Oculus & Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey: From Flipping iPhones On Ebay To Selling For $2Bn To Facebook

i remember there were times for the thing i needed it would cost like fifty dollars and it was just like it was it was inc incompatible that i could afford it i mean like honestly oc owes more to the iphone than anything else i mean like if the iphone wouldn't have existed there wouldn't have been broken iphones for me to buy unlock repair and sell on ebay like i because i made tens of thousands of dollars as a teenager on that on that side hustle like if if that had not happened then oc probably wouldn't exist today that's it what's up we got palmer lucky on the podcast palmer is a billionaire he created oc which he sold to facebook he's created andrew which is now one of the biggest like government they make weapons for the government and super interesting guy i'm gonna call it right now i think this is a all timer episode i don't know what's i don't you know you guys know i don't hype it up like that unless it's legit this was an all timer episode sam what are some of the things that we talked about so early on we asked him basically what he did with his money so he made hundreds of millions of dollars at the age of like twenty three or something like that and we said where did you put your money and it was very clear on what he did with it he talked about some of his early crypto investment so he bought crypto way way early like in two thousand ten i think he said he talked about how he's was making minimum wage and then became a billionaire like four five years after just making minimum wage what else we talked about couple of interesting things where he likes to hang out on the internet we're like dude where do how do you know about all this stuff where do you learn this stuff what are your subreddit what are you what are you listening to in reading because i need to start doing some of that he told us some of his by way go there remember he actually sent a facebook group that he'd liked and he actually named of facebook group does he only get a lot more popular and then yeah he talked about basically like his world war three gonna happen right he's he's supplying you know the his company builds tech for the defense department department of defense and so is world three gonna happen is there gonna be a nuke what is a tactical luke well you asked them a very specific question you go is russia gonna drop a nuclear bomb and his perspective is interesting i thought it was a good question and then the best part was we said alright you sold oc and then you created an which is an even bigger success i think it's like valued to eight billion dollars or something but there was many years in between did you consider doing any other ideas and he opened up and he's was like yeah actually there were these two or three other ideas he had an idea about creating a new kind of prison he had an idea that would try to solve obesity he had he had a couple ideas that we go into depth brainstorming with them so he had it all man and he had the the crazy backstory the success story but he also brought ideas and then he also argued with us about why he flies coach even though he's a billionaire and why he may or may not get into a fight with jason cal and so this episode had it all had fighting had ideas had success stories it's got it all alright enjoy this episode with palmer lucky i i don't know you don't need too much of an intro but i'll do it anyways palmer lucky is here created oc created and really interesting dude and and i think you know we have a bunch topics so i'm not gonna kind of be labor the intro sam i know you've been itching we we just you probably can't say the dm you you you you sent to try to get palmer on here you really wanted this man on the podcast why my friend my first question is to you sam why so palmer i am like the king of left handed compliments at least that's what they say about me but i i mean them as full handed compliments or right handed compliments but basically i love freaks i love weirdo i love extremist not like in the political sense but in the sense of like people who just go all in on stuff and or are just passionate about maybe like nerdy or unconventional things and you go all in on things and i love that i love people even if i don't like what they're going going all in on i i'm crazy fascinated by that and you see one of those guys who just goes all in on things you've done a lot at a young age and i like weirdo and i i put you in that in that category thank you i'm happy to be happy to be a weirdo know i'd rather be i'd rather either i'd rather be a person that that the the the people think ill or or or well of than somebody nobody thinks of it all i think well it be by the way i think well if they've had a poster at his office that was like for his employees he was like let freak flag fly that was like you know one of those like you know corporate values are typically like integrity and like determination and his it was like be a freak alright so so let's start with know let's start with some that kind of we're gonna try to as much we can avoid vr and avoid the facebook stuff because mostly just because you've talked about it a bunch of places i'm at frankly i'm interested because i am actually a vr fan but sam has has tried to forbid me from from asset questions so we're gonna leave that at the end if i get a little extra time but this is a podcast that started it's called my first million because we're interested in money and we think it's really funny that people are tap like money's like you know you the silicon valley things you could pretend you don't like money and like i know you're talking about yeah you know we're we're not doing it here for the money you know this money money you know money money's not the real objective i actually tell my own employees and onboarding that if if you work in a place where your boss is saying that you should be worried because it's it's one thing it's one thing to say that to the press it's one thing to say that in your marketing materials but you you know if if your employees don't believe that at the end of the day you're trying to make their job a fiscal responsible decision if you're effectively telling them you could be making more money elsewhere and your financial success is not my priority you should be concerned yeah yeah exactly and and you kinda did the best of both like for all the kind of ironic people who are like we're trying to change the world with this like you know hr onboarding software you know you actually kinda did and still made a bunch of money doing it so you know it's not like an either or hundred i mean when when i started oc list it was not because i thought it would be the thing that would make the most money there never been a successful be our company in history to be clear and i did it because it was something i was really passionate about now that said one of the things i'm most proud of in my whole career is that everyone who worked at oc achieved financial independence because we were able to build something incredible and i like i feel great that everyone who was part of that mission and who supported me early on was able to make a bunch of money and a a lot of them have gone on to do incredible things but yeah was not was not was not done because i thought it was the best way to make money it's because i thought it really was gonna be the best way to change the world in the long run was a little different i i that one it wasn't just oh this will be fun i wanna do something really cool and was like i felt like i had to do it or things were things are gonna go really poorly so more more of a more of a stick than a carrot on that one how much did you make off the ocular sale oh man i probably shouldn't say because this is also one of those complex things where you know there was the there was the sale so there's what they believe they called the merger consideration form of well you know proportion of the of the of the compensation and then they you know you cut unemployment deal where they say we're going to pay you you know this much for five years i can say that i i was locked i was locked up on a five year vest schedule so typical would be before most of our employees were for i got locked up for five because i was a key guy and that that money technically is not for the acquisition it's just four i had four yep so and and of course you know you you can't you can't pretend you can't say they're the same thing or they they're supposed to be treated differently tax wise compensation wise and then of course there's the bonuses we had we had an earn out that was a it was a it was a a huge earn it was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company if we could hit certain sales targets and user user like hours hours of time targets and we actually had four years to hit those targets and we we hit them within less than two years so we actually did it's kind funny when be like oh man acquisition must not be going as well as people expect is like no we maxed out the top bracket of our earn out because we're we're we're were kicking butt but anyway i it it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars i can tell you that so in the healthy hundreds of millions of dollars what where you were you who listen to this sorry i'll go real quick a bunch people who listen to this our founders and and like would want to sell their company someday and both me and sam we started this podcast right when we both exited our companies because it's like alright we're kinda earning out well we can't start another company right now but like we can start a podcast that that sounds kind of fun and and actually yet just yesterday i just closed on another sale of a company but these are small scale compared to what you did right like congratulations thank you but you you sold for i don't know two or three billion bucks how does that happen somebody you know z comes over to your house and it's like i'll give you three billion dollars for this like how does that how does that even how does that conversation go down when when when when you're talking about the sort of like the grand slam type of outcomes well it's a it's a long story but you know i you know i i know i know sam didn't wanna talk all about vr but no i the the this shit's interesting to me oh great then we we we were told one won't talk about vr optics and in the med that but i i guess on on the business side of it the the interesting thing about the acquisition is that we didn't have any of intention of selling initially and when we first had our conversation with facebook and i think that really what was a positive thing because actually first time we talked i think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell and we said no we're not interested we think this company is easily gonna surpass that value we think it's not gonna be a problem for us to make more money and yeah we were we're we're happy to work with you guys but we we don't wanna be by the way was was that easy to say no a billion dollars i mean you started this thing like on a kick kickstarter dude like you know at at some point were you like was it hard to say no or was it not a not an issue at that point it wasn't an issue for me and i think i think a different people are different opinions i mean look if you if you look over my career i've made a lot of similar decisions like when i was starting oc when i was deciding whether i was do a kickstarter or work for someone else i actually had a job on a job offer on the table from from sony to run a playstation vr lab you know i had a playstation group and when i turned them down they actually doubled the offer and then i had to turn them down again and a lot of people were wondering how could you have done that you know how could you decided to do your own thing it with so much higher risk and i think that a lot of it is is social programming you i grew up watching media that conditioned me to believe that when you have an opportunity you have to take it when you know when when you almost have to follow the narrative and looking back i'm not sure i could have done anything i was like could i have stayed in school instead of starting oc once i realized i had this breakthrough in vr technology i think i could not have possibly done it there's it it it's almost to the level of free will not existing i could not have chosen that could i have gone to work for sony looking back i don't think so i think i couldn't have made that decision and i think it's actually the same thing with that billion dollar offer like i almost could not have said yes you know like that that that first offer i like