EP #37 How The Founder of Oculus Plans to Save America w/ Palmer Luckey

In this episode, during this year’s Abundance360 summit, Palmer and Peter discussed Palmer’s experience with Facebook, turning down $1 Billion dollars and shifting into the military tech industry. You will learn about: 06:40 | The Transition From Gaming To Warfare 20:52 | Have We Already Connected Our Brains To Computers? 32:23 | Quantum Computing VS Quantum Communication Palmer Luckey is an inventor and entrepreneur known for designing the Oculus Rift and founding the company Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook for $2.3 billion. In 2017, he founded Anduril Industries, which integrates a consumer technology business model with mission-driven objectives to transform the defense capabilities of the US and its allies by fusing Al with hardware advancements. Learn about Anduril Industries >Become a part of my community. Learn about my executive summit, A360. >Join me on a 5-Star Platinum Longevity Trip at Abundance Platinum. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  You sold the Oculus to Facebook. You were basically a kid. And they offered you a billion dollars and you say no.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  So in the end, it ended up being a $2.3 billion deal.

• 1:09Peter Diamandis?

  How do you turn down a billion dollars? How old were you then?

• 1:12Speaker 03

  At the time, I would have been 20. Yeah, would have been 20. I didn't know anything about AI. When we started the company, we didn't even know what products we were going to make. In 2019, we won Bloomberg's Most Controversial Tech Company in Tech Award. In 2017, we won Wired's Worst Company in Silicon Valley Award.

• 1:32Peter Diamandis?

  You're doing something very different now.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  We need better weapons if we are going to ethically engage in warfare. People are like, oh my God, you've opened up Pandora's Box.

• 1:40Peter Diamandis?

  How are we going to deal with that?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  It's basically already solved. We're just waiting for the products to come out. That's how they're going to make VR cool. It's not engineering, it's marketing. It's a virtual reality headset that kills you when you die in the game. This is a science fiction concept that has existed for decades. We build robotic submarines that can dive to depths of over 6,000 meters.

• 1:56Peter Diamandis?

  It may be down there right now, we just don't know.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  I could tell you, but...

• 1:59Peter Diamandis?

  But then you'd have to have me play your headset.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  This was going to be the future. It was going to be not just the next computational platform, but the final computational platform.

• 2:11Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. My conversation today is with Palmer Lucky, the incredible inventor, entrepreneur, the creator of Oculus, who famously turned down a billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg to go on and ultimately get 2.3 billion for selling Oculus to Facebook. But today, the conversation was on a different subject. It was on a conversation that was titled "Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy" because after Palmer sold his company to Facebook and exited, he didn't go and start another VR company. He started a defense company, of all things, combining AI, robotics, drones, and machine learning to create a new layer of

• 2:52Peter Diamandis?

  defense for the United States. An extraordinary pivot. So I sat down with Palmer at Abundance360 to talk about his company, where it's going, and it buzzed the entire audience. He was probably rated the number one conversation, and it really surprised me. So depending on how you feel about our military, is it something that makes you proud and excited, or you don't like talking about defense, this is a conversation to have because in the world today, defending democracy is a critically important thing. And how are exponential technologies going to be used? My massive transformative purpose is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create

• 3:37Peter Diamandis?

  a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future in humanity. And that's what I'm doing with this podcast, to open up every relationship, every conversation I have with you, to inspire you, to support you in going big, in helping uplift humanity. If that's of interest to you, please subscribe to this podcast. Allow me to share with you the wisdom that I'm learning from the most incredible moonshot entrepreneurs on the planet. Let's dive into this conversation with Palmer Lucky, the CEO, founder of Anduril. And get ready, hold on. Hey, buddy. Very high energy. Very high energy. Well, you gotta be. Come on. It's the most exciting time to be alive. I agree.

• 4:21Peter Diamandis?

