over the course of decades, when I call around, just the likelihood of of large institutions walking away from capital commitments is highly unusual.

• 26:47Logan Bartlett?

  I will say, I agree with that, and I just, it felt like a question that I had to ask. But the other thing is, and this is important for people to keep in mind, we are a fairly small asset class comparatively to buyouts and hedge funds and, you know, whatever, real estate and all of that. And so, the ability to fund these liabilities for a big state pension plan with, and we're dropping the bucket comparatively. And so, I ultimately don't think, you know, I think if there's going to be issues, it's going to be with different, bigger asset classes than than ours. But yeah, it was a question that I think people asked a lot.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Well, and I think there's also the question of like, will will GPs sit and not call the capital and not not invest the capital, right? So that was another big question that I got. And, you know, the reality is like, I think venture capital is a race for top quartile returns. So, you know, I think every everyone that's in the business wants to try to be the best. And I don't think anyone decides to get into venture capital without trying to have top quartile or top decile returns. And, you know, the math would say that you really can't be a top quartile fund by sitting on the sidelines. You know, you need to find a way to deploy your capital in order to, you know, create IRR that ultimately creates value that you can eventually return to your shareholders.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, we're supposed to outperform the public markets and we're supposed to, you know, have less correlation with the public markets than other kinds of asset classes. So I think, I think a lot of people implicitly feel like if you raise the capital, there's an obligation to invest it, or you should give it back. And in general, people don't give it back. They they invest the capital. So I think, I think some of this is just human behavior, right? If you are are paid. To invest the capital and that is your job. You feel it is your obligation to do that job. And there might be a quarter or two or a period of time where that's difficult. But you know, our committed capital investment periods are usually at least three years, sometimes even longer.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So I think eventually people do decide that they can see the best in the moment and find the opportunities and find the trends that allow us to keep doing what we're doing. And that's why I think over all these, these various different time periods, people have consistently found a way to deploy some percentage of their dry powder.

• 29:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well statistically, it would seem, and I'm sure your data backs this up. But if you do, the points where things are the lowest are generally the best times to invest. One, and, and two, the consistency of deployment generally bodes well for opportunities to exist. And so sitting out a year or two, because the ball can go so far when you hit a home run. It's not that a grand slam is worth four runs. A grand slam could be worth 50 runs or 100 runs or something. And so the opportunity when the ball goes far is, leads to some different incentives

• 29:54Logan Bartlett?

  to continue to invest and make sure that you don't miss on those opportunities. I also think, I mean, one of the things we talked to our LPs about is our job ultimately isn't to time the market. Right?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:08Logan Bartlett?

  LPs are looking at us or venture firms or growth funds or whatever it is, as an allocation of into the vintage and ideally the best allocation they can get into a particular vintage and trusting that manager to deploy the dollars as prudently as they see fit. And so ultimately skipping a vintage in general, isn't something that the LPs want you to be doing. They want you to find the most prudent investments that exist over some period of time. But just saying, hey, I think things are crazy right now. That actually messes up a lot of things on their side because you know, they're thinking about allocation

• 30:49Logan Bartlett?

  across all these different asset classes and venture, they want to be a portion of that that generates outsized returns, hopefully if they do it right. And so it's this interesting kind of circular wheel that exists.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Well, and I think through the lens of a founder, you know, we all want the same thing, right? So I think. I think the venture industry wants to invest in companies that are making either technical progress or are showing a lot of growth and are taking market share or creating market share. And so, you know, we're all looking to invest in any leading indicators that there's a prospect of long-term growth. And so, when a company is small, it's actually relatively easy for them to create these leading indicators because it's the law of large numbers. If you are, the bigger you are, the harder it is to show that you have the capacity to grow. And the smaller you are, the easier it is for you to take market

• 31:42Speaker 01

  share from competitors or to, you know, create competitive differentiation by focusing on, you know, creating a best-to-breed solution that appeals to parts of the market that are growing. And I think if founders continue to focus on that, almost irrespective of how the public markets are performing next year, there's just a lot of venture capitalists that are professionally trained to see those leading indicators and to allow the companies to continue to grow and scale and experiment. And I, you know, I think a lot of founders don't necessarily know that that's the case, right? They sort of see the public market correction, they hear about economic doom and gloom, and they think the venture capitalists

• 32:24Speaker 01

  are somehow not going to be able to see through it, just like we're asking them to do that. We tell them to have confidence and, you know, to make sure that they don't just, you know, live in fear and play defense, but go back on the offense and maybe see the best in the opportunity. A lot of our companies, you know, maybe have a product that is one tenth the price of their competitor, and this is a really great market to, you know, convince somebody to switch if you can save them that much money.

• 32:50Logan Bartlett?

  Definitely. Those opportunities present themselves here, and it'll be interesting to see how ultimately this plays itself out. Were there any more takeaways that you had in playing around with the data or any predictions that came out of it?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  The biggest positive prediction that I made, aside from the fact that I thought that the funding from the industry would still continue to stay at record levels, which was not intuitive to me. It was not intuitive that we would continue to invest $100 billion next year, but the numbers would suggest that we will definitely invest $100 billion next year. I also think there will be a trickle down effect. I think because maybe so many companies previously could raise money at the high end of the market, right? The unicorn and Deca corn market, you saw just a lot of mega rounds at high prices. So a lot of the capital maybe had the perception of haves and have nots, people that could raise hundreds of millions and billions.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  And then, you know, maybe some founders felt like, why is it so hard for me to get 10 or 20 million?

• 33:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, it's interesting. So your, so your bet now, I guess, let's, let's, uh, let's make the bet. You're saying 2023. So 2021 was around, uh, was this US data 96.2?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, this is US data reported by the National Venture Capital, uh, National Venture Capital Association in partnership with PitchBook. So I think this data is fairly accurate. I mean, I'm always surprised at how accurate the PitchBook data is when I look it up. I always wonder how they.

• 34:24Logan Bartlett?

  Oh yeah, no, I think, I think they do a great job.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think they, I think they go, I think they go through like the dumpsters outside of Andreessen Horowitz and pull out the, the stock prices and the cap tables and.

• 34:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, don't we all? That's where everyone sources these days. Um, so, so 96.2 billion in, in 2021, you're saying 111, uh, in 2023 in your, your rough estimate. So should we say, uh, rough bet here, 2023 greater than 2021? Do you feel comfortable making that bet? I'll take the other side. I'll take.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 35:01Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. There we go. Well, good.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  I will take that bet. So, um, I, I, I am more than happy to buy you the cryptocurrency of your choice, uh, when, yeah, no matter, no matter which coin, no matter which coin you want, I will buy you one.

• 35:15Logan Bartlett?

  That's great. Yeah. I love them all. Yeah. As most people that listen know, I'm a big fan of all the coins. So. Uh, okay. Well, good. Well, we'll need to circle back at what point. So I guess, uh, sometime Q1-ish of 2024, we'll circle back and, uh, and see. I'm going to set a reminder right now, but.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 35:34Logan Bartlett?

  So I guess, uh, sometime Q1-ish of 2024, we'll circle back and, uh, and see. I'm going to set a reminder right now.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Awesome. I'll see you. I'll see you in the metaverse.

• 35:44Logan Bartlett?

  Perfect. I love it. Paul, we're lucky. Thank you for doing this.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 35:48Logan Bartlett?

  I'm, I'm very excited. We've, uh, I've wanted to do this in person. I've, uh, I've been a, uh, admirer of the companies you've built and how you've gone about it, uh, not without different, uh, controversies that have popped up along the way. Uh, and I think we can talk about some of that stuff, but the media portrayal of you versus in prepping for this, uh, who the person that I've heard a bunch of things about, it seems a little, uh, incongruous, I would say, to say the least.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yes, the media lies.

• 36:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that. What's about a time you, you were aspiring tech journalist?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Well, that, yeah, people actually don't understand this mostly because it just didn't come up all that much during the Oculus days. I was a journalism major. I went to journalism school for three years.

• 36:35Logan Bartlett?

  At 15, right?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  I started, yeah, I started attending college when I was 15, um, and I dropped out when I was 19 and, uh, to, to start Oculus. And I was actually the online editor of the school paper, the daily 49er. So it's not, it's not like, uh, I have this, uh, this internal bias against journalism. If anything, I'm, uh, generally inclined to be charitable and favorable and to see the value in good journalism. Uh, I, I actually just dislike specific journalists and specific outlets, uh, probably more than a person who didn't have such a background of journalism would.

• 37:08Logan Bartlett?

  I thought it would take us a while to work up into this, but it's interesting. Uh, I mean, this has been true, even in the early days of, of Oculus, there were a lot of like little details about who did what at CES, right? Like misrepresenting, like the whole story of your tech career has like little, I mean, there's, there's one big one that we can talk about, but like there's, there's little anecdotes about how like journalism can be misrepresented at times along the way, right?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we, we, we, I kind of dealt with that a lot at Oculus, but. The reality is you don't, you don't have to deal with it when everything is going well. And when you're being treated generally fairly, you know, I wasn't going to go out and nitpick that they got some small thing wrong, or some small attribution incorrect. The issue is when they started to just say things that were completely untrue, totally fabricated, and then refused to correct them for years and years and years on end. I mean, that, that was, that was really for me, very, very surprising. Because I, I knew people made mistakes, but I didn't quite understand the extent to which they would protect their careers over correcting the truth.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Actually, like, you know, there was, one of them, there's an Ars Technica article about me, where it said that I was funding racist, anti-Semitic memes that were being spread all over Twitter and Facebook, which of course, like, the whole thing was actually just a completely fabricated claim. Nothing like it even happened. And they refused to remove or even edit the article for six years. And they actually removed it just a few months ago without telling me, no retraction, nothing. And I'm, I wish I could see behind the scenes, like, what caused them to finally, after, because for years I asked them to correct it. I was like, this is obviously false, you have no sources, it's contradicted by many other credible sources, you're clearly in the wrong here. And they just refused to even respond.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And then finally, six years later, it disappears. And, you know, I've gone, been through that, similar things, literally dozens of times.

• 39:10Logan Bartlett?

  I, I sort of thought we would build up into this.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would have been better, right?

• 39:13Logan Bartlett?

  We're diving right in. I, I think one of the interesting things, as I sort of poked around, like, there actually isn't a great, verified version of like, how all that stuff sort of played out, right?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 39:28Logan Bartlett?

  The history of the future, which is a great book about the Oculus story, and it goes into a little bit of this stuff. But, I mean, I don't know, most of the time, when people want to learn things, the default isn't like, hey, go turn to page 300 of this 550-page book, right?

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Right, no, we're a soundbite world, you know, a headline world.

• 39:47Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, and that was sort of the problem, it was pithy headlines. So, I, and I realize there's restrictions. On some of the things that you can, you can, you can say, but uh, so you were very clear that uh, and you, you like making this explicit. You were, you were fired from Facebook.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Correct. And I, and thank you for calling out that I'd like to make it clear. It's, I'm not trying to make myself overly victimized here, but there are so many times where executives are, are pushed out of their own companies. And then everyone agrees to play by the rules. I mean, you've seen this.

• 40:16Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  They've decided to spend more time with their family.

• 40:18Logan Bartlett?

  VCs are the same way.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  They're excited to move on to the next great adventure.

• 40:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. VCs are excited to get back to operating or go spend time with their families.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  There we go. Oh, get back to operating. Yeah, that's a good one.