narrative it makes no sense it doesn't align with what i've been trained is what you do when you're a you know when you're a a free thinking icon class and so i i couldn't have done it i think what what what happened is a few things changed over over time after that initial offer you know we didn't talk to to facebook for for for a few months after that and a few things happened one it became clear that our competition was not only serious but was going to be putting massive dollars into their success something not a lot of people remember but i certainly do because it was a big deal in my mind the day that we announced no the day we find and it wasn't anything anyone else the day we finalized the facebook acquisition was the same day that sony announced playstation vr and we had known that it was coming for a while you we we'd actually even shown each other prototypes and stuff but it really reinforced this was a serious thing we're gonna have some of the biggest games companies in the world putting hundreds of millions of dollars in a competing with us and know that that made i think are the the that made the the pitch that facebook came back with which is listen you maybe you could make more money an independent company but if you're with us we're gonna make vr happen much faster so it you yes you'll you might make more money but you're going to go much slower than if we were able to artificially super charge your growth far beyond even what you could do with venture capital and they they were willing to commit billions of dollars a year for a period of a decade or more and that's that's a really tough thing to turn down when you really believe in something and is this like literally z coming to your house and talking to you about this or is there like an army of lawyers in between you guys that are like you know bankers and and corp dev people it was a very small number of people i mean it was it was i mean i i think that the the the the lawyers and the accountants are much more likely to be involved in a deal when the deal is contingent on you know your your revenue and your multiples and your p else like that that's where you need to drag those people to really make a an assessment this was such a high level bet it's not like oh i think that you have this margin on your headset and you've sold this many development kits it was so early and the technology is so nascent the real bet is do you believe in the universe do you believe that there's going to be a virtual world parallel to our own where you're living and you're working and your playing and then most importantly do you believe this is the best team in the world to do it and i didn't notice this at the time but i found out later that mark had been going around and talking to various university research labs government research labs talking to a you seeing what other companies were doing and their conclusion was we were way ahead of everyone else and that if if this was going to happen this shift to immersive computing the final computing platform arguably that we were the people in the best position to do it and that's not something that a lawyer can really give an opinion on it's not something that accountant can put a value on it's a it's a very high level bet what was your personal financial situation when you turned down the billion dollar offer so at the time early early in oc so yeah i mean i started oc he's my own money and at that time i was working a minimum wage job in living in a nineteen foot camper trailer i was nineteen years old so people aren't familiar with the story to that degree i i had almost no money literally had a few hundred dollars in my bank account because i spent all the money that i made putting myself through school and working on virtual reality technology and i was extraordinarily or in i i had a minimum wage job i was also fixing computers on the side for a while i've been buying broken iphones put it fixing them and unlocking them selling those for spare cash and so i you i'd i'd burned a lot of money on my on my on my nutty hobby and when we started oc we we didn't pay ourselves very much by the time the acquisition happened i had given myself raise we decided that nobody in the company was going to make over a hundred thousand dollars we called it the hundred k club so we're we're paying the ceo a hundred thousand dollars i was getting paid a hundred thousand dollars and to me that that actually felt incredible was like wow hundred thousand dollars this is absolutely crazy i can i can afford anything you're like you know how many cell phone how many iphones i'd have to fix to make a hundred thousand dollars heck a lot because you fixed iphones and like scrubbing boats or something i read is that what you i mean when i started working on vr stuff i was i work for a few years in a boat yard so yeah yeah scrubbing boats rep painting rep painting the the the the the the bottom paint sweeping the boat yard you know the the that that type of stuff so so so to me the money was not was not a huge motivating factor also because maybe maybe too optimistic i believe oc was going to be worth tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars so it really wasn't the the month i know i i know this is what contrary to what i said before but it wasn't the money that was motivating me to make the sale the it it was the pitch hey we're gonna get you billions of dollars right now like not not the not the compensation for the for the the acquisition but we're gonna give you your your organization billions of dollars a year to go out and make virtual reality actually happen and that's what you're going to need to compete with google to compete with sony to compete with microsoft all of which have seen what you're doing bought in like they've drunk your ko aid but they're gonna try to kill you over it that that was kind of the situation we were in and facebook was one of the very few companies that had a strong incentive to make virtual reality and immersive computing writ large to come about as quickly as possible because unlike google unlike like microsoft they did not benefit from the status quo in the hardware space so if if we kept using mobile phones and normal computers for you know next twenty thirty years google and microsoft are gonna do just fine like they're they're already the winners in that paradigm if you can shake everything up and force a reset with immersive computing a r vr r r or whatever you wanna call it it could be that microsoft is one of the top players and it could be that apple and google are are some of the top players but it's unlikely that all of them are gonna remain the dominant players and that's an opening for a company like facebook to come in and even if they're not first place forcing the reset puts them in second or third place instead of being totally subs soviet to the operating system vendors and to the hardware vendors so it it was one of those things where there were other companies that were interested none of them actually had a strong incentive to put billions of dollars into vr on an ongoing basis when you could see google killed their vr program first they killed their pc team then they killed their mobile vr team microsoft is winding down their internal efforts i mean it's it it's a it's a it's a it's a tough business and i'm not convinced that oc would still be around if we hadn't had those resources i'm gonna move on from like asking you these money questions but i wanna ask one more because i do think it's fascinating because you went from like maybe not having a lot to having a lot and you're also like not fall yeah which i like when i sold my business i put everything into bonds and just vanguard total index funds just did like a normal eighty twenty split and then eventually some real estate and then hubspot stock and just normal like basic stuff what did you do with your money and what have you because i know you bought like a a marina i think or you tried to buy i don't know if i went through but like what what what does like someone like you do with that amount of liquidity so most of it i did what you're talking about i generally don't believe in trying to beat the market through market market transactions i mean it's one thing to build like i think you build wealth by building companies that's where you should be focusing your effort not trying to be smarter than all the finance guys we're sitting around and using every tool at their disposal to try and game the financial market so actually yeah van vanguard funds like vanguard five hundred total index funds my my grandpa taught me a lot about investing and about how you shouldn't try to beat the market probably the the my investment philosophies informed mostly by john bog little black book begun investing or like look you keep your fees low keep your costs slow and just go with the market and you know if if the market goes so poorly that i become poor then united states has bigger problems than than than than the market so that was that was that was most what i did i bought the not as a financial investment it was actually it was one of the only marina so this is getting a little into the weeds or something probably very few people care about but just so you know in california almost all marina the water is owned by the state or by the feds and then they do long term leases like thirty or forty years to operators that are allowed to operate those marina and they might own let's say the parking lot the operator but they do not own the water they do not own the docks it's just a long term lease and they read you that over there's only a small handful of marina in the entire state of california where the underlying land under the water and the water itself is deed to a private title and the marina that i bought was one of those and you know with without getting into it without getting into know my my my whole c s delusion i think that you're gonna end up needing if you wanna have transport fares that are operating from land out to international waters you do not wanna be in a position where the place you're doing that from is totally dependent on state government bureau choosing to renew your lease on a particular on a particular arena so that was actually that was actually a purchase little it'll it'll it'll pay off someday you'll see you y'all see see i bought my house just like i like the the walk in closet was nice and i was like oh that's good enough reason for me i didn't have to like you going to international water well and in my case i i did buy it i mean i i did a i did a few things like as soon as i had money i immediately started learning to fly helicopters for real because i always wanted be a helicopter pilot ever since being a little kid so like it was like it was like two weeks after the wire completed i was i was flying helicopters so that was really cool i bought a sixty nine mustang convertible that was really cool and i bought a first generation tesla model s that was cool and then i bought a house for my parents you know it's like the the the it's like the basketball player contract move you know you you get the money you buy the you buy the house for for your parents and then i bought a house for myself that was close to my grandpa actually and unfortunately we then ended up having to move up to silicon valley because of the acquisition and then he passed away while i was up there so one one of my one of my regrets but i'm still in that house wow okay that's amazing and one other thing i had seen was that you i don't know if this is even a real thing or it's like some twitter fake you know fake photo or whatever did you buy bitcoin in twenty thirteen no no i bought bitcoin much earlier than i was not here the twenty twenty thirteen is when i was on i i was in the forbes thirty under thirty and they asked everyone on it for a quote for the print edition and it was the the theme was what is your advice to other young founders and my quote was buy more bitcoin and but i i'm i've actually been involved in bitcoin since before there were any exchanges i like i i was a true og g on the bitcoin talk dot org forums there were no exchanges you could only do direct transactions for goods i actually sold a banner ad on my game console modification forum it was a one week banner ad on this forum with almost no traffic and i sold it for four hundred bitcoin and then i ended up i ended up buying someone's samsung samsung galaxy vibrant which was the t mobile variant of the first galaxy phone for eight hundred bitcoin i believe which at the time was you well well under a dollar per bitcoin right so i've i've actually been in sixteen million very early days sixteen oh my god how do you so like alright you