  Come on, you bounce out of bed in the morning excited, don't you? Most mornings. Most mornings. So I have to start with a couple of questions, just because I have to. So you sold...

• 4:36Peter Diamandis?

  The Oculus to Facebook. And you go and meet with Mark Zuckerberg and he offers you a billion dollars. Now, I mean, you were basically a kid who had this sort of working prototype. And he offers you a billion dollars and you say no. And then he offers you, how much?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  So in the end, it ended up being a $2.3 billion deal plus $700 million in performance bonuses, which we actually achieved all the performance metrics years ahead of schedule. So that was pretty cool.

• 5:10Peter Diamandis?

  So how do you turn down a billion dollars? How old were you then?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  At the time, I would have been 20. Yeah. Would have been 20.

• 5:18Peter Diamandis?

  That's kind of life-changing amount of money. Like, seriously, why did you turn down a billion dollars? Did you really think he would come back?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Well, the main thing is we weren't looking to sell the company. So when we had this first discussion, we were actually by then quite a ways beyond having just a work, you know, a well-proved console. We had sold our DK1. We had sold about 55,000 virtual reality headsets to game developers around the world.

• 5:40Peter Diamandis?

  So you were going to consumer?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were on a path to launch a consumer product. We had a lot of game developers that were supporting us. We were true, like religious zealots of VR. We believed that this was going to be the future. It was going to be not just the next computational platform, but the final computational platform, the only one fully capable of encompassing every other form of media and human communication. You know, we really bought into this. And so when it came with a billion dollars, like, look, that would make us a lot of money, but I think that we're going to be able to do what we need to do on our own. There's no reason for me to sell this to another company. And so the thing that changed it wasn't really the offer going up to $2 billion.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  It was the fact that that was paired with an offer to continue spending billions of dollars every single year for a decade plus until we achieved mainstream adoption. And that's the thing that really gets to you as an entrepreneur. Like, well, I could do this on my own. I might even make more money in the end if I retain ownership in this thing as it becomes a multi-hundred-billion or trillion-dollar company.

• 6:44Peter Diamandis?

  It was giving birth to your vision.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  And on a much faster timeline than I would ever be able to do. And Facebook was in a different position, you know, almost 10 years ago than than than they were today. I mean, there were other companies interested in buying us. And I won't say necessarily who they are, but because I, you know, I don't want to be that kind of guy. Nobody's going to want to talk to me anymore. But there were companies who are interested in buying us, but the problem is these other big tech companies. VR was an interesting sideshow for them, not the way they saw their entire business pivoting for the next decade.

• 7:11Peter Diamandis?

  They weren't going to change the name of their company for that.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  They were going to, well, they would change the name of the company. They'd use you to sell more game consoles. They'd use you to kind of be an interesting marketing gimmick. Uh, but their, Facebook was one of the only companies that came in and said, this is, this is our future. We believe that we are going to pivot the entire company. So when people acted surprised when Facebook changed their name to Meta, you know, that that wasn't something that happened overnight. That was, you know, the culmination of 10 years of, of, and, and, you know, really part of the pitch that got us to sell to them in the first place.

• 7:39Peter Diamandis?

  So you're doing something very different now. Explain to the group what Androl Systems does.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Sure. So Androl is a defense product company. We build weapons. Uh, it's obviously pretty different from working in the gaming and entertainment and virtual reality space, but it was something that I really felt was going to be very important. Uh, the, the reason I ended up in the space is because, in short, I looked out at the world and I realized there was this fiction taking holds in the minds of people, even smart people, that we lived at the end of history, people called it, that, that, that there was never going to be any more large scale conflict, that economic entanglements precluded the idea of large scale warfare and that therefore it was not something that was worth investing in. We didn't need to get better at it. We didn't need to be more efficient at it. We didn't need the ability to increase our precision in our military action because at