• 40:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's like, oh, well, eight, eight, eight straight years of zeros on investments and now you're ready to go back.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Go back to operating. Yeah. And so I, I think that that is not a healthy thing. I think it's not a productive thing. I would like to see the industry be, be, be more honest about this, if only because it minimizes the, like, we all hear about the successful acquisitions. We all hear about the ones that go well and how they made the money and how it's great. But then the, the other side of it, the part where they potentially are getting forced out of their companies, where control is seized beyond the limits of what was agreed. Those parts often get smoothed over by the corporate messaging. And the problem is then future people deciding what they're going to do with their company, uh, only see that positive side.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  And they don't understand, they don't have the real world experience to, to, to, to know that things don't always or even often go that way. So I think it's productive for, for, for people to see both sides of the coin. The Oculus story, one of the things that I was most worried about is it would be taken as very much a success story of mine where it was like, you know, I, I did this thing. I built this company. I sold it. It went great for me and then I moved on to my next great adventure. I would hope that people could learn something from not just the good parts of what happened, but the bad.

• 41:41Logan Bartlett?

  You, you also, I mean, you have this very pragmatic view in a lot of ways. And it's a dichotomy, I think in some where, where you, you've said like, it still fills you with rage to this day, right?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 41:54Logan Bartlett?

  Of like what happened, but also you have this, um, in some ways piece that, that I've heard you. Talk about about like, hey, ultimately, what I care about is the VR industry becoming what it is. And it's in good hands for doing that. And so I can't let my personal views of what happened to me get in the way of like the mission that I actually wanted to support. Or, or like, hey, I actually believe in the system at which people can maybe not be fired for political views. But I believe in the system at which at will employment exists. That's something that I believe in. And so I actually think that I have a right to be fired from my company if they give me a few billion dollars.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I mean, I've had to make this clear to people. They say, I can't believe that you were fired for your political views. And actually, I'll go even further. It's not just that will play like, this is not legal. I'm not saying that I break the law here, you know, just as a disclaimer for whoever's listening.

• 42:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  But I actually think you should, in certain situations, be able to fire someone there for their political views. Imagine that I work at, you know, I work at Citibank. And we hire as an executive, somebody who comes in. And then shortly after hiring them, they are publicly out on the record as saying, my life's work is to dismantle central banking and the capitalist apparatus. It is a moral imperative that I return the world to the people and that we nationalize all banking and, and, and industry. I, that's very much a political belief.

• 43:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  And I think it would be fair for Citibank to say, you know, I think Citibank is not the right place for you.

• 43:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I think you should go somewhere else. But to the letter of the law, you would have to continue to employ that person and allow them to be out there, you know, using their Citibank job as a platform to get recognition and say things that are fundamentally opposed, not just what Citibank is doing, but what the entire industry that you're operating in is doing. And you couldn't possibly be an effective executive in that situation. And so that, that's, that's one of the things I actually, I kind of wish that it was legal for Facebook to just say, yeah, we fired him for his politics. He, he didn't fit in. We, we, you know, we, we didn't, we didn't like what he was doing, so we got rid of him. Instead, you have to make these ridiculous constructs where like, if you ask them, you know, was Palmer

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Politics, any part of why he was fired. They have to insist, not only was it not why he was fired, we didn't even consider it. It wasn't even part of our thought process. It's like saying that the sky is green, especially if you see the contemporary evidence, you know, like if you've read some of the stuff from the time, it's extraordinarily obvious that it was at least in some part motivated by politics, but instead, everyone has to lie. Everyone has to say these nonsensical statements and argue that they're telling the truth. And it's just so bad for everybody to have that happen.

• 44:42Logan Bartlett?

  We're dancing.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  And of course, and of course, I'm at peace because, you know, like if I wanted to, I could just go and, you know, just go and try to like, you know, Reese, you've seen me go off on a few of the people who have wronged me. There's a lot of people who have wronged me where I've never gone after them because I've done the calculus and it would be bad for the VR industry. I'm not going to do anything bad for the VR industry. And people often will say, oh, you know, the press should be fair and they shouldn't be cheerleaders for the VR industry or tear it down. But I'm not a journalist. I'm a techno bro. And so I can do whatever I want, including choosing to not address major issues because I think it'll help the industry that I care so much about. So there's a lot of people who, who escaped, escaped my wrath only because it would be terrible for the VR industry. Sorry, but sorry for.

• 45:26Logan Bartlett?

  No, no, no, that's it. So we danced around it a little bit. I guess maybe I took it down. It's actually kind of hard to find a canonical record of like, what even kind of transpired that's synthesized in a way. So, so let me do it in my words.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  All right, sounds good.

• 45:44Logan Bartlett?

  You correct me on anything that you want to.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  All right, let's do it.

• 45:47Logan Bartlett?

  So you gave $9,000 to a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America. It was a self-described social welfare 501(c)(4) nonprofit.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 45:56Logan Bartlett?

  With a goal to shitpost for Donald Trump as the, I mean, it was for a broad set of candidates against Hillary Clinton, I guess theoretically, because that's the structure of the 501(c)(4) or whatever, but like for Donald Trump and the, the specifically to bring shitposting to the real world was, I think there was, I think that the quote there.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 46:16Logan Bartlett?

  People always, they quote shitpost out of there and then they say, oh, that means.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  That he was trying to flood the internet with with memes and posts like well no actually in fact they explicitly were saying it's shitposting but not in that venue.

• 46:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Which was very frustrating for me at the time.

• 46:32Logan Bartlett?

  And so the distinction you're drawing is like not just doing digital ads of shitposts and.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Well, it's not even just doing digital ads. All they did was run a physical billboard.

• 46:40Logan Bartlett?

  I was gonna get that. One, one, and so that was the distinction you were drawing was so so ultimately what happened.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And in the description of the organization, they're they're making that distinction.

• 46:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  If you were doing it on the internet, you would just be a shitposting organization.

• 46:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  You just wouldn't say our goal is to bring shitposting into real life.

• 46:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yep. And and so there was one billboard that was run. It said too big to jail for Hillary Clinton.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  It was a picture of Hillary Clinton alongside the text, too big to jail.

• 47:02Logan Bartlett?

  Too big to jail. And so there was one billboard that.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Referring at the time to, you know, at the time that it came out, this was when there was a lot of controversy about handling of classified material and whether or not she was being treated the way that other people had been treated by the legal system for handling data in similar ways.

• 47:20Logan Bartlett?

  And so how it came to be is interesting for journalists, journalistic integrity and all that, that you were ultimately tied up in all this. And I think that's a interesting thing if if people really care about about how it came to be. But you did not, your original intention wasn't to be public with this, right? It was the the founders, I think, of the subforum subreddit.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  They just used to be moderators of it.

• 47:44Logan Bartlett?

  Moderators of the.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the thing. They they weren't even moderators. They at one point were moderators of of the subreddit for like the DeFato subreddit for for for the Trump campaign.

• 47:53Logan Bartlett?

  Which which has ultimately got banned by Reddit. And I don't even really know.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Years later.

• 47:58Logan Bartlett?

  Years later, 2020, I think. And some of the stuff that at least the Daily Beast article, that was the big one that broke out, said was to become a, maybe it was a moderator, it said, is there a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy? Was 9/11 an inside job?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  So the interesting thing there, you're right, they did. They they mentioned, oh, it's this horrible place. For example, they ask you, you had to answer if 9/11 was an inside job. But they don't say what the right answer was. And the thing is, those questions, they imply that you basically had to be a crazy conspiracy nutter in order to even be allowed in. It was actually the opposite. They implemented those questions. To keep out all of the nutters that were trying to become moderators. Like if you said nine 11 was inside job, you were not allowed to become a moderator. They basically said, okay, yeah, that's like, if you think that the US government did this, you should not be moderating this political forum for a current US president. And so that was, that was the actual really interesting thing is how they, they, they, they actually

• 48:52Speaker 02

  completely flipped it by acting like you had to answer one way. And in fact, it was the other way. It was, they were trying to filter out exactly the people they're implying they were.

• 49:03Logan Bartlett?

  That's interesting. And so, and obviously there was a period of time at which it was popular and then it branched off. And there were different, you know, whatever ties to different groups and all that. But, uh, so, so this ultimately came out through some very weird series of events that Daily Beast, it seems like didn't respect journalistic integrity behind, uh, you know, verifying things off the record.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 49:27Logan Bartlett?

  Was at least the way.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Well, they confirmed in writing that it would be off the record.

• 49:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  And then later, uh, when, when I pointed that out, the editor said, oh no, while you were on the phone, you confirmed that it would be on the record.

• 49:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not how, that's not how any of this works.

• 49:43Logan Bartlett?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Why would I have done such a thing?

• 49:46Logan Bartlett?

  That's what, yeah. It's actually the Occam's razor of this situation is like, why, why would that have been how you would want to reveal, you know, in this big breaking thing, it just, whatever.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  And people do make mistakes being on the record, off the record. I mean, it happens, especially when they're not familiar with the rules.

• 50:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  For journalists, I remember I, I went to journalism school. I was, I was a journalist. I was an editor. I very well understood the rules. I worked in the tech sector for years. I did literally thousands of interviews.

• 50:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  I understood the rules and it was in writing that it was off the record. And so they, they don't argue that, oh, this was of such journalism important, journalistic import that we're breaking the rules. It was just, no, no, you agreed on the call that it was on the record.

• 50:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  It's like. Which of course was untrue.

• 50:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. So they did that. A bunch of controversy followed. This was prior to the actual presidential election.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:37Logan Bartlett?

  So a bunch of Facebook doesn't-

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Late September of 2016.

• 50:41Logan Bartlett?

  Late, oh wow. So-

• 50:42Speaker 02

  September 22nd.

• 50:44Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, got it. And so you're asked to take a leave of absence as this shitstorm is brewing. People are internally within Facebook signing different things and game studios are saying like, "Oh, we might not work with Facebook."

• 50:57Speaker 02

  So actually, that's another bit of misinformation. A lot, there were a lot of headlines that said, "Game studios are dropping support for Oculus until they remove Palmer Lucky." So there were three companies that said on their Twitter that they were not going to work with Oculus until the situation resolved. They didn't actually say that they needed to fire me. One of them was a trading, a paper trading card game company that later said that they were, the whole thing was just a joke. They're like, "No, no, we thought it was a joke. We said we're dropping Oculus support. We literally make paper trading cards." The joke was that we were dropping support.

• 51:31Logan Bartlett?

  And you're like, "Ha, ha, ha."

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's-

• 51:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, "Thanks for that, I appreciate it."

• 51:33Speaker 02

  So that's one of them. And then the other, the other two had never released a game, and in fact, neither of them ever released anything. They were two independent solo developers who never released the games they were working on, which, like, they weren't Oculus partners. They hadn't even been approved to be on our store. How can they be dropping support for us when, in fact, we had no relationship with them, had no plans of hosting their game one way or the other? But instead, people turned to this huge, they did this huge thing, saying, "Developers are dropping support for Oculus," which really bothered me because, you know, as a business guy, that's an accusation of material impact, saying his actions had

• 52:13Speaker 02

  a material impact on the Oculus business, and it was just completely false. Not a single developer we had ever worked with did anything of the sort.

• 52:23Logan Bartlett?