you you we had biology you know biology on the pod and like he was one of these guys where he would like give an analogy he's was like oh you know bitcoin is kinda like the battle of tam and i'm like bro i you can't you i needed analogy for your analogy like i can't tell you about the battle of games in world war two like i can't have that conversation with you and you're a little bit like that where you're talking about like you just like threw in a few lines like oh this gaming forum i have i was i go down that path but and then you're talking about like this boat marina thing and i'm like that that's a whole conversation like how wonder earth you discovered that and then i'm sure you have strong opinion you you just have bearish and then now obviously you're doing government stuff and you've done and you have no bunch about politics whatever how are you becoming so well versed and also so opinionated on such a broad set of topics because you have to most of the time like the the best things that i've done that i have done in my career have not been going super super deep on one vertical and then finding the really really hard gains that are at the end of a long fight that everyone's made like i an example here would be with just like optics technology most people are fighting way at the end of the spectrum where they're trying to like oh we're using new cutting edge materials that increase the ability to control light more precisely by two percent and we're we're trying to figure out the physics of how we can manufacture these polymers most of my best ideas have not come from that they've been from knowing things in totally different fields that have nothing to do with the field or at least people don't think they do and then pulling ideas from those fields and applying them in a new way like the the the really key thing that oc rift work is just one example rather than focusing on trying to make these optical stacks that cost thousands of dollars and weighed a bunch and that was really what was making these headsets weigh many pounds and cost tens of thousands dollars was the high end optical stack that was able to project images on your retina with minimal distortion but you needed you know bunch of lenses they're all very very expensive very high precision what i did is figure out that you could just render a distorted image you see render your image distorted it on the graphics card in the inverse way that the lens distorted it and then basically you would render an image it looks terrible on the screen but after viewing it through the lens that i had which was optimized for high field of view low weight low cost but not optimized to have low distortion low chromatic abe operation or geometric abe it would come out looking looking perfect and like that that's something where an optical engineer someone who's working on just optics would not would not think of that you know that's very much like a a a a a software idea but the software people are also not necessarily thinking about how they could celeste expenses of expensive pieces of optics objects and of course there are people who do that do that i think that some of the best entrepreneurs or people who have understanding that is sufficient in enough areas to pull from one area and solve the biggest problems of another so i i mean i i i'm making it a priority you asked how do i do it you making a priority to know a little about a lot so two questions one just go back to the bitcoin thing for a second what sure how did you get into like why were you on the bitcoin talk forms or why did you see it even before you know almost anybody so what were you doing there and why did it catch your eye yep and then you know today ten years later there's a whole bunch of people that are disillusioned by it they say oh it's all all this times gone by ten years didn't work out other people are more bullish than ever what you know where you stand now so what caught your eye and then where do you stand now so i mean i i think i got a bitcoin it would have been mid mid to late two thousand ten and and i i i i was really fascinated because i i mean look i'm a guy who was into virtual reality and the meta this is just adjacent to that it's another super cool you know a sip cyberpunk concept the idea of you know un trace internet currency that is based on only the consensus of all of the cyberpunk who are using it crypto geographically verified and secured with no nation state controlling it or issuing it or diluting it or manipulating like like what what a cool thing when you're when you're an anti authority teenager who who who loves who loves cyberpunk science fiction and so that that it was like i bought into the the very original cool vision not the oh this is gonna be huge for everybody everyone but like this is this is this is cyberpunk car i have to be a part of this and when i started like my my my initial thinking was not that it was a good store of value that was that's actually been i think the most contentious thing about crypto is after it started sky i i didn't buy it because i was speculating nobody was even thinking about that pack then like it's it's crazy to me to watch all these new crypto kids get in and it seems like it's all about just having having coins pumping the value dumping them it's really just you know these this financial markets play that i've never believed in i've because i always believe in you know investing in the whole market but to me it was always values as a as a means of moving wealth around it's not a as a store for years or decades it's a way that you can move wealth around without any without being behold to any any centralized authority or centralized power and i think today like even for all the issues bitcoin has and people you know putting it down because of it crashing well first of all every every time there's a bitcoin crashed it's like oh no it's crashed to only ten x what it was two years ago every single time every crash is like that but more importantly it's still a good way to move value around and that said my prediction in twenty thirteen was that bitcoin will go to about a hundred thousand dollars and then stabilize i'm sticking with it i i i think i think it'll get there i'm i'm not i'm not sure that it in particular has the has the appropriate utility to reach a higher store of value and wow okay amazing and then did you oh by the way i have and i have to throw out there i'm one of those guys who lost a bunch of coins in mount go act oh man i got go good and it was it was one of those things where there was no like looking back everyone's like oh my god i can't believe that you know you would have and i had most of my coins in in my own wallet but i had a significant amount on on got because people were transferring coins to my go to my go account and now everyone's was like oh my god of course you would never keep your coins in an exchange but like i was sixteen years old and like you know there there was no there's no like idiot guy to bitcoin back then it was it was the type of thing you only used if you were a a crazy a crazy internet nut and so you've mentioned forums and i'm a big forum sky like i still i remember you know bb i wasn't like before be whatever was before bb that's not me but i've been on forums and i love forums and you talked about amen the bitcoin talk forums i went and read a bunch of your early posts on the what was the name of the like odd retro no no no the the headset one the had three yeah exactly what your old your old post there i went and like stockton them just to be like because i like to see the origin i'm like my goodness it's fun like what are the like archaeologists for like the internet i like to go find the original shit and so you know i saw you posting there and you're like hey i'm trying to build this thing i'm thinking about doing this you did a bunch of like kind of really cool crowds stuff i think you even like asked reddit like you know should i buy it should we buy vibe or something like that you did a bunch of cool stuff on forums and i thought about that and some of them like i when i learned poker i learned it through forums yep if you think about today like if who's the sick the sixteen year old version of you today what forms do you think they're hanging out in what's the thing because when you were doing this is fifteen years ago like we are still early and you were early early early same thing with bitcoin you were early early and so what do you think are the interesting forums today that people are hanging out in that you think will play out over the next decade or so and and also what are what are what are some of your favorite pie bits of the web and and forums that you're hanging out in i mean much to my i like i love forums too i think they are more or less the pinnacle of asynchronous communication like if you are doing collaborative product the all of the incentives are correct so so i like i i ran a form them the mod retro forum so it's a forum for people who modified vintage game consoles in particular with a focus on turning them into handheld self contained unit so cutting apart in nintendo sixty fours and super nintendo's and playstation and then replacing like the power electronics with modern power electronics running them off of the latest lithium battery technology although it was nike had back when back when i started started you working on portable you know putting in lcd screens that were designed for portable dvd players and the like and building these self contained units and it forums are interesting because your your currency is is attention but you can only get attention by getting people to come in you know respond and engage with you and so there's a strong incentive to update people on what you're doing to to to write really interesting things and to you get people regularly coming back and engaging with your stuff i mean that that's the dopamine high right it's other people care about what i'm doing so today it's been so algorithm you know algorithm driven that you don't have the same incentives in terms of long term sustained engagement and you know collaborating with people there's a lot more incentive to do things on your own do one big push in a form that will cause ordinary people who are not necessarily technically competent to you know watch it for at least three minutes so that it's seen as you watch it long i like i think the pockets which is what you asked like there's great pockets on youtube there's great pockets on reddit there's actually a lot of private facebook groups still like one highlight like i'm a member of a of a night vision group where people build their own night vision night vision goggles and it's got a a couple thousand people but it's it's a private group and very very much not viral driven you know it's not like the tick tiktok tick tiktok techno no heads it's not like the youtube techno no heads but man i i really miss forums you know mod retro had a core group of a few thousand active members that we're that we're doing stuff in heyday and we're doing a few a few million page views a month and you would you never see those ratios these days you know of of i mean of of engage to to to watchers one thing that that i thought was actually really interesting i don't know i see i've interrupt i've to interrupt one last thing i forgot actually a huge fraction of the people that i hired for oc in the early days were volunteer moderators on the mod retro forums like you people always you they hire their network right they hire the people that they know that they can trust and that they know our competent and that was my network when i was a teenager it was other it was other loser gamer teenagers on the internet and so we like that that like we well some of our lead electrical people our lead hardware people our lead mech electronics people were all people who had been moderators on mod retro you're like in fact the first person i hired was was one of the other moderators and i i i actually sent him a message said hey what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing this fall and he said oh i'm i'm i'm starting starting college i said no you're not you're gonna come work for me and i literally i like i i told him that on a friday and i literally drove out in my minivan to pick him up from his mom's house on monday and he had all his stuff and like four boxes i picked him up we got in my van and we drove to the condemned motel that i was living in i mean it was it was it was it was wild i mean the that and that that was that was my network so it's always funny when people are like oh you know your network is your network you know look you we're you got all the scan for kids get the iv