• 8:31Speaker 03

  the end of the day, it's an outdated thing that was a thing, you know, part of the past. And so you had a lot of tech companies that were also hugely dependent on China and thus unwilling to do anything that would upset the Chinese government. You had a lot of tech companies refusing to do work with the Department of Defense, a lot of defense companies that were totally incompetent in areas like artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, high-end networking and processing, robotics. Uh, and then startups didn't get into the defense space. One, because it's not cool. Two, because they couldn't raise money to get into the space. And three, because the government is so bad at buying from startups that they shouldn't raise money to do that even if they wanted to. And I realized that this was something I was pretty worried about. There's never been a point in US history where our Best technology companies have refused to work with the military.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  So imagine if in the run up to World War II, if Westinghouse and General Electric had said, you know, I don't think that we can work with the United States military. Imperial Japan is just too big of a revenue opportunity for us. Imagine if during the Cold War, if you had had General Electric or Bell Labs saying, you know, we love America and all, but I think that we need to be a transnational corporation that doesn't really pick a side between things like democracy and authoritarianism. Because, you know, we really think that the Soviet Union, they've got a really good concentration of energy resources that we just need to, you know, make sure we have unfettered access to. And that really spooked me. I felt like we were in a similar situation today, and I wanted to do something about that. So that's how I ended up in that space.

• 9:55Peter Diamandis?

  I get it.

• 10:00Peter Diamandis?

  We've got even some standing applause here.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  I will say, I've just got to do a quick detour to say this. This is the Palmer Lucky I Told You So Tour. Um, to 2022, now into 2023. Because people are cheering. When we started this company, we were vilified. People were telling, the most charitable interpretation we got from those people was that it was a waste of time. It was somewhere between you're evil and what you're doing is irrelevant to the future and you're just wasting your resources. And I mean, like in 2019, we won Bloomberg's Most Controversial Tech Company in Tech Award. In 2017, we won Wired's Worst Company in Silicon Valley Award. I mean, like, so I want to put it in perspective. Now that we've had large-scale conflict, return with a vengeance.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Now that people understand the dynamics of China and Taiwan in the near future, it's easy for everybody to say, oh, man, this is great. I love what you're doing. But, man, it was not popular. I remember my first web summit. I'd been to a web summit twice at Oculus. I came back with Androl. Just glares. It was brutal.

• 11:03Peter Diamandis?

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• 12:54Speaker 03

  Where's the name Andoril come from?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Is Warner Brothers legal here?

• 12:59Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  All right. Well, in that case, unofficially, it's named after Andoril, which is the sword that Aragorn wields in The Lord of the Rings. There's a few reasons. It's named "The Flame of the West" in Elven. The idea being that it is the sword that allows the kingdom of man to stand against the oncoming thralls of Mordor. And there are two quotes from the books that I think really drove us naming the company. One is, "The man who bears this weapon wields a sword more deadly than any that has ever existed." I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's pretty sweet." But then there's a better one that actually drove it, and it is, "I love the sword not for the brightness of the blade, nor the keenness of the edge,

• 13:44Speaker 03

  but for that which it protects." And that was what we wanted to get across, and internally, too.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  I wanted to reinforce this to my employees. We're not building weapons because it's cool, because of the brightness of the blade, the keenness of the edge, the fastness of the drone. We are building it because of that which protects, which is America and our allies around the world who believe in self-determination, democracy, freedom of speech. And I thought that that was important. We're not an inanimate object. We are a conscious sword that fights for a specific side.

• 14:20Peter Diamandis?

  So when I was looking to try and find a faculty member here to talk about exponentials, it's so challenging because there are so many different technologies. But what I loved about what you do, Palmer, is you're converging so many of them, right? You're bringing them together in extraordinary systems. Can you just talk a little bit about the various games and toys in your toy chest?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  The Androl toy chest or my personal?

• 14:45Peter Diamandis?

  Actually, they're probably both very cool, but...