  And so how much, like, at that-

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Or if you really want to go the other way, every single developer we worked with- Kept working with us despite the controversy.

• 52:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  What you, I don't know if you can say that, you know, lack of action is an affirmative action, but if you're gonna skew it that one way, that the way to skew it is every single partner we had stood with us.

• 52:44Logan Bartlett?

  How much of after all that stuff happened, then, then it starts brewing on itself? And I've never been.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny because for people who aren't listening, for who haven't followed this, like I gave money to this, to this, and what the report said is that I was funding anti-Semitic, racist, white supremacist troll farms that were attacking Clinton supporters all over the internet on Facebook and Twitter and posting these vile horrible memes all over the place. So I just want to make clear, the thing that I was getting attacked for was not what I did. It was, I did one thing. It was reported as a completely different thing and on all the controversy was in response to that.

• 53:21Logan Bartlett?

  Did the Daily Beast, so the Daily Beast reported that?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  So that's actually the other interesting thing. The Daily Beast did not report any of these things. Now, what they did is they did like what I talked about earlier, where they made, they implied that you had to, that you had to support white nationalism in order to be a model. They implied you had to think nine 11 was an inside theory, but they didn't actually explicitly say it. They just did it so that any reasonable person would read it and assume much worse. The other articles were actually the ones that were much worse. The Daily Beast, for all of the journalistic malpractice they engaged in, they were not the ones who actually elevated these claims to saying, you know, he's funding Donald Trump's anti-Semitic meme machine. He's flooding the internet with Nazi propaganda. Like those were just made up by other outlets like Wired and Washington Post and the New

• 54:09Speaker 02

  York Times and Boing Boing. I mean, like the gamut of credible to non-credible, it was all completely false reporting.

• 54:16Logan Bartlett?

  And was it, was it actually reporting or was it skimming aggregation? Like, how much do you think it was malintent?

• 54:21Speaker 02

  It was original reporting. I, when I, of course, everything is just aggregation.

• 54:25Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  But no, these were like, like this wasn't just like they posted a link. It was like, you know, all like five plus paragraph articles, putting their own spin on what had happened, reporting mostly what people on Twitter had, were saying about it as if it was fact. And it was, it was, it was, it's hard to stress this without sounding like a nutter. But like, the claims they were reporting had no sourcing. Were totally untrue. There was no source whatsoever and anyone who tried to point that out was immediately smeared as, oh, they're a neo-Nazi Palmer Lucky apologist. If actually, for example, like the Neogaff forums, which are major game industry development community, they actually made it policy that anyone defending me was instantly banned

• 55:09Speaker 02

  from the forum. I mean, like, that was, that was the level of pushback on correction that there was.

• 55:14Logan Bartlett?

  What do you think? I mean, it's actually, it brings so many different questions to light in all of this. But so this whole controversy starts brewing, the election happens.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 55:26Logan Bartlett?

  The person that I think all the people that were against you were supporting and who I also voted for in full disclosure, didn't get elected.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 55:35Logan Bartlett?

  And the person that you were supporting did get elected. And then that's when it actually went from like, this is crazy annoyance, but probably going to blow over to like, holy shit.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I was explicitly told after the election, you can come back to the office.

• 55:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Like, we're just gonna let this blow over. But you're right, it's because Trump won, they decided that strategy was non-viable.

• 56:01Logan Bartlett?

  And did you ever get, I mean, it seems, in reading the book, it seems like implicit that there, and you're so pragmatic about a lot of these things, that actually from like, had it been a business decision, right? It seems like, hey, listen, if game studios were actually going to drop Oculus and I was the impediment to it, like, I totally understand why that would have to be a business decision.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I would have done it in a second.

• 56:24Logan Bartlett?

  You would have fired yourself if you were Mark Zuckerberg in that situation, if game studios were going to drop Oculus.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 56:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. But that wasn't what was actually happening, right?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  No, it isn't what was happening at all. And I think also, like, you know, it's very much the palace intrigue thing where the tech reporters were all over this fascinating drama. Gamers, gamers, gamers are not, you know, they're not, they're not, they're not following the exact political views of every executive in every company at every studio. It's just, I mean, like, look at, look at Bobby Kotick.

• 56:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, he's a outspoken Republican. He's donated Republicans for many, many years. And, you know, he's running Blizzard Activision and they're one of- One of the, if not the, most successful game studios in the world. So clearly, you know, voting for Trump is not this thing that makes a company disqualified. It's, it's, it would be specific things like you mentioned, game developers dropping Oculus. You know, that, that would, that, that would be the equivalent.

• 57:19Logan Bartlett?

  So I don't want to ask you to speculate on other people's intentions because I realize that's just, that's a hard thing to do. But what, what do you think led, I mean, obviously some leadership desire to not push back on all of this. Was it just a loud group of people that this seemed like the easiest way to make this whole thing kind of blow over within Facebook? Like, what was the rational, Palmer Lucky, the detached analytical person of like, hey, everyone's sort of acting in their own self-interest, which I think you, you believe at the end of the day incentives and self-interest drive a lot of these things. And so if you were to speculate why it actually happened, what's your, what's your speculation on it?

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the playbook that they followed was more or less exactly the playbook that you would, that you would learn in crisis communications training. I mean, it's, you know, to let it blow over, not give them more fuel. Like what, what they did was actually like pretty by the book. I don't think it was the right move. I think we were an unconventional company in an unconventional situation that you couldn't have done things in that way. In particular, because it would have been so easy to at least tamp down on the worst of it. You know, it's like, again, the reason I'm, I'm highlighting that all this reporting was false is because I want to be fair to people. It's gotten boiled down to in the modern day is, you know, oh, they were upset because you gave money to a pro-Trump group. But it's not quite true. That's unfair to the people who are angry.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  They were reading media that I was funding neo-Nazi propaganda farms run by antisemites who were flooding social media with personal attacks and trolls against Hillary Clinton's supporters. Like, that's what was getting reported. That's why people were angry. We could have easily taken the edge off of that and been like, whoa, whoa, like. Yeah, that's not what's happening. And instead, there was a refusal to even do that basic crisis control like, hey, this reporting is outright false. And there were a few reasons for that. One, one of the things that was going on during the election was it was it was kind of, it was kind of a, it was considered unthinkable to question the press if you were left-leaning press. But like, the act of saying the press is lying to you was considered an attack on democracy itself.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  That was, you, you, I mean, you remember 2016. And so there were a lot of people like, we cannot actually say the press is lying to people because that's what Trump says about the press. Like, right, but we all agree that's obviously what's happening right now. They are, they are just fabricating a story. Like, yeah, but we can't say that because it'll look so bad and anti-democratic, as if the press enjoys this special, you know, position in, in, uh, in, in government that makes them unassailable. Um, so that, that was part of it. The other reason that I think, uh, that the thing that really mixed things up, do you remember, uh, do you remember Correct the Record? Vaguely, yes. Vaguely. Nobody really talks about it these days, but it was very relevant at the time.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Uh, it came out that, that ActBlue, ShareBlue was funneling millions of dollars to correct the record, which was an actual campaign to pay people to post on the internet to say nice things about Hillary Clinton and bad things about Donald Trump. It was, it was an actual astroturfing campaign and it was actually funded by the DNC and major, major left-wing organizations. And my whole controversy came out about a week after that was revealed that they were doing that. And so I, I think in some ways, I, I was being framed as kind of the mega millionaire financier of the right-wing equivalent to correct the record. It was kind of a, oh, well, look, we're doing this, but, but also the other side is doing that.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  And I think that's what set it partially out of control and why there was so much mainstream media coverage. Like, the Washington Post story wasn't about Oculus or video games. It was about how, you know, how astroturfing troll farms are funded and operated. And they're, they, they basically talked about Correct the Record. And they're like, oh, and Palmer Lucky's doing this on the right too. He's paying people to troll people on the internet too. That that that kind of made it very difficult because to go out and try to correct the record, as it were, on that would have also been seen as kind of picking the right wing side of the debate. And so that that was, I think fundamentally, why I ended up, why I ended up in such a bad spot is I assumed that the people making communications decisions were looking out for the company and for me. And you typically typically the way that

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  it works is you let the company, you let the company handle the strategy and in exchange, you get protected.

• 1:01:43Logan Bartlett?

  That's the hope.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  It's like, look, I'll like, I'll let you call, I'll let you call the shots and I'll be a team player as long as we're all on the same team. What I did not divine is that there was no intention of keeping me on the team. And in fact, it was just a poorly run PR strategy that didn't help the company or me or anybody.

• 1:02:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Who? So so you you kind of understand from an incentive standpoint in a lot of ways how you ended up in that situation.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I like just to to to to to put it in one sentence, if they would have just fired me and said, we're firing him because we don't think he can be an effective leader because so many people here hate Trump and his supporters. I would have been unhappy about it. But ideologically, I couldn't have found my much rage in myself about it. I would be like, OK, that's like, that's a well, that's a well, that's at least like a reasonable concept to hold. You have the right to fire me. The problem was where I wasn't allowed to correct these really awful stories. And I was thrown under the bus at the end of the day. It was, you know, I got, I got, I got, I got fucked at both ends.

• 1:02:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's almost like the principled element of it is, is what was so like frustrating. It was like all different things that could be screwed over ended up cutting you the wrong way on this.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  And also making it that it was very clear that like, one of the reasons I was so angry afterwards is because the way that the initial situation was handled made it much harder for me to start a new company and to get started again. You know, like basically, the fact that all these stories had been allowed to go uncorrected for the better part of a year, more or less cemented them as truth. Which is why, to this day, you still have press repeating those same claims, which are just, they're obviously false, but if you put in no effort, then it's easy to re-report them.

• 1:03:35Logan Bartlett?

  And honestly, I mean, I think about myself until I sort of went down this rabbit hole of doing all this, like, it's actually a very natural thing. You want to believe what you're being told is true. And going back to primary research on every topic, like, isn't a tenable way to live your life on this.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Oh, it's tough. Yeah, you can do it on one or two topics you care about, but to do it every time, you're right, there's not enough time in the day.

• 1:03:59Logan Bartlett?

  There's not, it's just like, oh, you know, that seems like not, the pearl's not worth a dive for me to figure out exactly what happened to Palmer Lucky. Easier for me as a venture capitalist to not invest in his next company, just because I would have to go talk to so many different people to figure out all these different things.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Well, especially because you go to Wikipedia, and it says a bunch of stuff, and it cites a bunch of stories. And the way Wikipedia works is if a credible outlet reports that it's true, it's true. Now, that's true even if primary sources directly contradict it. Wikipedia says primary sources are not to be trusted. It's actually third parties that are reporting on that are the ones that are actually weighted higher. So you can have a primary source that directly contradicts, let's say, five major media outlets saying something, and Wikipedia is going to say, no, no, the version that the media outlet said is true, is true. And you can't edit it, because the admins will come in and say, no, no, this is, this is a settled fact. And so, like, for you, the venture capitalist, you're going to look and say, wow, this is a well-sourced claim. Many credible outlets have said so. This must be true.

• 1:04:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  It's the only reasonable thing that someone could do, which is why, by the way, I'm not angry at people who read these stories and were, and were aggressive against me. This is why I'm so angry, particular at the reporters, because the people who were misled, were misled. This is not their fault. They, they were told something that wasn't true, and they got really angry about something that didn't happen, and that's not their fault. I can't really hold, I can't say, oh, well, you should have gone to the primary sources.