kids and we were just a bunch of internet losers and we did better than any of them you're like i'm hiring h d alumni they're like was at harvard medical no no no head mounted display for alumni yeah those was it was it was i actually the the the guy that i was hiring his is his name's chris d and he had never built a head mounted to display but he was he was very accomplished on the little he was verbal see you've been a lot of handheld vintage just game consoles and i i knew he was very confident i knew exact like you you talk about a job interview where you meet someone for you know whatever they're you know maybe an hour or something but i had been seeing this guy's work published on the forum over the course of years and so i knew he had i i knew he had skills and i knew had work that's exactly we me and sean have hired so many people on twitter and i tell people all time like i gonna get job i'm man if you just like you need to post your thoughts so people understand your texture and your taste and your character like there's significantly better doing it there and then just dm someone and then they'll just gonna click your profile no this person's tweeting all this like interesting insight that aligns exactly well and that and and and that's harder to fake too if you if you have somebody who has a history of building things for themselves of doing things because they want to not because they're getting paid to that you can't fake that the way that you can fake an interview it's easy like oh i'm passionate about x y and z well show me your years of work that you've done for no money showing that you really are and i mean we we we still hire a lot of people like that at and like we we we we have benefits that are intended to lure people like that like one of our benefits we have is that we will buy anyone in the company any tool they want for their personal projects as well as work projects and that's the type of thing where people who don't have personal projects who just you know they show up to their to their wage machine and they clock in and they clock out they're not attracted by that but the types of people who wanna create for the sake of creation those to those people that's a it's a it's a golden ticket on that note we did the same thing my cofounder founder he's a lot like you like fifteen at age fifteen started working at a dot com during the dot com boom it was like you know had a job and it was like what the hell going on and always was just doing his own thing and so he used to buy like three d printers and robotics and we're building like social apps it's like we didn't need any of this stuff and i was like what are you doing like why we doing this he's like because a i want it like i want to come to a space and like what i'm done with work i'm just gonna go downstairs to their lab and i'm gonna build like a drone or i'm gonna like take this raspberry pie and like she it over here and figure something else out he's like also that that's also how we'll get great people like i wanna work with other hackers like that who likes to tinker on this stuff and he's like he's like it's he's like he had had an exit so he's like you know doing very well his the last company went public and so he was like you know when i was like sixteen eighteen twenty one like i just couldn't afford to like the thousand dollar thing that you would need to have he's like i just got lucky that the dude down the street would let me come over and play with his thing and that's like that was like a a life changer of a moment he's like so i just wanna do that for people like i'm just make it free anybody can come in and maybe could use this stuff and he was totally right even though like our cfo was like hey we can't justify that he's like don't worry i'll pay for it all out of pocket and i was like i know i and i know that struggle know we're like and it doesn't even have to be a thousand dollars i mean i remember there were times were the thing i needed it would cost like fifty dollars and it was just like it was it was inc incompatible that i could afford it i mean like honestly oc owes more to the iphone than anything else i mean like if the iphone wouldn't have existed there wouldn't have been broken iphones for me to buy unlock repair and sell on ebay like i because i mean tens of thousands of dollars as a teenager on that on that side hustle like like if if that had not happened then oc probably wouldn't exist today that's amazing i wanna ask you a bit about andrew but before before we get to that what ideas were you pursuing or i bet you if you're like us i imagine you have a list of like things that you're contemplating what was what was on that list prior starting andrew i know there was like a prison thing and but what what else like per were you interested in well what was the prison thing i'll start with that one because that that one sounds interesting also that there were two things i was seriously considering and then one thing that i'm i'm i'm gonna do someday so c setting is off the table right now it's too long term but there were two short term things that i was looking at aside from so the three choices were fixed national security solve obesity or solve incarceration and the yeah i tried to think about you what are the ways that i would tackle these issues and way i saw defense was i wanted to build the defense products company that up ends the incentives that typically exist in the military industrial complex but the the prison one was that i wanted to basically take out the incentives of the private prison complex that exists today right now private prison companies are are growing there's more and more people being housed in privately operated prisons they're publicly traded and those companies have a strong incentive to lobby for and and perpetuate laws that inca people for the longest period of time for the least serious crime in other words they don't want murderers and terrorists they want they want non nonviolent drug offenders who will be in prison for a long time and when they get out of prison they want them to come back and be a repeat customer they want good good tenants they want good that's right occupancy good tenants yeah and the incentives they've set up with the government where the government prep pays for these beds the government basically says well we've already paid for the bed so if they're not old then we're not locking up enough people you know it's a it's a very bad set of incentives some idea was that i could start a private prison company they would run as a non profit organization and we would use the tax advantages of that to out compete private prison companies and more importantly we would have a business model they would inc everybody towards the right set of incentives so what i wanted to do is go to the government and say listen i'll lock up your prisoners but you don't get to pay us upfront in fact you can't pass us upfront you have to pay us after the person serves their term and then stays out of prison for five years then you're going to pay me and the idea is that now all of a sudden i'm motivated and know by my whole organization is motivated to get people through as quickly as possible release them as quickly as possible and then have them stay out of prison and not return to crime and i mean that would have been that would have been a game changer and it would've have been a very attractive business model to these governments that are always you know looking to delay their expenditures that the biggest problem that i ran into as i looked into this is it wasn't a technological problem it was a lobbying and marketing and government affairs problem and it wasn't at a federal level where you can basically convince a handful of people and then achieve success it it was going to be this like there's low local cal by local thing where you have a lot of people who depend on prisons for jobs you have a lot of politicians who are very involved in and it was and also the deals are not rec repeated very often this isn't like enterprise software where people are always on the lookout for a way to get an edge or move to a new provider that could reduce their costs or risk it's like oh yeah know we we're gonna rec compete this deal on thirty five years and so it's it would it would have been this thing where i i just couldn't debate an impact fast enough and so i've been involved with other people who are making impacts in other ways okay so that was one well you can just have like some silicon valley guy wearing like tight jeans and broad shoes like every other salesperson person sitting down like hey so we'd like to have a conversation about your prisoners we'd like to have your business like you know no give me some of your unfortunately not yeah yeah unfortunately not and and the thing is the people who make the decisions would not have benefited from us succeeding so in business like when you're and this is a big we can get in this with too one of the biggest problems with selling the government versus businesses or private private individuals with with with private individuals and businesses you just have to convince them that it'll be that'll be a you know that that then be a good thing for them and then they'll buy them the people who are in charge of purchasing for government they often don't benefit from saving money or reducing their manpower or any of this thing in many cases the guy in charge of making the buying decision his political power and earning power are directly tied to his ability to keep costs high and to keep manpower up and to not allow anything to displace that so that was actually the big problem i realized that you it's it's nice to think you can solve any problem with with new ideas through disruption but some things are kind of self reinforcing very hard to fix the the other thing i was looking at is obesity you know obesity is is one of if not the leading preventable cause of death in the united states either there's so many there's so many other health problems that are the result of of obesity and some people say that we need to make exercise more popular some people say that we need to stop normalizing obesity some people say we need medical treatment for it or you know we need to make eat healthy eating better i i took a pretty cynical view of it i said no obesity is not going away unless you let american people eat whatever they want whenever they want as much as they want with no lifestyle changes no exercise and absolutely no effort on their parts whatsoever and so within that constraint what could you do to to solve this issue and the the the the result that the that their idea came on was long chain hydrocarbon based synthetic foods so in other words oil based foods you you guys are familiar with impossible burger beyond burger have you had them yeah yeah so i mean it was probably better than the worst beef burger you've ever had right it was it was at least at that level it's we're it's better than the worst one you've ever had yeah it it was a whatever i'll eat this yeah whatever eat this but certainly not up to the level of the best beef burger you've ever had no and and so one of the one of the interesting that this is where i was drawing from outside you know in an outside world all these people trying to make fake food they're all trying to build fake food out of food and i said well wait let's think of this from first principles if i'm a materials engineer and i'm trying to solve set of problems that a fake burger manufacturer trying to solve you know how it feels in your mouth how it comes apart in your mouth how it how it sears how it cooks how it changes texture when it's cooked if i were a chemical or material engineer trying to build let's say it's not food just you know a pace a substance with a certain set of of parameters what am i gonna use is it is it beans is it chick pee is it corn no of course not i'm gonna use oil because man is a master of oil we can make it in anything wax gels solids anything in between rubber paste we can do any thing with oil we can make it into truly anything with almost any material properties that we want and so i said well let's leverage that let's leverage everything we know about making inert hydrocarbons that are non toxic and use that to make fake food for people that tastes and feels like real food but has zero caloric value that cannot be absorbed by your body it just goes right through you just like fiber and things like up that crazy taco about diet coke i yeah it's a yeah that existed dude it's called the white castle but you're let me yeah you're just say like the diet coke cheeseburger yes a diet a diet coke cheeseburger the diet coke cheese the diet you the the