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Well, I have a submarines. That's pretty cool. But Androl also has a submarine. So my submarine, you put people inside of it because I want to be inside of it. But we, Androl, I mean, we build robotic submarines that can dive to depths of over 6,000 meters. One of them is actually the longest-range electric vehicle in the world of any kind. It has a range of thousands of miles, totally autonomously, on all-electric power, totally silent, impossible to detect, non-nuclear.

• 15:11Peter Diamandis?

  That's impressive.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  We've got some good stuff in there. So robotic submarines, advanced autonomous aircraft, autonomous ground vehicles. We're building things that are in space. We have a few Space Force contracts that I can't talk about the specifics of. And we're working on something that is not, not, a domain that has been heretofore unexploited has been the underground domain. The thing is, nobody since the Cold War has conceived, they're called subterrains. So submarines that go into terrain. Subterrains, they're not practical to put people into, and you can't communicate with something that's deep underground. But autonomy and artificial intelligence allow you to, for the first time, have payloads that can do useful things, operating autonomously, deep underground for long distances.

• 15:54Peter Diamandis?

  It may be down there right now, we just don't know. Yeah, it was interesting.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I could tell you, but...

• 16:01Peter Diamandis?

  But then you'd have to have me play your headset. We'll get to that later.

• 16:09Peter Diamandis?

  Drones, how many drone designs? I mean, that seems like the most interesting place to play.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  We've got six aerial vehicles that we've announced, and then we've got another half dozen that have not been announced. They're all purpose-built for specific use cases. Some of them are protecting military bases from incoming drone threats right now. So, I mean, overseas, in combat zones, right now. Some of them are doing it here in the United States. We have other drones that are providing targeting for long-range precision fire systems, so you don't have to move. Like, right now, the way that you put guided, you know, a laser on a target, a lot of time, you have a JTAC, you have a guy who literally has to get close to them, point a laser at them, and then he's the one guiding it. The problem is, the enemies that we have all have sensors that detect that laser, and the second you start lasering, they're gonna try to kill you. If you can replace that job with a drone, you can take a person out of harm's way that had a 50/50 shot of coming back from any real conflict.

• 17:01Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. AR and VR, what are you doing in that world? I mean, that's your legacy, or your starting point, I should say, not your legacy. You have plenty of legacies left. How far has that tech gotten? Are you happy with the advances? And what are you doing in Anduril?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Look, I'm happy and I'm unhappy. I don't want to complain too much, because everyone who gets blown out of their own company, I was fired, I didn't leave Oculus. Everyone who gets blown out of their own company looks at it and says, "Oh, I could've done it better, I would've made different decisions." And I, of course, would have, and I think that Meta has dropped the ball on quite a few things. I think Magic Leap dropped the ball on quite a few things.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  It really pains me as a VR enthusiast. At the same time, though, my fundamental outlook hasn't changed. We are clearly on a path to where we can make virtual reality devices that provide Matrix-level immersion within our lifetimes. And we're gonna be able to replace at least the sense of vision perfectly within the next 10 years. And we're gonna get very close in the next three years. It's an incredible thing to allow you to virtually experience anything that you can conceive of, that you can imagine, that you want another person to experience, whether it's practical, or for entertainment, you know, or for any other purpose. I'm still a big believer in it.

• 18:18Peter Diamandis?

  Is the tech there? Or do we need to invent something to get to, I guess, resolution of the visual cortex?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  So we're gonna be fine. The great thing about VR is it's not, it's like AI. I'd say 10 years ago, it was not clear when the breakthrough would happen, what it would look like. How would we get to AI that scales to something that, if not AGI, at least it, you know,

• 18:39Peter Diamandis?

  Feels like AGI.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  It appears to be AGI for many use cases. And it was kind of unclear what the path was. For VR, it's a very clear path. You can literally chart it on the roadmap of every major contract manufacturer in the world. You know exactly what's gonna happen, what resolution you need, what nanometer processes you need to use to make it happen. And so it's just this march towards implementing things that have already been invented. We don't need any new inventions. We don't need any new technology. We just need to keep iterating on what we already have and we'll brute force our way there within a few years.