• 1:05:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Because you're, to your point, that's not reasonable. But I can hold the people who made that happen accountable.

• 1:05:29Logan Bartlett?

  Which, which, so what's the better takeaway from you in all this? All of this, like, obviously, it's a very unfortunate situation. You're the company you founded was taken away from you, and I know it's going to bother you. You know, I mean, you seem to be doing well. Andrel seems to be.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  We're doing great.

• 1:05:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, great. And it seems like you're in a pretty good place with all of that. But I'm sure it's still hurts.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  I mean, the biggest takeaway is do not underestimate the long term impact of not correcting

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  falsehoods about your company or yourself. A lot of people, they say, oh, it's not that big of a deal. I'll just let it be said, and we don't correct it. They don't want to go toe to toe with the press. And they don't understand the long term impact of that, because that thing that was said can now get re-reported. Like, there was a New York Times story that reported a quote, and they put it in quotation marks and said that I said something. Well, I never said that. And in fact, I had the written quote. They were quoting a written quote, I said, hey, your quote is literally inaccurate. I said something totally different. Here is the written quote. So we don't think the meaning is all that different. And I explained, I said, well, that's not how the New York Times style guide works. You don't get to decide, we put, we put in quotes what we think the general meaning of something was, because it actually is important to note what it was.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Actually, what it was is we were talking, I was talking about why I donated to Nimbly America. And the original sentence said, you know, I donated them to put things on this billboard because X. And they just removed on this billboard. It just, they just removed what I actually did. I'm like, no, no, this doesn't work, because you're removing the context in a way where it's going to get misreported. And then what happened? I fought it a little bit, I stopped fighting it. And then that quote, the one that I didn't say, ended up being endlessly quoted by dozens of stories over the course of three years. And so a lot of people don't understand the value of taking the hit at the beginning, going toe to toe with the press. And if they will not correct the story, like, I've been pretty effective at using newsletters and interviews and even Twitter

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  to say, hey, this is wrong, this is false, this particular reporter, this particular outlet is. Derelict in their duties. And that actually seems to work pretty well in getting stories correct.

• 1:07:35Logan Bartlett?

  What's been the most, so in getting the story out there, I mean, when this all came on my radar, was really the, the Jason Calacanis, like all in thing. Like, and, and we were talking about it before we started, like you've been recognized in, in, in Ukraine for that. Like, what's been the most effective means of, of actually dissuading people from thinking that narrative?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  You have to get out and you have to actually tell them your story. If you don't tell them, then they're not going to dig themselves. You have to make it so that, that the real version of what happened is as easy to find as the false version. You need to make it where a person doesn't have to go deep into the primary sources of what happened in the distant year of 2016. And instead you just have to keep talking about what you're doing now and also what happened then. That's actually worked out pretty well for me. I think me being very aggressive has gotten myself and by extension Andrel into a much better place.

• 1:08:29Logan Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Which is not what anyone in any crisis communications, you know, PR firm will tell you. They will tell you, like what I, if I'm like, yes, the way to solve misreporting is to immediately aggressively attack the journalist who is, who is lying about you. They'd be like, oh no, you can't do that. But it turns out that in the modern, in the modern dynamic, that's often the only, the only way you can defend yourself.

• 1:08:56Logan Bartlett?

  After all of, after, after you went through all this stuff, like what, um, I mean, you, you came out the other side and now have Andrel, which I promise we'll talk about at some point.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  That's right. Finally, we get to talk about.

• 1:09:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, we can talk about your, your current company, but, uh, it seems like going through something like this, inevitably when I.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  I will note, it's pretty incredible that I've spent hundreds of hours of my life, maybe thousands, dealing with a $9,000 donation that I made. Honestly, without putting that much thought into it, I don't want to sound like a rich guy here, but I had just sold my company for billions of dollars. This was a relatively small donation to a relatively innocuous cause. It was one billboard in Pittsburgh that had Hillary and the word too big to jail. It's incredible how that was. Turned into like this defining thing that has to be addressed every single time anyone does a story about me.

• 1:09:47Logan Bartlett?

  But I think what's interesting about that is, or at least you're cross the bear in this. And again, I don't know if you see it this way, and actually having gone through it, I'm sure easy for me to say. But is that you are like, how many people have gone through something similar and aren't willing to talk about it in the way that you have? Or come out the other side around it, right?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Well, though, most of them just have their careers destroyed and they never have a second chance.

• 1:10:09Logan Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  That's the reality. Like I'm lucky. Yeah, I'm lucky to be able to deal with it. But you know, at the same time, where I don't feel it's my, should be my cross to bear is you have many, many other entrepreneurs donating much larger sums of money to their political candidates of choice. The reality is it, it, it isn't Trump and it wasn't misreported. And so that's a, so it's like, oh, the real problem is Palmer, you know, donating to political organizations. It's like, wait a second, the people working above me, even at Facebook donated literally hundreds of millions of dollars to political organizations to almost, you know, first of all, not very much coverage, but certainly no scorn.

• 1:10:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  And that, that's always, that, that's all, that's all you, and I'll get to find like, oh, Palmer, you know, outspoken, right, you know, right wing propaganda funder. It's like, wow, is that really all it takes these days? $9,000 and all of a sudden you're outspoken about your politics and you're funding right wing propaganda. It's like, nobody would ever be like, oh, this Democrat, he gave a few thousand dollars to Planned Parenthood. So he's, he's an outspoken, well-known, left-wing politic, political.

• 1:11:13Logan Bartlett?

  Anonymously and got doxed into doing it, therefore you're outspoken right wing.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is another thing. Yeah, I've, I've, I've had rallies with like, you know, you're, you, you, you were very outspoken about your political beliefs during the election. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 1:11:26Logan Bartlett?

  Let's be clear. I was, I was doxed out of, yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  And, and the reason that's important is from a business perspective, if you are at being outspoken is a very different business position than like, I'm going to have my politics and keep it to myself, which is basically what I was doing. You know, the, the only alternative beyond that is I'm going to have my politics, keep it to myself and do absolutely nothing to support anyone that I support.

• 1:11:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Which is, which is a, you know, a tough thing to advocate for.

• 1:11:49Logan Bartlett?

  Listen.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  For any, for any side of.

• 1:11:50Logan Bartlett?

  Path a lot of people end up taking because of all this.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  It's a smart one, honestly.

• 1:11:54Logan Bartlett?

  Well, so we dove right into that and I want to touch on a few different things and I appreciate you going through all that. Hopefully that serves as at least something of a primary document on all this. It took me, even as you heard, I made mistakes along the way in talking that through and that was.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  And that's after you've read books on it, you've read interviews on it.

• 1:12:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I knew directionally what it was, but so, so you are how old now?

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  29 years old.

• 1:12:20Logan Bartlett?

  Wow, depth store. You're getting.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  It feels that way sometimes.

• 1:12:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you were, you were the, the boy wonder at 19 starting Oculus. So, so you grew up, we're in Orange County right now.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  I grew up in Long Beach, California, which is actually technically LA County.

• 1:12:35Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  You know, you're close to the port, so right on the, right on the line.

• 1:12:39Logan Bartlett?

  So your father was a car salesman?

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:12:41Logan Bartlett?

  Mother homeschooled you?

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:12:44Logan Bartlett?

  And did you have an inclination, like it seems like you had a bunch of different interests. I mean, going into journalism, you were also deep into tech and VR and gaming and all this stuff. Being homeschooled, it sounds like also you were a little bit of a pain in the ass as a kid. You got kicked out of your house at least twice, once into a trailer, once into your garage at some point.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  I'm, I mean, some would say I'm a pain in the ass today.

• 1:13:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, listen, aren't we all?

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  But yeah, not, not, not all too much has changed, I guess.

• 1:13:10Logan Bartlett?

  Aren't we all? So take, take me through how you, how you got into Oculus originally and that. And I think one of the interesting things as we ultimately take it back to the, to the company you're now a part of and founded. I think it's interesting to talk about how accidental versus purposeful the two different companies were as you contrast them.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Well, like the thing about Oculus was VR was my, was my hobby at the time. And so I started Oculus because I really liked VR and I wanted to make a run. I had, I had a few good ideas for. Had basically how to make a better VR headset and how to replace certain high-end hardware functions with much cheaper software functions, make it easy to use for game developers. But I started working on VR when I was 15 as a hobby because I was building PC gaming rigs. And I had built a really, really nice PC gaming rig. And as I started planning out my next round of upgrades, it just wasn't exciting. And it was clear that the future of gaming was not going to be more monitors and more graphics cards and just incremental improvements. It was going to be something radically different. And as a science fiction fan, it was apparent to me that virtual reality was not just the next step in gaming,

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  but the final thing. Once you have perfect virtual reality, like that's it. The ability to simulate anything a human could experience or imagine experiencing, that's the holy grail. And so I decided that I was going to work on that as a hobby. And Oculus kind of came out of that, not because I thought that VR was going to be the best business ever, or because it was going to make me a lot of money, but because I loved working on VR. It was very interesting. I had a lot of fun working on it. And it turned out that I was doing the right thing at the right time. And the technology was in a place where I could build a multi-billion dollar company out of those insights and ideas from a hobby. To the point you just mentioned, I've often said Andro was different because I started from the beginning saying,

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  I am going to build this into be a major company so that I can have a big impact through the size and through the influence, which is very different from, you know, let's make my hobby into a thing that pays the bills. So I can move out of this 19-foot camper trailer and into a real apartment.

• 1:15:11Logan Bartlett?

  Following your passions generally doesn't lead to being a billionaire or founding a multi-billion dollar.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not at all. I mean, one of my contrarian pieces of advice to people is to never follow your passions, follow your talents. Because those often are not 100% aligned. So many people, they give this false advice where they're told, follow your dreams, follow your passion, whatever you love doing, that's the thing that you really should do with your life. The problem is that most of the things worth loving are not things where you are going to be able to make money. Or certainly have an impact. And this is especially true for, I think, kids and teens. Kids and teens told, follow your passions. Like, no, no, no. What you're passionate about with when you're nine years old has very little correlation with good life decisions. It is, it is, it is bad advice for kids, in my opinion. And that's how you end up with the

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  number one most desired job for children, being a YouTuber, or a Twitch streamer, rather than being an astronaut, or an engineer, or, or, or a writer, or whatever, whatever stereotypical great profession you want to, you want to lay out.

• 1:16:16Logan Bartlett?

  You say children. I'm 34 years old, and I'm a YouTuber now. So I, you know, I don't think it's just children that are aspiring on that. But I think it's interesting. I mean, the point about-

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Oh, it's fine to have good YouTubers. And I think your success in this space shows that you do have at least some talent that lies there. The issue is when it is by far the most desired job in the whole country. Like, we can't have a country of YouTubers.