diet coke dairy products and so i actually started making prototypes of this and i was messing around with frying foods and mineral oil with with with high flash points because mineral oil also no calories i made some para based cheese so it's basically like para wax based fake cheese product that you could still make grilled cheese sandwiches with and it tasted great but at almost no calories it was there there are a few other wild things that they came with i also built a device that injected soda syrup through a stream onto your tongue directly as carbonated water flowed over it because it turns out you can only detect what it's a weird per conceptual thing people think of optical illusions as as you know the the main type of illusion that's out there but there's also physical illusions like if you if you put put it putting in your mouth your body assumes that the full mass of the pudding is comprised of whatever is touching your tongue but if you can create physically structured foods where the part that's touching your tongue is different than the bulk of the rest of the material your body still thinks that the entire bulk of it is whatever touching your i went down promise for a while what does your house look like well i mean at it it it's it's a little more boring now but at the time what when when i was acquired by facebook i moved up to the bay area and we had about ten people living in a thirteen thousand square foot home that was built in the thirties on six acres and so we turned to the dining room into a machine shop we turned we we turned to the there there was like a like a ballroom for dancing and we turned that into an assembly area and and and welding welding room i mean we had a soft goods room and is one funny area as someone does it was was a it was don't even know what that means what soft goods oh just like so like cheese i mean like the traditional example that when when people have like a soft goods engineer would be like like tennis shoes bras you know things that are incorporating fabrics and also play i don't thinking you like a like a a tennis a tennis racket is is is is an example of soft good engineering where you've got you know the handle and the shock absorption and all that but like in our case it was for head mounted of display stuff so like head mounted of display straps the the fabric associated with it we also we're you know we're we're also cosplay players so we are also building our building our anime costumes there so lot of soft good stuff you you the more you talk the more i realize you you do the one thing we celebrate the most on this podcast because they're like people are like i don't get it like you and sam you do a certain style of entrepreneurship right like for example i optimize for just i wanted it to be me and one other dude i don't want any employees i don't wanna go to an office and just want max leverage and i'm not trying to be a billionaire they wanna raise money i wanna own the whole thing and just do it my way on whatever projects are fun yep and but then sometimes we'll celebrate like the you and elon musk of the world that are going huge and sometimes we celebrate this dude is making this chrome extension he makes twenty k a month and lives in you know bali and he's having fun so people don't get it they're like what do you like which one do you admire like i get it tech crunch admire this thing and vcs admire this thing but you guys seem to be across the board and we're like we like people that just define the win define winning on their terms and then like actual it so like you have in a house with thirteen other people that does that has like you know an assembly room and a soft goods room and or whatever it seems like you're living your best life in that state maybe hundred percent one and i mean it's it's it's the the weird thing about what i get to do now like these are these all sound you know like like like fun things but i'm still getting to do that and like we have all kinds of stuff like that going on actually that the the tough thing is the coolest things that we're doing here i can't even necessarily talk about because the the most successful projects that are doing the cooler going in the coolest directions are the ones that that that we have to keep kind of on wraps oh i have to say on on petroleum food just in case anyone's wondering why didn't do that one i thought national security would would be a better use of my time and that was because i realized tech what the national security was a technological problem in addition to being a lobbying and marketing problem and sales problem the the problem with petroleum foods is that it was not sustainable if using new oil as a feeds stock it would just it would consume too much and the good news is you can recycle hydrocarbons but then if i don't if you can see where this is going but it means you're gonna literally be like cent oil out of the sewer system and then reusing it to construct new food and i realized like you have you seen all the you media coverage pink pink slime at mcdonald's and that's what i i saw going but it looks kinda gross yeah i'm i'm at i'm at do you think people wanna buy food that's literally rem manufactured from sewage you know that that that was kind of the main problem i said you know what i'm i'm i'm pretty good at marketing and sales i am not good enough to sell sewer food to people yeah you you you sound i mean i need to figure that out you sound like you're a bad guy in batman if you're like yeah he's going through the sewers and recycling it turning it into food and it's it's like it's almost too good of a story right like like i i under sometimes i think the media is unfair but it's like could you expect them to not you know sensational literally a guy who's who's selling rep processed sewage as food like it's like they have to cover in a sensational way and i can't even blame them for it and i decide i would rather work in an area where technological improvement would be the main way that you would compete we didn't need to you know do crazy marketing you just had to be competent and be better than all of the other players which was not necessarily that high of a bar i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets are doing databases hubspot grow better do you you talked about the media for second and i when i was doing research i was like the you know there's this great silicon valley post that's called like the hands of time of social media of of media in silicon valley it's like it it starts at noon and it's like you're born hey you know nobody's ever heard you then at one you're like emerging at three you're like the star everybody loves you and it like goes and then it cycles all the way back to midnight and it's like your evil your ruining society and you like destroy democracy and whatever else and this happens with every hot company and every hot founder or whatever and when i was looking at your media coverage to do research it's all like this is the boy wonder he's nineteen years old he's making virtual reality real he's doing this out of his garage in his house whatever yep and then it turns into like this guy like you know the mega super evil guy he's getting fired by facebook and then it's like the defense stuff so you've seen kind of both sides of the media machine i think you kinda jade like where do you trust the media today and i how do you think about you know the media well there's an interesting quote that people often misuse from the nolan batman movies you either die a hero or live see yourself live long enough to become the villain and a lot of people misunderstand that they think that it means you start out as a hero and then eventually descend into into being you know a bad guy and they look at harvey dent and they that they they think that's the moral but that's not what was what what what harvey dent was saying harvey dent had actually always been a kind of crooked power seeking political type what what what he was saying is that he had always been the same person fighting for the same ideals and that he just lived long enough to see the world change around him that so that people started saying that what he was was a villain you know he didn't say that you become the villain and you literally to say see yourself become the villain in the eyes of everyone else and i i i feel like i've definitely been through bet been through that been through that a little bit i mean it's worth noting i'm not inclined to dislike the media naturally a lot of people assumed that that must be the case i i don't know if you know this i was a journalism as major at cal state long beach i was actually the online editor of the of the school paper the daily forty nine so i i by no meet like i there was a time where i thought i was going to go into a career in tech journalism and so i i never really had had any issues with it as a as you know i thought it was a very a very honorable thing to do you know to go out and and be the guy who dig dig digs and gets the truth and lets people know what's going on that they otherwise would not have the ability or the time to su out themselves and then unfortunately i've had quite a few experiences with the media like do i trust the media it's like well i mean i've had like literally dozens of major outlets post literally fabricated quotes from me literally you literally like things that never happened they said they all we did all terrible things that just never even happen and then refused to correct them for years on end so it's one of this be like oh palmer why do you attack the media it's like i don't know like there's not any real way to to get to get around there i mean like we're not talking about tiny outlets like the new york times posted a quote for me that i literally never said and i i told them like hey you you said that i said this i i never said that they said well it's it's it's it's more or less what you said we don't think the meeting is different i was like yeah but you're you're your your ethics guide i know i know what it is i was taught the new york times style guide when i was in journalism school it doesn't it doesn't say you get to quote me and para phrase me and you think that it is doesn't mean anything different and then of course everyone re quotes their fate quote you're like i don't think a quote means what you think it means you know you're like the those those like you know those little signs in the paper that say it's a quote that that means something different than what than what you guys are saying well i explained to that said i said your quote for me is literally missing six of the words that i said but you have it in quotes with a period and i i never said that and it was actually and it there was no period because it was part of a longer run argument i was making and that that did not even have a period there and they're like oh well we don't think it really changes the meeting so just i you without labor the point you know i think you you can't you can't trust the media to to you can't trust the media to do the right thing and if you do you're probably gonna get burned at some point it worked for me for a while and until it didn't what does what does andrew do and what made you realize that the the the the approach to solve that problem was the approach that you pick because that seems like such a grand i i i understand the high level what you do but it's so grand that i think well like oc was fairly grand but i kinda get that you can kinda tinker in your garage and come up with the nifty product and whatever and like no one's gonna like get hurt really and it's like a pretty simple process hard but simple andrew i'm like oh my god i don't even know where to start i mean i i've seen the movie with jonah hill where he's like a war dog or wherever it's called where like buys all weapons and i'm like is that what andrew does and yeah yeah i'm like is that what does and how an earth does even a rich guy who's twenty eight in his apartment or his big house come up with us this is crazy like who do you call you call like hey hey brock i was thinking you know maybe we could try this like mvp you know what mean i don't even know how you start that i mean it it's tough and it is such a big problem and so una approachable that very few people do approach it i mean like but very big picture an is trying to build the next major defense prime meaning we were the prime contract holder we're not a sub contractor to existing prime like lockheed martin or ray or north gru or boeing and you know i eighty percent of the us defense budget goes to just a handful of companies these big prime that just completely dominate the industry and they get paid on what's called a cost