• 19:10Peter Diamandis?

  So if I were gonna be critical of the VR world right now, because I've got a whole bunch of Oculus headsets unboxed and boxed still, it's still the cumbersomeness of wearing it for any length of time.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:24Peter Diamandis?

  How are we gonna deal with that?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  It's basically already solved. We're just waiting for the products to come out. So like Quest Pro weighs over 700 grams and it's pretty big. It just came out. It's pretty advanced. But it's not using a recent advancement that has been made possible, which is called Pancake Optics. They reflect the beam inside internally a few times. They've been around for actually decades, but only recently have displays become bright enough that you can emit polarized light that is high enough brightness to overcome the optical inefficiency of Pancake Optics. There is a headset that just came out. It's called the Big Screen VR Headset. Highly suggest you guys check it out. It has cost less than a Quest Pro. It's $990 instead of $1,500. And instead of 750 grams, it weighs 179 grams. It's a fifth of the weight.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  It looks like a tiny pair of the smallest ski goggles you've ever seen and it's super close to your face, better tracking, higher resolution. And the Apple headset that's coming out soon is the next generation display from the same company that makes their displays. So like, there's some stuff coming that is extremely good. It's not sunglasses, but it's very close and Apple is going to market it well enough. They're gonna pay to put it on. All the celebrities and then everyone's gonna believe that it's cool just like with shutter shades and those big giant Lady Gaga glasses. They were really dumb, but people loved them because they were on famous people and Apple's Apple's gonna do it again. That's how they're gonna make VR cool. It's not engineering, it's marketing.

• 20:45Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. You know, I remember the human interface labs up in Seattle used to talk about these virtual retinal displays where you would paint with a laser on the back of the retina.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 20:54Peter Diamandis?

  Is that tech ever gonna see the light?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah. So VRDs, virtual retinal displays.

• 20:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  There's a few companies that have been working on it. I think it was it's it's it's a really cool technology that made a lot of sense. There's a company called Microvision that was working on it.

• 21:05Peter Diamandis?

  I remember.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Hey, Microvision was one of the first three stocks that I bought. I got I invested $500 in the stock market and it was Apple, Lockheed Martin and Microvision. And Microvision didn't do as hot as the other ones, but I think that basically that that that technology is interesting, but I think it's been supplanted by other technologies that take advantage of these multi hundred billion dollar investments into semiconductor manufacturing silicon silicon manufacturing processes. Like making high end micro displays is actually very similar similar process wise to making high end microprocessors. And so I think that in a in in a in a vacuum, scanning laser displays might win, but in a real world where there's hundreds of billions going into a different path, that's the path that's going to that's going to win.

• 21:52Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's go beyond the headset. Brain computer interface, BCI. How excited are you about that? And are you going to be one of the first people in line or never?

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Well, the thing about brain to computer interfaces, it's all dependent. It's kind of a it's kind of hard to define what is interfacing with the brain. You know, there are people who would argue that your eyeballs are interfacing with the brain. I'm not one of them. There's other people that say that looking at your brain through your skull is interfacing with the brain. Maybe. What about laying on top of the brain? You need to go into the brain. What if you're hooked up to the spinal cord right at the base of the brain? What if I'm a little further down the spinal cord? What if I'm tapping into median nerve cords in my arm and I'm using neural plasticity?

• 22:30Peter Diamandis?

  Let me define this.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  To feed data in that way.

• 22:31Peter Diamandis?