• 1:16:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. Yeah, that's, no, very much true. It's, it's interesting. I mean, it sort of goes to the, I've heard you talk about the, you know, people wanting to be lawyers, or when, when artists or whoever within a company go to the engineers and say, why, this isn't fair. Like, you guys are getting paid more than me. Maybe you can speak a little bit about those.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  I know you're, yeah, I mean, I've, I experienced this, especially at Facebook. You know, there was, there was this interesting, interesting dynamic where you, there was this idea that some people have, that all work is of equal value. And like, this is something people say. They'll say, all work is of equal value. And so you'll have someone whose days consist of, like, brainstorming, and sketching flowers, and thinking about how they're gonna do a sticker in the Facebook chat. And then you'll have them complain and say, why is it that engineers are valued more highly at this company? We live in a culture that values certain things over others. And the reality is, all of our work has equal value. And I'd say, like, you know, the, the, the autismo super engineers would be like, no, you are wrong. Your work

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  has less value, by all definitions of the word value. That's why you're paid less. That's why there's less prestige. That's why there's, there's like that. That's why it's easier to get a job doing it. People think, how could you say that? You, everyone is equal worth. Like, no, there are certain jobs that create more value in the world for myself and for everybody else. And while, while wages are not a perfect reflection of value disparity, certainly there, everyone should be able to agree that there are jobs that create more value for mankind than others. And that, that was a, yeah, there's people who would always say that that, that was unfair. And the thing is, some of that is due to like lawyers. They have to go to law school and you know, go through a really painful grind.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  But also their jobs really are, are, are terrible. And like, you'll even hear this from lawyers who love practicing law. Nobody will say this job makes you feel good. It activates all the serotonin and dopamine on a regulator. It's like, no, this is a tough job. And one of the reasons I'm paid more is because it, uh, it, it sucks. And you have to pay people more if they're going to do shitty jobs. And it's, it's, it's just very interesting that, that huge, that huge gap. Because I've always been someone where I've, I've always thought myself is pretty, pretty rational. And even when I wanted to be a journalist, I never would have dreamed of going to be like, yes, my, my job as a, as a writer is, uh, you know, equally, equally valuable in terms of salary as an engineer.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  I would have to be like, oh, well, maybe I'm making a bigger impact in the world. But it's definitely not worth as much money as the guy who had to go to school to be an engineer.

• 1:19:13Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting. You're making me think that maybe not all lawyers are just in it for the love of law.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  I, oh, not at all. And a lot of lawyers aren't, and a lot of doctors aren't. And that's not to say that they don't find meaning and worth and value in it. And before anyone says that I'm attacking doctors and lawyers, I have a lot of doctor and lawyer acquaintances, friends and colleagues who will say the exact same thing. Like, look, you don't get into, you don't get into law. Uh, if, if law didn't pay well, I probably wouldn't be doing it.

• 1:19:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I think that's, I think.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Even if they love law, even if they love it.

• 1:19:44Logan Bartlett?

  If, if we cut lawyer salaries in half, I think there's going to be less of them. I just, it's a, it's a, it's a theory of mine, but I think that's true.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this also gets to being in like, like executive positions. The people often are saying, oh, you know, CEOs are paid too much and CC weed is paid too much. I know this is, this sounds like such a stereotypical rich, rich executive thing to say. Like, having been on the other side of that, where you are responsible for everyone's wellbeing, you're the final backstop for legal and compliance and fundraising. And if you don't perform, everyone's out of a job and the company's gone, like. I think a lot of these guys are not paid enough, especially the ones who already have a lot of money. Like it, you, if we took CEO salaries and dropped them to be remotely like what it is to be a worker. I think most of these people would be like, man, peace out. I am out of here. It is not worth the extraordinary stress and demand.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  Also, they're, I mean, they're, they're seeing, I, most of these people, they're not seeing their kids. They're not seeing their families. They, they have to give up on so many holidays on so many occasions because they have to put the company first. Uh, you, you couldn't pay me enough to do the job of some of these executives that I've seen, especially in companies that are going downhill. Like executive, they're like, oh, how's this company failing? And they're paying the CEO of $10 million a year. It's like, you know why they're paying $10 million a year? Cause the company's failing. Yeah. You, you want that job? You want to go work in the place where every day your job is to try to attempt the 10% probability chance of a turnaround? That's that, you couldn't pay me to do it with any amount of money.

• 1:21:14Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting. Yeah. I, I, I mean, it's all these things. It sort of goes back to the incentive point between dollars and prestige. And what, and it's sort of like, hey, listen, the, everyone's like, well, why don't we have better people in politics? And I'm like, well, listen, that's a pretty fucking shitty job and you don't get paid very well. And like people send you death.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  For many people in politics, it's the best job they can have too. Like there's, there's a lot of people where like, like, yeah, like it, it isn't that great of a job. And people are like, oh, well, pays $170,000 a year and you get benefits. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you spend all your time traveling, you're basically, you're fundraising all of the time.

• 1:21:49Logan Bartlett?

  You get death threats all the time from random people.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Your, your family is now on, is now, is now being attacked by, by press, by random people on Twitter. And that never goes away, even after you're a politician, you're now.

• 1:22:01Logan Bartlett?

  Why are so many politicians sociopaths? It's like, well, listen, it takes a sociopathic person to want that job. Right?

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  Well, and I think a lot of the best politicians I've seen are the ones that get out of politics eventually. So like, they'll get in because they really want to make a difference and then they, they, they, they just can't take it.

• 1:22:20Logan Bartlett?

  They come to, yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  If you're able to survive in politics for, for, for, for decades, it either means that you are. You're truly a believer in your mission, or you are

• 1:22:30Logan Bartlett?

  Broken in the brain in some way. Yeah, I think that's right.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:22:33Logan Bartlett?

  So Oculus, so VR, you started it at 19, sold by 21 for billions, two to three billion, depending on sort of how you

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  Depends on how you count.

• 1:22:45Logan Bartlett?

  What's a billion between?

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Depends on the accounting.

• 1:22:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, what's a billion between friends, right? But

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Specifically, like the reason for the confusion, and just for anyone who's listening, the official number was $2.3 billion. But the way that it worked out is there was also a $700 million

• 1:23:01Logan Bartlett?

  Employee retention.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Entoy retention package, because that was a lot of the value of Oculus was the employees. And some employees had more equity than others, but you really had to make sure that people who did not necessarily have a lot of equity ownership at the time of the acquisition were sufficiently motivated that they were going to continue working. And that's also true for some people that did have a lot of equity ownership, where you had to make it worth hanging around instead of just immediately piecing out. Yeah, that's one of the downsides of a rich tech market is sometimes you'll have great people brought together. They accomplish something extraordinary and then they make enough money to go spend time with their families. And who can blame them?

• 1:23:36Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  But it's a loss for the industry when you have the, you all have a successful company. I mean, you've seen this before, company IPOs, and then it's right after the lockout period. Half of the most talented people, they're gone, not just from the company, but from the workforce forever. I'm not saying that people shouldn't make money. I love it, but it's, it's, it's one of those things where if you want to paint the whole picture, you gotta look at the downsides too. But that's why there was a $700 million retention package.

• 1:24:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Make sure that those people stuck around for a few years to see through what we were doing.

• 1:24:04Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so it was 75 people when it was acquired, right? And by the time you left, and as we touched on, in 2016, or I guess beginning of 2017.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:24:15Logan Bartlett?

  How many people were at the company?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  About 1,400 people.

• 1:24:18Logan Bartlett?

  Do you regret?

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  April 1st, 2017.

• 1:24:20Logan Bartlett?

  April 1st, 2017. Do you regret having, yeah, exactly. Do you regret having sold the business to Facebook?

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 1:24:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  It was definitely the best thing for VR.

• 1:24:31Logan Bartlett?

  Because of the industry itself, because of the financial outcome?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Everything. It was, we got the resources we needed to get the rift out the door and to fund so much content that never would have gotten funded otherwise. So much of the VR content, especially in the very early years, you have to understand, could never have survived organically. The market was too small. Nobody could possibly have invested the money that we did to start that self-sustaining flywheel of people wanting to buy the headset so that they can play the cool games, which then, you know, leads to money, then leads to more cool games, which leads to more sold headsets. Like, to kick off that flywheel takes billions of dollars. I mean, look at what it took even just to start Xbox. That took billions of dollars. And that was a game console. People understood that. They were able to have ports from other consoles to their platform. Like, starting a new platform takes billions of dollars.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  And Facebook put in the money. Now, I don't agree with every tactical decision they've made, but broadly, they are putting more into VR than anybody else in the world. And people often point to other companies, especially at the time they did. They said, well, why not Google? Why not Microsoft? All those companies have dropped their VR initiatives. Facebook's the only one that has the singular god-king leader who has the power and the money to continue investing in virtual reality, no matter what anyone says about it. Shareholders, board of directors, or otherwise. And it's really hard to be unhappy with that outcome as someone who wants VR to happen. Now, people say, oh, but do you really want it in the hands of that particular corporation? Do you really want, you know, this particular

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  model of advertising to take hold? And my view is, like, the really hard thing is getting VR to the mainstream. It's not necessarily going to happen. You have to make it happen.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Seeing that happen is my life's work, was my life's work anyway. Uh, I, it's, it's hard for me, no matter how angry I am about how it all turned up. It's hard for me to turn around and say, because I got screwed, this was bad.

• 1:26:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  That's just not how it is. It's, it was good and I got screwed.

• 1:26:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So, um, so now finally, uh, so Andrew, we're sitting in your office.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  And I made a bunch of money.

• 1:26:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Like, I, I don't want people to act like, you know, I, I did not walk away, walk away poor. Uh, so that, that certainly just realistically does make it a little bit easier to, to rest, to rest easy.

• 1:26:49Logan Bartlett?

  I, uh, I, no, I, I can, I can only imagine that. I'm told, I'm told you have a wonderful house here with a lot of cool, interesting stuff.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  I do, but I'd say I'm like, I'm probably not going to go on the path that you've seen with other people where they, they, they've departed Facebook and then been very aggressively against Facebook. And we talked about this earlier. I'm not going to do that because it'd be bad for the VR industry.

• 1:27:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  It'd be personally gratifying, huge, hugely bad thing to do if I want VR to succeed, uh, as it's currently structured.

• 1:27:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Interesting. So, so you took, uh, some time off after you were fired, uh, and started thinking about what you were going to do next. And you landed on Andrel.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  I basically decided more or less immediately, like we officially, we officially founded the company June 6th, 2017, which is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Um, but like, I, I mean, I had already actually purchased some warehouse space and started buying machine shop stuff. So I, I, I knew I was doing it actually before I was, it, it took, it took Facebook a while to fire me. They told me in January that I was being fired and then it takes a long time to fire somebody who's so deeply entangled with the company. Uh, you know, it's not just like some random person where you move over their project. It takes, it takes a while.

• 1:27:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. They don't give you a box in the same way.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  They don't give you a box and walk you out the door. Um, but the, uh, but yeah, I mean, I, I, as soon as I heard I was being fired, I knew that this was what I wanted to work on. Working on national security.

• 1:28:11Logan Bartlett?

  National defense. And so, so you, you've said, or I've heard that the problem that existed within national security is those who can, won't. And those who, uh, will, can't, right?

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:28:23Logan Bartlett?

  In terms of, and so, so maybe talk a little bit about, what was the insight, uh, that you saw in, in the, uh, the industry that presented an opportunity for Andrel?