plus basis they get paid for their time materials fixed percentage of profit on top which means that they're incentivized to move slowly they actually make more money when they come up with more expensive systems more money when they sell more of something more money when it even breaks more often because they get to sell more parts for it i mean it's it's a it's a really bizarre contracting system that we created in world war two to basically take over the us war machine or sorry the us industrial machine turn it into a war machine because companies like ford were saying hey i i can't even quote you when it's gonna cost to make a tank because i've never really you know this has never really been my business and they said okay fine we'll pay you whatever it costs and then a fixed percentage of profit on top to make sure that you are able to keep running your business and then unfortunately we just kept doing that even though we were no longer in an existential war mode and so in the last thirty five years since the end of the cold war the government had completely lost its ability to grow small defense companies into large defense and consequences companies i mean you know samuel cole went from working in his tiny garage workshop to arming the entire western world that's that's that's what we used to be able to do you can start small and get big if you had the best stuff but in the last thirty five years there were only two unicorns before and in the defense space and thirty five years not just being chosen arbitrarily it's basically since the end of the cold war during the cold war we did turn small defense companies into into major players but since then it's pal spacex both founded by billionaires and then nobody else that's it and so it it's so hard to get in you know founders say i have no idea how i could possibly started a the defense company so they don't start a the defense company a venture capitalist say i'm not gonna invest in a defense company there's no examples of success in the last thirty five years less the billionaires who can do anything i'm sure they could have done whatever they wanted with their billions and so the vcs don't wanna wanna to invest in it and this is and then smart employees don't wanna go work at defense start because they look at the landscape they say look this might be a cool lifestyle business but it's never gonna grow to a scale where the equity that i'm given is a significant is a significant way to generate money for me and my family and so i i i said man you know if that's really what it takes it it really it you if it it really does take lots and lots of money and lots and lots of influence and really smart people then i'm in a position to start a company that very few people are very few founders have experience running a multi billion dollar company with thousands of employees mass manufacturing millions of pieces of hardware and are and are willing to give up the ado iteration of their peers in the media like was actually probably the most important factor if i would've have just left oc by retiring on my own it would've have been much harder for me to go into an area like building weapons for the us and our allies because so many people got so angry about it you friends that i had who didn't wanna talk to me anymore investors who said that not only would we never make money but that what we were doing was morally rep and wrong and you yeah i was trying to explain to people listen we live in a world where our major strategic adversaries are rapidly building advanced technology that has no peer here in the united states war machine the the major conflict is imminent in asia in europe with a lot of our strong allies and partners and we needed to be ready not just to win those wars the goal is not to win awards to deter war from happening in the first place and if we don't have the tools we need to deter them then war is inevitable and i you guys probably remember how things were you know i guess bat you bought five or six years ago it was very very popular to believe that we're at the end of history and that peace is too profitable for anyone to rock the boat and that that was the thing that would keep everybody in line i think that russia and invading ukraine finally woke up a lot of people to realize that history is not over land borders are not fixed and it like i mean look how wild it is that europe is still buying billions of dollars of goods from russia even as russia literally invades europe i mean like that's that's how screw that's how screwed they are and i think peep people people did not see this a few years ago and i felt i felt a little bit like a crazy person and if i i'll ramble on one more thing and you've probably heard me say this before elsewhere but it could be that you know your your your viewers haven't had heard me say i'll say again you we're living in the first time in us history where the most innovative powerful and large technology companies in our country refused to work with the military that's never been the case our most powerful companies have always understood that they had a responsibility to aid with national security but now what mean whether you're talking about google or in particular apple i mean apple's got ninety five percent of their manufacturing in china they agreed to invest they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing capacity there they've agreed to invest a further two hundred and seventy five billion dollars in chinese manufacturing in exchange for being allowed to operate as an independent company in china instead of being national into a joint venture majority owned by china i mean they they that they're in a position where if they do anything to upset the chinese government the one person in china could sign one piece of paper that would wipe out the most powerful company in the entire world instantly a two trillion dollar company like they they they are not masters of their own destiny not bought by any means and i i i guess i wanna stress this because it's never been the case in history and that had me terrified you i i five years ago i could see we're were on the pre of war with advanced powers who had fully suppressed our most advanced technology companies through economic tools and you know if i i i don't understand why more people were not scared by that but i felt like i couldn't do anything that was more important starting andrew to start help solving that problem and thanks for letting me ramble for so long than that i know that was a long ramble but i've i've got a lot of a lot of emotion all built up inside of them on on it no i mean that's why we wanted you on as to hear what you're doing and why and you also flipped and like the common denominator with either the prison thing the food the the the oil based foods or this is that you kind of looked at it from another angle and also maybe flip the incentives to the cost structure so what you were saying was let's say with the prison thing you wanted be incentivized to keep people out of prison rather than in as long as possible exactly it sounds like for andrew it's so simple right yeah sounds it is simple but it's not easy yeah yeah and well and then what it sounds like what you ran into there was the incentive for the local official who you know who decides on these things may have been to have a a bigger budget and not a smaller budget and so you know your incentives were sort of clashing right whereas and he does and he doesn't have to say i'm not buying your thing because my incentives are wrong you'd be like oh we've done an assessment of all the vendors and this one really has a lot more experience and we don't wanna take a risk on a new vendor it could literally be that simple he people like oh but how would they justify the business model you know would be so much better isn't half to you he can speak nope i i do a risk and so what's the business model with andrew because you're not doing call plus you're doing something else and so that's we're we're a defense product company mean we we work the way it's not even a revolutionary business model it's the way every tech company works you use your own money you build a product you make it work and then you go to customers and you sell it to them and that that is a very hard thing to do in the defense space but we've basically bet that we will be able to pick the right things to work on they will be able to find the right partners in government to help tell us what we should be investing our own money in ahead of time and that in the end when it works that we'll be able to sell most of the time to the government now there are be times where we get screwed there will be times where we don't build things that work and you know and it's our own money that we burned instead of taxpayers but on the whole we're very incentivized to be efficient we don't want things to drag we don't wanna drag it out to be a ten r and d program on a cost plus basis when when we can get it done six months with some really really smart ideas and so we we've got the right incentives and we're we're we're basically out there trying to convince the department of defense and politicians that this is the way that all defense companies should be working everyone should live in fear looking over their own own shoulder knowing that if they fail that they're the ones who are gonna get screwed not taxpayers so when you get a contract that's like we got a nine hundred million dollar contract that's after you've already produced the product and they're basically just agreeing to buy the goods at that point is that what that means in your case yeah i mean we recently just won a billion dollar contract with soc comp special operations command to do all of their counter drone work so basically protecting like building the hardware and software that is defending them from from drones that are attacking their installations and positions and we started working on our counter drone system using all of our own money years and years ago before we had any customer we just we started building a hardware and the software building our intercept building our jam and then we it was after we invested a ton of our own money proved that this was the right way to solve the problem that we were able to go and actually there was a full competition for who they were gonna select for this and they did basically shoot off between all these different companies and some of the companies that we beat were actually getting paid by the government to develop their systems using government money but we had invested quite a bit more money and moved much faster and there were literally contractors that were complaining saying this isn't fair we have to compete with and and they've been investing their own money for years how could we possibly be expected to compete when the government's only given us you know tens of millions of dollars over the course of the last two years and i i'm like guys that like of course this how works like you could have won if you had spent your own money if you had spent your own money for five years you probably would be able to compete with us on an even playing field but you can't take no risk and expect all of the reward and we spend a lot less than these companies developing much better capabilities because we had the right incentives so you're you're i think i think you're thirty years old so you're we're we're all about the same age you're sitting there with just thirty a few weeks ago happy birthday you're sitting there in a fucking hawaiian t shirt with the goatee i you're probably the type of dude who walks around barefoot at all the time and you're talking about cosplay and yet you just said we just want a billion dollar contract from the government how do you work up like the the the confidence to think like i'm gonna go in against all these gray haired suits and like they're gonna the government's eventually gonna take me seriously i'm gonna sell this sell this thing i mean or do you have people selling on your behalf but like that that's just reach for me to understand some people think that i should that i should dress differently and try to kind of you know appeal to the government sensibilities and like you know oh i should be dressing in a suit and i should be very very straight laced and you'll be very very serious all the time but i think that one of the most important things that an is doing is not just building technology ourselves but it's inspiring other companies to work in defense not just company like inspiring companies that aren't in defense to pivot in defense and inspiring people to start new defense companies and if they see me like becoming a boring guy who's who's you know has