  Let me define this. High band high bandwidth connection of your neocortex where you can think and Google and you can see imagery that bypasses your your optic nerve.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  I not only believe that's gonna happen, I think you won't even need to go directly into the neocortex. I think you're actually gonna be able to do it through your peripheral nervous system. You have enough spare bandwidth on your peripheral nervous system. People do this where, like, you remember with Brainport? Brainport was a company that was building an imaging, uh, it was an electrohaptic pad with a resolution of, I think, 124 by 124? It went on your tongue, and it actually gave it-

• 23:03Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  And it allowed you, through neural plasticity-

• 23:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  -to learn to see through your tongue. There's actually a lot more bandwidth in your median nerve cord, which is the one that handles these fingers. Uh, there's a plenty of spare bandwidth on there. They make peripheral cuff electrodes that go on there. People who are amputees have learned to control artificial limbs using it. They've learned to feel from touch sensors using it, and they've even learned to control multiple limbs from a single median nerve cord-

• 23:28Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  -peripheral cuff electrode. And I guess I'll close it with that.

• 23:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  I believe that the long-term future, not for VR, because VR is gonna be very much about mimicking all of the senses with high fidelity, but for AR, I think AR is not going to be visual. AR is going to be entirely based on brain-to-computer interfaces or peripheral nervous system interfaces. I don't want to have my AR experience limited to the limitations of the human visual system, where I have a foveated region that I have to concentrate on to know any real information on something. I just want to subconsciously perceive the pose of where my car is, where I'm going. I want to have these things at the level of proprioception. If I make a funny pose, I know exactly what the pose of my body is because of all the mechanoreceptors feeding into my brain. If I can teach myself

• 24:14Speaker 03

  to perceive things out in the world through my peripheral nervous system as just part of my proprioceptive system, you can now have a much more valuable AR system that is not constrained to the limitations of the vision system and allows you to fully use your vision on other things rather than just data I/O. So that's where I think it's all going. AR is going to be a tiny implant in your-

• 24:34Peter Diamandis?

  So you have tiered inputs into your perceptome.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  VR is always gonna be about strapping a bunch of stuff to your face. Getting past the optical nerves is pretty tough.

• 24:44Peter Diamandis?

  Speaking of strapping stuff to your face, you also very famously about- Two or three months ago, I came out with a brand-new headset design, which I'm not gonna let my kids play with. Can you describe what you did?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  It's not just a design, it's built. It's implemented and it works. Just to, I really wanna really make sure people are sufficiently afraid. So, it's a, it's a simple concept. It's a virtual reality headset that kills you when you die in the game. This is a science fiction concept that has existed for decades. In fact, the concept of a simulation that can kill you if you die inside of it has existed longer than virtual reality headsets. It's that old, the, just in, in science fiction, it's been around for about a century.

• 25:27Peter Diamandis?

  So if I remember the design, it's basically a headset with three?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Three explosive charges pointed at the critical areas of the brain for an immediate nervous system shutdown. Yeah, I don't want, you know, you don't want someone to be in pain. But, look, here's the idea.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  The idea here was to build something, and it really, I mean, it's really a performance art piece more than anything else. I don't think of myself as an artist, but I guess that's what I've become. You know, I, I wanted to show, hey, this is, it's an interesting idea. What, you know, what is real, what is not? A lot of people treat simulations differently because there's no consequences in it. They know it's not the real world. Well, how do you act when you're in a simulation where the consequences are as serious as the real world? How does that change the way you interact with other people in the simulation? How does it change your interactions with even virtual agents inside the simulation? If you know that you are capable of inflicting harm on them and they on you? And, you know, it's one of those, I actually did it to celebrate the, uh, if anyone's familiar with the anime, Sword Art Online. It's actually a light novel series.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see a few hands go, "Woo!" There you go. So it was actually to, I, I released it on, in November on SAO Day, which is the day that in Sword Art Online, a fictional tech-mad genius imprisons thousands of VR players inside of his simulation using a headset that will kill them in the real life if they die in the, in the game. I thought, you know, that's just perfect time to put this out there. Celebrate SAO Day. Anyway, if anyone wants to try it, you can't. I've, I've, I've actually already, already got it locked up in my, in my gun safe, so.