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  Well, it was three things. Uh, and it's, it's kind of the reason I started Andrel was because I saw an opportunity and also a big problem. The problems were, uh, The major defense primes in the United States, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon, were not equipped with the talent and incentives they needed to build autonomous systems, core technologies like sensor fusion and mesh networking. They were not equipped to build the systems that I thought were going to define the future of warfare and deterrence. And equipped from a talent within the organization standpoint. That's right. Meaning like the best AI experts in the world are not inside defense companies. They are inside of companies like Facebook, like Google. Like, actually, I've lost people to Snapchat who are excellent.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  They genuinely have one of the best computer vision teams in the world. People laugh because they think it's just a funny, you know, social media mustache emoji AR overlay app. They have excellent technologists. But all those excellent technologists are working on problems that I don't think matter all that much. Advertising optimization, getting a little bit more engagement in the photo applications. So that really... Profitable, but not meaningful in the same way. Profitable, but not... And also profitable only in the sense that, yes, they're doing something that is worth more than their salary, but like, you know, how... You know, if you're making a particular ad, you know, 0.1% more effective, you know, one ad product, 0.1% more effective, that'll pay your salary. Not profitable at a personal level, profitable at organizational level.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  We can debate what the meaning of life is here in a little bit, but... And then the tech companies where all these people are, are not working on defense for a variety of reasons. Some of it's ideological. Most of that is a smokescreen for the executive intention, which is to preserve access to Chinese markets, Chinese capital, Chinese manufacturing. For example, Apple, they couldn't work with the DOD even if they wanted to because 95% of their manufacturing is in China. They're investing another $275 billion in Chinese manufacturing capacity. If they even try to move out of China, they'll be swiftly punished by the Chinese government as an example and deterrent to other companies that might try to do the same. And so you have the largest, even the largest companies

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  in the world are totally dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. And there's never been a point in history where anything was remotely like this. Like, imagine... During the buildup to World War II, if the most valuable technology companies in the world in the United States, it's like, we can't work with the DOD because we need access to Imperial Japanese manufacturing. Or imagine if during the Cold War, if we'd said, ah, I don't think we can help the Department of Defense because we really see, we really see the Soviet Union as a huge revenue opportunity for us. We're in a position like that today, except it's even worse. Because back then, we could have changed our mind, had a conflict broken out, and we could have pivoted into it.

• 1:31:19Logan Bartlett?

  Well, IBM, IBM serviced Germany back in World War II, right?

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  So they did, and I'll get to that in one second. But that is an interesting one. You know, right now, we're in a position where in the US, we couldn't change our minds because we outsourced all of our manufacturing and industry. So if, if a war did happen, we would just be totally screwed because our big tech companies have divorced themselves from duty in a way that's never been seen in the history. Now IBM was interesting because you're right, IBM did service Germany, including under the Nazis. And like, it's a very complicated issue. Like IBM, I think today is a very good company. Their official excuse is that they didn't understand the extent of what was happening in Nazi Germany and that when they were required to by the government, that they did comply with the rules and stop supporting things.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Whether or not that's true, even in the case of IBM, literally supplying technology to the Nazis, even when they were supplying the Nazis, they were also working with the US military. And so that's what, when I say we're in a worse position today, these companies will sell technology to China because they need China to be happy. They will not sell it to the US military for exactly the same reason, because they need China to remain happy. So at least IBM was willing to sell to both sides of the war instead of just the wrong side.

• 1:32:35Logan Bartlett?

  So, so there's two different buckets. There's the, there's the Lockheed's and the Raytheon's and the Northrop Grumman's. And then there's the Apple, the Googles, the, I don't know who else is in that bucket, Microsoft. And, and so there, and there's been, at different times, Google's tried to work with-

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  And Microsoft, by the way, they're a shining light. They have said, their president Brad Smith said that US warfighters will always have access to their best technology. They did the IVAS program, building AR glasses for the US Army. It's like, Microsoft actually is, is one where I think they're doing the right thing, and they are getting penalized in, in- In China and other markets for it. I'm so glad that they're doing that. They're making the right call. So I just wanted to call them out of that list. They're, they're one of the good guys, in my opinion.

• 1:33:15Logan Bartlett?

  So I guess Apple, Google are specific.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  I think Apple and Google, really, Apple is kind of my favorite go-to example because they're so dependent. I mean, without Chinese manufacturing, Apple ceases to exist. People talk about Apple cash reserves as if it's, you know, the lost treasure of Atlantis. It's $100 billion plus in cash sitting in the bank. They talk about that like that'll allow them to weather anything. It couldn't weather this. $100 billion is not enough to completely reset up all manufacturing for all Apple products, many of which require components that can only be made in China at present. Their company could be destroyed with the stroke of one pen, and they're the most powerful, largest corporation in the entire world. So that, that's the best example.

• 1:33:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And their business is hardware, and so that, that lends itself to being sold into China a little bit easier.

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yep, exactly.

• 1:34:08Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so the insight of-

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, China's a market as well as-

• 1:34:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. As well as manufacturing. So, so those who can, won't, those who will, can't. And so that, and so you wanted to build a Silicon Valley-style philosophy. We can debate Silicon Valley as a, as a, as a literal place, but as a mentality that was servicing the United States and our Western allies. Is that right?

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, people have had this idea before to start defense-focused startups and try to be a prime, but they've never been successful because of the failure of the US government primarily. If you look at the last 35 years, and you've probably heard this before, because you've seen my podcast, but for people who haven't heard it, 35-year period, there were only two unicorns in the entire defense space: Palantir, SpaceX, both founded by billionaires, which means investors write them off. And the issue with that is if you try to start a new defense company, most investors will say, or would say, rather, "Look, I don't have to understand this market to understand that you can't be successful in it." There's dozens of examples of success in enterprise software, dozens in social media, dozens in gaming, dozens of, there's all these unicorns in all these other industries. Clearly, the government-

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  Is incapable of turning small defense companies into big defense companies. And for that reason, I'm not going to invest because investors wouldn't invest in new defense companies. Smart founders wouldn't start defense companies. Smart employees wouldn't want to work for defense.

• 1:35:29Logan Bartlett?

  It's all a pattern matching feedback loop and VCs in general, like to the credit of of the industry. And so it's a very rational way of operating to defend myself of like, and we do this a lot internally. Hey, what's the precedent or comp for, you know, if this becomes big, what, what do we think it can be? Right. And you draw analogues against, hey, well, we think it can be a XYZ type company. And it's a lot easier to point to, hey, we think it could be 10% of a Google, right? Rather than a, hey, we, we don't really know, but we just think it can be really fucking big. Right. And that's really hard when there isn't any precedent.

• 1:36:09Logan Bartlett?

  And we're talking about today that there's SpaceX and Palantir like five years ago. Those were still, I mean, SpaceX still is paper gains, right? But like back then it was even more paper gains, right? And so it's actually, it's very rational. And if the government isn't willing to fund and work with these startups, then you can't really get the flywheel spinning at all.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  That's right. And I think like the, the success of Unreal at raising money and then also succeeding and winning billions of dollars in government contracts has changed the game for a lot of other companies. I think other companies have raised more on our success than we have.

• 1:36:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Which is great. I love it. I think it's, it's much better for the industry to set that as the norm. But, you know, we were able to do it because we started with a great team. I had a lot of money, so, you know, we didn't have to agree to bad terms. And also we had investors that believed in our vision. I know that sounds like a cliche at, at some point, but it's true. I mean, we were asking. A pretty crazy thing of our investors, like, yeah, you know, there's never been, like, in the modern era, there's no examples of building the equivalent of Lockheed or Raytheon, a true defense prime, building military hardware and weapons. But we believed that it was possible. We came to them with a vision of how we were going to pull it off, and they believed in us. And our first investor in Anduril was Founders

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  Fund. And it's worth noting, Founders Fund was also the first institutional investor in Oculus. They were the first one to agree to write a check for, I think it was $1 million. And it was similar back then. Lots of people saying, oh, this will never work. There's never been a successful VR company in history, ever. And getting the right investors on board who do believe in your vision is, as cliché as it sounds, absolutely critical to succeeding and raising future capital.

• 1:37:58Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that I think is fundamental to Anduril and your founding tenants of this, not just the philosophy of how to bring these two together, but is that that cultural equivalence is a lie, right?

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:15Logan Bartlett?

  And that, and I think at times, and not to bring it back to the media thing, but in times, we've, we've sort of jumped to, hey, every culture has its own unique, uniqueness to it, and everything's special in its own way. And to not understand that is to judge other cultures or other people and all that. You fundamentally reject that notion in starting this company, correct?

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  Yes. Every culture is different. But in particular, people will say, oh, no, every country is different, and no country is better than one or the other. There's no, no, you can't, you can't put a value on a culture and say that one is better than the other. That's, that's crazy to me. There are cultures, there are countries, and there are governments that are better or worse than others. Some people are like, oh, saying a culture is inferior is racist. It's like, no, this isn't about race. In fact, culture is the least race tied thing there is. Culture definitionally is mostly about behaviors and activities. It is, it is the furthest thing from geography or race. There are cultures that do not value free speech. There are Cultures that do not value individual liberty.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  There are cultures that do not value the idea of being able to decide for yourself what you will do with your own life. And there are many cultures that recognize use of force as an appropriate way to determine leadership. And I think that it's absolutely okay to say, you know what? That is, that is not good. It is better to have democracy and human rights and, you know, a recognition that people have the right to choose for themselves, what they want to be and what they want to do. And I know that sounds almost like cliche, but that's what you have to boil it down to when you're talking about values of one culture, one country, one government being different or better than the others.

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  And in particular, I think our system and the system that our allies have adopted in different levels of success is superior to what you see, for example, in Russia or in China. And what they have built, the people say, oh, well, what you really mean is like, what you really mean is the, you know, the Chinese government, you don't really mean the Chinese people or their culture. I'm like, no, no, no, their culture also has an element of it being okay to rule through application of force, to be an empire that rules over people and that people don't have individual liberty to choose their, their, their own destiny. Like that, that is, that's not even a government thing. That is also a cultural thing. So I know it's a bit controversial, but you're right.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  I believe that cultures can be better than others in terms of their, their, the level of morality and decency.

• 1:40:54Logan Bartlett?

  So we've sort of set the backdrop for all the things that led to your, your current company.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:41:00Logan Bartlett?

  What, what do you actually do?

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  So what we build is tools for the United States and our allies to deter war from happening in the first place. And if it does happen, to win quickly. Our, we focus primarily on artificial intelligence and autonomy enabled systems. So we build hardware that is powered by artificial intelligence, you know, really high end networking, high end sensor fusion technology, really kind of software defined hardware enabled products that are able to solve complex missions. So. We build products that defend military bases from ground, air, and undersea incursions. We build systems that protect US bases from air attacks. We build things that are used to find targets and mark them so that we can destroy them if

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  we need, if need be. We build a whole bunch of stuff I can't talk about today. And we also build software systems that tie together not just our hardware, but also dozens of existing military systems into a single command and control interface that allows you to use every sensor in the mesh as a sensor for every effector in the mesh. So tying together manned fighter craft, naval destroyers, ground vehicles, ground weapons platforms, all into one user interface so that all the people and all the machines have access to the important data all of the time as quickly as possible. I know that that covers a lot of ground, but that's what we're building. We're building drones, small drones that go in backpacks, large drones that go in the back of, in the back of big trucks.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  We're building sensor towers that are deployed along the border, a bunch of critical infrastructure, a bunch along of US military bases, a lot of counter air systems for knocking air vehicles out of the sky before they are able to attack US and allied forces. And we're deployed not only here in the US, but also all around the world on combat footprints that are seeing real action every day.