to make himself super lame to sell to the government that's not a lifestyle that they're gonna wanna lead you know and so we need to show that they can be successful and show them that it's that it's gonna be fun now i also wanna keep wearing flip flops in hawaiian shirt so maybe i'm maybe this is just you know post factor justification on board i i i feel like i doing everyone disservice if i were to change yeah i think it's working now you know we the podcast is all about the future where brainstorming ideas opportunities but none of that matters if there's not really a future if this about to become world war three there's nukes flying everywhere so you're kind of a lot more in the loop than any guest that we've ever had on this mh what's gonna happen here is this what are the odds of like you know this sort of ukraine russia conflict breaking out into something a lot more serious and like you know is there gonna be a nuclear weapon you know in our in near future so let it's very hard to predict there's people who are better at this than me like what i always tell people is like our role is to build the tools and then you have to trust in democracy to deploy them correctly and if people were like oh you know when would you stop supplying weapons to you know you know you ukraine and you know what is there a point where you'd be two you know where you where you think that we should where you would make sure that you're not part of a nuclear escalation and i say listen if you believe in democracy at all then you should not want us foreign policy to be dictated by the ever changing whim of technology executives like what an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to set that you know you'll build weapons for the people you are politically aligned with and then you'll suddenly drop it despite the at like what it really is i will sell to the people that the us state department and the us dod you want me to like if if that need because they have information that i don't they have intelligence that i do not and i cannot second guess that and say oh you know i i would stop supplying if i thought there was this level of of escalation but you know with that out of the way i think that we are going to see a tactical nuke get used and and for people who are not familiar with the difference tactical nuclear weapons are designed for tactical use as part of a battle for basically conventional warfare tactics so blowing up you know you blowing up an armour division or taking out a wing of bombers or maybe even destroying an airfield strategic nuclear weapons are used to deter mass nuclear exchange and to engage in you know strategic level annihilation of cities and the like the united states dis disabled all of our tactical nuclear weapons a long time ago we decided that our ward doctrine did not allow for tactical nukes nukes are only something you use at a strategic level to deter other people from using them against you that is not the case for russia russia has tactical nuclear weapons if they train to use them they it is part of their doctrine that they will use them in conventional conflict and they are at like even just having it in their doctrine shows that to some degree they are willing to bet that the united states and nobody else would respond with strategic nuclear weapons in response to use of a tactical nuclear weapon and the you know some people say oh even saying that they'll use a nuke is akin to supporting russia and saying we shouldn't support ukraine it the i'm not saying that at all i think actually appease has the the the longer that they're actually the the greater risk i mean if you can show if you show to the world that if you show to a world that even the threat of small scale tactical nuclear weapons is enough to deter any kind of intervention on in any kind of con in any kind of conventional warfare you actually hugely incentivize the nations of the world to obtain their own tactical nuclear weapons like you you you you don't really actually want the calculus to tip that way where countries look and say wow all russia had to do is threatened to use their tactical nukes and then they were allowed to operate with impunity in a conventional invasion and nobody was willing to stop to do anything about it or even stop buying their exports like that that's the that that that that'd be a very very bad precedent to set even beyond this war and so for that reason i then this is a little contra and not everyone agrees but i think that the odds of a tactical nuclear weapon are very high it will not be used on the united states it will not be used on a nato ally it'll probably be a tactical nuclear weapon used to strike some ina military target like it probably they're not gonna they're not gonna nuke cube it it's much more likely that it would be a port or you know or or an air installation or or something like that and i the reason i like to talk about this is i want people to get comfortable with this because there's this idea that you know it you use you use an you use a nuclear weapon and all of a sudden you're in world war three i think that's actually probably the wrong the wrong way to look at it because if you do that you're desperately admitting that tactical nuclear weapons deserve a strategic nuclear level response and if you set that up as you know the the nice lu path we all slide down yeah things really bad sounds like selfish and try but i i think i it's important to me and i bet it's important to a lot of people what does that mean for me a wealthy american with money in the stock market who lives in then a nice life like does that mean that like inflation is gonna get huge does that mean that my investments are gonna go down does that mean that like people i know i don't know anyone in ukraine so i'm i care about them but like does that mean people i know are gonna get hurt what does that mean for me it's a fair question you know i'm in a different position i know i know people who are from ukraine i i know people are in ukraine so for me it also it does get a little bit personal and we we have employees here who are who who are deeply deeply you know involved in one way or another with the people of ukraine but i think mostly you need to boil it now not to necessarily ukraine specific question but the the broader geopolitical question is the united states the world place are we going to help our allies and to what extent and i'm not saying that that means that we need to throw ourselves in two world war three over every conflict but we do need to very carefully weigh like what what will happen in taiwan if we completely pull that like the there's a million ways to tackle this so i'm not trying to set up a str man here but i'll throw out one that is actually very popular with certain politicians they say we should completely pull out we should not engage this is not our problem let the let the ex soviet guys duke it out they can do whatever they want well one the their the first issue is our european allies are gonna be in pretty bad shape if they have russia right on their border able to move deep deep deep into europe without any kind of buffer more importantly what do you think china is gonna do if they see that that's the united states attitude they say wow like there there there is a price they will not pay there is there is a certain level they are not willing to get engaged at if we can raise the cost above that level then they will make the short term decision to not get engaged that's very dangerous for taiwan which is in turn very dangerous for semiconductors and for our entire economy like i if taiwan actually gets invaded by china you could see a thirty or forty percent drop in the stock market beyond what we've already seen like that that's not even that's not even a that's not even a like a crazy assumption that's like a pretty well backed up by all of the the boring establishment economics guys prediction so that that that the way that i see it is you know your question why should i care because if we want to maintain credibility as a player that can deter wars not just win wars then we have to take actions that maintain our credibility there if we if if we were to say the ultimate version of screws you're on your own world we're all and we're gonna do our own thing we're going to get screwed by that very very quickly and so there's something between zero engagement and you know d day two point o that we have to do this is a great palmer where can people find you if they wanna go work at andrew or you know read more your stuff your your blog or twitter where should people follow or find you if they like this oh man well my my my my my handle my handle across social media is palmer tech but on you can provide me on twitter under the handle palmer lucky if there's my website palmer lucky dot com the number one palmer lucky blog on the internet and is also and got press sites spun i've coming for you oh hey my my word press too great tool each challenges just tell me about palmer lucky sixty nine dot com he's is this new project just working on yeah it's got a lot of promise oh man i gotta check this out that sounds right up my alley oh wait wait do you wanna rip a wwe style promo at jason cal who's coming after you he's challenge you to a fight why would you challenge a guy who builds weapons for a living tool fight i don't understand this but if you wanna rip a a w style promo this is this is no place there are hundred thousand entrepreneurs ready to back you here if you can get them on your side i mean maybe this is because i all like look i'm i don't know if you can tell like i'm actually a pretty big guy like i weigh about two hundred fifty pounds i'm six feet tall like i it's kind of i understand the mechanics of fighting well enough and i've i've done enough of it recreational to understand that the it's unlikely that somebody who's like you know five foot five and a hundred and forty pounds is gonna is good is gonna have a a a good shot but i the thing is i don't i'm not i'm not not a physical violence kinda i i it's weird to be like oh yeah you you you you you you you don't like me well i could beat you in in hand to hand combat it's like well i mean maybe like your ideas are still bad it's it doesn't one does one doesn't solve the other so now i unfortunately i don't think i'll be thrown i don't think i'll be thrown down the gauntlet beyond beyond noting that just you statistically speaking you know if if you just look at the fights between people of of of one bulk versus another you there's there's a there's a clear trend is this the most silicon valley dude is this the most silicon valley call out ever that's i am i know the mechanics of fighting i okay is on my side bitch but yeah you know what i mean and for and for people are listening and don't know the very short version is j j jason cal said a bunch of really awful stuff about me for for years starting back in twenty sixteen what you know when he said that i'm a terrible person that i don't care about my family or my i think he said palmer lucky is a complete moron who doesn't care about his employees or his families or his friends and then you know palmer in eighty eight he's a moron zuckerberg should fire him get rid of him what a useless waste of space then i get fired he celebrates it over and over overall man i'm so glad they fired home what a terrible loser etcetera etcetera anyway then he just didn't then he just didn't talk to me for years never reached out and then he invites me to go speak it on his podcast and then at his conference so went there and i've i basically told people and like i can't believe jason invited me it's only because i've claw my way back having a second unicorn before the age of thirty like this guy treating me like total garbage for years he's never apologized he spread a bunch of luck even insult society he spread a bunch of lies about me and then at at the con and i said hey here look at all this shitty said about me like you had like a it like a sweater back it was amazing yeah yeah and and then and and i did that at the end of my talk about you know basically the the future of conflict and particularly the war ukraine and then at the conference he said that he was sorry if he said anything that offended me but then when he put my video up he said actually i take it back everything that i said was accurate and i don't regret exactly what i said about him and i was and so i now won't people keep complaining me be like you guys need to bury the hatch you know me in the middle i'm like i didn't do anything to like you you can't meet me like you're right maybe maybe i don't care about my family but you know we can admit i i care about my friends let's meet