• 27:00Peter Diamandis?

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

• 27:41Peter Diamandis?

  the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to diamandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode. The concept is fascinating. How much time do you?

• 28:11Speaker 03

  The most fascinating part about it is the fact that nobody's ever done it. If people are like, "Oh, my God, you've opened up Pandora's box. Why would you create such a thing?" It's like, guys, it took me literally one weekend to build this. I mean, the Pandora's box was open when we made the first Oculus Rift and whoever invented the shaped charges that I was using. You know, it's a... But I think it was a cool idea and it definitely got a lot of people talking. More than I expected.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  How did you get started as a defense company, as a small entrepreneur? I think of the government as a customer is fearful to change suppliers and to take risks. I mean, I experienced this in the aerospace industry and in the rocket business and the satellite business. It's like, it's safe to buy Big Blue and the defense system. So, how did you overcome that?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Well, the number one job of every bureaucrat is to not get fired. And so, what you have to do is make sure that you convince them that if they don't do what you want, they will get fired. And typically, it's safer to go with the big companies, not with the new startups. And that was one of the reasons I started Andro. Like, the problems you're laying out, it's hard to work with the government. They don't know how to work with small companies. They want you to spend your own money to get rid of all of the risk because they don't want to take any risk on new entrants. Those are the reasons I started Androl because I was one of the few people that had the resources to overcome those barriers. Most companies have no shot. They don't have the money. They don't have the connections. They don't have the expertise. They don't have the team. And so we went into this from the beginning. When we started the company, we didn't even know what product we were going to make.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  How wild is that? Like, and I'm serious. This is not like a crazy retro, retro, you know, retcon of our founding story. It's well documented even at the time. Most companies, they start with a technology or a product. And then the people say, how can we, who can we apply this to? What can we, who can we sell this to? We started with the problem, which is we need better weapons if we are going to ethically engage in warfare. There is no moral high ground in leaving this problem to existing prime contractors that are incompetent at many things and totally unable to do, to do other things. And so we started there. We said, we're going to start a new kind of defense company that's going to use its own money to develop products, make them work, and then after they work,

• 30:25Speaker 03

  sell them to the government as a fully functioning system, not asking taxpayers to take on the risk, instead taking it on ourselves. And then we sat down day one and said, okay, so now that we've started a company, what are we going to build? And that, that was, by the way, that was how we arrived at artificial intelligence as kind of the core of all of our products. People think we're a hardware company because we build drones and submarines and robots, command and control systems. We're actually, we have two thirds of our company working on software. We're primarily an AI and autonomy company. Our core product is something called Lattice. It's an AI sensor fusion platform that fuses all these things together. Existing military systems, our military systems, command and control of people and robots, getting the right information at the right place at the right time. And we decided to do that, not because AI was hot six years ago. It wasn't nearly as hot as today. It was because we decided, like, I didn't know anything about AI.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  But it was clear after talking to people in the defense space that that's what they needed. And so that's why we started building those products.

• 31:14Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, I'm sure you know this, this process of investing it, building it, and then selling it was the way all contracting in the government was done 100 years ago.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  That's right. Now, cost plus contracting was an interesting invention. It did allow us to basically take over our entire industrial base during World War II without being communist. So we're like, no, no, no, we're not taking over our industry. We're just going to pay them exactly what it costs to build them, something a small fixed profit on top. And if they don't do that, then they are not going to get to work with the government ever again. And that worked in a total war scenario where everyone was working as fast as they could. We went through multiple generations of fighter planes in five years. But when you're in a quasi peace time, kind of Cold War type situation, cost plus contracting incentivizes people to be slow, not innovative, and to never reuse building blocks they've already built because they make more money when they build from scratch,

• 32:06Speaker 03

  more money when it takes longer and more money when it's more expensive.

• 32:09Peter Diamandis?

  Perverse situation.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  And you will always get what you incentivize.