• 1:42:57Logan Bartlett?

  And there's, there's two other things I think that are interesting that it feels like you've done. One is that there was an opportunity to shortcut your way into some of these contracts by willing to kind of go at risk, right? And put your balls on the table and say, hey, we're going for this and like, we're going to use our own money, which is not the way that the primes traditionally operate, right?

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Well, we use our own money and we decide what to build, how to build it, and how to build it and when it's done. And then we sell a product to the government. You're right, most government contracts are on what's called a cost plus basis where they get paid for time and materials, which incentivizes them to actually work slowly to pick expensive solutions rather than cheap solutions.

• 1:43:38Logan Bartlett?

  Because there's just a little bit above, you're going to get your time and then you're going to get a little bit of profit margin on top of it.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. You get paid typically a few percent on top of whatever your materials are. So you're actually incentivized. To make your materials cost as high as possible, your hourly cost is, or your hour, number of hours as high as possible.

• 1:43:57Logan Bartlett?

  So it's because if I'm getting 20% on $500 million, or and it's a $500 million project, it's better if it's a billion dollars.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  And it won't be 20%, it'll be like 4%, 5%.

• 1:44:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  And so the people often misunderstand the severity of the issue. It would be, people think, oh, that means that they're going to just work on a project slower, because they want to kind of milk it for money, but it's worse than that. Even at the very beginning of the process, they will architect things in such a way that it has to be expensive to build, because let's say that you could solve the problem for $10,000. At that point, it's not even worth doing the paperwork. You will never architect a system that is so cheap that you can't make significant money in this model. And so what we've done is say, you know what, we're going to try to solve the problem for first principles, and we're going to try to build it using our own money, and then we are going to do better than everyone else and sell it to the government.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Often, we're selling to the government for a small fraction of the price of competing systems and performing better, and we still make more money, both in terms of absolute absolute amount and percentage, because we are able to build cheaper systems that are still higher margin, because we actually did it in an intelligent way, that was trying to be efficient from the very beginning. Like, the first page of our first pitch deck said, "Andro will save the government hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year." And I mean, we're, you know, we're, we're, we're well on our way, but we're not quite there yet.

• 1:45:23Logan Bartlett?

  And one of the other, I mean, you're going at risk, but then you're also not doing the incrementality of how the government typically operates of, let's make a slightly, you know, this one goes to 11, or faster horses, or whatever the right analogy is, which is how you're doing it more from a first principle standpoint of how we can solve this, this problem, correct?

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Internally, we always say to always trust that the customer knows what their problem is, never trust that they know what the solution is. Meaning, these are the guys who are actually getting attacked, getting, getting killed, having to carry out these missions. They know where they're struggling, they know where they are not winning. But you cannot count on them to then come to you and say, and this is the thing that we think you need to build to solve the problem, because a lot of times they don't have exposure to the full set of technologies you can bring to bear. They're not experts on autonomy, artificial intelligence. They don't know what new sensor technologies might be possible if you invested more money into it. And so what we usually do is listen to them about what the problems are, and then try to come up with better solutions than anything that they've ever thought up.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  And we maintain close communication as we build the thing. I like to say, we can't just build a Batmobile and show up and say, hey, what do you think of this thing out of the blue? But if you keep them in the loop, then you can make sure you're building the right thing, even though the government's not paying you to do it.

• 1:46:40Logan Bartlett?

  Which is something you personally, and I think you encourage your employees to do as well, is to try to know a lot about a lot, but at a minimum know a little.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  A little about a lot. Well, yeah, if you know a little about a lot of different things, then you can reach outside of your, you reach outside of your domain to do, to do totally different solutions that you never would have come up otherwise. Like, the government solution to an aircraft not having enough range would often be like, okay, we're going to iterate on the compression ratio of this engine, or we're going to spend a year trying to make the aerodynamics 5% better. But if you have people who are in a totally different world, they might say, well, actually, you could just have better flight path planning that is taking advantage of reading the air, you know, the weather conditions in real time as you're taking off out 100 miles. And it could be just through that you achieve your 5%, improvement. Oh, and guess what? All you needed was a cheap sensor and a couple

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  weeks of development. And a person who's an aerodynamicist never would have even considered that as the solution to the problem. Someone who's an expert in, you know, building new engines never would have even considered it. And you know who really wouldn't have considered it? The guy who's in charge of funding that airplane. It's not even on his radar as a possible solution to his range problem. And so that, yeah, we try to think of it from first principles. What's really the best way to solve a problem? Not the best way within one particular industry. And I make sure that we have employees who have a broad, a broad experience of things from different industries, not just experience in the defense

• 1:48:07Logan Bartlett?

  And that manifests itself in interesting ways, I think, where instead of like autonomy, for example, in flight, the failure rate, if you're trying to build it with a person flying a plane, right? The failure rate that you want to maintain is astronomical, right? Because if it fails, then the person's going to die. But if it fails one out of every 1,000 flights and it falls off, then you can design it cheaper and have it be more effective. And actually, if it falls off, then it's not actually a big deal. No one's dying, right?

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  Well, and not only are you able to make things cheaper, like you could say, okay, we don't need the life support systems. We don't need to have triple redundant oxygen systems. We don't need to x-ray every bolt because it's okay if one out of 1,000 airframes ends up failing. That's just, that's just fine. It's easier to get reliability through multiplication of numbers than multiplication of reliability of each airframe. But you also actually get better capabilities. You know, you've probably seen the new Top Gun. You remember the part where Tom Cruise was flying and he, you know, they talked about how he bent the airframe, flying it beyond its limits? So the thing is, when they're talking about those limits, that was actually a really clear example. The airframe was capable of much more than they would willingly allow a human to normally operate it at. Because if a person operates

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  that aircraft that way, and something goes wrong, then it's going to potentially rip apart, explode, and he dies. But if you have autonomy, you say, you know what? We're gonna have all these things operating at the limit, where maybe there's even a 50% chance the aircraft is going to destroy itself during the mission by operating so hard. That's okay. Not acceptable with people. Totally acceptable if it's part of your plan with autonomous systems. And autonomy is going to enable so many advancements in cost reduction, in capability advancement, and also in the number of systems you can manage. You can't manage thousands and thousands of airframes at the same time in an area if they're manned. It just doesn't work. People are bad parallel computers. You literally cannot communicate over radio fast enough

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  to coordinate. But with autonomy, you can have 1,000 airframes all working together to do missions that are literally impossible for people to do.

• 1:50:18Logan Bartlett?

  Ultimately, the systems in war that get used will kill people.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:50:25Logan Bartlett?

  That's what happens in war. So one of the things I've heard you talk about is that there's that optionality presents the opportunity for morality and that actually having these opportunities.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the way I usually frame it is technological superiority is a prerequisite for ethical use of technology.

• 1:50:45Logan Bartlett?

  Can you elaborate on what that actually means to you?

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  Sure. Now, people often say, well, that's not technically true. You could choose to use technology in a moral way, even if you're losing. But history suggests that doesn't happen. When you have worse technology and less power than your adversary, you will fight dirty to survive. If you want to basically use technology in the most ethical way in war, meaning you want to have the lowest amount of collateral damage, you want to have the lowest amount of friendly fire, you want to have the least suffering possible while still defending your country, it's much easier to do that when you are so immensely

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  powerful and so immensely perceptive, meaning your intelligence apparatus and surveillance apparatus for watching your enemy's systems is so good, you can basically fight with your hands behind your back. You'd say, you know what? We're not going to take a potshot at that thing when it's rolling by a civilian building because we know we're going to be able to kill it at any instant that we choose. We're going to wait until a different moment. It's when you have limited capabilities, when you're on the wrong side of the technological curve, that you start to say, you know what? We have to take whatever shot we can get. Oh, is that an enemy soldier or is that a farmer? I don't know, and I'm not willing to risk those five guys over there. I'm going to take the shot. A lot of the worst ethical decisions that we have made as a country in war have been when we are not in a good

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  position to win. And I think that's true for almost any other country that wants to survive. And so what the reason I say technological superiority is a prerequisite for ethical superiority is because. It's only when you have the technological high ground that you can be reasonably expected, us or anyone else, to take the ethical high ground and take a strategic hit because you believe in doing the right thing.

• 1:52:36Logan Bartlett?

  And there's this uniquely American complex of, and it's probably manifested from movies and journalism and all this.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  In terms of cultural superiority, I will say, one of the things I love about American military culture is the mentality of not leaving your troops behind, not abandoning, not abandoning them even when it is extraordinarily costly in treasure and in additional life to recover people. I think that is something that many cultures do not have, and I think it's a very positive thing that, you know, treats the value of human life appropriately. There's a lot of places where the value of human life is treated as less, and I think it deprives them of so much in the long run when they treat human life as, you know, a cog in the machine that can be thrown away rather than another chance for a brilliant person to make a big difference. So I know that's not what we're talking about, but it's another one of those things where I, when I think about ethical superiority, it's

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  not just about winning the war. It's about like, I want to kill as few of their people as possible. I want as few people of my people to die as possible. And I think that for us to value life that highly, you have to be in a position to act on it.

• 1:53:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Technological superiority leading to ethical superiority, or the opportunity for that.

• 1:53:50Speaker 02

  It's very much the opportunity. It's not necessarily.

• 1:53:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not inherent that that's going to be the case as China and Russia will present. But there is this uniquely American philosophy with how we operate in almost everything. It's, it could be a pandemic. It could be any crisis that we're ultimately faced with that, hey, we're, if we galvanize and pool our resources to something, right? We can will something into existence. And actually, your industry now doesn't exactly work like that, right? And I'm sure it's manifested itself in some ways and become more commonplace with what's going on in Ukraine. But why do we need to build way ahead

• 1:54:33Logan Bartlett?

  of the need, the need for these solutions that are actually practical from a war standpoint? Why is actually prepping for, for what could happen, the best way to prevent stuff from happening?

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  You want to build the things that you need before the war happens. The whole point of the war machine is not to win wars. It's to deter wars. You want to build tools that are so powerful that you're up. And like most wars happen when one or both sides misestimate the strength of their adversary. If they know that they're going to lose, it's possible they'll go to wars and, you know, as a matter of honor, but rare. Usually, if you know your adversary will win, then you will not fight him. If you think that he's weaker than he is, then you might fight him. And if you know he actually is weak, you also will fight him. So it's not just about being strong. It's about making sure that the other side knows how strong you are so they can factor that into their calculus.

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  And what I always tell people is if what happens is you'll have like Ukraine gets invaded. Everyone says, oh, my God, I want to do something to help. I want to build drones for Ukraine. I want to try to help as much as I can. The time to help is not after the invasion. At that point, you're already screwed. There's already people dying. There's already cities being leveled. You want to build things long ahead of that so that you can deter that conflict from ever happening in the first place. And that's especially true when you're living in a society like the United States where we've given away so much of our manufacturing capacity that we can't afford to pivot in after the fact. I mean, World War II, we pivot our entire industrial machine to being a war machine. And our industrial machine is not nearly as powerful as it once was. It's not an option anymore.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  And so it's not even even if you don't believe in the deterrence factor. If you want to win the war, you also have to start building these things far ahead of time. So that's kind of my my principle here. The reality is to stop the conflict, you have to build things long before the invasion happens. And this is the case for like Taiwan as well. If Taiwan gets invaded, it will be because we did not build the right things to make sure that there are two. Taiwan doesn't need the power to beat China in a war, right? That's not what Taiwan wants. That's not what Australia wants. They want the tools that they need to make themselves too prickly to step on. That's that's all they want. And if they do get invaded, it's because we gave them the wrong tools and they weren't prickly enough.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  I've talked many times about if Taiwan gets invaded and then everyone says, oh my God, you know, how could we have predicted this if only someone had known that this would happen? It'll, it'll, it'll drive me nuts because it's, it's very apparent today that they are not prickly enough.