in the middle it's like no no it's not gonna happen anyway so now now jason saying that he can that he can beat me up on and he's and and and you know look look maybe he could but the odds don't seem in his favor i do think he trains jj so you know he does have that going form i if i recall correctly hey you know i i i i did i did karate one time when i was a kid you know i get old yeah well now it's it's it's been wild for me because i mean my whole career i've been my my my whole career i've been a whiz kid you know it's like the the palmer lucky value proposition is wow look at that guy he's imp successful given his age and now it's just look palmer he's yeah he's successful i guess thirty yeah i wouldn't wanna dealing with the cycle i don't really doing anything and also you know i find jason very entertaining i like i don't know personally very well or anything but but you know he's entertaining but he also i think was totally wrong in this circumstance i remember when i first heard him say all that shit i looked up i was like man palmer must have well actually called you parker lucky i was like man this parker lucky that's right this pluck little guy must have done something really messed up and then i saw what was actually done and i saw the coverage and i was like oh he he donated ten thousand dollars to just you know like this thing or whatever you know you you were right right whatever and jason was out there saying he says palmer paying trump supporters extreme your anti yeah yeah yeah yeah extreme terror trolling he said not quite violent but close to it and he's posting anti semitic memes and miso hate attacks it's like due it is nine thousand dollars to a billboard like you've you've given a heck of a lot war yeah spicier your political stuff than that a you know that's you know in a political cause our political donation it's nothing like you know i think that's one of the big one of the big hypocrisy so as mainstream is you can one the of silicon valley is like it's all about open minded unless you disagree with us unless you unless you believe in the thing i don't agree with then how dare you believe that you know how dare are you support that canada i don't like how dare you you know that have to come you know votes for or whatever it's one of the great backgrounds so it's so it's so far foreign to me too because i mean like one of my best friends is a socialist alec we we very we we strongly disagree politically but like you running oc i was never i i i like i had my political beliefs but they were like one percent of my time i'm thinking ninety nine percent of it was on vr and my company and it's it's actually very funny where like i there was a story recently said y know palmer palmer lucky you know a very outspoken republican i'm like i mean i've literally tweeted about politics two times in eight years like yeah the like i'm not outspoken by any means but does that it means like oh there was this story years ago where he privately donated not using his name and that means he's an outspoken republican and you know i i imagine if people were like mark zuckerberg outspoken democrat does x like no was even nobody would wanna correct would be like you must have made a mistake dennis doesn't tight yeah but you i i mean that but that that's the best part about and is that you know like i my political beliefs like our ceo brian shi yeah he's he's very much a democrat and we have a huge mix of people at an across the entire political spectrum and what we've done is said listen we we might not agree on everything but we agree the importance of national security we agree that the united states needs to have the tools that deter russia china and other ag from getting into fights with our partners and allies and we agree that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year while we make tens of billions of dollars year and if we agree on those things we need to put aside the differences and you'll focus on what's what's the same and i think that's been a really healthy company company culture like a lot of other companies you know they'll they'll they they wanna take one political side or the other and we've been very clear no we are not a politically oriented company we are a mission oriented company and to the extent like if a republican does something that's bad for our mission we're gonna push back on it if a democrat does something that is bad for our mission we're gonna push back on it but it needs to be about our ability to you defend the west not our you know our personal opinions on how the country should be run so that's that that's i i highly encourage people to set that to set that tone when they're starting their own companies if you wanna be able to attract people from all over the country all over the world of all different political persuasion because if you pick aside you're you're alien huge swath of people not just the people who disagree with you but also people who don't want to be in a company that's partisan and might not even care one way or the other i i know there's a lot of people here like look i don't i even really have a strong political set of beliefs but i do know i don't wanna work in a place where that's the thing that drives all our decisions you're like oh we got the office socialist just walking around giving away snacks it's awesome it's great you need a diverse workplace like this it's dude you're awesome right i'm it's right i'm so pumped that you came on this is this is this has been amazing i would love you to come on again well wait i have to bring up one more thing but i have to bring up one more thing i so i i get a chance to bring something fine go so i i we we we we we we got we gotta talk about the the tweet you ua made where you said that there's no way that there's any billionaires out there that actually fly coach and don't fly yes good you have got a good memory do you do you fly coach oh you you do fly coach you said that you're an idiot what are you doing jc count was right i mean so so i i the reason i wanted to chat about it is yeah i i think i responded and i told like hey you're you're wrong like i i actually do i don't fly private and i do fly coach for me it's it's it's a it's a it's a reason thing where we we with exceptions for long term like long long international travel we only cover coach travel for our employees it's like look it's only a few hours like it is a very bad use of company money for us to be buying business or first class for people because we have so much travel at the company we could easily spend a very serious fraction of our of our of our resources on just people traveling in slightly better seats and so and it's especially you know especially bad when it's like i'm i really gonna pay you to like you know fly business class for three hours to a place where you're then going to like sweat it out in a desert for for a week like you know it's it's only you know so you and your coach sheets better than the desert and your wife your girlfriend for whatever if you're going to europe you're gonna fly coach even when i use my own money i fly coach and people say well why don't you just fly first class why don't you fly business and here's why because i expect my employees to fly coach and even like yes i a lot of money but it's if i don't also do it it feels like i'm out of touch or i don't know what it's like or you know oh it's easy for you to say that we should fly coach because you don't have to do it because you happen have a bunch of money and so for for me a lot of is setting example like look it's not actually that bad i am willing to do it even when i pay for my own travel because that's i i think you about that back so don't you have like people who wanna like kill you or like hurt you i mean aren't you like i mean like like you've got the whole anti trump crown who sees you and they're like go after yourself and then now you're like dealing with lockheed martin and stuff shirley they wanna like knee cap you you you're got you're you're i don't know what you're feeling kind best fan yeah you got jason gonna crazy buy you in a no like something's gonna happen you know what it'd be like surely like there's like some type of security risk also maybe you have life insurance or something like that if they're gonna ensure you i'd be like dog you're doing you're you gotta have this a security person with you or you gotta like have someone with you like surely there's some type of security risk you gotta think like beyond just like hey guys i'm sol with you on this flight like i get it like i mean surely there's some type of like you're you're you're you're you're you're totally right and i i mean it depends on the trip where the trip is and what i'm doing and like i i i make sure to keep myself safe and i probably don't wanna get into specifics because you know like you said there's people out there who who are who are who are not fans of me and like they you you mentioned you know jason cal and the trump people but like what about the mexican cartel that we've cost hundreds of millions of dollars in drug trade what about you know all the people who have been foil in attacks on us military forces because of our stuff and you know like there's there's actually a long list of people who are more who are scarier than than jason cal if you can believe it but yeah look you you you you're right that to some degree that that's a worry but i also think that in general if someone's gonna come to kill me it's probably gonna be a place where they know i'm going to be and there's there's there's actually much higher like to me the high risk place is actually not on a on a flight in the secure zone yeah it's not on southwest in the secure zone of an airport like that there's actually it it's actually probably more likely to be the restaurants i go to too much but i anyway i guess i want explain that's why i it if if i'm gonna ask my employees to do it i need to do it too even when it's my own money even when it's my own cost because otherwise you are like you you coming out it's not just that i appear out of touch i would literally be out of touch and look maybe one day coach gets so bad that i tell everyone guys you know what i hear you we're all going business now but i think i think today is not that bad you're crazy i i have agreed with everything you've said except for that you are crazy yeah no i'm actually glad you said this because i was feeling like man this guy's great was funny he's smart he's just really big thinker i'm glad you have something you're totally wrong about it makes me feel so much better at this interview that's a great service you did for everybody here by having this absolute nonsense policy for yourself you know like if i go get you if i'm the guy fly to go get that billion dollar contract and fly back you know in the in the c zone of southwest i'm riding the next day at work i'm tell you i i love the i love the back of the plane on the window nobody but nobody bothers you you can get on you can let everybody get off the plane before you do you don't have to fight anybody you just let everyone look at phil i what what i i gotta throw this in my my my grandpa was a pilot for united airlines for all over forty years and so i also grew up around commercial airlines and so this might be another thing like to me there is a certain romantic to like mass market mass available air travel like what an incredible thing and we did it america did it we figured out how to make it economically viable and we build everyone else's airplanes like it it is an american thing and so i even when you're on everyone else's planes they're mostly made by americans and the ones that are made by europeans were made with american technology so i i hey look i i i also like some around feet i think theater gross you're into coach i think coach is stressful yeah to each their own and i think we'll leave it at that agree to disagree their own no look i i disagree with that a opinion but i respect it like hell and i respect you you're you're the best man i would love for you to come on if you want like in a few weeks a few months whenever and talk some more about ideas you're i i'm a fan of yours so this feels really cool that you're here maybe we thank you i appreciate that is this been a lot of fun we covered some good ground here yes and maybe we've sucker you into be coming friends with us so if you ever want you could d some dms on twitter and we come homie who knows i don't know maybe you we'll invite each other over and hang out you could show us a speaker or two i don't know we'll see what happens but this has been awesome come on come coming down anytime alright sweet thank you so much alright see you guys later