• 32:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, our government created a system that created the monster we have today.

• 32:16Peter Diamandis?

  Robots, are you looking at humanoid robots?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  We are, and if you're a humanoid robot company, you should reach out to me. We are not building humanoid robot hardware because there's too many good people doing a good job. I only want to do things that other people are not going to do. I'm not, I don't want to be in the business of just building the same thing as the other guy, but I slightly beat him and put him out of business, or he slightly beats me and put me out of business. I try to find the empty space and fill it best I can. But we have a, we have a software product that needs to interface with humanoid robots. So it's a, it's a universal API that allows our software to operate existing legacy weapon systems. So things like old radar systems, old anti-air systems, the type of things that are in Ukraine, in Poland, in Europe, that we gave them decades ago. If, right now, it requires a team of people to be operating it, which they're a huge target.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  A radar site is a high priority target for any strike. If you could instead say, we're going to basically build an interoperability layer that consists of a humanoid robot that can pull the levers and push the buttons, and then our software can just tell it, you know, turn on, turn off, give me the targets, do this, do that. It's a really useful thing. Anyway, to get more, email me.

• 33:23Peter Diamandis?

  Are you thinking about quantum computing?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  No, it seems like it's far enough away from practicality that I can just let other people think about it for a while. We are interested in quantum communication.

• 33:35Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I should have said quantum technologies.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Okay, quantum communication is a game changer. If anyone can promote, if anyone could build a technology that could promote a stable enough bond that you don't get, that you don't get disentanglement.

• 33:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a total game changer for.

• 33:51Peter Diamandis?

  We're talking about tonight with Jack Hittary, who's the CEO of Sandbox AQ. If you know Jack?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 33:56Peter Diamandis?

  Great. And so we'll be talking about quantum chemistry, quantum encryption, quantum.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a game changer, but I can't say much more beyond that.

• 34:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. What technology do you wish existed that doesn't yet?

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Oh, man. There's so many. I mean.

• 34:12Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, let's list them.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Well, for a while I experimented with petroleum-based foods that would have zero calories because your body doesn't do anything with them. Basically, if you're gonna build foods, you shouldn't.

• 34:20Peter Diamandis?

  My son told me like a gram of uranium has got like five billion calories or some shit like that.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  If you're looking at it from a certain point of view, that is true. But long-chain hydrocarbons are, where we are, man is master of making them into anything. Gels, rubbers, paste, polymers, solids. And so if you want to build something that, you know, tastes, has the mouth feel of a real food, it's actually easier to do it with oil products that are inert in your body than it is to start with plant-based stuff. The problem is that the only way to make it economical is to recycle the output. And people don't want to eat sewage food. It's just you can't market it. And so I gave up on it for that reason. I would love to see it, though. It'd be a big deal.

• 34:59Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. What else is in your, in your sort of advanced tech world?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Um, you know, I'm pretty excited about de-extinction of species with practical applications.

• 35:08Peter Diamandis?

  Are you an investor along with us in Colossal?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 35:11Peter Diamandis?

  Maybe. It's not a secret.

• 35:14Peter Diamandis?

  Ben Lamb's a dear friend. He's been on the stage many times.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Well, look, I've been chatting with those guys. And I'll say like, there's some pretty interesting possibilities. People are always looking at the species that are the cuddliest and the coolest. I think, and I think they agree, there's gonna be species you can de-extinct that have practical applications in restoring ecosystems and doing all kinds of different stuff.

• 35:36Peter Diamandis?

  Woolly mammoth, I guess.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  And also, imagine this, 600-pound dire wolf canine units for special forces. Yeah. Anyway, that's my, that's my dream. That's my dream. Fingers crossed.

• 35:50Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Hey, you can put a lot more body armor on a dire wolf than a German shepherd.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Who wants to have a 600-pound wolf with 100 pounds of body armor on? Oh, God. Amazing. Let's give it up for Palmer Lucky. Thank you, guys.

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