• 1:57:15Logan Bartlett?

  You went over to Ukraine when?

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  That's right. It was pretty recently. So I, I've talked with Zelensky a few times, but that was the first time I've ever been to Ukraine.

• 1:57:24Logan Bartlett?

  What's your, uh, what's your opinion on the state? I assume you keep up with it pretty closely and what you can disclose.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  Very, very closely.

• 1:57:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. What, uh, what's your view on the state of play as it stands and you know, whatever mid-September 2022?

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  I think that there is a decent chance that this is going to turn into a very long, long-term conflict, which is not what anyone wants. It's not what the US wants. It's certainly not what Ukraine wants. And then obviously it's not what Russia wants. They thought this was going to be easy. They roll in, they take the country, they parade through the streets and they, they, they, they be done. Um, the, the Ukrainians are fighting incredibly well, given the tools that they have. They have shown immense courage in going into, into danger, not because they have to, uh, but because they want to stay and defend their country. And that, that's a, that, that's something that we haven't really seen, we haven't really seen in, in, in recent times.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  It's like a well, a well-armed, modern-ish fighting force that's willing to put themselves in that, in that situation.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  I think that in the long run, they are going to be able to push Russia out of, out of, out of Ukraine. Um, the biggest issue that they're going to have is, is, is keeping some of these eastern, these eastern parts of Ukraine. I mean, like when Putin says that, that, that, that these parts of Ukraine are Russian, uh, I don't want to give him a propaganda victory, but like to some degree, he is correct culturally. You, you do have places in Ukraine that identify as, as more Russian. They speak Russian. They, they, they actually like Putin. You, it, it, there's probably no equivalent quite like it in the United States. You know, imagine if in the United States, there were like a bunch of people in Alaska who actually wish that Alaska was still part of Russia.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  Uh, that would make it a really tough, tough place to hold. And so I think the toughest thing they, they, they face in the long run may not be the Russian armed forces proper, but rather a, you know, kind of a, uh, You know insurgency that is armed and funded by the Russian, the Russian government over the long run. In the near term, I think they're going to be able to push Russia back out and take most of that territory back. I'm very optimistic.

• 1:59:35Logan Bartlett?

  So you're, you're on your second wildly successful company. Andrel was most recently valued at?

• 1:59:42Speaker 02

  We're in the middle, we're in the middle of raising a round right now. So we'll see.

• 1:59:46Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. So, so.

• 1:59:47Speaker 02

  Our last round was about $4 billion.

• 1:59:50Logan Bartlett?

  Billions and billions of dollars.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  Actually 4.6 billion.

• 1:59:54Logan Bartlett?

  4.6.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  Exactly twice the purchase price of Oculus.

• 1:59:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Wow. Amazing how those coincidences.

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  It's amazing how those numbers work out, isn't it? It's all, it's all, it's almost like the, like the numbers are arbitrary.

• 2:00:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Or, or that the CEO has some pride in, in the numbers and continuing to prove doubters wrong.

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  A lot, a lot of, I mean, it's true. I've talked about this many times. I, I have a chip on my shoulder. And so like, I cannot help, but I mean, I want to show people that I'm somebody.

• 2:00:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

  That I was not a one hit wonder because I was, I was, I was kind of terrified that that's what would happen post Oculus, that I would be the thing that I did. You know, I'd be the, I'd be, I'd be the, I'd be the music artist that had that one hit and was never able to recapture the magic. And it's not even just, it's not, it's not even just about proving that I'm somebody. It's also like, that would for me be very sad if I had to confront that within myself and realize that that's all I'm good for. So I'm in a much better place, having done, done well again.

• 2:00:51Logan Bartlett?

  But you haven't actually, or for brief periods of time, you've been the CEO of, what's been your role between Oculus and, and Andrel?

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  I mean, very, very brief, you know, I, I actually started Oculus in April of 2012. And for, for a while it was just me. And yeah, that was, that was, that was the case through announcing Oculus and the launch of the Oculus Rift. But I think that was when it was just me. Very, very shortly afterwards. Like I think, I think in September of 2000, so I, you know, we, we launched our Kickstarter in August of 2012. And we raised a million dollars in about an hour. And then we ended up closing about $2.4 million by the end. The campaign and then at some point in early September was when was when I gave away the job of CEO to somebody else.

• 2:01:43Logan Bartlett?

  And it seems like, I mean, you have

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Being CEOs is it's a tough job. It's not the one that I want to have. So I guess as for my role, I basically have operated in both cases. My title is founder and I operate in a quasi CTO capacity, except I also, except I also get to meddle with everything that's not technology, which most CTOs get get get shoot away from.

• 2:02:04Logan Bartlett?

  What? So what is it? I mean, the CEO job I know is hard, but also it takes a certain level of both self-awareness and ego lists to not want that title to some extent, people want to wear that that crown. Is that something that you've always had? Was it something you realized in doing the job itself? Like, I mean, you could also call yourself CEO and delegate these responsibilities and just be like, well, I'm the CEO, but I don't really do that stuff, which I know people do as well. How do you think about it?

• 2:02:33Speaker 02

  People are the result of their social programming to a huge degree. Free will is, is, is I think real, but hugely, hugely conditioned by what you've been exposed to in life. And I've cleared, like, in my value system, being a CEO is not a thing that makes me egoful. I've always liked, like, in media, I like the crazy, weird, mad scientist guy who builds all the tech. I like the guy who makes everything go. You know, maybe he's the guy who's getting yelled at by the CEO to, you know, to the now's not the time for his latest, latest crazy thing. And those are the people that I've always, always thought were the most interesting.

• 2:03:11Logan Bartlett?

  You do a good job of, you know, the Hawaiian shirt and the shorts and all that. You lean into this like Tony Stark, you know, LARPing as a eccentric, you know, bad genius here.

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, all, you know, that's, and the thing is, this is how I dressed all through high school and all through college. So put to a certain degree, it's just me saying, look, I refuse to change. I refuse to have been changed. I want to believe that I'm still the same person. Like, I've also often pondered if I really had any choice but to start Oculus. People like, oh, you, you had these breakthroughs in VR tech and as a hobby, you know, but why did you decide to, you know, start a company rather than because like, you know, in history of the future, it might, it mentioned that, you know, Sony had a standing job offer to run a VR lab at PlayStation Group. And People like, why did you start your own company instead of taking that job? And looking back, I think I literally couldn't have made a different decision because I've seen so much media, like, what do you do when you're placed in this moment where, you know, it's this

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  one time where you can decide to do it on your own and you'll make this incredible impact? You have to do it. I had no choice but to drop out of school. I had no choice but to start my own company, but I didn't necessarily want to be CEO. That wasn't part of my fantasy. The fantasy was, you know, taking that leap and starting the company. And so I think probably, we talked earlier about how there's people who, before we were on, we talked about how there's people who they wanted to, you know, they want to, they want to, they want to get into VC. And it's really interesting. I think a lot of people, they think it's like really cool to be a partner at a VC firm. And it's not good to get into a role because you just want that ego boost, right? You shouldn't be a CEO because you want that CEO name tag. You shouldn't be a venture capitalist because you want that venture capitalist name tag.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  You know, you have to want to do the things that those jobs entail. And I see a lot of people who want the ego part more than the other part.

• 2:05:02Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and if you chase, especially what I've seen is whatever.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  But in terms of when you talk about me being egoless and giving up the CEO, it's not egoless. It's just whatever, however my mind.

• 2:05:11Logan Bartlett?

  It's narrative centric of like what you, you know, what you've heard and where.

• 2:05:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. Oh, it's totally narrative centric. My life, my life is a story and I like, I like the story better when I'm not the CEO.

• 2:05:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Now, what about, what about, you've mentioned that you saw, you recognized that at one point you were, you were the bottleneck. You were the best at doing a lot of things within your company. And you thought that was cool. And then you realized, actually, that's fucking terrible.

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was a really kind of painful thing for me to go through in the Oculus days, where I realized that in order to be successful, like the job of an executive is to make themselves obsolete. Your job is to hire people who are better than you at everything. Not just the things that you hate doing. Everyone does that. Oh, they love to hire someone to be their admin who handles their schedule because they hate doing that. You have to be the guy who hires someone who's better than you at doing the things you like doing. That sucks. It's very painful because for a time I was, you know, there was a time at Oculus where I was the best and only optical, optical, optomechanical engineer. And I realized as time went on that as much as I liked working on the optical systems, as much as I liked, you know, designing hardware.

• 2:06:19Speaker 02

  Uh, I was basically playing house. I was just doing it because it was fun. And it was to the detriment of our customers. It was to the detriment of my team. It was to the detriment of my investors. Like, I, look, I like electrical design, too. I can, I can lay out a board, but I'm not that good at it. I should obviously hire somebody who's much better than me at electrical design to that. And any time that I spend doing that, instead of things that I am uniquely capable of doing, is time where I'm just doing it for myself and hurting everyone else. And that was really painful to go through, to realize that, uh, the job of a tech company founder is not to build the technology, it's to build the company. Uh, you know, it's, I, I often, when college kids ask me about, they say, oh, Palmer, I love programming. What's your advice on starting a tech company?

• 2:07:03Speaker 02

  I say, if you want to work on tech, you need to go work for somebody else.

• 2:07:05Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, don't do it.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  If you want to work on non-stop bullshit, start your own company, because that's actually what you're signing up to do. And I'm okay with it now. I went into this with Andorl, eyes wide open. I knew what was happening, but I'm glad I got to go through that at Oculus and realized that, uh, you know, your job is to hire people who are better than you at the things that you like doing. And you just have, you have to be okay with that. And if you're not okay with it, I highly recommend, if not working, if, if, if not working for somebody else, at least, uh, you know, not, uh, not trying to build, not trying to build a company, like be an independent contractor or work for somebody else, but don't, don't, don't build a large organization around yourself if what you really want to do is, you know, type, type, type code into the keyboard or, uh, you know, lens into the Zmax.

• 2:07:51Logan Bartlett?

  Well, Palmer, lucky. Uh, that's all I got. Thanks for doing this, man.

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. This has been a blast.

• 2:07:56Logan Bartlett?

  This is a lot of fun and, uh, thanks for being authentically yourself and answering all these questions for people's benefit. Uh, Palmer walked in sort of sight unseen to all the stuff we were going to go through and, uh, kind of, uh, just riffing here. So, um, yeah, really.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  That's always way more fun than having to go through a bunch of prep.

• 2:08:11Logan Bartlett?

  Way more fun. Thank you, sir.

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 2:08:18Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 34th episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thank you to John Sakota for coming on, as well as Palmer Lucky. Really fun conversation with both. Hope everyone enjoyed them and hopefully everyone has a nice weekend. And look forward to seeing you next week on the 35th episode of Cartoon Avatars.